The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz: The CIA’s Use of NGOs to Coup Foreign Governments, and How They’re Doing It to Trump
Tue, 27 May 2025
Mike Benz on how NGOs run the world on behalf of a small number of very dangerous people. (00:00) Introduction (01:20) What Are NGOs? (10:00) Why the CIA Was Really Created (26:02) George Soros’ Open Society Foundation (59:59) The Anti-American Agendas American Taxpayers Are Funding Paid partnerships with: Eight Sleep: Get $350 off the new Pod 5 Ultra at https://EightSleep.com/Tucker Liberty Safe: Promo code “MADEINUSA” for 5% off at https://LibertySafe.com/Tucker Heritage Foundation: https://Heritage.org/TuckerSimpliSafe: Visit https://simplisafe.com/TUCKER to claim 50% off & your first month free! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What Are NGOs and Their Role?
You can check out these protests online. They're hilarious. It's people protesting in the streets so that they are not allowed to know foreign funding of their own societies. Put the blindfolders on me. I'm not allowed to know whether that is funded by a foreign government. How much is funding?
The CIA was running a initiative to control the education space during the Cold War to stop the spread of communist sympathizing teachings and curricula. All of this was repurposed against right-wing populism when Trump won in 2016. I noticed. According to George Soros, the Open Society Foundation was to provide basically a tax loophole for his kids.
And it became such a powerful force in Washington that we had to synchronize U.S. foreign policy with the foreign policy set out by the Open Society Foundation.
NGOs, you hear the term all the time. And in fact, the deeper you look into almost any news story, especially one that pertains to the destruction of Western civilization in the United States, you find something called an NGO at the bottom of the story. NGO stands for non-governmental organization organization. But paradoxically, NGOs feel like a parallel government to me.
You've done a lot of research on this. I don't think this topic's talked about enough. So I'm just going to stand back and let you explain what an NGO is, where they came from, and what role they occupy in the modern West.
Yeah. NGOs are the stem cell of the government's central nervous system. They are this highly flexible tool, just like a stem cell can transform into any of the 220 different cell types in the human body, and they self-renew, and they can generate all these new neurons. That is really you can't disentangle or really separate the government from the non-governmental organizations.
This started in its origin really with the creation of the US income tax in 1913. And then in 1917, contributions to charitable organizations, to 501 , as we now know it, became tax deductible from this new income tax.
And so that gave rise to this money flow into private foundations and into nonprofit organizations that would come to play a large role in both World Wars, but in particular World War II, when humanitarian relief began to be a big part of
OSS and the predecessor to the CIA and military financial assistance to groups in afflicted by World War Two, and then in particular during the Marshall Plan after World War Two. NGOs played a key role in being a deniable front to run money to establish contacts and to provide direction and guidance to groups that the U.S. government did not want to be caught necessarily doing directly.
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Chapter 2: Why Was the CIA Created?
And so you can trace this back, really. You have all these charities. They were fronts, a lot of them, or at least in part. So it's a complicated relationship because you have government agencies and then you have outside high net worth individuals and families, dynastic American families like the Fords, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, all starting these private philanthropies.
all playing a role in U.S. statecraft, all having international businesses that rely on foreign markets. And so they're highly dependent on the State Department clearing the way for them, negotiating deals for them, acquiring territory, creating export markets, maintaining laws in foreign countries that maximize profitability, securing mining rights, securing trade routes.
So there's this complex interplay. This is why I always call... So the story is really about, I don't really think of it as a government being different than an NGO, as being different than this corporate financial overclass.
When I use the term the blob, which is not my term, that was a term from Obama's deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, to describe a force within Washington that was bigger than the White House that The Obama White House felt like it couldn't get its foreign policy done because this foreign policy establishment, this blob structure seemed to be more powerful than that.
But I think of the blob as having three levels to it. You have the guts of it inside the government, which is the State Department, the Defense Department, the intelligence community, and USAID. You can think of it, Hillary Clinton would call this the 3D model, diplomacy, defense, and development. And then the IC plays, the CIA, for example, plays a supporting role in those functions.
And these are all merged together as one cohesive way of advancing US foreign policy is what we call it. But it's really advancing the interests of, generally speaking, insiders or national champions like our large multinational corporations. But bring this back. So you have this government structure in the center of it. And then below that, you have the NGOs who are funded by the U.S.
government and who work alongside the U.S. government and have a longer reach than the U.S. government. The State Department can't just walk into certain conflict zones and talk to the indigenous community and get honest answers or tell them what to do without being on the record saying something they might not want attributed to them. The NGOs can go in and do that.
The NGOs can serve as the back channels for diplomacy. The NGOs can provide a plausible way of providing financial assistance or money or bribes to various groups to run shipments and arms and to create networks of assets that then a assistant secretary of state can then liaise with.
So, there's this network creation level and there's this influence level at the bottom, but above that government level is what I call the donor drafter class, which is – everyone understands the concept of big donors having a big influence on politics –
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Chapter 3: How Did George Soros' Foundation Influence US Policy?
Everyone knows George Kennan as the head of the policy planning staff at the State Department, as the author of the containment strategy against Russia in the Cold War, one of the most celebrated folks in US diplomacy history. But two months before granting this license to do all this, to have the CIA operate through NGOs, through civil society organizations, through private foundations,
through these astroturf grassroots advocacy nonprofits. He wrote this memo called The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare. And he argues that this is now April 1948. We had just effectively rigged the 1948 Italian election, April 18th, 1948. This was the first democratic election in Italy, which after World War II had ended.
And we had pitted basically a pro-US, pro-Western democracy candidate versus a pro-Soviet autocracy candidate was how it was pitched. And the very first national security memo, 1-1, was on the central importance of Italy to the U.S. position at the dawn of the Cold War and that we could not afford to lose this election. And so the very first covert action of the Central Intelligence Agency –
Under the 1947 Act, it was largely conceived of as being an intelligence collection agency, not so much operations. The CIA has two different career tracks. Intelligence, you know, they call it the analyst track and the operations track. And they're very different breeds of people. They're very, very different in what they do.
One of them, you know, you collect the intelligence and you synthesize it for policymakers at the State Department or at the White House National Security Council. A lot of reading, a lot of foreign websites. Yes, a lot of academics. Yeah.
And the operations is where you get, you know, the Barry Seale cocaine cowboy types and, you know, these, you know, the kind of wild folks who go in and do the dirty work to overthrow democratically elected governments or to do the.
So when people talk about the CIA, they're talking about the director of operations, really. That's what people, in the popular imagination, that's what a CIA officer is.
True. Although John Brennan was an analyst track his whole career. And, you know, I don't know that that makes a more charitable case than the operations side, but... But the fact is, is Kennan writes this memo in 1948, 12 days after the U.S. had rigged the Italian election in 1948. And that's what it was.
Miles Copeland, who was one of the leaders of that from the CIA side, wrote in a biography later in his life that without CIA intervention in that election, we would have lost 60 to 40.
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Chapter 4: What Anti-American Agendas Are Funded by Taxpayers?
And I took what a lot of people, I think, thought was a somber tone on that, that I was celebrating its shutdown, but I was braced. for impact about the ramifications of this and how it might play out. And I think I use the term that this is necessary to do this open heart surgery. We also have to ensure that the patient doesn't die on the operating table.
Just because it's the right diagnosis doesn't mean you can set it and forget it. If you don't midwife the process diligently, you could kill the entire American empire. And I bring up that point here because it's not just American intelligence and American statecraft and, you know, the State Department, the DOD, the CIA.
It's also virtually every single major international corporation that we consider to be American that is wrapped up in this NGO relationship. Plex, and I can go through examples of how that manifests, but I can't think of a single industry that's domiciled in America that people think of as great American companies.
that is not deeply connected to the NGO Plex, and in some respects, dependent on the NGO Plex to secure their markets, to secure their profitability, to secure their revenues, to secure their interests. And while we are taking on the NGO Plex, There's also this, and now they're going to make their voices heard through lobbying, through pressuring Congress. And this is what we're seeing.
Congress is now looking like they're not going to codify these doge cuts. We saw 26, I think, Republican members of Congress who are saying they're not going to approve the doge cuts around USAID.
But a lot of this is, I think, to find the solution that is politically possible, you have to understand, I guess, how the whole ecosystem works in order to provide, offer solutions that might have political viability, if that makes sense. Of course it does.
So, non-governmental is actually a sort of misleading description because they're para-governmental, it sounds like. Yes. You know, they're not, I mean, we're led to believe they're like, you know, Doctors Without Borders or whatever, you know, which I'm not against for the record, but like whatever the famous NGO is going into South Sudan to save people, they're acting totally independent.
They're non-governmental, but that, as you just described so capably, that's a lie.
Yeah. Well, this sort of gets down to the stem cell concept and what type of NGO cell type you're talking about. I'll give you a couple examples. So there are these para-governmental ones, like take, for example, the Open Society Foundation. Started in 1979. According to George Soros, it was to provide basically a tax loophole for his kids. That was the idea that he said.
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Chapter 5: How Are NGOs Connected to US Foreign Policy?
They need to reach into the NGO sphere or into the private sector with multinational companies to effectively co-sponsor and provide the top-up capital to get the amount of money they need to run this operation. That's legal?
Not only is it... Can I just fund a war if I want? Can I just like send a check to the Pentagon to buy more? I mean, we can have privately funded government.
Yeah, we've had it since the banana wars. We've had this relationship for... In Honduras. Yeah, Honduras, Guatemala. This has been a constant feature of American statecraft.
You know, almost since the beginning, which is that you have a government national security interest or a government commercial national interest, but then you also have the profiteers of that government action in the private sector, in the for-profit space, and also at the NGO layer to the extent that they're getting funded to do this work or it satisfies the wants of the sponsors of the NGOs.
So, I mean, this is what War is a Racket was about. If, you know, the Smedley Butler 1936, you know, book about how, you know, all of the major multinational corporations were on the take for World War I. All of them were on the take for, you know, when he's talking about how he toppled governments in South America for, you know, what was it? The City National Bank. Yeah.
And, you know, the petroleum companies and- United Fruit. United Fruit and- You know, but may I ask?
I mean, yes. I mean, of course, I knew that I read it, but I didn't understand that they are not only the beneficiaries of these policies, but also the funders of the policies. Yes. Yes. So but that the problem with that conceptually is that it puts it's all beyond democratic control. There's no I mean, there's no way to vote out.
You know, whoever George Soros or Larry Fink or whatever, there's just kind of right.
Right. Well, it's a tectonic plate. It's it's something that shapes the fabric of what we consider democracy to be. And it's and I think arming. everyone in America with the knowledge of that topography can shape the kinds of democratic action that you propose. I'll give you an example. I mean, this was just yesterday.
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Chapter 6: What is the Relationship Between NGOs and Corporations?
and Brown Jr. had covert security clearances for work with the Central Intelligence Agency. So while you have one of the world's premier infrastructure and development firms, which would later go on to work with Soros in Africa, and then would later spawn Vice President Dick Cheney
And Liz Cheney, who started off her career in USAID and comes from that same Halliburton, Brown and Root lineage, they've direct ties all over the CIA. And I guess I bring this up to say that in addition to that, you had this web of adjacent NGOs around statecraft there. So, for example, in that same files, again, the CIA is doing an internal fact check in this memo.
where they say Ramparts has accused all of these people of being CIA. And it's a memo, I think, to one of the local directors saying, we've reviewed the files. Here's what's true and false about the Ramparts article. And in one of these, they describe something called the Vernon Fund, which was a private philanthropy.
Well, it was created by the Central Intelligence Agency to look to the public like a private foundation. And it was set up to fund the webs of teachers unions all throughout the world. They sponsored something called the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession.
The CIA was running a initiative at the time to control the education space during the Cold War to stop the spread of communist teachings or communist sympathizing teachings and curricula especially in Cold War conflict zones all over Europe, all over Africa, all over Latin America.
And so to do that, to control, to make sure that students and young people and every person in society who comes up through the education system is ideologically aligned against communism, they had to control the teachers' unions and what was being taught, what was being promoted. And
I bring this up, again, I hate communism, but all this was repurposed against right-wing populism when Trump won in 2016. I noticed. Because instead of this same blob being threatened from its communist socialist left, it was being threatened from its populist nationalist right. But so the CIA, so in this memo, The CIA says, yeah, they're right about the Vernon Fund. Ramparts is right.
That was ours. We set it up to look like a private philanthropy. We recruited the daughter of the Texas governor to bundle money to the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession. in order to influence the National Education Association and create, I think it was like 140 different trade associations that they all work through.
Now, the National Education Association is the largest of the teaching union associations. And the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession is still around today. It's called Education International. They rebranded the name. but it's the same organization.
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Chapter 7: How Do NGOs Operate in Conflict Zones?
Chapter 8: What Are the Implications of Foreign Funding on Domestic Politics?
national interest to topple Bashar al-Assad because they have a fundamentally unique and singular benefit, whether it's good for us or not, which is that they get rich from it.
I remember reading about the fascists and one of the criticisms that I thought really resonated was they eliminated the difference between the state and, you know, they were socialists, truly, in Germany and in Italy. And you couldn't tell where the German government ended and Krups began. And you know what I mean? And that's bad. I thought it was bad then. I think it's bad now.
And I hate to see it happen here.
Well, it's funny you say that because last week at the Council on Foreign Relations, I think the panel was titled Reflections on the Post-Soviet Era and Implications for the Modern Day. This is the Council on Foreign Relations. And one of the questions asked to the panelists directly was, there was a deep state in Russia in the 1990s, these oligarchs. Yes. And, uh, We lost control over Russia.
They're basically analogizing Trump to Putin. And they're saying, we had all this control. We had total control over Russia during the Boris Yeltsin period. And we had all these relationships with the Russian oligarchs. But then Putin had a natural advantage as being the head of state, was somehow able to take over the Russian deep state. And then we lost control over Russia.
This is right. This is like the heart of it that nobody ever says. It's Putin's decision to decapitate the oligarchy. That's the reason they hate him.
Well, what they say is that he also co-opted it and got the oligarchy working for him rather than for outside.
And in the meantime, the Russian economy recovered and life expectancy went up and alcoholism went down and like it became a beautiful country. The oligarchy wasn't serving Russia. That's kind of the point.
And the punchline to this is, at the end of setting this question up, the guy at Council on Foreign Relations asks, so with those lessons, given that that's what happened with Putin, how can we preserve the deep state against Trump to save, so that the deep state can save us? This is sick. This is sick.
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