PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Tue, 25 Feb 2025
Patrick Bet-David sits down with Nikolas Ferreira and Mike Benz to dissect the deep connections between USAID, Brazilian corruption, and the political battle between Lula and Bolsonaro. Ferreira, one of Brazil’s most outspoken conservative voices, exposes how foreign influence and NGOs may be shaping Brazil’s political landscape, while Benz, an expert in geopolitical strategy, unpacks the hidden power dynamics between Washington and Latin America. -------👕 PURCHASE THE VT BRAZIL COLLECTION: https://bit.ly/3BZbD6l🖥️ REGISTER FOR THE MINNECT CIRCLES ECONOMY: https://bit.ly/4hVTkPK📺 VOTE ON TRUMP'S FIRST 100 DAYS:https://bit.ly/4gXLioq👕 GET THE LATEST VT MERCH:https://bit.ly/3BZbD6l📕 PBD'S BOOK "THE ACADEMY":https://bit.ly/41rtEV4📰 VTNEWS.AI: https://bit.ly/3OExClZ🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON SPOTIFY: https://bit.ly/4g57zR2🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ITUNES: https://bit.ly/4g1bXAh🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ALL PLATFORMS:https://bit.ly/4eXQl6A📱 CONNECT ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/4ikyEkC👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/3ZjWhB7🎓 VALUETAINMENT UNIVERSITY: https://bit.ly/3BfA5Qw📺 JOIN THE CHANNEL: https://bit.ly/4g5C6Or💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time!ABOUT US:Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Chapter 1: Who are the guests on this episode?
Okay, we were going to go pre-recorded with this today. We decided to go live because we have two of the most important voices in the world today. One of them happens to be Alexandre de Moraes' best friend, Mike Benz, who is in the house today. For whatever reason, these two guys just really like each other. He always picks on him. And there's a lot that's going to be exposed today.
Mike said he's got material he's going to be sharing he's never shared before. And if you know Mike, we've had him on. We were on together, what, three, four, five months ago. and him talking about USAID, all these other conversations that's been had. And when I was with the president of Brazil, we showed a clip of his. The president reacted to it.
There's a lot of people in Brazil right now are watching to see what he has to say. Some of the stories having to do with CIA possibly being involved with the coup and even pulling Bolsonaro aside saying, hey, you better kind of play along with us, Lloyd Austin and others, or else, but I'll let him explain it to you. He knows it better than I do. And the other one is,
Maybe, not even maybe, I can say he is the biggest superstar in all of Brazil. If you go to Brazil with him, you cannot walk the streets without people stopping. And we're in Brazil together eating pizza at this one place, I want to say four days ago, five days ago. This was just a few days ago, called Inferno. And while we're going there, we're having dinner left and right.
Everybody gets excited to see the face of Nicolas Ferreira. I want to say the proper way. Nicolas Ferreira.
Yeah, it's fine.
Who's got these two books as well. We're going to put the links below if there is, Rob, if you can find the links to these books. One of them is a parenting book, right? And the other one is about?
Politician and Christians.
Right. So both of them are going to be there as well by Nicolas. It's great to have you on the podcast.
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Chapter 2: What are the allegations against the Brazilian Supreme Court?
We are fighting against a tyranny, a censorship, especially from Alexandre de Moraes. And they try to silence the greatest leader of the right conservative wing in Brazil, that is Jair Bolsonaro. They say that he tried to kill Lula. And the vice president, but we know that the only one, the one candidate of presidential elections was Jair Bolsonaro.
He was stabbed in his belly by an ex-socialist affiliated party. And now they are trying to put him in jail for a fantasy coup. He was here in the U.S. when happened the 8th of January. People entering the Congress. It was a bad day for Brazil. But they are not any terrorists. They did, of course, some small crimes. But they are getting 17 years of jail.
like any other uh corrupt uh corrupted guy in brazil they get this uh for jail in brazil for corruption for robbery for anything so we know that they are doing this for to these people because they were wearing uh green and yellow t-shirts if they were using red red in brazil is for the labor sparring for the socialists If they were using red, maybe red, they would be free right now.
So they are persecuting us for everything we say. Like for now, I'm being sued because I said that Lula is a thief and he should be in jail. So we are facing a tyranny in Brazil.
Can you say that right now? So the fact that you're saying he's a thief and he should be in jail, you flying back to Brazil, is there any risk for you that anything could happen or no?
Yes, of course. I've been sued, criminal, for saying that. Me, as a deputy, I can say everything. And as all the Brazilians should say, though, but we are not able to say the truth in Brazil.
Now, your story, for some people that don't know, Rob, if you can pull up the clip, you were telling me this when we were together, is this is you at 17 years old, right? This is a school where, I think it's called PUC, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, it's a Catholic university.
And this is how he went viral. By the way, just so everybody knows, Nicholas has got 17-plus million followers just on Instagram. He posts a clip on Instagram. It gets a million likes, not even a million views. This guy is the biggest sensation there.
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Chapter 3: How has foreign influence affected Brazil's elections?
Yeah. Yeah. But I want to just just kind of close the loop on this, because if you go to the next one, next slide. Yeah. So Bill Burns makes a personal voyage. This is months before the election even happens. We are now force-feeding Brazil electronic voting machines the elected president doesn't even want in the country. And so the State Department is doing that.
Then we send in our covert action boys, the CIA, to say, don't you cast doubt. Look at the language told Brazilian senior officials that President Bolsonaro should stop casting doubt on his country's voting system. It's not even his country's voting system. We sent the semiconductor chips to build that because Brazil didn't want them themselves.
So we're putting the machines in there and then telling them, don't question the results of these machines. So go to the next one. So then this is also some foreign policy. A month after Bill Burns, it was the Pentagon secretary, Lloyd Austin's turn to go down to Brazil and push the chief of the Brazilian armed forces to commit to actually do a pledge. Go to the next slide.
Brazil manifestos seek to rein in Bolsonaro before election. This is before the election in a July conference with regional defense ministers. So we are personally paying as U.S. taxpayers for the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to go down there. We are. suffering under a chip shortage, and we are getting that diverted so that electronic voting machines can go down.
Then we are paying for the flights of the CIA director to go down and warn them not to cast doubt on the machines that they couldn't build without us and that the president didn't want. So this was – and actually, let me show you something else here as well.
Mike, the question here before we go to the next thing, why are they doing this?
Why do they care? So – My focus on this is on the internet censorship side. I love the people of Brazil. I love Brazilian Zouk dancing. I've always been around Brazilian people. I don't speak Portuguese. But I didn't seek this out. This was something that was an unavoidable, inescapable reality of the US censorship work that I was focused on.
It was a recurring fact since Trump won the election in 2016, as soon as Bolsonaro started gaining traction in Brazil, that these issues were interlinked, that they wanted to stop Bolsonaro for the same reasons they wanted to stop Donald Trump. I have that much 100%. There are other issues.
So I have this big unpublished report that I'm just showing you some things from here tonight, but that'll be published sometime in the next several months. There is the open question. So the technical reason they said they did it is because Bolsonaro was a threat to democracy. Who's they? The CIA and Biden? The CIA, Biden, State Department, USAID, the NGO swarm.
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Chapter 4: What is being discussed about USAID's role in Brazil?
This page and check if the information is true. So we prepared for a war, and I think we are winning so far. I don't like to celebrate things before they're over. But so far, misinformation has been... very unimportant in this election compared to what happened before.
And so what we did, I think we got rid or we prevented what we call the useful innocents, people that would forward fake news just without knowing or for not being conscious. I think we scare the amateurs and the professionals. The digital militias that have a hierarchy and are funded, we are paying very much attention to them.
And a couple of them, we have dismantled with the federal police and with great publicity. So I think we reduced disinformation campaigns to a minimum. in these elections, fortunately.
Okay, so if you pause there. Now, the Wilson Center is a U.S. State Department organ. We pay for this. The Wilson Center then got together with Brazilian judges and officials and did a whole disinformation war game to train them on the best practices of what we'd used to censor Trump during the 2020 election. You know, who else was at the Wilson Center?
Nina Jankovic, the head of the Disinformation Governance Board. We are literally taking best practices from the U.S. that were used to stop Trump from winning in 2020 and training every organ. We went around to the prosecutors, the judges, the universities. There's a whole story here with the unions. Top to bottom, we spent tens of millions of dollars.
So it's a big loss for them to lose USAID, or is that just the tip of the iceberg? Oh, my God. Because, I mean, it seems like they're a bit on an island without them. Is that correct, or is this...
like is there the ned still yes they're in a full-blown panic over it uh and now there are there's a question of if they can offset that through funding from the eu and other international bodies like the un they want to try to create sort of like replacement funding through the the private donor networks through The Soros networks and the Gates networks are going to have to pay.
The Craig Newmark networks, the Piero Midiar networks, the Reid Hoffman networks may have to spend their own billions to offset that. But they're also working with these in power. The censors in exile here in the U.S. are trying to get this funding to continue this work by partnering with foreign governments to get it now that USAID is down. But that is going to cost them a lot.
Mike, let me ask you a question. Have you been, again, three questions I've asked you. You're very good at dodging any question I ask. I don't think you've answered a single question of mine. I think you just came with a PowerPoint to present. I ask you, since you have knowledge in this.
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