Mike Ritland
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So it's difficult right now for them to form that cohesive network and unified action plan when you have folks from the Joe Biden side of the foreign policy establishment still extremely upset and feeling betrayed by the Kamala Harris side of it. But those wounds will heal, and time, I believe, does heal all wounds in that way as their economic interests are threatened further.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
potentially by the drastic reforms the Trump administration is pursuing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
operations abroad are dirtier apparatus, are blob foreign policy apparatus, capacity for covert activity and political dirty tricks weaponized against Americans, which is just a fundamental assault on the premise for even having them in the first place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, I'm shocked. I'm shocked to find the U.S.-funded blob NGO swarm descending on a right-wing populist party in Europe. No, of course. I mean, this is the most predictable thing of all time. I mean, Georgia's queue has been... a thorn in the side of the US and UK and NATO foreign policy establishment for a number of reasons.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The central linchpin of world geopolitics right now is the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Romania occupies a critical strategic point in that war, not just because of the transport of arms from Pakistan to Romania into Ukraine, which has been a long-time route to be able to run guns and arms and munitions in, but also because Romania shares the Black Sea coast,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
with Ukraine, and NATO is presently in the process of building the single largest NATO base in Europe in all of NATO history, 100% bigger than the Ramstein base in Germany. And in fact, NATO is, as we speak, moving arms, supplies, jets, and drones to that base because it points...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Straight out at Crimea and will be the the place of force projection And you know, this is this is the the military hard power Play on on Crimea is which is absolutely essential to Russia in their view as this is what kicked off this conflict to begin with really there was the effective secession of eastern Ukraine, but it was
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
russia's warm water port access uh in in crimea and obviously their military base there that was it was the crime crimea referendum to join the russian federation that kicked off all of this including the the you know the rattles snake nest that that trump walked into with ukraine and russia and whatnot and so you know georgia skew has has effectively campaigned on
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
being friends with both sides, enemies of neither. Neutrality does not want to antagonize Russia by building the NATO's largest lethal warfighting capability right on Romania's coast. It makes Romania a target. Obviously, from NATO's perspective, the moment Russia bombs Romania and extends the fight beyond Ukraine, that would be a major international incident.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Not. Not? You know, I mean, I speak... I think that a lot of the folks there pay attention to the things that I publish. I think so too. There's interaction simply through X and whatnot. They have an incredible job.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But the attempt to remove Georgia skew is the same thing that happened with Imran Khan. The Intercept published leaked cables Who was that? Imran Khan was the Prime Minister of Pakistan. And again, there's this deep relationship between Pakistan and Romania here because Pakistan was essentially how we trained and funded the Mujahideen in the 1970s and 80s against the Soviets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's a lot of military capacities that we warehoused there. There's a lot of money laundering through those. There's the famous BCCI Bank, Bank of Commerce and Credit International, sort of CIA proprietary bank that went down in web of scandals around Pakistan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Great Britain, the UK, which has massive interest in Eurasia, just built an air bridge between Pakistan and Romania for this exact purpose. And so, but Pakistan also, Imran Khan, the prime minister, did not want to... He did not want to... This is shortly after the 2022 Russia-Ukraine military fiasco kicked off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The US and UK foreign policy folks thought that, in their own words, when they were effectively bribing the political class of Pakistan, and this is all in The Intercept, everyone can look this up, these leaked cables, it showed that
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Carrots and sticks were offered by the Biden foreign policy establishment to parliamentarians in Pakistan in order to oust Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote, an impeachment that would take him from power. And then he was arrested shortly thereafter. He's currently in prison, even though he was the wildly popular elected head of state.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And the reason cited by the State Department for carrying out this coup operation was that Imran Khan had taken, quote, an aggressively neutral position because Khan had said that he will continue to have Pakistan do trade with Russia. He does not want to allow Russia. weapons, you know, to go to killing Russians.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And given how central that Pakistan is in this Pakistan-Romania corridor, Georgia skew, I see, is the same way, aggressively neutral. But that's all it takes. That was all it took for the State Department there. And can I continue just on this point? Absolutely.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Going after the courts in order to nullify elections or influence the activities of the elections is the beating heart of what USAID and, to a related extent, the State Department, CIA, and civil military folks at DOD do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID is in their charter to pursue so-called judicial reform, which allows them to effectively bribe and try to rig the decisions of judges and the judiciary and the rise and fall of laws in foreign countries. And USAID made a special project targeting what they call EMBs, election management bodies. which are the bodies in countries that adjudicate elections.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So, for example, it's our Supreme Court that decided, you know, the Bush versus Gore hanging, you know, hanging Chad's, you know, election in the U.S., 20 years ago. In Brazil, the EMB, the election management body, is what's called the TSE. It's basically a subcomponent of their STF Supreme Court. That is the Demorais Voldemort judge who banned X, seized assets from Starlink, and is basically...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
criminalized pro-Bolsonaro support on Brazilian social media. And they were sought after by USAID. USAID, I have their internal documents where they've, in just a few meetings alone, they'll gather together representatives from 12 different EMBs across the world and have USAID basically convince them, train them on what kind of ways to structure their court or what task forces to set up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
in the disinformation space in order to allow those courts to have a to not just adjudicate the elections, but to be able to effectively criminalize questioning the elections or speech during the election cycle. This is part of how the power in Brazil of that court expanded to such a huge size.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID was pumping money into that whole network around that court, pumping up the academic thought leadership, pumping up the legal advocates who were making pitches to the prosecutors and to the disinformation task force itself. And if they're going after every EMB, election management body in the world, effectively, to get those courts to criminalize populist speech.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
One of the things we're confronted by right now in this moment is it's becoming increasingly clear, I think, to the rest of the American population that it's this foreign policy establishment that's been weaponized against domestic citizens. But this was a nationalist movement from 2016 onward. Make America great again. America first, these sorts of things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You can bet your bottom dollar they're doing that to criminalize populist election results. In those same SEPs documents, this is the Political Process Strengthening Center at USAID, In that program, they define the enemy as populism.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They say that part of the purpose is to prevent the evolution of populist thought leadership because they define right-wing populism as a threat to democracy because it undermines the efficacy of democratic institutions, U.S.-backed NGOs and civil society institutions in the area. Well, guess what George's view is?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
He's a right-wing populist, or he's a populist at least, however you want to define it. He is, in their view, the virus that the white blood cells of USAID are custom-built to take out. And I just have to stress this point. This was attempted against Donald Trump when he won the 2016 election.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
When the Russiagate predicate came out about social media interference, everyone can trace the timeline of this and look up the contemporaneous news reporting. When the CIA came out and said there was Russian interference on U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
social media and there were Russian bots and trolls and RT and Sputnik were supporting Trump, they tried to get Congress to not certify the election result on the basis of Russian interference in the election. And to my recollection, they got, I believe, somewhere between a dozen and two dozen or almost a dozen U.S. congressmen to agree not to certify that vote. Now, it's not nearly enough.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's over 500 people in the House and 100 in the Senate. But if you can get that ball rolling and poach sitting members of Congress here in the U.S. eight years ago before they even built up this apparatus to be juiced and as powerful as it's become, Think of how much easier that task is and how far a little bit of money goes a long way in order to juice those networks in Romania.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
People joined it because they cared about their own country or their own neighborhood, whether their streets were safe, whether their school curriculum reflected their own values, whether there was waste, fraud, and abuse at the White House or D.C. level. They didn't think about, in large part, international affairs, foreign relations.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Yeah. No, absolutely. That's what USAID does. They create the surround sound. This is part of the reason I call it the USAID Truman Show. USAID goes after every single category of institution in the country they're targeting. The media, control over social media speech, the unions, the workers' groups, the judiciaries, the parliamentarians, the arts and music and culture groups.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
the universities and the academic institutions, everything, even folks in the commercial for-profit sector side. What USAID does is it does what it calls capacity building. It does a baseline assessment or strategic assessment of all the assets they have in the region, and then they look at the gap between what they have and what they need in order to accomplish a particular goal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
State Department foreign policy goal or a, you know, interagency-approved foreign policy goal. And then they close that gap by funding everything they need.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So, for example, if Georgia SKU is overwhelmingly popular with unions, they will bring in, they will fund the NED's Solidarity Center or other sort of, you know, CIA, you know, back channels or NED is, you know, this sort of squishy in-between between state and CIA. You know, there are non- nonprofit NGO that gets its funding from the U.S. government. It was created by the U.S. government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It was conceived of by the CIA director in 1983, William Casey, for it to be born. Its founders even say that their job was to do what the CIA used to do. That's basically delegated them They have something called the Solidarity Center, which is their union arm, and they'll often work with the AFL-CIO's international branches. So they say, okay, he's overwhelmingly popular there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Are those the people who are on board with our operational plan in place, for example, those people? have more disproportionate perception of political legitimacy for that, they will pump those up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If they say, okay, well, Georgia Skew is popular, you know, in the media here or in these demographics, they'll do a demographic assessment, you know, by ethnicity, gender, religious denomination, and they will close those gaps. They'll do art and activism. You'll see musicians. You'll see performers. You'll see cultural figures.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They will all be approached by USAID-funded NGOs and interlocutors to do that. And that's That's effective enough in a country with counterintelligence antibodies because it's a sort of first world economy or a second world economy. In a place like Romania, the task of trying to stop the reach of those octopus arms is impossible.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They may care about a few wars that they hear about in the news, but The MAGA movement did not really have, and is only now beginning, I think, to incubate a sort of foreign policy intelligentsia that both the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party has had for over half a century, and that the Democratic Party has had.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Georgia right now has been in the news all year because they've been trying to pass our equivalent of FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is a rule here that criminalizes any U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
person or institution who is lobbying the American government to change policies or lobbying Congress or the executive branch, but is getting funds from a foreign country to do that and is not disclosing it because we consider that to be a totally existential counterintelligence risk.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If you don't have a FARA law to know which NGOs or which universities or which for-profit entities or whatnot are getting money from, pick your foreign country X, China, Saudi Arabia, UK, you name it, to do it, then That's an obvious counterintelligence threat. That's an intelligence operation, effectively, being run. When Georgia tried to pass that law, which is just U.S. FARA, what happened?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, there were the same street riots that were deployed that USAID was flat-busted, caught doing in every place from the Arab Spring to you know, to virtually every color revolution, street protest movement the U.S. has done, at least since the 1980s.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so they're trying to stop Eastern European countries from even knowing the extent of the USAID Truman Show there and potentially even deploying their own rent-a-riot muscle to stop disclosure of that. So I don't know the extent in Romania, but I have to imagine If the truth is revealed, it would shock the world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Every plot of dirt on God's green earth is influenced by USAID. I believe you said at the beginning of this that it was about 100 countries, and you mentioned Africa, Asia... Western Hemisphere, South America, and Eastern Europe. It's every country on Earth. For example, why is USAID paying tens of millions of dollars to British censorship NGOs and British censorship firms?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Why are they funding places like the Center for Information Resilience? Why are they funding all these British institutions if It has no impact there. Well, you're juicing the skids of these London civil society institutions when you do that. Institute for Strategic Dialogue and whatnot. What are those groups doing? What is Institute for Strategic Dialogue doing?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It is doing advocacy and high-pressure campaigns and liaising with the tech companies to censor Americans. Americans are targeted. USAID is attacking Americans. When USAID paid the OCCRP, this is the corruption reporting project that's under the... under the public limelight right now because of massive scandals that have broken out in the past several months.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is the largest consortium of investigative journalists in the world. This is the group that broke the Panama Papers and other major world stories. Turns out half of their budget comes from USAID and the State Department. I believe in the beginning it was all of it or virtually all of it. They were effectively spawned out of USAID and the State Department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so that process, I think, is forming right now, and people are trying to trying to form that North Star. And I think many of the things that I've published help go into that thought leadership soup.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The USAID and the State Department have approval over what staff they can hire. They closely coordinate on the kinds of stories or category of stories or workload that they can carry out. On USA.gov right now, everyone can see this in the Wayback Machine with USA.gov currently under maintenance, shall we say.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's an incredible document at USAID bragging about the accomplishments that this investigative reporting group has done. Now, these are hit piece journalists that are carried out to capacity build independent media, not independent from government. It's our government. It's independent from you or what we say independent from other governments.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But they use this lie phrase independent media for all of their sponsored media assets. And so under the banner of supporting free and independent media in Central Europe, because they operate in Ukraine and about nine or ten or seven or eight Eastern European countries, it's jointly to do...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
independent media, sustainability funding, and anti-corruption, because we want to root out corruption in Eastern Ukraine, and root out corruption in Eastern Europe, root out corruption in Romania, and anywhere that, basically what they do is, They effectively function to write hit pieces and dig up dirt on the political enemies of the U.S. and U.K.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
legacy foreign policy establishment and then provide a predicate for prosecutors to arrest them or seize their assets or to induce policy changes in the country. And in fact, on USA.gov, and everyone can find this in the Wayback Machine, they have a document that says funding for OCCRP in Eastern Europe, $20 million dollars. Function, capacity building, independent media, anti-corruption.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Over $1 billion worth of assets seized. I believe it's several hundred policy changes induced in government or civil society organizations in the region. I believe they have six or seven government officials fired or sacked because of this group's reporting, including a president and a prime minister. So they're claiming criminal regime change.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And then the final one is 456 arrests and indictments. So this is mercenary media for the state. Paid for, deputized... These are effectively hitmen hired to seize the assets of, to get fired from their jobs, and to arrest, criminally take, use the criminal justice system, create a pipeline between their sponsored journalists and the local prosecutors.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
in order to arrest the political enemies of the U.S. government in these target countries. And you know this relationship with prosecutors in USAID runs very deep. For example, it was the USAID funding, which was implicated in that Joe Biden speech threat to Viktor Shokin around the removal of Viktor Shokin in Ukraine. That famous Council on Foreign Relations proposal And by golly, he did it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Son of a B, he did it. This was the famous clip where basically he said, if you don't fire the prosecutor, you're not going to get your billion. Well, USAID. USAID paid $27 million in just two grants alone to the Tide Center here in the U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The Tide Center is not just the fiscal sponsor of the Black Lives Matter Foundation, but they are also the fiscal sponsor of a group called FJP, it's Fair and Just Prosecutions,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
which is the group that manages the Soros prosecutors and tells them who to prosecute, who not to prosecute, has them sign pledges like Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, gives them talking points, gives them social media posts. This is all according to the Media Research Center, I should note. Meet on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. These are U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
prosecutors where the fiscal sponsor of that group 30% of Americans live under these Soros prosecutors now. And they're working with this group, Fair and Just Prosecutions, and they get their fiscal sponsorship through a mega-grantee of U.S. aid. USAID is, they do this everywhere and they can get away with it because judicial reform and anti-corruption is part of our humanitarian aid work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We're trying to strengthen their democracy. But this, when you read that accomplishment section, you don't know what crimes these people have committed. You don't know if they're guilty or innocent. USAID doesn't even brag about that in the document. It's the raw number. 456 of our enemies, 456 of our enemies got arrested
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
because of the incredible return on investment for paying our own mercenary media assets $20 million. And think of the return on investment. We paid them $20 million and we seized a billion dollars. You don't know what the crimes are when you read that document as a US citizen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
That scale of prosecutions, it's hard to imagine that every single person there was guilty of those crimes or that there wasn't some relationship with the prosecutors in the background that politicized those cases in the same way we have in the D.C. court here with the January 6th cases. So this plays out everywhere.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And this is also why USAID-funded SPOCs and NGOs had their own personnel making speeches to the prosecutors in Brazil when they ran the operation against Bolsonaro.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, it's all related. This is one of the reasons when I – do my lectures and I show the chart of the foreign policy establishment, State Department for U.S. National Interest, Defense Department for U.S. National Security, CIA as a sort of covert player to covertly help the State Department or covertly help DOD. These things are all connected. So the DOD picture is...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's this USAID Truman Show, and it touches everything. You think USAID is not having a massive impact on the government of France and the government of Germany and the government of the UK? USAID pays the Atlantic Council. In 2018, in the Atlantic Council's Democratic Defense Against Disinformation white papers,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on their board, I should mention, funded by the Pentagon and the State Department as well, and had a formal partnership with Burisma. But they're funded by USAID. In 2018, the front cover of their Democrat Defense Against Disinformation, one of their series in this, which was an internet censorship podcast.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
propaganda document and consensus-building document so that the Atlantic Council's muscle as NATO's think tank could go out to all of their different grantees and partner networks about who to censor, how to sell it, how to do it, what connections to establish with the tech companies in these governments. The front cover of this, and everyone can look this up,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
was the so-called Macron leaks in France and the distribution web of basically news stories that were damaging to Emmanuel Macron in the middle of his presidential run against Marine Le Pen, who USAID and the U.S. State Department – this is Western Europe. This is – where USAID ain't supposed to be, we're told.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The front cover that's funded by USAID has WikiLeaks at the center of this, Jack Posobiec as the other main highlighted note, a U.S. citizen, and the whole rest of the network map are all the different distributions of stories about these Macron leaks that helped Marine Le Pen but hurt their preferred winner of that election, Emmanuel Macron.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And what they were suggesting with that is that we need to stop Jack Posobiec and WikiLeaks from helping Marine, from publishing news stories that might help Marine Le Pen in Western Europe win that election. And that's USAID-sponsored, baby. They're touching every plot of dirt on God's green earth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, this is why it's useful to think of it as a blob. So it can come from several directions, and then it gets consensus built to build the appropriate operations network to carry it out. So, for example, U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
foreign policy is supposed to be set by the White House through the interagency process at the National Security Council, and it's the State Department who's supposed to be the agency general to steward policy. the execution of those foreign policy and national interest goals. And it's the Department of Defense that is supposed to steward that on the national security and military side.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
depending on what you are trying to do, like, for example, let's take the Georgia Ski Romania example. This could come from any number of directions in terms of how the idea first gets pitched and also a couple different tracks in terms of how it gets approved. And sometimes it can be done in a way that's totally rogue.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
A perhaps darker one and much bigger one to tackle in terms of cleaning that up. By the sheer size of it, USAID is about a $44 billion budget. The Pentagon's $900 billion. Depending on how you measure it, the black hole in their budget is somewhere between hundreds of billions to $35 trillion. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And this is one of the unique capacities of USAID in this story and why I believe it's important for the Trump White House to shut it down, to abolish it, executive order, congressional act, however, stored under state, and then after passing a series of reforms that we can maybe talk about at the end, if necessary, to spin out a new agency again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But the typical way this will happen is the White House wants to do something, or the Secretary of State, or some sort of thought leadership node within that, or within the National Security Council, pitch the idea and
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
All the different equities that would be involved in it, whether that's the Defense Department, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, supporting functions like FBI counterintelligence or DHS or other Justice Department and other people who would need to know in on that op would work. would all provide their comment and input.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It would finally get approved, and then it would be greenlit, and the appropriate grants to support that would all flow. The Pentagon would get the money, the State Department would issue grants about this, and then places like USAID would do the relevant humanitarian aid work in the region that would provide the cover to juice this, whether that's
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
doing civil society activity that has a sort of civil-military dual-use purpose or doing civil society work in the area that has a sort of CIA, State Department, national interest, political warfare element to it. And then that process would be midwifed by the National Security Council. But USAID is really unique in this process. And one of the reasons that it's gone so rogue is because
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID has always been this switch player. It was created in 1961 by JFK. A point that I've stressed continually is that a lot of people are talking about this presently as if JFK was purely thinking of creating USAID as a magnanimous charity because of the his high moral fiber, and then it got corrupted through these money laundering and payoff networks that are being publicized.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Two weeks before JFK created USAID by executive order, he awarded the Green Beret to the U.S. Special Forces and is singularly responsible for the massive upscaling of U.S. psychological operations, civil-military affairs, and unconventional warfare. JFK was bogged down in Vietnam and Laos and all these counterinsurgency debacles where the U.S. had interests in the region
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
World War II had ended quite recently. The World-Based International Order made it a big no-no to declare conventional war and bring in, you know, 1950 North Korea-style tanks and planes and napalm. And so we moved into this small wars, political war modality. And JFK believed in that very, very strongly. You know, this is why you have places like the, you know,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare that trains our special operations folks and the whole Fort Bragg-JFK special relationship during his presidency. But just two weeks after that historic October 21, 1961 Green Beret Special Forces event, JFK created USAID, and just one month later,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But the reason that I'm so overjoyed that it's starting with the USAID side is because it connects to all those points. And this is another thing that defenders of the establishment are now uncomfortably trying to find the right way to defend themselves, which is that if USAID is supposed to be humanitarian assistance and build the American people as a kind of international charity,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
launched Operation Pincushion, which sent the Green Berets, sent our special forces to Laos, where USAID was, you know, it would later turn out, USAID very quickly played this function of supporting these very same CIA-backed mercenary groups that Operation Pinkush was recruiting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They were sent to Laos by JFK to train and recruit these hillside guerrillas in Laos as part of our Southeast Asia, Vietnam-connected sub-war, unconventional warfare effort. We sent the special forces there to recruit them. The CIA managed that CIA mercenary army. And it was USAID who paid the head of that mercenary army to acquire two... U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
aircraft from two CIA proprietary airlines, Air America and Continental Air Services, everyone can look this up, in order to buy the planes that they use to traffic it's unseemly, but illegal narcotics to fund that war effort, as well as humanitarian relief supplies and personnel.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So USAID has played this swing role between state, CIA, and DOD and special forces work practically from the day it was born. But what's unique here is it's get out of White House approval free card. Can I flush this out for a second? Mm-hmm. Most of the major CIA scandals of the past two decades have not actually been the CIA directly themselves.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
In 1993, USAID created this new office to help wage the post-Cold War political warfare, initially in Eastern Europe, after we were trying to create political vassal states out of the former Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe. And this was called the Office of Transition Initiatives, OTI, USAID OTI.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it was designed to be a fast, flexible, rapid response capacity for USAID to do regime change work, to do political stabilization, to basically do sort of a kind of civilian special forces for civil, military, and political warfare work that would not have to run the traditional traps of approval. It wouldn't be bogged down in bureaucratic red tape.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it would effectively function under cover of humanitarian work as being a CIA, but without having the limitations that the CIA has on needing White House approval through what's called a presidential finding. So... All these CIA scandals popped off in the 1960s and 70s. The CIA went through a bunch of reforms. This was the famous Church Committee and Pike Committee hearings of 1975 and 1976.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
First time the U.S. ever created a Senate Intelligence Committee, a House Intelligence Committee, to permanently oversee the CIA, to stop what it had been doing, domestic political targeting at that time of left-wing Democrats, from ever happening again. Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election because of these scandals. And immediately, his first year in office,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
carried out the famous Halloween massacre that laid off 30% of the CIA operations division in a single night and crippled their budget. By the way, tell me if that sounds familiar to what's happening right now, you know, the first month of the Trump admin. won the office because of political scandals from intelligence agency oversight. It hits them right away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But then Carter ran into the Iran hostage situation. The national security state, the media, Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter neutering the CIA for having caused that. If we had had the CIA that we had before, the Iran hostage situation would have never happened. And so...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Why are they working with the U.S. Defense Department? Why are they working with Special Forces? Why is there even a civil-military coordinating branch for USAID and DoD? They have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes there or how dark many of the operations they thought USAID was involved in. And I think that this is part of what the blockade being set up right now to stop Doge
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There was still a black eye at CIA to get those old powers back, but the Reagan administration wanted those powers, so they couldn't get it through Congress.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So what they did is they basically created new structures to do what used to be done by the CIA, to be done by places like USAID and their newly created in 1983 National Endowment for Democracy, who is effectively the operations arm of much of USAID work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I say all this to say that USAID, the reason so much of the worst scandals that you find are USAID, and why I always say when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID, is because the CIA needs to get presidential approval for every covert action they do. There needs to be a presidential finding that they need to do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID does not, which means if a rogue cell at CIA or special forces or some wing of the State Department wants to do a dirty deed and they know the president won't approve or, in fact, targets directly or indirectly the president or his international allies, they know they can't get the presidential finding, but it has to be a covert action to run.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The world can't find out they're doing it or what these – grantees are actually doing, all they need to do is walk next door or place a phone call or, you know, meet in a secure location and tell their friends at USAID and USAID can make the whole thing happen totally, you know, basically behind the president's back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And I can go through a bunch of examples of that, but that's what, that's how Trump got hoodwinked in term 1.0 by his own USAID.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's the great flexible swing man for any of their needs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, this is the magic of being an independent agency. Is it an NGO? No. No, it's a formal U.S. government agency, but they make grants and subgrants and contracting work after the NGO class. But it's an independent agency. There's a great... There's a great U.S. Army War College book slash extended white paper that I've been publishing receipts from for the past six months.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's from 2014, and it's called the DOD and USAID Analysis and Recommendations for Development Defense Cooperation, going forward. It looks at this relationship between DOD, state, and USAID And it compiles DoD senior leadership thoughts on how best to synchronize what they call defense diplomacy development, the three Ds all working together, the military, the State Department, and USAID.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Because DoD has national security interests in the region, state has national interest or economic interest in the region. They need assets to play with, assets to liaise with, assets to build up, and development creates those assets. Paying to create these institutions, paying to co-op these institutions. So these things all go together, these three Ds, defense, diplomacy, development.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is 2014. This is over a decade ago. And in that U.S. Army War College memo, there's quotes from U.S. generals that say that they prefer working with USAID over state, even though USAID is... Independent, but it's always supposed to be guided by state. Because even our humanitarian assistance has to serve U.S. interests. And state represents those stated interests.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But you have DOD people, over a decade ago, saying they prefer to work with USAID over state for several reasons. That USAID is not bogged down by bureaucratic red tape of the, quote, interagency knife fight that happens at the National Security Council. But that USAID, quote, actually does stuff, whereas, you know, state is hamstrung by what they can actually do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's a diplomatic incident if the formal diplomatic arm of the U.S. State Department does something versus an independent aid agency that is there on a humanitarian purpose and, oh, they were using it for this wrong purpose. Because there's much more oversight on state. State runs the interagency gauntlet every day of its existence.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
from finding out is about. They don't want them to have USAID's books. They don't want them to have the internal records. They don't want them to have the emails and communications. They definitely don't want them to have the transfer of money flows.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It has to persuade the White House National Security Council and all the interagency partners to do something. But really the only oversight there is at USAID is what's happened is at the Office of Inspector General level. You have their own in-house accountability mechanism. And there's some great examples of how this has gone so haywire. I don't mean to... Keep going. Okay.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There was a massive scandal for USAID, and everyone can look this up. It was the Zunzaneo scandal. And let me make clear out the gate that I do not like and I'm not a fan of the Cuban government. I don't believe in socialism. I don't believe in communism. I'm not saying what I'm about to say because I believe that the Cuban government should remain or whatnot.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I leave aside the moral question about whether or not this was the right or wrong thing to do. But here is what was done. In 2014, a very massive scandal popped off that I think few people today remember. This was during the Biden White House where USAID took humanitarian funds that were earmarked for Pakistan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
and use them, we are told, to unilaterally create a social media website in Cuba at a time when Cuba had banned U.S. social media, considering Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and the like to be arms of U.S. statecraft.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The Obama administration was riding high at this moment from the Arab Spring and the Facebook revolutions and the Twitter revolutions that USAID and NED played such a critical role in. Funding money to these networks, training them, teaching them how to use Twitter hashtags, teaching them how to coordinate Facebook posts to tell people where to protest.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This was the sort of thing that even the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which directly oversees USAID, could not get access to until the present moment. Senator Joni Ernst had an ex-base with Elon Musk where she said when she tried to do oversight, she was threatened by USAID. When USAID ran the Zenzaneo op in Cuba in 2014 and the scandal popped off, who approved this?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
$1.2 billion pumped in by the State Department in Egypt during that time, for example. And so what USAID in their own internal documents showed is that they saw the success of the Arab Spring and they wanted to create a Cuban Spring. They wanted street protests, riots, what they called smart mobs in Cuba on the basis of U.S. social media that they could instrumentalize.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The problem was they didn't have the asset in the region. They couldn't get their social media in. So what they did is they used a Byzantine labyrinth of money laundering flows from these humanitarian aids earmarked for Pakistan – again, back to Pakistan – and used that to go through a subcontractor called Creative Associates International, who's a frequent USAID contractor for this dirty work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They were involved in all sorts of other ones, but it's CAI, not CIA, Creative Associates International, who then basically contacted two Cuban businessmen to create an identical version of Twitter, but for Cubans. Zunzanillo is... for Hummingbird. It's basically even simulated the bird. It had the like button, the retweet button.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And USA Documents showed that their plan was to get about 100,000, recruit people onto this platform, in their own words, with algorithms and feeds and promotion of that this was the site to share sports, music, and hurricane updates. That's their direct phrase in their own internal documents.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
but that once they had gotten a critical mass of users on the site, between like 60,000, 100,000, they would shift the algorithms, they would use the data that they hoovered up from Cubans signing up, taking note of their political proclivities, the network clusters they'd formed, in order to get them to take to the streets in a violent revolution protest against the Cuban government to form what they called smart mobs,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And basically, at the appropriate moment, once they've got them in, to get them to overthrow their government. Now, this is a classic CIA covert action. This has massive diplomatic implications for the United States government if this kind of thing is revealed. That's why the CIA is in charge of this stuff. Because the CIA is... the political warfare arm of the State Department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The State Department maintains our diplomatic relations and posture with the foreign world. The reason USAID is not supposed to be doing covert action, the CIA, is because if there's diplomatic blowback, it should be diplomatic organs who are doing it. But But what USAID said, you know, so evidently there was no presidential finding for that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They ran it, you know, so without President Obama's approval, at least that's the official story. And when, you know, Senate staffers during the oversight could not get access. So the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senate Foreign Relations Committee said they were duped. The interagency of the White House said they were duped.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You know, the official story, and they had public hearings on this, by the way, I believe in 2014. Yeah. The official story is that USAID did this whole thing in-house. And they did it because it was so-called discreet rather than covert, that it was not a formal covert action. It was simply discreet democracy promotion work to bring democracy to Cuba.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
That's a, if they ran that in the Obama administration, imagine what was done, you know, Trump wanted to knock out ISIS. ISIS, according to the previous White House, you know, we have WikiLeaks emails of Jake Sullivan saying to Hillary Clinton, Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria. And that effectively, you know, ISIS was a useful friend against Bashar al-Assad. Trump wants to knock out ISIS.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it turned out it was all in-house at USAID. What Senate staffers said was when they tried to get oversight of this operation along the way, they were told that if Senate staffers found out what USAID was doing, people could die. So they had to shield it from there. So we're opening up a Pandora's box And that's the threshold question is how much access to this is Doge ultimately going to get?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Hey, how do you fund money to ISIS if the president wants to eradicate ISIS, if you still want to use them as assets in the region? Well, you're not going to get interagency approval if the CIA does it in covert action. What if USAID does it? And that's how you see all this USAID money flowing to ISIS and Al-Qaeda and Taliban groups.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I think they just found $122 million from USAID to them just this week. I guarantee that number is a lot higher than that. And in fact, Trump's White House, Trump's OIG, who just took over USAID before this recent action, just published a memo where he said,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
and this is unbeknownst to the entire American public until now, that actually there's a big fat loophole at USAID where their contractors evidently don't need to... There may be a technical... Everyone can read that OIG report. John Solomon at Just the News published all this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But effectively, USAID can look the other way because there are no restrictions on their contractors in terms of their OFAC and counterterrorism money flow-throughs, or at least there's giant loopholes in them. So USAID can fund terrorist groups and get away with it in a way that no other U.S. government agency can. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is where it gets really dicey, and this is where I'm in a really difficult position. Because we have two... Fundamentally, there are two simultaneous tasks that... that appear to people who are new to this cinematic universe that are in massive conflict with each other.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
One is, given that this thing broke its sworn oath that it would never be used against the American people, and given the sheer depth and scale of what was weaponized, the American people need to know about it, and massive action has to be taken in order to not just knock it out, but salt the earth and stop it from ever rising again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So you need to go extremely hard in terms of showing the extent of it. On the other hand, this has been, you can make a very compelling argument, the reason that Americans have the standard of life that they do and have the advantages and privileges of the world's most powerful nation that it does.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You can make a very, very compelling argument that the rise of America to the preeminent world power in the 20th century would not have been remotely possible without this blob apparatus. Come back to this concept of no blob, no pencils.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You can't even make a pencil in this country unless you have a mechanism to be able to influence foreign governments if they nationalize their graphite mines or the export of their gum trees in Malaysia or the ability to potentially make inroads or liaise with or change the minds of unions that go on strike, that impact US national interest.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is the reason that our corporations are so powerful. They rely on the battering ram of the blob. In the early 1970s, in Chile, when there was an attempt to nationalize the bottling industry, Before we ran that coup, that coup was jointly coordinated, not just between the head of the CIA, but between the chairman of the Pepsi-Cola company.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Pepsi met with the head of the CIA, Don Kendall, met with Helms, and this is all declassified. You can read a great Guardian report, read right up on this, or any of the major national security think tanks. Basically, Pepsi's bottling operations in South America were being threatened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The chairman of Pepsi, Don Kendall, arranged a meeting with Henry Kissinger and said, hey, we need to stop this from happening. Kissinger then put him in touch with the head of the CIA. Pepsi, the head of the CIA, and the State Department's media mogul in Chile all met to jointly coordinate the best way to take down the government and take it down. Indeed, we did.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You see this happen time and again. How many governments have been overthrown in the interest of ExxonMobil and Chevron and other Western major oil companies? But hey, that's how we have cheap oil. You can make an argument that this is how we have energy dominance. And you can make the same argument about media, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Many people just this week are finding out that 90% of media outlets in Ukraine are funded by the US government. And if you're totally new to this space and you are rightly and righteously livid at finding out the extent of your own media ecosystem and diet has been puppeteered, co-opted, and financially sponsored by the government that is supposed to stay out of that domestically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You see these statistics and you go, burn it down, salt the earth. We've been told from elementary school to our own media outlets here that we have a free and independent press and that there's no role for the government in the media. The media is independent from government. That's the difference between us and the Soviet Union and China is we have free and independent media.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They have state-run media. You know, that's what distinguishes a democracy from an autocracy. And I totally understand the impulse, and I believe as much as possible, reforms need to be implemented, criminal penalties need to be attached for violating it, treble damages for civil suits, even be able to sue the agencies if they don't do oversight of the NGOs who operate domestically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But people who have not gone through their five stages of depression about the true extent of the USAID Truman Show... Before you proceed to the final evolution of these reforms, imagine a world where there's zero of that. Imagine a world where zero percent of media outlets or soft power hearts and minds work is sponsored by the U.S. government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
in Latin America, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, North Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Far East Asia, Eurasia. Imagine a world where there is zero influence whatsoever and other countries are not going to stop that, stop doing that work. We won elections doing this. And in doing so, we won favors for U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I didn't expect the speed of this. I think once they fixated on USAID, frankly, I think it was USAID's intransigence as the Trump admin and White House were just trying to simply audit things. And it was their reluctance combined with, I think, the scandals leading up to it that led them to zero in on it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
corporations, who in turn had skyrocketing and ever-expanding corporate profits, which in turn created the ability to hire Americans for jobs and to buy houses and to be able to buy health insurance and to be able to have a 401k of savings and to be able to pass down inherited wealth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But another problem is the MAGA movement, again, has not really had to deal with this dirty work abroad because the primary concern has been what's six inches in front of your face. My schools have this woke curricula. My infrastructure is crumbling. My kids can't afford to buy a home until they're 45 years old.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But the other part is that this mission statement of the blob to do this got corrupted as globalization destroyed the predicate for doing this dirty work in the first place. Okay, we overthrow the government of Chile for Pepsi. We overthrow the government of Iran for oil and gas. We overthrow the government of some Central African country to get the lithium in the cobalt.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Nominally, this is all supposed to help American corporations and American citizens. But what happens when those corporations outsource all their jobs to foreigners? What happens when they're not hiring American labor? What happens when they're not even building their manufacturing plants here?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Who are we doing these favors for when you have globalist corporations and you have globalist corporate boards and they've got no skin in the game? These are not... These are multinational corporations, and most of their export markets are to foreign customers. At this point, most of their labor pools are foreign citizens.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Most of their infrastructure, the facilities that they're building, this is how we had the heartland turn into the Rust Belt. It's because when you have these steel companies and you have these manufacturing places build their facilities somewhere else, it's not just the citizens, it's the entire regional development that goes away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So this whole concept of Reaganite trickle-down economics, that's what's good for the private sector, is good for the private citizen, has become completely divorced. And this is how you have this rogue blob that is stealing U.S. taxpayer money, citing a sort of Reaganite economic principle for doing this, trickle-down to the American citizens. But when you have this globalist conceit,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's no trickle down. All you're doing is helping the Wall Street and London private equity firms and financial firms and equity holders and huge salaries for the C-suite, the directors and officers and shareholders of this college of corporations that don't even represent the citizens anymore. And there's ways to put firewalls, by the way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And this is what I'm trying to educate the American people about. For example, You shouldn't even be able to... We're going to make the reforms, let's assume, to the worst of this dirty work, right? Just like we did in the 70s. We used to assassinate people, the CIA did. The CIA had whole assassination guides. Scandals in the 60s and 70s come out, we said, okay, okay, no more assassinations, okay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
A few things on that. One is, it's true that almost 14,000 employees were laid off at USAID. It's true that the name has been covered up at the building. It's true that all the foreign operations folks have been recalled. I don't know still, as of the time that we're speaking right now, that it's appropriate to say that USAID
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We can still do regime change work, but we can't authorize the killing of people of a political figure outside terrorism into covert action. Okay, well... you can do these for these other rogue activities. But in addition to that, Any stakeholder in a State Department operation or a USAID or that's assisted by U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Special Forces for great power competition has to meet some threshold of how much investment they're doing on the American soil, how many Americans they're employing on U.S. soil, how many contributions they've made to Americans and the American economy. You can't have this You can't have American taxpayers funding this globalist gut.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If this is done for nationalist reasons to help Americans, Americans have to be the beneficiaries of that. So this is all part of this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I'm saying that's part of the reforms because people need to keep this in mind as a sort of nascent – Trump world foreign policy establishment. There was a Republican foreign policy establishment for the past six years, but they've all been the neocon faction that represented the McCain, the Romney, the Liz Cheney, the Nikki Haley types.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And I'm not even trying to draw a personal beef when I say that. You can make the argument that this is sort of the foreign policy school that Marco Rubio was substantially supported by and that drew that distinction in 2016 between Rubio and Trump at the time. But I think Rubio, like J.D. Vance – J.D. Vance was not a Trump ally in the beginning either, but they've –
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I think that Rubio is doing, frankly, an incredible job so far. But the whole of Trump world is going to need to synchronize what their North Star is for these foreign policy visions. And I'm trying to say that it's a package deal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The thing about USAID was because of how flexible it was and because of how dirty it could be, again, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID and it's been this way for 20, 30 years at least. it was a shortcut. It was a shortcut that could close gaps quickly. And it's also a shortcut, for example, if you're not going to do regime change work,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And the highest ROI to be able to secure the petroleum, to be able to secure the lithium, the cobalt, the aluminum, the copper, the zinc, the timber, the import-export markets, the military bases, well, you're going to need to find other ways to offset that. the power you've lost by doing this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So for example, Trump in the oil and gas space, Trump is, you can see a creative way of trying to offset this. Like for example, let's just say a country who we depend on for petroleum access, goes rogue, shakes off the yoke of U.S. soft power in the region, say Azerbaijan or something, and you lose the petroleum because you lost your ability to influence those elections.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, now you need to offset that. Well, in Trump's case, he's saying drill, baby, drill domestically. So there's ways that you can maybe offset that. Or maybe you could, you can... Find other levers for carrots and sticks that don't rely on tapping into this dark arts sorcery work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
For example, I believe one of those things that just like with banning the CIA's ability to do assassinations after the 70s is banning social media censorship diplomacy. USAID's huge role in social media censorship. that's one of those assassinations level things that has to be completely banned by law in whatever continuing function USAID has.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
as a function has been shut down, given that I believe that the grants are still ongoing. There's been a funding pause, but USAID is funded through Q1, and there's going to be a dogfight in the budget about what to preserve, and the plan is to fold it under state. But to my knowledge, an executive order has not been passed formally abolishing it, and
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And any USAID administrator or someone who's caught doing that, there should be criminal penalties. There should be civil penalties with treble damages for every US citizen who's impacted by that. And because this is, This is impacting U.S. taxpayers paying to have this cloak and dagger work target them. There has to be recourse for that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So you can create those categories, but it also has to touch the corporate side for the stakeholder group, because otherwise, who are you doing this for? What are our American national interests?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I hesitate to concede that they fully had their legs chopped off. because of a number of reasons. One is, even assuming so, they're moving over to the State Department. Now, what I've been telling, you know, I do all these private live streams for my ex-subscribers, and for 14 months, I've been telling every lecture I've done, I've said, x-ray through every time you see USAID, and look, and
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
you have to see the State Department everywhere. They are not USAID. They're State Department. They've always been State Department. There's never been an inch of daylight. Now, let's sort of start with that because there actually is in the sense that it's a switch player between these other interagencies, and they have more flexibility to do this rogue work than State.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But they are fundamentally supposed to be a State Department function. They are independent, but they are supposed to be guided by State. And they only exist to advance the foreign policy stipulated goals set by state. But what difference does it make? Leave aside the flexible covert action under discrete democracy promotions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Leave aside the accountability, get out of White House approval free card aspect of it. What difference does it make to shut down USAID if you move everything over to the State Department? It's a State Department role anyway. There was intense debate about whether even to make it an independent agency because it's fundamentally the State Department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's the same debate that George Kennan had with his peers in 1948 when they created the function for covert action in the first place for the CIA.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
George Kennan was the guy who authored NSC 10-2, the national security memo that established the plausible deniability doctrine for the Central Intelligence Agency to do covert action, political warfare, economic sabotage, propaganda, and information black ops, the whole gamut of everything that the CIA is authorized to lie about so that our government can deny to us and to the world that they're actually doing it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
two months before George Kennan authored NSC 10-2 and gave us the national security structure that we currently live under. He wrote this memo that I talk about frequently called The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare. This is on April 30th, 1948. This was two weeks after the CIA's first
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
mostly unauthorized, covert action to rig and influence the course of and ultimately win the Italian election in Italy, which was the first election in Italy after World War II that pitted a US-backed, pro-Western candidate against a communist, Soviet-backed candidate. And the CIA did all sorts of dirty work in there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Even if it did, there'd be the legal challenge, and the bills to abolish USAID are still just-born babies in the House and the Senate. And even assuming the closure and abolition of USAID, it is going to be inherited by the State Department. So that function will continue, but under the direct oversight of state.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They had their assets stuffing ballot boxes, using mafia muscle to shut down opposition meetings. We bought the media in the region. We worked with all the religious groups and the charities and The people involved in that operation, you know, publicly wrote in the memoirs that we would have lost that election if not for the CIA.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
James Woolsey even defended that regime change operation on Fox News in 2017 when he was asked, you know, Russia's meddling in our elections. We don't meddle in foreign elections. And he, you know, said, well, you know, we used to do that sort of thing, you know, in Italy and in Greece. And He's referring to this event that I'm talking about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And then she says, well, we don't do that anymore, though, right? And he goes, well, chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, only in the interest of democracy, you know, basically. But at that point, there was no authorized CIA covert action to do it. They were a spy agency. They were on the ground. They took the reins and run.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And ex post facto, George Kennan, 12 days later, says, hey, this thing was gangbusters, right? We just swung the entire course of the Italian election doing this. We need to do this everywhere. And in fact, we need to create the capacity to do this everywhere, even if we don't intend to use it. Because this was a real last-minute effort last time. We need this capacity in place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Our assets in the organized labor, our assets in the judiciary, our assets in the media, our assets in the movies and culture – even if we don't intend to, just in case we ever need to. And he called this the inauguration of organized political warfare.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And something like 15 to 20 times in this memo, he presupposes that it's going to be parked at what he wanted to set up inside the State Department called the Bureau of Political Warfare.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
and that it would be a formal – that what we now call CIA covert activity would simply be another office at the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, D.C., in Foggy Bottom, not in Langley, Virginia, and it would be called the Bureau of Political Warfare. But he goes over the reason why we might not want to structure it that way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We might want to put it at another agency, which would come to be the CIA. And he talks about how the funding – The funding for it may not be able to be disguised on the State Department's books. It may raise too many questions. There may be too much of a – for this sort of covert activity, it may be best because it's political warfare and it's really dirty and it's huge diplomatic blowback.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And State Department has to report its finances very publicly and there's –
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
we created the state department the very first meeting of of congress of the united states of america in 1789 it was the first agency we created it's ancient everything runs through it so he said it might be best actually to have this done but it should still work constantly with the state department it's fundamentally a state farming function but perhaps it should be parked somewhere else and then two months later boom cia nsc 10-2
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
was tasked to do the thing that was originally anticipated for the State Department Office of Political Warfare. The same thing is happening right now with USAID. That's all this is. They're just going to create, and in fact, everyone can read Max Boot, the, uh, you know, Arch Council on Foreign Relations, you know, Never Trump, Neocon, um, you know, uh,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
you know, constant voice on the think tank space against all things Trump world, he penned a article, I believe it was during the Trump administration, where he called for this exact same structure to be set up to create, that we should not shy away from this sort of work or hide the fact that that we do them. We should create a formal track at USAID called the Career Track for Political Warfare.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But the warning signs to look for, I think there's no better description of what those warning signs are than what was said by U.S. ambassador turned legal hatchet man, Norm Eisen, I believe in an MSNBC appearance this week, where he called the Trump administration an autocratic regime, and we have tools to displace autocratic regimes around the world in, you know, People-powered revolutions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it should be called a Bureau of Political Warfare inside of USAID. And people should be trained specifically for this function of USAID early in their careers. And it should not be something that's a big scandal. And so we have a limited personnel pool because nobody wants to say that's what they do. They should be celebrated.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We need to turn the culture around so that when USAID can do this, they've got a much bigger and better network to do this. And we're now running into that. So I don't actually see USAID going away when you move it at state. Okay. You are inheriting – and this is an uncouth phrase, but I think the visceral imagery is intended to make this stick – closing the Ronald Reagan building –
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And moving all of those funds, if it's a billion in overhead, moving just, if you keep all the grants and move that 43 billion into the State Department, the State Department just inherits a USAID herpes infection. It's the same problems.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's this tumor, this growth, this permanent flare-up that now it's just, there's no difference between, other than the structural that allows you to get away from oversight, which is what I'm saying. But frankly, there'd be no difference if you shut down Langley headquarters and you created an office of political warfare at state to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If you shut down USAID headquarters and created an office for international development at state... Now, you're making Marco Rubio at that point the most powerful secretary of state in American history when you do that. But fundamentally, the problem was there was not oversight or repercussions for wrongdoing and rogue activity at USAID.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so it's coming back to the place it was intended to be spawned out of.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
What is that? The Atlantic Council bills itself as NATO's think tank, effectively. The easiest way to think of them is the sort of civil military, semi-clandestine, even though it's public-facing, coordinating arm for NATO priorities. So when you have... NATO is obviously the Western world's military alliance.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so they're concerned with the military activity of U.S., France, all the NATO countries. And it's their sort of consensus military activity. And people are finding this out, who are mostly concerned with domestic policy, they're finding this out more and more with this USAID story, which is that
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
A huge and sometimes the most important and dispositive element in military work is actually the civil affairs, is actually the political and civil society topography of the target country and its regional interests. partners, allies, and adversaries. And then oftentimes it's that the political, which determines the military result much more so than the military activity itself.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We're seeing this, for example, with Georgia's Q, right? NATO wants to build the military base right there and just point like a gun out at Crimea. This will obviously put the people of Romania, put a big fat kick me sign on their back from Russia the moment this goes operational. Okay. Well, NATO doesn't want that to happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
NATO, could NATO roll into Romania right now and run a, you know, Yugoslavia run back like 1995 and 1999 and Georgia gets elected, you know, gets elected head of state, decides to cancel the NATO air base, kick everyone out. Kind of a diplomatic incident if they roll in and, you know,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
napalm raid from fighter jets and drones, the sitting government of Romania, just because that party won the election and decided to cancel a military base. So the military can't do that directly. What they need is the civil military. They need the civil side of military operations to make that election result not happen. And you see the same thing. It's not just always about tilting elections.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And this was the man who basically spearheaded nearly every lawfare push against Trump world for the past eight years, for everything from the Trump impeachment to the J6 impeachment, to the all of the Ukraine affairs to running a group called Crew, which sued the Trump administration hundreds of times. And, you know, he was the former U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Sometimes it's about the passage of a law. For example, Ukraine, there was a lot of tense debates about the post-2014 Maidan revolution government's in Ukraine's stance towards the Russian half of the country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The Russian ethnics, the Russian speaking portion part of the country, the representation of the Russian side of the story on Ukrainian TV or social media or culture or the religious issues around the Russian Orthodox Church. Well, every bit of pro-Russia institution, institutional
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
affinity link that's cleaved out of Ukrainian politics or civil society helps further achieve the NATO goal of folding Ukraine into NATO and of helping Ukraine at that point militarily achieve reconquest of the breakaway Donbass and Crimea region. But the problem is if Zelensky didn't want to do that, for example, in May 2019 when he took office or April 2019,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If he didn't want to do that, it would kind of be a diplomatic incident for NATO if they ran strafing air raids over Kiev until he promised to kick the Russian language off of Ukrainian TV, effectively ban or place extreme limits on the Russian Orthodox Church influence. If he... defied the IMF and its privatization plan for Ukraine's energy assets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
NATO wants that done, but NATO can't be the one to do it. They can't have their fingerprints on the gun. So what they need is a sprawling civil military, whole of society capacity to have that political result achieved, but have it come from the civil institutions in and around that. And that's how you have the scandal of things like the Red Lines memo. 70 U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
government-funded NGOs, all signatory to the U.S. aid-funded, as well as NATO-funded and U.S. State Department-funded Ukraine Crisis Media Center, crisis management. This is the U.S. and NATO-funded organization umbrella arm. We talk about this 90% of Ukrainian media. Well, a lot of this is run out of these centralized U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
umbrella groups that coordinate the media surround sound of all these different NGOs and media organizations. And one of the major ones is called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. Well, I've talked about this before. One month, Zelensky takes office, April 2019.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
In May 2019, the Ukraine Crisis Media Center issues Zelensky a red lines memo saying that Zelensky will suffer political instability if he crosses any of the 25 listed below red lines.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
that touched Zelensky's ability to negotiate with Russia about energy affairs, negotiate with Russia about security affairs, block the privatization efforts of major Ukrainian industries, deviate in any way from the path to accession into the NATO and surrounding EU bodies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It had a section for their education, for their culture, for their language, for their media, for their energy policies, for their security policies. It's not just the USAID Truman Show in terms of what us as civilians think are organic institutions, but are in fact USAID proxies. It's the policies of sitting governments.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Zelensky only became the head of state for Ukraine because of the political instability this very same USAID network inflicted on Viktor Yanukovych, however you feel about him. I'm not even opining an opinion, but the fact is he was run out of office in a rental riot operation where... All of the major groups involved were USAID funded. So, you know, easy come, easy go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And what they're saying is, twice in that memo, the top line of it says, these are red lines, cross them, instability. They say it right again in bold in the memo right before the 70 signatories. Message received, but NATO can't say that directly because, hey, that's an attack on democracy. If NATO says it, we're supposed to have a civilian-run government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So you need a civilian front for the military consensus. That's why the U.S. Department of Defense pays over a million dollars a year to the Atlantic Council and why they have seven CIA directors on their board to juice the capacity to create this civilian front for a military monster.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
ambassador to the Czech Republic for President Obama and even wrote a playbook, basically, on how to... how to orchestrate color revolutions against populist movements that were rising in Europe while he was at the Brookings Institution just a few years ago. And he's openly calling on live television to take that same
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Yeah, well, USAID does grant funding. USAID builds thought leadership. So academics, academic universities function as a kind of super turbocharged NGO. They are 501c3s. They are nonprofits, just like the NGOs are. They are not for profit. You can give them a lot more money without the unseemly blowback of looking like USAID is picking winners and losers in private sector markets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
private sector partnerships. And so USAID funds research grants. USAID funds departments and centers and institutions in order to make all these things happen. So for example, with the Wuhan lab, how did USAID end up paying $15 million effectively to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create bat-borne vaccines
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
jump from animal to human, gain of function, SARS-CoV-2, Frankensteinian freak monster viruses. Why are there USAID fingerprints on that work? Well, it's because it's run through universities who then put the pass-through funding in order to do that. That money initially went to, for example, I believe it was UC Davis. It was the University of California funding
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Then it went through to EcoHealth Alliance, which is this famous – EcoHealth Alliance was famous for its, I believe, NIH and HHS grants. This was the famous case of it being barred after the revelations of the past few years. I believe EcoHealth Alliance is now barred from being able to get future grants anymore. But they got his pass-through money, and then they then passed the money.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Then that money flowed to the Wuhan Institute. And so through this nonprofit sphere, you can create ever more layers of plausible liability that the U.S. government was behind this, that the U.S. government wanted to do this for whatever reason. You can make the argument that gain-of-function,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
is not actually to be, you know, deployed as a biological warfare weapon, or it's not actually to be sort of leaked to destabilize, you know, a popular government like the Trump administration, but actually it's, we do this gain of research function in order to build vaccines in order to, if somebody else builds something like this, we have a way to counter somebody else's biological warfare.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is the same argument. You can think of the Mockingbird media apparatus, the USA Truman Show in the media space. You can make the same argument that, listen, we fund this Truman Show. We find 90% of countries, you know, media complex while sort of either lying about it or trying to hide people from knowing about it, like protesting these foreign agent registration act type things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Because if we don't do it, somebody else, Russia could do it, China could do it, and so we need to be in the game. This thing's dual use. We're not necessarily just doing this to blare propaganda, but it's to counter foreign countries' propaganda. Same thing with why we, the justification for gain-of-function and building freak mutant viruses and jumping them from animals to human.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We create these viruses that never existed in a lab. in order to create vaccines against hypothetical future viruses, and to build the knowledge base of academic researchers and medical researchers in the field, so even if we aren't able to have the vaccines, we're able to quickly close the gap in the future to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
playbook for overthrowing foreign governments and to find a way to implement it here. And the first two things that he said off the top were that this needs to be a legal fight and it needs to be a media fight. So taking it to the courts and taking it to the media for hearts and minds. But what you've seen, one of the warning signs that I'm very concerned about
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We're learning more about the sciences by expanding beyond the current set of virus suites that we've seen. That's a policy debate that I'm not even entering into, but... But the fact is, is this is what we do. We do this at every major university. And universities, in turn, often function as arms of the state. For example, when the U.S. State Department and...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The CIA and USAID, USAID created the Office of Transition Initiatives, OTI, in 1993. That was when we were privatizing Russia. Well, who functioned in many respects as the long arm of the State Department during that time, often representing State Departments in diplomatic, effectively a diplomatic interlocutor, was the Harvard University. Harvard Endowment was working hand in glove.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
In fact, everyone can read about this published in mainstream media. The Harvard boys do Russia or read Casino Moscow or any number of write-ups. This is all openly acknowledged that Harvard was effectively a... a shadow diplomacy arm, and it was able to, you know, it put a massive favor in the favor bank to the U.S. because they led the shock therapy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They led the privatization of a trillion dollars in state-owned assets of the Soviet empire to be bought up at fire sale prices by Wall Street and London stakeholders. They loved what they were doing. Now, I should note, this is the same relationship that happens at the NGOs. Take, for example, the Tide Center, okay? We talked about this before.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The Tide Center is known by many conservatives as a sort of notorious left-wing Soros network because I believe Soros gave at least like $14 million or something to the Tide Center. dark money network hub that is a 501c3 but you can't see what money flows to any of its projects that are not 501c3s but that get their 501c3 through the Tide Center. And so Black Lives Matter Foundation
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
gets his 501c3 through the Tide Center. USAID gave them $27 million. FJP, Fair and Just Prosecutions, which is the effective puppeteer of, at least according to the Media Research Center report and the Daily Wire reports on this, which broke all these insider internal documents,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They give their marching orders to Letitia James and Alvin Bragg and the people prosecuting our presidents while effectively pressuring them to do so, while representing the donor network that makes up their re-election campaigns. This is a massive conflict of interest. And where do they get their 501c3 from? The $27 million USAID grantee recipient. But what do those grants look like?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, the Tide Center has – I think one of these is about a $25 million grant from USAID to the Tide Center. For the Tide Center to quote – and everyone can look this up. I believe I'm stating this accurately – To secure concrete commitments from foreign countries for certain foreign policy goals that are hinted at in the grant. Of course, this is another issue because of the secrecy around USAID.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
These grant descriptions are very, very nominal. You know, instead of the, you know, 10 paragraphs or instead, you know, it's just oftentimes it's 50 word descriptions for USAID. hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grants.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
is that a fundamental part of these people powered revolutions, these so-called color revolutions, is on the street action to destabilize countries, which also provides a sort of patina, a predicate to the rest of the world that this is the genuine reflection of the democratic
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And in this case, the Tide Center is being formally deputized to negotiate with secure foreign commitments from secure commitments for the United States government from foreign governments They're being deputized, and this may be the Tides Foundation rather than the Tides Center, which is its sister entity, but this is the Tides Network.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But that's what Harvard did, and that's what all these universities who get USAID funding do when they are involved in these activities. in that gooey line between domestic university researchers or domestic centers, but they have cultural exchange events with the people in Pakistan and the energy engineers there, like Arizona State University, for example, or Harvard, or Stanford, or MIT.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
These have international touch points, and every one of those touch points can double as an instrument of statecraft. What's a big, fat, juicy incentive to go out and do that statecraft to achieve U.S. State Department ends? Big, fat grant funding from the U.S. State Department, USAID, and frequently DARPA and the U.S. Defense Department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID, together with the U.S. State Department's Bureau for Refugee Population and Migration, Last year alone, according to, I believe, the Center for Immigration Studies, gave $1.6 billion to the migrant groups
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
who formed the illegal migrant trail from South America and Latin America up into the southern border, paying for their food, their transport, their shelter, giving them often cash debit cards. So this is... A billion and a half dollars that USAID, in conjunction, because again, USAID always x-ray through. USAID is the mask. State Department is mask off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So it's no wonder that they jointly coordinate this. But it's the specific immigration wing of the State Department for refugee population migration, together with USAID, a billion and a half dollars just in, I believe, a single year alone. It may be the whole Biden administration alone.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
to a web of over 200 NGOs who, every step of the way, capacity build illegal immigrants to make the voyage safely and comfortably and can pay their whole way through in order to violate U.S. immigration law and to illegally... enter and make their new lives here in this country. And some of this gets really, really ugly. And I'll give you an example of this. USAID is doing that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it was administered for the whole of the Biden administration by Samantha Power. Samantha Power's husband, and I don't normally feel it's appropriate to mention family members, but they are both political and in the Biden administration's government doing a one-two punch on this issue. So, you know, this is not about the personal. This is just because these two things are connected.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
people being underserved by an autocratic government but it has the the benefit of shutting down the country and destabilizing the government because they're they're between a rock and a hard place they they'll shut down the highways they'll shut down though you know the union workers will all walk out and shut down industry by going on mass strike uh there'll be violent confrontations uh in
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Cass Sunstein was a very infamous figure in the conservative world for a long time because he was the author, I believe in 2008, 2007, 2008, of a famous white paper called Conspiracy Theories, which made the argument that the U.S. federal government needs to infiltrate the online space and infiltrate the cognitive intelligentsia of alternative movements.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
At the time, he was concerned about things like 9-11 conspiracy theories on YouTube, undermining the diplomatic posture and standing of the United States and our military posture. If these theories gained steam, it would... He massively degraded the ability to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq and build an international coalition.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so he made the argument, and I'm not weighing in on this, by the way, substantively, but this is simply what he said, and everyone can look this up. This is Samantha Power's husband, who then joined Samantha Power on the other end of this. Actually, maybe I'll start with that side of the story.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
He moved over while Samantha Power was head of USAID, running this program, spending a billion and a half dollars to fund illegal immigrants to make their way from foreign countries into our country illegally. DHS is responsible for managing that and stopping that and catching them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Cass Sunstein moved over to DHS in order to help run the immigration policy, where he was basically a senior advisor on immigration policy around the open border that left the whole thing open. So you have the one-two punch. Samantha Power is funding the machine so that they all get here. And, you know, her husband is a DHS...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
creating and popularizing and implementing the policies that make sure there's catch and release and the whole thing's open and we can't do anything to stop them once they get here. Interagency approval, you might say, but it's all in-house right there. But
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The other part of this is this gets back to the role of USAID in psychological operations and why USAID needs to lie about what it does abroad and why it needs to lie about what it does to our own oversight organs and the people, the US citizens who vote for it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So Sunstein writes this conspiracy theories thing and he argues, whether you agree with it or not, a lot of people will never even think about that when they're considering the merits of such a thing that these things, if they gain steam, have massive diplomatic implications. You're going to convince France to contribute to the war effort.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You're going to convince Germany and the UK while they see things on YouTube that make their own parliamentarians or prime minister question the predicate for it. You can understand the national security impulse to want to do this work. I'm not saying that's the thing to do, by the way. Believe me. So it was called Conspiracy Theories, this initial paper, and it made the argument that the U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
dozens of cities, attacking police, as we saw with the BLM riots, even burning down police precincts. And then the only way to really respond to that in order to stop that is through an almost kind of quasi-military scale deployment to physically remove those people from the highways they're blocking, the infrastructure that they're terrorizing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
federal government needs to develop a new capacity to infiltrate these movements and develop methods to either neutralize them or reroute their cognitive thought leadership in order to avoid the outcome that results in free and unfettered alternative media popularizing ideas that could undermine the workings of the State Department or the U.S. military.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Then quickly thereafter, he writes a book called Nudge. Nudge is basically the Holy Bible for the censorship industry. And it's basically required reading for anyone who wants to have a career in countering disinformation or disinformation studies, if you will, or information integrity or digital resilience or media literacy. This is the sort of It lays out the gospel.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And I think that just because of the pure money outlays and how easy that picture is to understand for Americans, it's now challenging the entire foreign policy establishment from the operations of the State Department to the intelligence services to the defense establishment. I think it's validated already.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's called Nudge because it's a book about how to get people to do things without top-down coercion, the appearance of autocratic coercive control, but getting them to do it anyway. How do you, Steph, shove people to do it because that's what Russia and China do. Nudge them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Find a way to get them to do it without your fingerprints being on it, without it drawing the same critiques that would have if the Russian or Chinese government decided to do this. And what it's about, you know, it's about creating this kind of whole-of-society surround sound. The State Department wants to do it, DOD wants to do it, CIA wants to do it, USAID wants to do it. Okay?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We don't need to make it formal government policy. We don't need to throw people in jail for they do it. If they do it, we need to create, you know, and Nudge itself was primarily about the behavioral role of this, but also the behavioral psychology behind this, but also about the role of institutions in making this happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But what you do is you, instead of doing top-down, you astroturf a bottom-up and you create a middle-out and a whole society. You want people to feel like their lives will be over if they challenge it, but you can't criminalize it. We have a First Amendment. Well, what if you raise the costs of that behavior? It's incentives. It's carrots and sticks. How do we heighten the cost of doing that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
What assets do we need in civil society in order to achieve this? Well,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
If they're deplatformed, they can't access their wedding photos and baby photos because they're kicked off Facebook, or they see a friend of theirs was and can no longer DM with grandma because they posted about, hey, these vaccines may have come from the Wuhan lab, or these vaccines may have been funded by the US government, or they might not work, or we shouldn't go through with a mandate.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We don't want to throw people in jail for that. Yet, maybe. Because a lot of these same folks have now started to talk about, well, maybe the fundamental problem is the First Amendment itself, and that's why they are all working with the EU and the UK and foreign governments, like Brazil, to make this happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But, okay, so get the social media companies to demonetize them, deplatform them, do algorithmic suspension. Okay, that's one thing we can do. What's another thing we can do? Well, we can do defamations and lawsuits. We can use lawfare. And we can make high-profile cases of this. And there were... examples of this in documents of the affirmative planning of
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
finding a sympathetic plaintiff to make an example out of these media companies to do this. And these were published before things like Dominion and some of these other lawsuits around these cases. How can you create vocational penalties for doing this?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But when you do that, you get hit by the second round of the Color Revolution playbook, which Cries of humanitarian rights violations, authoritarian crackdowns. See, now we prove they're authoritarian because they've done this. And that's where the international community comes into the picture with joint sanctions, economic pressure. Now they can hold up this crackdown as the reason to do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So, for example, you don't need to arrest him, but have Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, implement policies that he goes on live television and proudly says, no jab, no job. You can't earn a living if you believe these things or spread information around that. Tony Fauci himself, and the eternal shame of it is it took three years after COVID for these emails to come out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
said that one of the best ways to actually get people to get citizen buy-in for the vaccine rollout and stop these vaccine conspiracy theories is to raise the cost of people saying them and that you need to make it hurt. And that will, you know, he said that in so many words, and everyone can look up this receipt. I have, you know, I've reposted this 20 times in my ex-account.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's been played on Fox News. I believe there's an audio file with it as well. But that was not, you know, the criminal justice system. This was not the Attorney General of the United States, but it was the key administrator of the entire public health system during the COVID response, saying the fundamental guiding tenet of it is justice. Make it hurt. Make it hurt.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Change the incentives so that if people question what we're doing, it costs them their livelihoods. It costs them their social media accounts. It costs them their standing. It costs them their medical licenses. Make it worse than prison. Because at least you spend a year in prison. You come out, you still got your Facebook, your Twitter, your Instagram. You still got your business license.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You know, you... You can serve your time and come back to society. When you lose all these things, you often lose them forever, at least until Elon acquired X and set that free.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
How did that happen? Well, I haven't seen the source documents. I've seen this be reported. I haven't double, triple checked that. I've seen that as headlines. So I'm not affirmatively weighing into that until I see the source of those numbers myself. So I don't know her particular case. But what frequently happens in other high-level scenarios like this is,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
you have stakeholders who, now, first of all, so there's a few things, right? There's always the potential. So let me remove it from the Samantha Power thing because I just want to be respectful and note that I just don't know that for a fact, but let's just call this Cynthia P-word. Cynthia P-words. We'll call her Cynthia instead of Samantha, okay? Random example, not her.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There are many ways that this kind of radical jump in wealth can be acquired. Now, first of all, I also don't know if that's a cumulative household income that includes the net worth of her husband. This is also a frequent thing. I know in reporting disclosures, oftentimes you don't need to just report your own income.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And this gets back to the fundamental question. position we're in at this unique moment in American history where the foreign policy establishment is really, for the first time in a very serious way, having to respond to the will of the people who pay for it, which is that you have this out-of-power network here in the U.S. that is grasping to try to find allies on the Republican side in Congress.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You need to report the combined income of family members, because that's often how money is laundered. You saw this with the Biden family, for example. When you apply for security clearance, they need to know if you're holding your assets. You declare this much income, but actually the house is owned in the name of your wife.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It looks like you have a $5 million home, but it's your home, you live in it. Any moment you could change the deed back to your thing. So oftentimes there are equity interests or large asset interests that are combined. So again, I don't know in this case, but there are a few things. First of all, you have insider knowledge in these cases.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So talking generally about this, because this is the famous Nancy Pelosi tracker about how she does this. And I talk about this frequently. This is why there is a pipeline from blob to banker. the people who administer U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
foreign policy and are insiders and have national security clearances and know everyone in the business and know everyone in the network and know everything they're up to next and their whole inside thought process and they have access to the classified documents and they know, you know, like, you know, sure is a, you know, staring into a...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Magic 8-Ball or maybe like a fortune teller, they know, they can see the swirling purple clouds inside the glass of what the CIA is going to do, what the DOD is going to do, what the State Department is going to do, what the USAID is going to do. in Ukraine next, in Congo next, in Venezuela next.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They know or have a really good insider trader's advantage knowledge of whether there's going to be a coup, for example, in that country that opens up that country's natural resources to privatization. Is oil and gas going to be privatized in Turkmenistan? And you are a part of a Goldman Sachs firm This is how you get these things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Jared Cohen from the State Department's policy planning staff, then creating Google Jigsaw, which played the tip of the spearhead role in internet censorship, AI super weapons, and works closely with the US State Department and DHS CISA for censorship work, as well as foreign academic institutions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Like the Cambridge University Social Decision-Making Lab, which is partnered with all these groups that does psychological inoculation work funded by the U.S. taxpayer in part or partnered in part. Well, what did Jared Cohen do right after going to Jigsaw? Went to Goldman Sachs, and he's doing macroeconomic and global policy there. Well, what does he bring to the table?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Let's see, the State Department's policy planning staff and that whole network where it was basically the CIA branch of Google that he was interleasing with that whole time. He brings the whole network together. How is he able to help Goldman Sachs make investment predictions so that they're one step ahead of the market?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Well, it's not technically insider trading in the sense that it's directly at the portfolio company with advanced knowledge of their business line and some 10B5 securities violation. It is the great unstated insider trading reason that there is this blob-to-banker pipeline. Mark Milley, for example, I believe is at J.P. Morgan or another one of those banks.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Another great example of this is the Joe Biden White House blobber-to-banker pipeline. So Joe Biden's closest political... advisor in the White House and has been since was since the 1980s was a guy named Mike Donilon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Mike Donilon was this sort of shadow advisor figure who, you know, according to media reports, basically, you know, sits over Biden's shoulder with everything he does and and helps advise on, you know, political and other strategy. Well, Mike. So Mike Donilon's brother is a guy named Tom Donilon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They are now being counter-pressured by folks like Elon and others who are threatening to primary them if they defect. And their strongest allies are a handful of folks on the Republican side in Congress, but most potently the in-power governments abroad that have a similar axe to grind against Trump and Trump world and Trump's foreign policy vision.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Tom Donilon basically hit the hat trick of everything you can possibly do as an apex predator of the U.S. national security state. National security advisor, State Department, coordinated the military, the intelligence, and the statecraft world for years and years, decades. Apex predator of the national security state at the highest level of military intelligence and statecraft.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
What was he doing during the entirety of the Biden White House? He was the chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute. So this is basically overseeing, administrating the investment arm of BlackRock, which has $10 trillion of assets under management. I know that a lot of those are donor-advised funds and pass-throughs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But this is, at the end of the day, a $10 trillion juggernaut of portfolio investments. And his brother is the closest advisor to the President of the United States who commands the Pentagon, the CIA, and Macron. the State Department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So all that would need to be done, I mean, you can imagine why, you know, BlackRock might want to pick up someone like Tom Donilon, who, you know, even if he had zero experience whatsoever as a banker or as a finance mogul, maybe, you know, Who knows if Mark Milley can even read a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or can even have a conversation with any of the quants who crunch the numbers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They don't care about that. They want to know whether or not they can be the first mover and capture the entire market, for example, of the potential for lithium to open up in the Golden Triangle. Because what's the Biden administration going to do? Are they going to send in the Marines? Are they going to send in the boys? Are they going to do that in Iran?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
What's going to happen with Russia and the $75 trillion worth of natural resources that Russia sits on? What parts of that? What regions? How about Africa? How about all the cobalt and lithium in the Congo? or the copper companies that are their portfolio companies, or the zinc, or the timber, the copper, the aluminum, the gold, the silver, everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so, in theory, all that would need to happen was a conversation from Mike to his brother, Tom, and then suddenly, BlackRock has a first mover advantage of knowing exactly where, you know, the Wayne Gretzky quote, right? How are you so good? You're not even that fast. How are you so good at hockey? And he says, I don't skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck is going.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
That's how it looks like I'm so fast. Well, speed of investment is everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So there's the direct – Now, all of this has moral hazard involved. All of this corrupts the domestic process and in some respect jeopardizes that sort of Smith-Muntz style protecting domestic people from foreign-facing operations type stuff whenever those media outlets pick winners and losers in domestic politics. But there are two variations of this that...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
that will be happy to assist in this project any way they can.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
One of them you know is – well, let me explain them. So the first is a lot of people are just now seeing a lot of these very damning-looking USAID outflows to mainstream media outlets like Politico or to Reuters, for example. I mentioned that there's $300 million in –
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
grants that were given by the Biden administration from various government agencies to Reuters, while Reuters won a Pulitzer for, you know, Reuters was the tip of the spear for all anti-Trump reporting, and they won a Pulitzer in the year 2024 for their series on Elon Musk and malfeasance by Elon Musk and his companies at all of his different portfolio companies, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So what I predict you're going to see is a transatlantic flank attack, where you have the out-of-power foreign policy establishment here teaming up with in-power foreign governments, like in the UK, in the UK Labour Party, like across the EU with in-power EU governments, like in places like Brazil with Lula, like in certain governments in Central Asia,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX, X, at the same time that Biden from the White House had asked the U.S. government, had replied to reporters that regulators should look into Elon Musk and that 11 different U.S. government regulatory agencies, regulatory bodies and agencies were pursuing adverse action against all four of those very agencies that Reuters won its Pulitzer for writing hit pieces about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
This is, by the way, a little bit of a... There's the same sort of moral hazard here that you have with USAID sponsoring the OCCRP. Hit piece journalists... that only have the capacity to do that because their revenues and their profits are being buffered by the American taxpayer. Even though the grants are not explicitly to the U.S. to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There's no grant from a Biden-governed agency of that $300 million that says, write hit pieces on Donald Trump or Trump allies. Just like the money to OCCRP, the corruption reporting probe, is supposed to be for corruption, for politicians and oligarchs and significant cultural figures in Eastern Europe.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But in the process of doing that, OCCRP turned around and dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani and his work in Ukraine, and that formed part of the basis to impeach Donald Trump as president in the Ukraine impeachment in 2019. So American citizens who voted for Donald Trump effectively funded, through Donald Trump's US aid, the impeachment of Donald Trump.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
They also dug up dirt on Paul Manafort and other US citizens, but in that case, It was, you can argue, dirtier than the Reuters case because the grants were to dig up dirt. In the Reuters case, it's complicated. You see this with just a huge quantity of U.S. media. Let me start from the bottom here. Premium subscriptions are part of news agencies' business models. Paywalls.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Almost every major media outlet has paywalls for their news content. And part of the justification for the U.S. government paying U.S. media companies sounds benign on its face. We want our government officials, our hired employees who are representing you, to be as best equipped and to be as knowledgeable as possible about what their line of business representing you as possible.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And so they need to have as much information as possible. And so we pay premium subscriptions for foreign-facing activity to U.S. media companies who are the best in business or sometimes the only or some of the only people who provide that needed proprietary service. So a great example of this is with the Reuters case. Because when I talked about the Reuters case, a lot of people
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
there's still a scandal there and a moral hazard in the system that needs to be reformed, but a lot of people ran away with it and sort of presupposed, when they read this, that that meant that it was like a direct pay to play. We don't know if there was or wasn't, if there was back-channel conversations, if there was an informal phone call. I'm not suggesting there was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Or if it's simply the incentives aligned. You know these are the people giving you the money. You know they're targeting Trump. Because this was the other thing, is all 11 agencies targeting Trump, targeting Elon Musk, were paying to the... non-news agency side of Reuters who was digging up the dirt that the regulatory agencies could use to go after Elon Musk. The same thing for OCCRP.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I believe right now they're in the consensus building process of this, which is very similar to what happened when Trump won the first time. I cover internet censorship. It's my primary reason that I crusade on all these other elements. But this played out in the first few months of Trump 1.0.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID funds the hit piece journalists. The hit piece journalists dig up dirt. The prosecutors then use that dirt as the basis to arrest them. And then you have a USAID big fat bow on top of it with an accomplishment section saying, ta-da, 456 arrests that we sponsored. But in this case, for example, the Justice Department under the Biden administration paid tens of millions of dollars.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It was something like $60 million to Reuters for Westlaw because Thomson Reuters has properties. They have their news agency side. They have a tool for legal folks, for legal research. LexisNexis and Westlaw dominate that space. So the Justice Department is paying for Westlaw and they're tens of millions of dollars padding the profits of a portfolio company of Thomson Reuters.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But every one of those million is less that they need to make in their news line because their profits are still being pumped up for the network, and they are still... picking heavy winners and losers in domestic politics. You know, like, for example, what if they were paying Raytheon?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You know, what if the Defense Department was paying Raytheon, you know, continually, you know, as it does, billions of dollars in defense contracts, and Raytheon opens up a new line of business called Raytheon Media LLC. And Raytheon Media LLC has a basically explicit media purpose. to target Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Republicans like Bill Kristol.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I mean, just straight up, just like the Washington Post, just like Reuters, just like no objectivity. In fact, they even just like the Washington Post and all the different journalistic things said, we're going to end whataboutism. Objectivity is no longer an underpinning credo of our reporting because we believe both sides makes misinformation spread.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So we do need to pick winners and losers in this. And Trump, And Trump doubled Raytheon's Pentagon contracts to Raytheon. So the contracts aren't going directly to Raytheon Media. They're going to Raytheon Military LLC. But now, Raytheon Media doesn't have to make a dime because their margins, their revenues, are padded up the wazoo by a huge cash infusion to a sister line of business.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You see this everywhere. NewsGuard, for example, one of the most notorious private sector for-profit censorship mercenary firms with the former head of NATO on its board, the former head of DHS on its board, the former... head of the State Department's Global Engagement Center on his board. You name it. Mark Milley, the former head of the CIA NSA. I'm sorry, not Mark Milley.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
General Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the CIA NSA, four-star general on his board. they got a $750,000 Pentagon contract, nominally for the purpose of helping the Pentagon scan the internet to help scan and ban Chinese and Russian propaganda online. Now, as this new MAGA foreign policy coalition and base has to navigate the tension between foreign ops and domestic interests,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We have to navigate what the role is of countering foreign influence and countering foreign propaganda, squaring that with the fact that that was the exact predicate used to take out hundreds of thousands and arguably millions of Trump supporters at home when Trump was called a Russian asset and Trump was just like Putin, Trump equals Putin. The FBI is saying it. The CIA is saying it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Internet censorship didn't really hit the American people in a very serious way until late 2017, early 2018. What were they doing in the interim time? They were having these consensus-building All the major think tanks were having these... How do we build the coalition? What exactly is going to be our civil society strategy, our legal strategy?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And you had tens of thousands of American citizens who were rolled up in these very groups who were supposed to be focused on Russia, making the argument that, well, these Americans are being an unwitting or unwitting vassal of talking points from Russia, so now we get to put them in these blacklist databases. So that's a tension that has to be navigated. But the point is, however you navigate it,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
That 750,000 Pentagon grant to NewsGuard was not explicitly for NewsGuard to create advertiser blacklists to target Stephen Crowder and Ben Shapiro and Prager University and Fox News hosts and virtually every populist right-wing media conduit for news. the man who is now the sitting democratically elected president of the United States. But it's the same Raytheon military, Raytheon media thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So we need to create firewalls so there's no domestic bleed. If you volunteer to accept... a U.S. government contract for foreign-facing work from any foreign-facing agency, whether that's state, whether that's aid, whether that's DOD, whether that's a confidential CIA service. It's another thing, right? Reuters does CIA services. They have a whole intelligence assistance wing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
So they're getting paid By the CIA and the DOD, again, this is the, you know, it's not the Reuters media line, but it's the, you know, it's the sort of strategic intelligence and whatnot. But this problem pops up everywhere with all these news. But then you do have another problem. So you have that USAID Truman show that comes up from that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But then you also have the other one, which is that we actually do fund these, a lot of these U.S. media outlets online. to operate in foreign countries. And then they also operate at home, so they sort of are being a direct arm of the State Department for what the grant is doing, and then they're coming back and using that. So, for example, a great example is like our fact-checkers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Independent fact-checkers. My asthma. There's no such thing as an independent fact-checker. This entire field was created by the U.S. State Department. I would say with a set spike relationship, a sort of Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal relationship with the UK Foreign Office because this was a transatlantic thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The UK Foreign Office funds a ton of these as well, but it's one foreign policy blob there. Why do places like the Poynter Institute – Almost every one of the credentialed fact-checkers for Facebook and Reddit and Twitter 1.0 and TikTok and Twitch and YouTube, almost every single one of these groups are either directly or partnered with a U.S. state department.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Who are our friends in the Chamber of Commerce who can put economic pressure on this? How do we build a predicate for this, whether it's counterintelligence through Russiagate or whether it's a democracy promotion predicate that Trump is an attack on democracy? And that process is the process of seducing people from...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
It's because we use this international fact-checking network, which is housed under the Poynter Institute. as the way to get foreign countries to censor their internet, to stop the rise of politicians, whether they be right-wing populist or left-wing socialist sometimes, to stop them, to censor their internets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
We pump up these American fact-checker groups, and then they get sent to Myanmar, and they get sent to the Philippines, and they get sent to Brazil, and they get sent to Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And, you know, like, for example, you know, in this story about Bangladesh that I've been talking about a lot lately, where you have a lot of this USAID and, you know, International Republican Institute NED funds to – places like transgender dance festivals and rap groups there and, you know, supporting, you know, picking sides in the political thing there?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The guy who is now the top foreign advisor was the former Bangladesh foreign secretary. During this period before he retook power here recently in 2024, he was brought in by USAID. USAID ran a countering misinformation workshop hosted at the U.S. Embassy in Bangladesh. Who did they have as the featured speakers to teach
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
bangladeshi journalists about how to counter misinformation it was the guy who would be would get catapulted into the you know into the top foreign advisor position with with the new government and the guy who became the head of it is the clinton global fellow initiative i should note i mean it's basically a pro-us uh you know government now and uh
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And who was the other person that was the co-leader of this? It was the executive director of PolitiFact. The U.S.-based PolitiFact. The, you know, flagging you here for misinformation and disinformation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You know, pressuring the social media companies and always having that latent threat of advertiser boycotts and potential legal noncompliance, I should note, with the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation because it is, in July, effectively going to be illegal to spread disinformation in Europe under this EU Digital Services Act. And if I can stress this to any,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
people presently in charge of White House or State Department policy on this,
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The EU Digital Censorship Act, technically called the Digital Services Act, has to be stopped through whatever diplomatic means necessary to stop it because it will absolutely destroy freedom of speech in this country as we know it, as Americans will not be allowed to talk to Americans about topics that a foreign regulatory body calls, in its sole discretion, disinformation unless you stop it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
different fractal coalitions into one cohesive network that can do this together, and right now they're fractured. I'm sorry if I'm taking a while for saying this, but just to complete this point, because it's going to hang over the rest of this conversation, we can't forget that the Democrats elected Joe Biden as president, and he was removed by another faction of the Democrats.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Every U.S. ambassador in Europe has to apply carrots and sticks pressure. The U.S. ambassador to the EU has to apply this pressure. The U.S. ambassador to NATO has to apply adjacent pressure. The White House has to. This thing is one of the craziest assaults on free speech in America our country will ever experience. And I should note, USAID and our foreign policy blob made this happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
In fact, my foundation's publishing this report. 19 U.S. government-funded... entities are signatories and nine of them are helping implement this very EU code of practice doing this. That's a full 20% of the signatories are from the US government and most of the major ones that have a lot more clout.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
The critical node is coming from inside the House because the Biden White House actually had a formal policy goal. It's Information Integrity Working Group, which is something that I've now published. It's on our foundation's website to get Europe and help Europe pass this thing and tighten the disinformation regs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
USAID had a formal program through CEPS to help the EU and other countries pass disinformation laws because the First Amendment wouldn't allow it. So they're working with the international partners.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
I support the White House's current reforms. I do believe fundamentally and if nothing else, symbolically, the complete and total abolition of USAID, uh, alone sends a chilling message to not do this kind of dirty work in the future if you ever begin to look like the former disgraced, folded-up USAID. You can imagine whatever form USAID takes in the future, whether they call it U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
OOD or whether it's the Bureau of International Development at State, people are going to be tempted to do this. We have... This is like... God and the devil. This is like, there's an eternal struggle here. And sometimes the moral area can look great. Sometimes different elected governments are going to have different defined national interests about what governments to deploy US soft power in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And it's going to look to one side like it's freedom fighting, one side of the American electorate like freedom fighting or liberation. It's going to look to another side like regime change, coup mongering, and black ops dirty tricks. That will always be there, as well as the potential for profiteering or for doing that –
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
you know, index finger trick in the domestic thumbie war of a fair fight of two, you know, Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, whatever it is, whoever can weaponize the blob can take out their domestic political opponent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And we need, so what I would like to see happen is during this education process, while everyone is learning about the sheer extent of it, and we are just begun to peel the onion on this, is that in whatever stage of, The aid function continues to... The critical thing is putting in a Smith-Munt style protection for funding and operations.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
Smith-Munt was supposed to protect us from foreign propaganda or... distributed inward. And even that was destroyed by Barack Obama's presidency with the NDAA modernization that removed that protection. So we are now completely Smith-Mutton-less than we have been for 12 years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
But there's something even worse going on with USAID, which is the Smith-Mutt problem of foreign propaganda rigging the domestic information ecosystem. But this is for funding and operations. USAID's function can fund U.S. organizations for their international work, and now they are pumped up on steroids with their capitalization for their domestic work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
There was effectively a West Wing Democrat Party civil war, and Joe Biden put on the Trump hat while Kamala was running against Trump with a big smile. He even asked for the hat to put it on. I've never seen Joe Biden happier than the day after the election when he walked out and made the press statement that Donald Trump had won the election.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And also, their foreign operations can target U.S. citizens, like we mentioned with the OCCRP example. How are there no criminal penalties passed by Congress?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
How is there no civilian right of action with treble damages in civil court against either the recipient of the aid when Rudy Giuliani is paying his tax dollars for the State Department to hand it over to the group that writes hit pieces on him to get him acquitted?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
To get him not only humiliated, but to help all the adjacent reputational destruction that makes it easier to indict him on related charges. So we need a sort of Smith month for financing and operations for U.S. aid. Also for the adjacent ones. DOD should be subject to this law, state, CIA. But aid is the most obvious one because...
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
These are public grants, and this is supposed to be humanitarian work. It's the last place you'd see coming to get socked in your own eyeball by the government you voted for. So that civil penalty can take the form of suing the grantee, but maybe you should also be able to sue the agency itself.
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
You can sue the FBI for wrongful death if something they do is through gross negligence or otherwise results in the death of your family member or something. This is something that The famous Jesse Trinidou case of the Oklahoma City bombing. That can be done. What if USAID had to worry for its own budget if it failed in oversight to catch one of its grantees?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And you could sue USAID if one of USAID's grantees broke that firewall. Well, USAID has to fight for its life in the budget every year just like everybody else does. And
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
And if they had their own budgets mortally threatened and they need to decide whether or not to plan the overthrow of a government in Central Asia because it wouldn't have enough capital to pull it off because they're targeting a U.S. citizen in Tanzania. The whole thing gets chilled. But you need these reforms at every layer. You understand?
Shawn Ryan Show
#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
what had been percolating for a long time, which was this weaponization, not just of what the focus was for the past several years of domestic agencies like the Justice Department and FBI against US citizens, but actually our even dirtier
Shawn Ryan Show
#163 Gary Brecka - Biohacking Secrets to Longevity, Aging Myths and the Science of Nutrition
Mic Drop, hosted by former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland. It's raw.
Shawn Ryan Show
#163 Gary Brecka - Biohacking Secrets to Longevity, Aging Myths and the Science of Nutrition
It's unfiltered. That was the most horrible screaming I'd ever heard. Taking a hit on the chin, you want to pay it back. It's tough talk from the top minds in their field.
Shawn Ryan Show
#163 Gary Brecka - Biohacking Secrets to Longevity, Aging Myths and the Science of Nutrition
Mic Drop, follow and listen on your favorite platform.
Shawn Ryan Show
Peak Points | "I Was Covered in Blood" - Terrifying Moments as a Police Officer
Mic Drop, hosted by former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland. It's raw.
Shawn Ryan Show
Peak Points | "I Was Covered in Blood" - Terrifying Moments as a Police Officer
It's tough talk from the top minds in their field.
Shawn Ryan Show
Peak Points | "I Was Covered in Blood" - Terrifying Moments as a Police Officer
Mic Drop, follow and listen on your favorite platform.