Mike Benz is a former official with the U.S. Department of State and current Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, is a free speech watchdog organization dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet. www.foundationforfreedomonline.com For a FREE trial and 10% off your first Squarespace website or domain, visit www.squarespace.com/ROGAN This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Get working on a better you with therapy. Visit BetterHelp.com/JRE today to get 10% off your first month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What insights does Mike Benz provide about USAID's activities?
But when you open that door and you step into it, you see there's an entire other universe here that's been right next to you this whole time.
When you first started working for the State Department, did you have any inclination that you were going to get involved? Did you have any inclination that this was going on? Did you know already?
Yeah, definitely.
You already knew?
Yeah, definitely. I had already been working on this for many years.
When did you first discover it?
around august 2016 uh i was i was deeply passionate about the internet censorship issue um and you know i had i had some weird experiences playing chess as a kid where you know i sort of came of age when gary kasparov lost a deep blue and ai took over uh you know
really took the spirit out of a lot of a lot of the chess world and it was apparent to me as a kid that these ai sensors that these ai chess engines were going to out compete humans but when i was young the sort of older people in the room were in denial about it and when i saw that same thing in 2016 with the the development of ai censorship super weapons you know i i
I call those weapons of mass deletion, that they would be like weapons of mass destruction, but for speech. You know, a few lines of code would allow you to destroy entire political movements, governments, narratives. There'd be no escape from it. We would permanently change the face of political warfare or domestic politics and
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Chapter 2: How does USAID influence global media and political landscapes?
Oh, 100%. Well, I don't know if it's going to hold up. I think it's going to be a legal dogfight. This is, you know, it's funny because it's sort of a circular dragon eating its own tail because you're going after the primary soft power projection organ of the blob because it's been weaponized against Americans. But what is the blob authorized to do? What is USAID authorized to do under statute?
Well, something they call judicial reform, which is USAID. And poaching funding financially, the networks around judges, around around courts, around the legal system, around the governance structure of every country on planet Earth. I mean, Jamie, if you want to go through a fun exercise right now, you can put on screen just a simple Google search so people can see just how open source this is.
And I can walk through specific damning examples of this. But if you just type in on Google the word USAID and then in a Boolean quotes, judicial reform. And what you're going to see are. You know, basically 100 countries that USAID is going after the judges, going after the legal system in order to rig the scales of justice in favor of the foreign policy establishment's interest there.
And this has fully come home. And I can go through some examples of this. For example, there's a group called the OCCRP, which you can think of as the Corruption Reporting Project. This is a group that half of its funding comes from USAID and the U.S. State Department. The USAID and the State Department have a veto right over the staff that it can hire.
This is the largest consortium of investigative journalists on planet Earth. This is the group that broke the Panama Papers. You know, they got all these hacked documents. They got special access to it. I don't have any facts on this. I'm simply noting that it's an oddity that a group funded by a major CIA funding conduit, USAID,
while the CIA has the ability to hack any target around the world that's authorized by the National Security Council. They're getting these special access documents that are reportedly either hacked or leaked, and they're being sponsored by... you know, the group that's connected to something with a hacking power. But I don't know that for a fact.
I'm simply noting that for investigative purposes, for oversight bodies who may want to ask questions. But they, so they've won hundreds of awards. Their name has been, you know, so pristine for so long. They've been around for, you know, almost 20 years. And they were sponsored in order to do, they do investigative hit piece journalism about corruption.
And what they do is they go after all of the State Department and USAID and DOD's opponents in the region. So, for example, Jamie, I texted you this beforehand, but if the first thing you want to put on screen are the first two images that I texted you, this is from the USAID.gov website. And I think this will shock people when they see this. with the USA.gov URL right there.
And so that you can see how, yeah, so if you go to the first page that I texted you, and then we'll get to this one. This is the first thing you sent me. Okay, I'm sorry, the second one then? Yeah. Okay. So here it is. This is USAID's Strengthening Transparency and Accountability through Investigative Reporting Program. Okay. What you'll see here is you'll see the life of activity.
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Chapter 3: What are the historical roots of USAID's covert operations?
Well, okay. So this was a billion dollars. Okay. So this will actually go to the other one. Okay. We'll start with this. Okay. So here's from USAID. USAID announces, now this is, again, basically the final months of the Obama administration. This is right before the November 2016 election. USAID announces a billion-dollar loan guarantee. Remember, he referenced the loan guarantee.
By the way, do they pay these loans back?
Well, depends on if they play ball or not. This is another one of these things, right? If you're a good boy and you do what the blob tells you to do, maybe we can be flexible on loan forgiveness. Maybe we can allow you to punt the default. But you'll see it's... But these are the carrots and sticks.
This is why we infiltrate and co-opt these institutions and why you have a $44 billion annual slush fund around the world to do this. But you'll see it's the issuance of the billion-dollar loan guarantee to the government of Ukraine, and it's to support the implementation of governance reforms. So it's for the – we condition it on you changing the policies of your government.
And this is already 2016 after we installed a coup.
Yes.
In 2014.
with your government, you know, that factors into what the U.S. ambassador in the region will tell their Ukrainian or other government counterparts, you know, loan guarantees and whatnot are conditioned on. But so if you go to the you'll notice that Biden there used a very specific phrase there about securing commitments. I don't know if everyone caught that.
I want to note the similarity of that to if you go to the other screenshot, Jamie, that text you hear. I'm sorry that my mug is on this. I just pulled this up.
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Chapter 4: How does USAID's funding impact international governance?
It says the aim is to redirect funding to higher quality news domains and improve regulatory and market environments. Regulatory means laws, laws, laws about this, like the EU digital services act, um, So this is a top-down U.S. government plan to financially re-engineer the entire economics of...
the news industry in order to make it so that if you spread messaging against the state or against a sensitive policy issue by the state, you are put out of business. You cannot professionalize. You can't compete with CNN or New York Times or MSNBC. Just like this is what happened to Breitbart, for example, and they got caught up in this web. They lost 99% of their advertising revenue.
They were going up like this. And however you feel about Breitbart, these are the plain facts of this inaction. They were a rising star in the 2016 election. Steve Bannon, who was the head of that, went on to be basically the top White House advisor directly. They got crushed when 99% of their ad revenue.
This is why everyone's having to switch to bilking our own citizens to pay for it because the natural thing advertisers would want to do, a return on investment for putting ads on news sites or social media, they can't do because they're getting pressure from the government. And so now look at the bottom.
Now, I don't have this, but any members of Congress or Doge or House or Senate oversight or White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, I implore you, a few examples of advertiser outreach are included in Annex 3. I don't have that annex. It's not available on the USAID website that I downloaded this from before it went down.
USAID is giving out examples of advertiser outreach, how to pressure them in order to do this. And there's much more there. If you go to the next slide, for example, you'll see this is – they have whole categories of what USAID wants media companies to do, wants regulatory bodies to do, wants all of its other whole society partners to do. But here are just the first two entries from this.
What can technology companies do? So this is USAID telling Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Twitch – eliminate the financial incentives, nuke their ad revenue, if we don't like what they say. What could national governments do? Again, this is our government funded by our tax dollars. telling foreign governments that they should regulate ad networks to kill the ad revenue of U.S.
social media websites and U.S. news entities, like has been caught up in the advertiser database at State and USAID under the Biden administration. And there's a million more examples like this. But if you want to go to a really crazy one, there's a YouTube video that is still live. It's by Globsec. Actually, before I turn to that, do you mind if I go? No, go ahead.
We're going to go to this May 2017 Globsec video. But before I do that, Jamie, I texted you an image. of um of a piece that that uh my foundation just published if you um it says 23 eu organizations drive eu censorship law uh if you yeah if you scroll scroll up or or actually if you scroll down um uh Oh, you know, actually, maybe I didn't text you. So it's at the top of my feed right now.
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Chapter 5: What role does the U.S. government play in international media censorship?
Paramilitary terrorist groups are extremely useful to U.S. statecraft for DOD special operations work as well as for political destabilization work. I'll give you a great example. We'll stay in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden, a peaceful, what was it? A warrior on the road to peace. I remember the puff pieces about Osama bin Laden before. The Mujahideen.
The Mujahideen.
1989?
No, 79, I believe. Oh, 1979. Yeah. If you type in Zbigniew Brzezinski, that's going to be a wallop one to spell live. But if you used to do Zbigniew... Brzezinski, you can go to YouTube and type in Mujahideen and you'll watch him airdrop out of the helicopter and make the exact same speech that John McCain made to the Azov Battalion, the extremist
paramilitary faction of ukraine that was banned from getting federal funding uh... you know in uh... twenty fourteen the democrats said they're all nazis but now they're all you know sponsored and get uh... standing ovations from in the halls of congress because now they are geopolitically useful uh... to pump up to capacity build so so so here u.s.
national security adviser brzezinski flew to pakistan to set about rallying resistance He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role. On the Afghan border near the Khyber Pass, he urged the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts.
Can you pause for a sec? Notice how he said he wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role. The whole point was to pump up this fundamentalist, extremist, terrorist group with the funding and support they need, but without revealing America's role. Hello, USAID. That's the function today, but keep on.
We know of their deep belief in God, and we are confident that their struggle will succeed.
That land over there is yours.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of government-controlled narratives?
They don't need to worry about losing their careers at those companies they just went on strike at because they're going to be on U.S. taxpayer dime, baby. It's going to be U.S. truck drivers, median income, you know, forty five, fifty thousand dollars a year. paying for striking African workers to get no-show jobs as a part of a race riot operation for the U.S.
Special Forces to give leverage to the U.S. State Department ambassador in order to stop a random port construction in West Africa.
And it says here, within two weeks, the construction company lost 60% of its required labor pool.
So it's effective. And this is where, I don't know if you want to take a breather and pivot to something lighter, but this is where it starts to get really, really nasty because there are layers to this that I see, but because I'm not an insider, I don't have access to the inside government documents, I don't have subpoena power at Congress,
Someone has to has to get an answer on some of these questions. And I was going to talk about the connection of this to, you know, the rent riots. I should say formally, we don't know that the rent rights formally the riots that popped off in this country happened.
In 2020, and that I see as one of the main ways that the blob may be able to regain leverage here in the United States in the years ahead. Right now, they're doing lawfare. They're trying to mend... They're a little bit impotent right now because their coalition is very fractured. Many of the stalwart international Republicans have gone full MAGA.
So the bipartisan consensus on this is weaker than it was. And then probably most... most difficult for them there's a bit of a civil war happening even within the democrat party because of all the bad blood between the biden camp and the kamala harris camp i mean you need a unified network on the democrat side to pull this off and you had joe you know joe biden was
soft coot out of office by his own party and you have half the democrat party who was in by it was a very contentious long drawn out process joe biden put on a mega hat actually asked one of those union workers i believe he was one of those people at that event for the mega hat to put on and that was a that was quite a how about jill biden wearing a red dress when she went to vote Yeah. Yeah.
Good.
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Chapter 7: How does USAID interact with global political movements?
Yeah, if you just type in – if you just go to my XFeed and you just hit the search bar and you type in Taylor Swift.
I'm on YouTube, though. You said to go to YouTube.
Oh, no. My XFeed is the best way to search it. But it has a picture on that slide deck where, again, this is psychological operations planners pitching to NATO, the Western World's military alliance. And the slide has a picture of Taylor Swift, and it basically says something like – and when the receipt's on the screen, you'll read it directly. It says –
You know, example of, you know, celebrities who can be trained to spread desired messaging. I think that was the exact phrase trained to spread desired messaging. And she and the presenter goes over the drawbacks of this and how and, you know, what we need to decide.
So the moral efficacy of this, but basically saying that, you know, Taylor Swift has worked in various things before that have been empirically shown to move the needle on government initiatives. For example, her get out the vote campaign. you know, her get out the vote work, increase the vote, her public health campaign stuff, bought by in there. Well, don't, that video has a lot of cursory.
Okay, yeah, pause right there. Okay, no, no, no, no, scroll up, scroll up. Right there, pause right there. And if you, you see that goal, identify key actors to train and spread desired messaging. This is on NATO's, we pay for NATO. We paid for this to be pitched. Now, here's where some of this story got misreported.
I don't know that anyone from NATO directly reached out to Taylor Swift or her campaign to do that. And if they did, this would not be formalized in a formal Pentagon grant or quid pro quo. But I should note, look at who the biggest sponsor of South by Southwest is in Texas now. It's the military. Go ahead and look up the scandal if you want about South by Southwest Pentagon funding.
They've taken over the music industry because it's hearts and minds work. Okay, I guess that just happened in 2024. Let's see. If you go to, okay, so this has caused so much problems for the past couple of years that I guess they're now reforming this. But if you run a Boolean search for before 2024, you'll see this. But basically the Pentagon, or if you scroll down, maybe it might be right there.
So it caused this big boycott because the Pentagon, in tandem with this music diplomacy program and these U.S. aid backing of these things... Okay, well, that's a U.S. Army in Palestine one, but you'll see the numbers on this. Basically...
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Chapter 8: What are some significant historical examples of U.S. covert actions?
And they brought in the executive director of PolitiFact, flew him all the way out to Pakistan. The U.S. Embassy in Pakistan to train journalists about how to counter misinformation. The same journalist training seminars we're seeing Internews do. We see SEPS do. We see the Atlantic Council do. But I come back to –
The US Institute for Peace, on a live URL as we speak, not even two years ago, made an impassioned plea to the Taliban to keep 95% of the world's heroin flowing. You have to explain that to the American people. That is the State Department's policy. If U.S. Institute of Peace is not going to go rogue against the State Department foreign policy there because they're funded by the State Department.
You see the same thing with these ISIS terrorist drug narco networks. Anyone remember the WikiLeaks email, Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State? ISIS is on our side in Syria.
Well, that means the more of those poppy crops that get retailed off to ISIS networks, the more powerful and well-financed they are, the more they can pay their soldiers or stop their soldiers from defecting, from being mercenaries. And lo and behold, that same network just toppled the Syrian government.
And I should note structuring through USAID is the sauce to this because there is a sitting tweet from the U.S. Embassy in Syria from 2017 when Trump was wiping out ISIS that put a $10 million bounty on the head of Mohammed al-Jalani, the commander of those forces, the current basically head of state in the interim government in Syria. There was a $10 million bounty on his head under Trump.
They made the argument that his HTS group was an Al Qaeda spinoff and no Al Qaeda allowed. Well... According to his own military generals, who said this openly in mainstream media after the fact, we were constantly playing shell games with the numbers to hide the troop activity and what we were doing on the ground in Syria and the broader region.
If you don't need a presidential finding to finance a terrorist group or a paramilitary group, it's too dirty for CIA. President won't approve. Run it through USAID.
And what does this have to do with hip-hop?
Well... you have these narco networks. Like, for example, like what I was saying about the USAID bought the airplanes for the wholesalers to move it to the retailers. And when you have this intersection between hip-hop and the drug economy, hip-hop popularizing it, you know, you have a lot of these rappers who've said, you know, we're told by our promoters or our managers to, you know,
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