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Language: en
Is it true that there's documentation on
like literal documentation on how to
launch a street uprising?
>> Oh my god, there's where do you want me
to start? There's an entire field. It
It's not just like a document. I mean,
it's this is democratization studies,
you know, international relations 101.
Now, college kids learn how to do this.
This is this is how I mean think about
someone like Michael McFall who is the
US ambassador to Russia.
>> He he spent 30 years at Stanford uh
working on the the body of work, the
playbook on how to do it, the um the
sequencing of events, all the different
levers within a society you need to
control in order to have it successfully
play out. There's these models are
constantly updated for emerging
technologies like social media uh for
you know emerging
laws and uh you know counteratt attempts
by a government to resist a color
revolution like NGO transparency laws
and the like. It's a it's a huge huge
huge field and it started off in the
1950s
uh right in tandem with the construction
of the intelligence apparatus in our
country. I mean really it all goes back
to
they you know they all call themselves
scholars and academics in order to try
to you know I always say you can't spell
academia without CIA but the fact is is
Jean Sharp was
>> so dark. Well, to this day, I mean, Jean
Sharp started this work in the 1950s,
um, at a time when the US foreign policy
establishment was, you know, in in the
absolute armpit of the of the Cold War
and trying to figure out how do we, now
that the nature of war has moved into
the political realm rather than the
kinetic military realm, how do we
develop a body of of theory to reliably
be able to go country by country and
develop this political influence
apparatus uh in order if we lose an
election, what do we do in that event?
How do we still have a kind of civil
society resistance? How can that take
power even if we don't win an election?
And so this this body of work that is
now every major university and I'm not
joking when I say that whether it's
Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth,
Berkeley, Arizona State University, uh
Florida un there's
it is a it is a 101 for getting into
this field that you learn about um civil
resistance and it is a big part of what
the State department, what USID, what
the US Agency for Global Media does, but
Jean Sharp, I mean, this this started as
a
I hesitate to even legitimize it with
with even the front term of academia
because you have to understand that this
is a military
and and if if you want to extend it, a
military, statecraft, and intelligence
world completely. Jean Sharp got $50
million from the Department of War to do
the to do the research for this at the
Harvard Center for International
Affairs. Now, you know, for folks who
are following along, I'll just let you
play out the acronym for Center for
International Affairs in your head. Um,
you this is like
right in your face. I mean this is this
is the Harvard CIA. Uh this which was
created by Henry Kissinger which who was
the national security adviser and
secretary of state recruited Jean Sharp.
They got $50 million from the department
of war and not just from the department
of war but from the psychological
operations center of it in order to
build the body of work for how groups
that were supported by the US state
department could uh could leverage
influence of a minority of the
population to do bottom up rather than
top- down revolutions because prior
prior to World War II too. The the way
you did coups was primarily through the
military. What you would do is the the
state department um this is before we
had a CIA, but the British would do
this. The the the UK foreign office
would work with uh you know uh military
generals or the US war department would
work with military generals, police,
security forces. And because the the
guys with guns had a monopoly on
violence, all the the way to do coups
was always top down. You would you would
work with a the generals, the police,
and then you would simply have a
military takeover of the country and
then you would have an interim head of
state and then you would try to kind of
roll out democracy in a managed way in
these vassal state countries.
But uh as it became apparent that you
could actually not just have top down
revolutions, but you could have bottom
up revolutions. It turns out there's
something that's effectively the same as
a as a military if you get it big enough
and that's a paramilitary.
as as the US military paradigm moved
into what they called small wars rather
than big World War II style things, the
CIA, the State Department, USAD, they
were all working with hillside gerilla
groups in Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam
or you know Chile or Colombia and and
what they found is actually you know if
you get a big enough crowd it's
basically like a military if the mob is
so big that the police can't take it on
or if the police end up shooting someone
in the crowd, the mob will just kill the
police. They're they're bigger. They
they're they outnumber them. Uh in many
respects, in many cases, they're armed
or they've got kind of small arms or
they've got bulldozers or Molotov
cocktails or uh or and a certain
quotient of the police or military on
their side as well. then you can do a
bottomup so-called peoplepowered
revolution. And the magic behind that
was essentially winning enough hearts
and minds through the media to accuse
the democratically elected leader of
being illegitimate or corrupt. Uh mixed
with cash essentially these these groups
being funded to do it through USAID or
the state department or flow through
entities like the National Endowment for
Democracy or the US Institute of Peace.
But it's it's an enormous body of work.
It's it's democratization studies. It'si
civil resistance. Um it goes by any
number of names. But um yeah, it's you
can get a comfortable job at a US
university, any US university or even
law school teaching that field to young
aspiring coup plotters.
>> Now, have we ever run the coup playbook
against ourselves?
>> Absolutely. There was a group
specifically dedicated to it by a
professor in the field who was also
number three at the Pentagon. It's
called the Transition Integrity Project
in 2020.
Transition is one of these uh watch
words. Transition means we're going to
overthrow your government. Transition,
we call it a democratic transition.
>> Uh that is uh when when we don't like
the government that's in power and so we
are going to transition it to a new
government. And in 2020, a group was set
up called the Transition Integrity
Project. It was run by Rosa Brooks, who
was a very, very high ranking Pentagon
official for the Obama administration.
Just a not to put too fine a point on
it, but she wrote a book in 2016 called
How Everything Became War and the
Military Became Everything.
>> Whoa. and uh basically on her
experiences on how the military uh can
take over the civil society space and
all the different examples of how you
know the military would fund operas in
Eastern Europe to influence hearts and
minds and this is you know everything
whether it's media operas art murals you
know graffiti
dance festivals uh and and you see this
now I mean there's a big scuffle at
South by Southwest I think in 20 23 or
2020. Yeah, I think it was 2023. South
by uh the Pentagon became one of the
biggest funders of music festivals like
South by Southwest. Uh you know, you you
know, you have
>> to control like what bands or I don't
understand.
>> Well, essentially now this has been
going on for a very very long time.
Music is and not to not to detour too
hard into this but the arts and cultural
space is a big part of hearts and minds
and and culture control and politics is
downstream of culture. This is how you
see.
>> Yes. But are they literally like
becoming ANR executives? Like I don't
how does this cuz one thing I want to
understand is okay this has been used
against us then as recently as 2020.
This is very recent. So what do they
actually do? Like how much of this is
astroturf? I I hear so many conspiracy
theories and most of it sound like total
BS to me. But what was the actual
playbook run on us?
>> Well, I can Okay, so we we sort of have
two open threads right now. One of them
is this 2020 transition integrity
project. And I and I want to get deeper
into that to to immediately answer kind
of like how the playbook works in
something like the music industry. I can
give you some great specific examples
and I can talk about the general
structure of it. I I'll give you some
specific ones. So um every year we as
taxpayers give about $350 million to a
group called the National Endowment for
Democracy.
uh that that funding is from us as
taxpayers to the treasury to the to the
state department to NED the national
down for democracy. Uh the national down
for democracy was created in 1983 by the
Reagan administration as a response to
the Democrats in the late 1970s severing
many of the powers of the Central
Intelligence Agency. when uh the Church
Committee and Pike Committee hearings of
75 and 76 ended up revealing the CIA was
manipulating domestic politics in order
to stop the left-wing antivietnam war
movement. Uh Democrats reacted very
heavily against the CIA. They hated the
CIA in the late '7s, early 80s. Jimmy
Carter rode to power on the back of that
scandal. Uh, one of the first things he
did is he put CIA director Stanfield
Turner in charge of the CIA and
immediately fired 30% of the entire
operations division of the CIA in a
single day. It was called the Halloween
massacre. Uh, then in 1979, the US lost
control over Iran with the Iranian
revolution. The national security state
blamed that on having a weak CIA who
could have stopped that coup from
happening in Iran. Uh Ronald Reagan wins
the presidency, wants to give the CI
their old powers back, but has a problem
which is that the Democrats controlled
Congress at the time. They controlled
the House of Representatives.
And so through the executive branch, he
establishes the National Endowment for
Democracy. In the words of its founder,
Carl Gershchman, uh, who he told, I
believe it was the Washington Post in
1986, uh, Democrat groups around the
world used to get in trouble when they
were seen as being subsidized by the
CIA. We have not had the power to do
that in a long time. That is why the
endowment was created. So literally you
have a direct quote from the founder of
the group that they were set up to fund
the groups that it would be too
embarrassing to the group or too
scandalizing to a group if the money
came from the CIA. The idea for the
National Endowment for Democracy came
from the CIA. came from William Casey
and one of his right-hand man guys,
Raymond Green, who had worked in the
propaganda and disinformation bureau of
the CIA for 30 years, who went on to
directly draft the legislation
establishing the National Endowment for
Democracy. The CIA gets a copy of every
single grant the National Endowment for
Democracy makes. We don't get any
transparency over that. So even though
it's an NGO uh that's supposed to be
working overtly on philanthropic work,
it's a complete intelligence operation.
Uh the the Biden State Department
actually signed this stealth agreement
with NED that every single one of their
grants is under a total blanket
sensitivity.
So it's uh it's it's it's even more
secret than the CIA in the sense that
even Tulsi Gabbard can't just demand
access to it because technically it's
not classified. Uh, so it can't just be
immediately unclassified. It's got this
sensitivity blanket that if any of the
oversight organs know, then everyone
involved in these programs could die
because it would put them at such risk
to know they're being sponsored by this
group that's effectively more secret
than the CIA itself. In fact, the the
Washington Post in the 1990s when when
CIA director Bob Gates was was up for
confirmation, the Washington Post wrote
an article saying we don't even need to
confirm a CIA director this year because
we have the National Down for Democracy
and it's uh it's it's everything the CIA
wants to be and more. Well, they have
they have four cores at at NED. The way
it's structured operationally, they have
a Republican branch called the IRI.
Basically, everyone who wants to run for
president has to go through the IRI. Um,
John McCain ran IRI for 25 years. Mitt
Romney has been on the board of IRI for
15 years. Uh, Marco Rubio won the 2024
man of the year for for IRI. Uh, Trump
was the only Republican in the past
25 years who was not on the board or
running IRI. This just just goes to show
how closely the CIA has effectively
vetted presidents. Uh there's a Democrat
branch called the NDI. Hunter Biden was
on the uh chairman's
the the the chairman's advisory board of
NDI. Make of that what you will. Um but
the chairman of of the NDI was Maline
Albbright who was the secretary of
state. So again you have this state
department CIA nexus but the other two
cores are the uh center for
international private enterprise for the
CI and chamber of commerce and the
solidarity center for the CI and unions.
They also have a media arm to control
media NED does it's called the center
for international media assistance. This
is yet another one of these CIA control
over over media vectors. But just to
come back to this music thing, um
we overthrew the government of
Bangladesh in 2024. The Biden
administration did. Um there had been a
big beef between the the Democrats and
um uh the the prime minister of
Bangladesh over a number of issues.
Military uh military base in the region,
petroleum, uh Hillary Clinton at one
point when she was secretary of state
threatened to have the IRS go after the
prime minister's son who was living in
the US. Um but the state the Biden State
Department was losing hearts and minds
in Bangladesh. the they lost the last
two elections and the state department
had correspondence with the national
endowment for democracy about what to do
about it. uh after the loss I believe it
was in 2021
uh 2021 2022 the elections there
um the state department worked with one
of their NGO CIA cutouts the national
down for democracy about what could be
done in Bangladesh because despite
running all this money into the
opposition they still got crushed in the
election and what was proposed was a
destabilization campaign uh to in
instead of trying to win the vote uh
trying to organize a color revolution to
get people in the streets and to
destabilize
the the country in order to essentially
break it and induce a crisis. And one of
the ways they did that was through
funding not just students and
universities and all the different
cleavages in Bangladesh society who felt
disaffected. For example, Ned sp with
state department money sponsored
transgender dance festivals. uh really
went after like the LGBT population,
went after women,
>> way to spark division.
>> Yes. As a way to do street protests and
to uh create an international human
rights outcry, uh as as a way to to
break down society and so that they
wouldn't just have an ordinary vote. Uh
it would be chaos. It'd be destabilized.
And this is what happens if you can't
win an election under stable conditions,
induce a crisis, things break and then
there's movement and then sometimes you
can just overthrow the government like
was done in Ukraine and like what was
done in Bangladesh. The prime minister
had to evacuate the country because once
again the CIA backed mobs surrounded the
parliament building and then just took
power. But but within those those
documents that were produced by the
investigative uh outlet the Greyzone who
had a whistleblower at IRI, the Ned
Republican branch. It was amazing what
what uh what turned up. The the CIA
through IRI was funding Bangladesh rap
and hiphop groups to sponsor musical and
hiphop anthems targeted at young people,
unemployed people, disaffected youth to
take to the streets and to seow distrust
in the Bangladesh in the in the
Bangladesh government. In fact, this was
in the baseline assessment report of IRI
to the state department. They bragged
about this, you know, they had columns
for all the different grants and what
they were doing and they had, you can
actually go on YouTube and you can if
you run a search on my ex account for
Bangladesh, you'll uh you'll you'll see
all the documents that that uh the
Greyzone published and that I've I've
highlighted and but the the CIA through
IRI was reporting to the State
Department about the different musical
anthems that were being produced with
State Department money to get people to
take to the streets to get people to to
distrust or or believe that their
government was corrupt. And they were
reporting on this how the lyrics were
quote designed uh to get people in the
streets and protesting. I believe one of
the rappers in this group uh was also a
uh visiting professor at a US aid
sponsored university that was one of the
launching points for these student
protests. But you see the same thing
everywhere. This happened in Cuba with
something called the Santa Cedra
movement where USAD sponsored one of the
main rap and hiphop groups and and had
this anthem uh about um blood and um
blood and wasn't blood and so it was
like uh land and land and it was
something that was it was Apatria Evita
I think was the name of it and then got
this you know this local rap group
played on international radio and while
they were working with the assistant
secretary for Western Hemisphere uh and
while they were funded by USAID,
but you see this the the
Biden State Department set up an entire
bureau called the the the um the State
Department bureau for music diplomacy.
Uh last year they brought 22 different
hip hop and uh hip-hop and rap musicians
from 14 different countries to the state
department for training for activist
training.
You have revolution music sponsored by
the US state department USAD I think uh
freedombeat.org or I think is is one you
can look at where it's literally just
civil resistance movements sponsored by
the State Department uh to to sponsor
riots and revolutions. And this is a
checklist item in the same way that
music is. And you'll see this in Miami
where I am. The the largest performing
arts center is the Adrien Arch Center.
Adrien Arshes is one of the largest
financial sponsors of the Atlanta
Council which has seven CIA directors on
its board and gets annual funding every
year from the War Department, the State
Department, USAD and the National
Endowment for Democracy. Then you you
get this cultural intunement. By the
way, this is a big part of when we
overthrew the government of Ukraine in
2014. One of the first things we did
with the new vassel government when
Yatsenyuk was installed, not by a vote,
installed by Victoria Nuland and she
bragged about this on a hot mic that was
caught when she said, "F the EU. We're
going with Yatsenuk." Um, Vladimir
Klitsko is going to have to sit this one
out. We'll make a mayor of Kiev and, you
know, he'll have to be satisfied with
that. Uh, one of the first things that
happened was they moved the Ministry of
Education, the control for it out of
Ukraine and into this EU credentiing
body. And, uh, one of the red lines that
the State Department, USAD and NATO set
for Zalinsky, his first month in office,
the May 2019 redlines memo, was that
none of the reforms put in place between
2014 and 2019 about education and
culture could be reversed. They banned
the Russian language, for example, on uh
on any Ukrainian TV. They banned uh
Russian access, you know, Russian
controlled social media accounts and
Telegram accounts. Um they they banned
the Russian language or any Russian
affinity teachings in Ukrainian uh
education. You you also see, for
example, Randy Weine Garden, the head of
the, you know, American Federation of
Teachers
making, you know, half a dozen
pilgrimages over to Ukraine to work with
the teachers unions in uh to work with
the teachers unions in Ukraine and
effectively create this, you know, so
that the this the kids don't get to have
any sort of cultural affinity with the
political influence within Ukraine, even
though half of the country was was
Russian ethnic. were not allowed to
speak the language, were not allowed to
have any, you know, cultural
glorification of anything Russian. uh so
that their minds were controlled in a
way that they would grow up to believe
in Ukrainian nationalism and the you
know the entire purging of any kind of
Russian affinity or any kind of alliance
between Russia and Ukraine which had
existed
you know for for a you know going back
to the Crimean War in the 1800s I mean
going back forever but completely purged
because the CIA ran a coup in 2014 and
they didn't on mean reversion after the
Crimea referendum in 2014. But you see
this everywhere and it's it's so it's
full spectrum. It's the media. It's the
teachers. In fact, the CIA was busted
funding our own teachers unions in in
the US
>> through something called the Vernon
Fund, which which the CIA would later
confess was a
>> was a CIA front philanthropy that gave a
million dollars to the National
Education Association.
>> That's the largest teachers union in the
country. uh as well as a CI proprietary
called the World Confederation for
Organizations of the Teaching
Profession.
>> Hold on. When When was this?
>> This is in the 1960s. 1966.
>> Jesus, man. Okay. So, uh let me put a
bow in this and see if I'm tracking this
accurately. So, uh dear public, if you
can hear my voice right now, what Mike
Benz has just told us is that the right
way to view all of these things is that
warfare is no longer kinetic, at least
if we can avoid it. Uh the real warfare
is soft power. There are people that
fully understand the way that we are
indoctrinated whether it's music,
education,
uh arts, on and on. And they are finding
ways to get money into those places
through NOS's and the like. US aid being
the most famous right now uh of
disseminating taxpayer dollars around
the globe uh under the guise of being
philanthropic but actually being soft
power warfare that these are effectively
agents of uh you you were very careful
to say they're not all agents of the
government but but certainly what we're
talking about right now that some subset
of them are agents of government foreign
policy and they are the one thing that
we haven't really pulled in really
tightly yet, but this idea of uh
drafting off the policies. You've got
these hedge funds that are like, "Hey, I
have economic interests here." And the
reason I don't think we've quite pulled
that one in yet is you'll say we lost an
election or we won an election, but we
haven't defined exactly what that means.
Like who the blob, like who's
considering it to be a win or a loss?
I'm guessing the blob and Trump are sort
of diametrically opposed. So would it be
as simple as if the blob is one Trump
mega ideology has lost and vice versa?
Like I get the economic part, but is
there like a thing that guides the
economic thing or is it just like well
Soros happens to be shorting them today
and so we want them to lose. Oh, he's
actually hoping this one will win so we
want them to win. that that part I'm not
entirely sure like how sort of one for
one this is like is this an economic
battle where we use useful idiots on the
ideological standpoint or is this an
ideological standpoint that happens to
get a lot easier when uh a someone like
Larry Frink who I think of as using
social movements as cover for economic
gain where he's like oh I'm just going
to pull this green blanket on top of my
investing strategy and I just know what
policies are going to get yeses, what
policies are going to get no. I don't
care if it's green or not. I just know
green's an effective way for me to make
more money. So, if you can help us tease
that out, whether ideology is driving
this, whether economics are driving
this, that would be I think really
helpful. Yeah, I would say economics.
It's easy. There is a weird kind of
democracy within the blob in the sense
that you do have this big stakeholder
soup and the way foreign policy usually
gets made is through a consensus of
stakeholders within the kind of high-
netw worth individual family class the
sort of folks who have you know
effectively control over the hedge fund
private equity multi big multinational
corporation folks and they they all have
different interests