Kind: captions
Language: en
From the 1940s through the Cold War,
onethird of the CIA's entire budget was
devoted to media manipulation. They do
not want you thinking for yourself.
Today, the same tactics have gone
digital and are far more ubiquitous.
Former State Department official Mike
Benz joins me to expose what he calls
the censorship industrial complex. a
coordinated web of government agencies,
NOS's, and hedge funds working together
to shape narratives, silence descent,
and weaponize culture itself. And it's
not for your benefit, it's for theirs.
This interview is one of those rare
occasions where someone fundamentally
alters my mental map of how the world
actually works. So, strap in because
even if you already know Mike Benz, this
one is going to make your hair stand on
end. Without further ado, I bring you
Mike Benz.
I have always considered NOS's to be
pro-humanity philanthropies, but in
researching you, you make them sound
more like an extension of the CIA and a
way for global elites to control the
power structures of the world
essentially for maximum personal gain.
Can you explain to me what NOS's are and
how they came to be in the way that we
know them now? NOS's are essentially the
kind of stem cell of of the influence
world. They can they can take any number
of forms. They can play a wide role in
organic and grassroots movements in the
play things of billionaires uh as fronts
for intelligence and statecraftraft
operations. But they really came in into
the
in into the for of uh of statecraftraft
and intelligence work with changes to
the tax code um in the early 20th
century. And then the the role that they
played particularly in World War II when
relief agencies
uh came to play this kind of outsized
role in supplies and the supplies and
logistics for the war through uh
religious charities through humanitarian
and philanthropic uh relief. These
organizations which were philanthropic
in name uh began to be used as a way to
move behind the iron curtain uh in
during the cold war to uh to work in
South and Central America as a way to
have logistics supply lines uh run
money, run guns, run supplies
uh all over the world. And because it is
deniable under the banner of aid
and because attacking NOS's looks like a
crackdown on civil society, it's a
little bit like, you know, there was a
strange moment in the uh Israel Iran
conflict uh several months ago where you
um Iran or Hamas would have uh you know
military facilities under a hospital and
then when Israel got attacked, it turned
out a bunch of their military uh
apparatus and and structures were also
under hospitals. And so it's so you you
you don't want to attack a hospital
because that will draw a kind of uh
humanitarian outcry to the world. And so
you end up having these the things that
sound best in names end up being um the
most effective fronts for the dirtiest
deeds. Mhm.
>> Now the big thing that I really want to
understand. So I by nature I'm not a
conspiratorial guy but modern life is
pushing me more and more in that
direction. Uh there's an author named
James Burnham who's had a huge impact on
the way that I think. And his thesis is
there's always been elites. There will
always be elites. No matter what there's
going to be a small group of people that
basically control the way other people
think. All throughout human history,
they've been able to control the
narrative because they could control the
dissemination of media. Now though, in
the age of social media, we're being
asked a question, which is what's going
to happen when you lose control of the
ability to control the narrative. So the
worldview that I'm updating as I
research you is that the manipulation of
the media landscape is even more
coordinated and global than I ever would
have imagined. And um I want to figure
out if that's me sort of letting my
imagination run wild or if really we are
as a populace being intentionally
controlled at the level of narrative.
>> Well, it's always been this way since
the printing press because of just the
the cost that it took to run a media
business. It couldn't be done in an
amateur way because everyone didn't have
their own platform for free like you
have on X or Facebook or YouTube or
Instagram or Twitch or or even a blog.
And so there was a kind of elite control
over media uh because there were so
there were so few me messengers. And so,
uh, being able to consolidate control
over just a a few messengers allows you
to control all the messages. And this
was a big part of the American
influence apparatus around the world,
even even before World War II. I mean,
if you look at things like this, the
SpanishAmerican War and remember the
Maine and this is how we got an American
Empire in 1898. It was yellow
journalism. It was just a a handful of
newspapers. the William Randph Hurst uh
set, you know, was able to effectively
control all of American opinion in order
to mislead the American population
essentially into the idea that Spain had
uh you know bombed the main in in the
Havana Harbor and that this was a
military attack that necessitated the
conquest of Cuba and ended up netting us
the Philippines and
that persist. existed all the way up
through Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkan.
Again, you had a you only had three news
channels on TV at that time. You had uh
CBS, NBC, and ABC, which all grew out of
veterans from the Office of War
Information. The the Pentagon in 1941-42
centralized media effectively in the
United States as part of the World War
II effort. So all the radio stations,
all of the major uh print distribution
newspapers, journals, periodicals,
Hollywood, uh they they all ran through
the Pentagon as part of centralizing
propaganda and ensuring support for the
war as well as working with
international partners in Europe and
around the world. That that relationship
maintained itself during the cold war.
It greatly expanded actually uh as the
State Department and the uh what's now
the US Agency for Global Media, but at
the time it was CI proprietary media
organizations like Radio Free Europe,
Radio Liberty, Voice of America, Radio
Free Asia. You had things like, you
know, Project Mockingbird where you had
the CIA explicitly placing stringers and
editors on uh almost all of the major
distribution newspapers not just in the
United States but all over the world. Uh
you had the State Department's focus on
on public diplomacy and funding independ
so-called independent media outlets all
over the world. So even if they weren't
CI proprietaries, they would be
effectively on US government payroll.
That exploded after the 1960s with USID
being formed and this idea that uh you
know providing funding for media outlets
is is part of the humanitarian work of
ensuring uh you know free speech around
the world. That would come to be quite
ironic when USAD would champion internet
censorship after they too much free
speech ended up losing elections. But uh
but it's it's a huge part of it. I mean
a third of the CI's budget in the 20th
century went to media. And then you
>> Yeah, it's it's a it's a huge amount.
The world is moving from this kind of
military occupation imperial model to a
soft power influence model where
everything moves through democracy. That
is the vote of the people. At least this
is how they used to define it for 2016.
But the vote of the people uh to give
legitimacy to the government so that the
government has the consent of the
governed. And in that world, the desire
for empire is has not gone down at all.
The demand for political vaselage
control is still there. But now you
can't use guns and napalm and tanks and
tens of thousands of casualties in every
country in order to enforce that. So how
do you do it? Well, now the new
battlefield becomes hearts and minds and
influencing the electorate in every
country to make sure that they vote the
way the US state department wants them
to vote. And so that is why you have
this codery of government agencies
around the state department from the CIA
to USAD to the US agency for global
media to even things like the World
Bank, the IMF, uh the ex export import
bank, the development finance
corporation who all put their levers on
the various media institutions. For
example, oftentimes there'll be a
condition of a World Bank or IMF loan
that you must allow free and independent
media, which they define almost
exclusively as meaning pro-state
department media. At the time this was
attached to this concept of free speech
diplomacy and a way of showing that the
free world, the capitalist uh you know
inspired economically
skyrocketing United States and western
allies were a better system of
government than a closed system, a
closed society under the iron curtain or
under the the Soviet communist boot. And
so there was a real convergence between
our interests and our values. And so a
lot of this statecraftraft, this this
funding of media and support for media
pluralism uh and media freedom was tied
to our interests in that the more media
we could pipe into Romania or Hungary or
Poland uh or anywhere in Central and
Eastern Europe or in places in Africa or
Asia or Central America that were
tilting Soviet. The more funding, the
more control we would have over the
hearts and minds, the more control we
would have over their elections, over
their elected leaders, over their uh
domestic referendum in terms of whether
to allow a US military base or to go
forward with a trade agreement or allow
an American oil company or mining
company to operate profitably in the
region. And so everything is downstream
of of that. All the the the little
operations like influencing union groups
or universities or members of the
military in a country is is all
downstream of having this base of
favorability in terms of hearts and
minds.
>> If if that works and you can influence a
country enough, ours or anybody else's
through media, like if you've got Andrew
Tate and it's like, oh, he's actually
going to sway people like we've got to
shut it down. you get why people are
like that. Uh Charlie Kirk was just
assassinated again for things that he's
saying. But it's like if these things
work then it you can begin to map why
the immune system response to Andrew
Tate was so extreme. You can understand
why somebody felt like, okay, I don't
like what Charlie's saying, so he
absolutely has to be taken out. In some
ways, it's almost more distressing that
we're that easily influencable. Um but
okay so that's piece number one. Piece
number two is that at some point in the
story this stops being about foreign
policy is good for the let's just take
an American context foreign policy
American foreign policy stops being good
for Americans and it starts being good
for um the people who have an economic
interest. And so you have made what I
would say is a compelling case for um
you can think of something like George
Soros's open society as being a hedge
fund that has an NGO attached to it in
order to make sure that they get the
policies that they need. Um one, have I
understood that correctly? And if I
have, talk to me about what it means to
draft off of policy.
>> I am so glad that you picked that up.
That is such a central point. um so few
people appreciate kind of the the
magnitude and implication of that and
it's such an underdisussed part of this.
The Soros story is it's a very clean
example of of what you just identified
which is that you have the Soros
management fund which is kind of the the
flagship hedge fund private equity
alternative asset investments. These are
all the all the different um liquid and
illquid investments that the Soros
Empire makes in uh in currencies around
the world, in um in companies around the
world, in industries around the world.
And then you've got two different things
that the hedge fund rides on. One of
them is the relationship with the US
government and the other is the civil
society institutions.
And in each case, the way the the racket
works is that Soros will fund government
agencies to push things that maximize
what's best for the hedge fund and will
uh deploy this philanthropic front
through the Open Society Foundation to
push things that from the from the So
the government does the top down
influencing and then the civil society
organizations do the bottom up
influencing And it all drives profits
towards Soros Inc. which then also gives
more money to influence politicians and
more money to feed into the uh open
society network. So that you know the
the racket just keeps growing and
growing and Soros is by no means the
only one who does this. I mean there are
dozens hundreds of of of hedge fund
folks who operate this way. Now, the
second thing that you asked was about
how you can draft off policy. And this
is when I when I refer to the blob,
which is a term coined by Barack Obama's
deputy national security adviser, Ben
Rhodess, when he was trying to describe
the foreign policy establishment in
Washington that's more powerful than the
presidency. This is the Obama White
House saying there's some force here
that's bigger than us that we can't take
on. So, this is a very bipartisan thing.
uh and deliberately so but the there's I
talk about these kind of three layers to
the blob. You've got the inside guts of
it which is the state department, the
CIA,
USAID, the department of war, the you
know the export import bank, the
development finance corporate all these
foreignfacing
influence operations that are designed
to be you know best for American
interests as they as they describe it.
Then you've got underneath that the
civil society layer which is all these
interstitial partnerships between the
government and the boots on the ground,
the universities, the media
organizations, the unions, the
universities, the the members of the
legal profession, the members of the
public health profession, all their
different trade associations which will
get US aid funding and will work with
the US embassy in the region. But on top
of that, you have this donor drafter
class. And I I use that term because you
can think of it like a bike race. In a
bike race, you don't want to be first
because the person who's in first cuts
the wind uh for everybody else behind
them. So, it's more
metabolically, energetically expensive
to be number one in the bike race until
the end of the race because everybody
else gets to draft off draft off the
wind that you've cut for them. It's the
same thing for businesses, for hedge
funds, for multinational corporations
who serve as, you know, oftentimes
portfolio companies for these uh big
private equity interests. you don't want
to, let's just say you're an oil company
and there's a huge amount of oil in
Venezuela, but it's controlled by a
communist dictatorship. Now, what what
used to be done in the in the 19th
century is, you know, you had a lot of
these companies try to effectively wage
their own wars. Uh like United Fruit,
for example, would go into Guatemala and
Nicaragua and they would go in with a
mercenary army. They would literally pay
uh you know hundreds of people from
Miami and Tampa and New Orleans uh to
you know get on ships essentially and
and and they would back a military coup
themselves and then they would work with
the State Department and the War
Department for some top up protection
and diplomatic support. But what ended
up happening was is this relationship
between big business in the United
States and multinational
corporations that get their supplies
from overseas, that have their markets
overseas, that have their labor
overseas, it became more and more
important for the war department, the
state department, the intelligence
services to the the more they did for
those corporations, the more they cut
the wind for it, the more profits those
corporations would have because they
wouldn't have to do it themselves and in
many cases most cases they can't do it
themselves. When you look at, for
example, Exxon Mobile and how much it's
profited off of uh partnerships in the
Middle East or uh or oil coming out of
the the Caspian, you know, the the
Caspian basin or you look at what
happened for example in the 2014 to 2022
uh Ukraine situation, the the the
profits of Exxon and Chevron and Shell
and British Petroleum completely
exploded
uh after the particularly after 2022 uh
as the but really after the 2014 coup as
the state department led a sanctions
campaign against Russia after 2014 that
was the Maidan revolution that was the
CIA USID backed coup to overthrow the
democratically elected government in
Ukraine. Victor Yanukovich was ran out
of office as the CIA effectively ran a
January 6 operation. If if you accept
the the official story on January 6,
that was literally what was done by our
CIA and State Department. Victoria
Nuland two months before that coup uh
described how you how uh the US
government through the state department,
USAD and other government agencies had
given over $5 billion of US taxpayer
money to the very right sector groups
who ended up setting the entire Maidon
Square on fire and violently ousting the
democratically elected president out of
office. when she gave those remarks at a
US State Department event, she was
standing behind one poster for Chevron
and another for Exxon Mobile. And uh as
when Crimea broke away and the Donbass
broke away, the US State Department
through Ambassador Daniel Frerieded led
a sanctions an international sanctions
road show to cut uh Russian gas off of
off of all of Europe country by country
just cutting uh cutting off the market
for Exxon and Chevron's competitors. So
now they can't get gas from cheap
natural gas from Russia. They have to
buy much more expensive liqufied natural
gas from Houston, Texas. uh you know
paying huge huge markups but now it's a
captured market because it's enforced by
the barrel of a gun from the US war
department uh which was literally uh you
know taking the territory in eastern
Ukraine and by the US state department
which was uh
diplomatically pressuring every country
in Europe to only buy from uh you know
these multinational corporations who
would get But it's it's that way with
everything. Every business works this
way. Every industry works this way. It's
the same thing with mining, for example.
You know, George Soros is a great
example in Mongolia uh in in the mid
2000s. Um the largest copper mine in the
world was discovered in Mongolia in um
and in the early 2000s. There was a
fight over uh which mining companies
would would get the rights to this mine.
And so the US State Department, the US
Embassy in Mongolia worked with the
George Soros Open Society Foundation.
This is all in Wikileaks by the way. You
can just go to the Wikileaks cables and
just run a search for Soros or Soros
Mongolia and you can see this out right
out in the open. But the the US State
Department effectively worked on uh with
the Open Society Institute in order to
make sure that Rio Tinto got the deal
got the deal. uh essentially and got it
on favorable terms. The Open Society
Institute led riots and protests against
the Mongolian government
>> to coersse more profitable deal terms
for Rio Tinto. Well, while George Soros
has a huge long position in Riointo.
>> So, so you know, you've got street
protest movements all over Mongolia.
You've got huge amounts of money pouring
in from the Open Society Institute and
from USAID grants and US State
Department grants to astroturf this
movement. And it's it's all redounding
to the secular insular profits of the
largest donor to the Democrat party. I
mean, Soros has gave $100 million to the
Democrats last election cycle. The
second largest donor is 40 million.
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And now, let's get back to the show. Um,
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 counter 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 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 bottomup rather than
top- down revolutions because prior
prior to World War II who 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
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 do 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. Uh
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 because 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 70s, 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 CIA
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 Gershman uh who he told I believe
it was the Washington Post in 1986
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 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 hip hop groups and and had
this anthem uh about um blood and um
blood and wasn't blood and soil. It was
like a land and land.
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 USAD,
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
hiphop 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 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 Arsh Center
Adrien Arch is 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
Yatsenuk 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 red lines 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
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 want 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 on 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 you know, the the
you know, the head of uh Exxon Mobile is
going to have different interests than
the head of Walmart is going to have
different interests than the head of a
clean ethanol company. And their own
power waxes and waines over time. You
know, there there was a time when, you
know, the biggest game in town in the
NGO world was the Ford Foundation by
far. I mean, it was it was the biggest
NGO. uh it worked very closely with the
CIA. uh and it also had a you know
effectively you know controlling shares
over the the Ford Motor Company and this
is at a time when we were creating
export markets for Ford cars and this
was a big part of uh you know it was
tied into the the petroleum you know
world as well but it's always been this
way but different stakeholders rise and
fall in power over time as different
industries and you know and different
alliances form and and reform and and so
we're in an interesting moment I think
right now as the the Biden
administration alienated a lot of the
traditional allies that were part of the
uh kind of more left-leaning folks and
the Trump administration alienated many
of those who were on traditionally on
the right the Chamber of Commerce for
example was traditionally a a right-wing
Republican institution representing all
the largest US multinational businesses
because they wanted free markets, low
taxes, free enterprise, low regulation
and that was something that was
typically associated with the Republican
party and the Republicans and the
Democrats would, you know, offset that
with media unions, Hollywood,
universities and the kind of limousine
liberal hedge fund class. And so but but
Trump lost a significant amount of the
Chamber of Commerce with by by
articulating a foreign policy that was
less interventionist uh you know less
war oriented uh less you know less money
to these democracy building so-called
you know institutions that would secure
markets for chamber of commerce
companies and so you saw a lot of but
but all these things are a big soup and
so they they move in tandem you you know
George Soros
doesn't really go in alone so much as he
goes in with the Bill Browder, you know,
banker types from London or he'll go in
on, you know, with the the clean energy
folks from, you know, Al Gore's uh clean
energy hedge fund or and you have these
kind of consortiums, the these kind of,
you know, alliance structures that that
pit against each other and as elected
leaders are favorable or sometimes They
start off favorable and then they become
unfavorable and then alliances shift
from there. So you know there is a kind
of weird evolutionary democracy within
the donor drafter class that ends up you
know what we see as politics is really
kind of a proxy war that plays out
within that network. It was obviously
for example when Elon came in and
supported Trump in the 2024 election.
You can make the argument and I I love
Elon.
I mean more than I can describe. I think
he's truly a great man of history. The
fact is is you know just looking at it
under that same lens you Elon was
aspiring to be a kind of conservative
uh or you know centrist conservative
Soros and you would talk about Soros all
the time and Elon's businesses did
benefit in the beginning. Certainly, I
know that he's gone, you know, uh, to
pay back a lot of the subsidies and has
worked to make his businesses
independent. But the fact the fact is is
Tesla benefited enormously from the coup
in Bolivia for lithium in um, you know,
under this is like 8 8 years ago now.
And Elon was on Twitter, proud proud of
that. At the time SpaceX got, you know,
rockets that were effectively
intermediated in the very beginning
from,
you know, from the State Department.
SpaceX plays a major role in uh in in US
diplomatic and power projection. they
were SpaceX had a role at the table when
I was at the State Department in charge
of the the the cyber cyber realm and
>> uh it's you know used in Starlink and
the like and but the millions millions
of dollars in subsidies for Tesla and
SpaceX and the like and so you can make
an argument there was a donor drafter
class side of that it's simply the the
the natural stable equilibrium of a
capitalist democracy and I don't I'm not
saying that to attack capitalism I I
love capitalism this simply is what it
is in that sense and you have to contend
with it with the recognition that money
absolutely helps and then but sometimes
there's only so much money can buy
because you can push things too far and
no amount of propaganda will shift you
uh from certain things. That's why they
had to turn to censorship because the
propaganda they couldn't turn it up past
10 anymore. So, you know, they they had
to move to to nastier toolkits. But I
guess what I'm trying to say is you see
you see this everywhere. you know,
George Soros was pushing this coup in
Brazil against the Bolsinaro
administration and then went on to make,
you know, like $150 million from all the
government mandates uh to help Soros
invested companies in Brazil from the
clean ethanol uh mandates that
essentially hurt these um you know,
fossil fuel industries. While while
Soros was making giant long bets on
clean energy, he coos out the guy, you
know, who was the fossil fuel person and
then, you know, raen from his own hedge
fund while his open society institute is
working with USAD to get everyone
arrested who who backs Bolsinaro to get
everyone censored on social media to to
fund the union groups backing Bolsinaro.
It ends up making a massive return on
investment for Soros's own companies.
It's the same thing in Ukraine for
example with NAFTA gas. All these
companies partner with NAFTA gas and
then they kick Russia out and then they
privatize NAFTA gas under threat of IMF
uh you know loan tanches being cut off
and so the Soros Empire makes hundreds
of millions of dollars from that grand
Ukraine energy play which is enforced by
the War Department, the State
Department, USAD, CIA and and so but but
this is this has always been I mean it's
the same thing with Hallebertton and
Dick Cheney. It's the same thing with
Exxon Mobile in the entire 20th century.
We had the C CEO and chairman of Exxon
Mobile as the secretary of state if you
remember under Trump one. It's the same
thing with Walmart. Walmart, you know,
is is a is a massive logistics and
retail operation that relies, if you
look at Walmart, they sponsor all of
these US aid lobby groups like the
Global Leadership Coalition and have
made billions of dollars off US regime
change. It's all the way down to Pizza
Hut. Look, I I I played this on Joe
Rogan when I was on there last time, and
it's like, look at the Gorbachoff Pizza
Hut ad from the 1990s
where, you know, Miky Gorbachoff is is
in a frigin Pizza Hut ad where you've
got these different Russians who are
complaining about how, you know, they're
not sure about how much they love this
new capitalist system and they're
arguing that there's corruption, but
then they turn to each other with
Gorbachov smiling in the background. and
they say, "But you know what?
We've got Pizza Hut. Can't be that bad."
And and a big Pizza Hut ad. Well, Pizza
Hut got 200 million new customers for
Pizza Hut because the Department of War,
the Department of State, USAD, and the
CIA opened up that market for them. So,
everyone's got an interest in
influencing these political systems. And
you know it it's not something that you
need to look at in a particularly
conspiratorial way. This is just the way
the world works. And once you accept
that and kind of get past the shock and
all it it helps analyze things with with
just this is this is the way the world
works. And uh you know you have if you
start with that as a first principle
everything else makes sense from there
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launch GPT right now. All right. There
is a lot of shock and awe in what you
just said. Talk to me about censorship.
This is one of the most shocking and
aweing things that um in researching you
for this interview that I came across. I
always knew that Elon was a pivotal
moment, him buying X, but I always
assumed it was because he opened up free
speech. I didn't realize that and you
tell me if you agree with the statement
but now um after listening to you my
takeaway is that the reason that the
Elon purchase of X was such a big deal
was he broke the ability to feed the
censorship machinery uh by limiting the
amount that they could scrape X. So they
couldn't in real time get a sense of the
natural language that people were using
and therefore couldn't censor fast
enough. And so for me, as I look at the
world and I feel like something has come
loose, man, like all of the uprisings
everywhere, I'm like, what is driving
this? Now, because my focus is so
obsessively economic, I can give you the
explanation for why people were feeling
that way, but I couldn't have explained
what the spark was that suddenly made it
possible for them to all coordinate and
all of that. Um, am I right to believe
that that really broke free because we
broke the censorship apparatus at an AI
level?
>> That's a huge part of it. There there
are a lot of levels to the to the Elon
uh revolution that started in late 2022
and you know immediately firing the
trust and safety team there made it um
made it very difficult to actually
enforce the censorship pressure that was
being applied by these NOS's. The way it
would work is the government would fund
the NOS's. The NOS's would pressure the
platforms through their trust and safety
teams simultaneously threatening
advertiser boycott to crush the revenue
and hearings or regulatory enforcements
from uh effectively the government
whether the executive or the legislative
branch so that it was economically
not viable to disobey what the NOS said.
And this is the this is the way it's
always structured. By the way, for
example, I mentioned earlier the the red
lines memo
>> that was given to Zilinski in Ukraine uh
his first month in office. He you know
he uh in in May 2019 the 20 red lines
the 70 NOS's undersigned a joint letter
saying there will be political
instability if you do any one of these
20 red lines and it was security policy
economic policy media policy
uh religious policies uh you know all
the all basically every everything in uh
public policy in Ukraine
the you know the the head of state, the
newly elected head of state was
threatened uh that if you chart your own
course, you're going to be overthrown.
And it's effectively what they said.
They said it will lead to uh political
instability, you know, which is, you
know, threatening to destabilize the
country if if they
>> real shame if we had to transition your
government,
>> right? But that wasn't delivered
directly by the Secretary of State. that
was delivered by what was called the
Ukraine Crisis Media Center is still
around today and played a weird role in
the origins of Russia gate. But that was
70 NOS's who all moved together as one
cohesive swarm. But what was the Ukraine
Crisis Media Center funded by? It was
funded by the US State Department, USAD
about a dozen of these CIA NGO cutouts
like kimonics and by NATO itself. So
NATO sponsors the NOS's. The State
Department, USAD, the CIA cutouts
sponsor the NOS's. They swarm around and
deliver this basically economic death
deathnell message. If you did, if you
don't do what we tell you to do, then
you will be bankrupted. You'll be driven
into the ground. There'll be we'll
destabilize you.
>> Why do they care so much? Is this like
they're just trying to alienate Russia?
Well, the, you know, Russia sits on $75
trillion worth of natural resources.
>> So, this is a long-term play to
Russia up enough that they can get in
there and get access to the resources.
>> It's been one. Yes. This was the whole
we fought the you know the cold war
arguably over this and the entire 30
years postcold war has been NATO
expansion. Country after country after
country after country even after we
promised Gorbachev not one NATO will not
expand one inch to the east. uh you know
James Baker in 1990 you know made you
know made that promise and um you know
now NATO is expanding all the way to
Russia's doorstep you know wasn't
it's but you this is moving country
after country into the security and
political and economic vaselage where we
will we incrementally eat up these
resources but it's a condition of
joining NATO that you need to have all
these reforms put in place you know you
need to have uh open media media, which
does not mean open media, right? It
means we need to be able to influence
the hearts and minds in your country.
You know, you have to you have to buy
from NATO contractors. You have to make
all these re reforms to your rule of law
and judicial independence. That doesn't
mean you have independent judges. That
means you have judges who come through
US aid incubator programs like the like
the world like the uh world justice uh
project or uh the American bar
association US aid programs like it's
you turn over your control to the blob
in order to get folded into this and
then you become a giant military base so
that uh you know Russia doesn't you know
is is not able to to fight back but
essentially this is a it's a play for
natural resources play for the the
minerals and the rare earths and the oil
and the gas and the cobalt and the
lithium and the aluminum and the gold
and the wheat and the agriculture and
the I I mean it's it's it's the biggest
prize on earth. Russia has almost twice
as much natural resources as the United
States does.
>> Wow.
>> And that was that was our unipolar
moment in the 1990s when we almost had
control over Russia. We did under Boris
Yelen. Then we lost under Putin and
that's why Putin's become this, you
know, Hitlerite boogeyman that you're
just kind of scioped into having to say
incantations about how you hate him so
much be because, you know, he he cost he
cost billions of dollars to to a lot of
very significant stakeholders in
American politics. But uh
anyway, that's that's a bit of an aside,
but the point that I'm I'm trying to
build towards here is
you you have this democracy of
stakeholders and it's it's always it's
always been like this. Now, in in a
sense on on the on the censorship story,
you know, the problem was the internet
changed everything. the the internet
democratized
media and so you couldn't do what you
did in the 20th century when all the
major media outlets had some legacy
connections to the office of war
information or to the US you know bureau
of pub state department bureau of public
diplomacy or to the CIA or to the uh you
know state department CIA NGO world you
could have independent genuinely
independ dependent
citizen journalists and influencers who
had more impact on hearts and minds than
the media pawns of the blob. And
suddenly what some random
24year-old video gamer like, you know,
PewDiePie or something in 2016, what he
said about the election swayed more
hearts and minds than the New York
Times. And I remember it was at the
German Marshall Fund. I think in 2019
where um I think it was John Allen who's
a four-star general
um he ended up being the head of
Brookings but he he identified hate
speech online as one of the top three
biggest geopolitical threats in the
entire world. This is a four-star
military general and effectively a CIA
cutout NGO saying that because hate
speech gives rise to ethnationalism
which gives rise to nationalism which
gives rise to things like Brexit and
potentially fxit and Italexit and Brexit
which is going to dissolve the EU which
is going to dissolve NATO which is going
to destroy the entire rules-based
international order because you know
kids in Call of Duty were were you know
able to use strong language with each
other freely. And and one of the things
he said in that talk was like, "Imagine
a world where the New York Times is
reduced to a medium-sized fa a
medium-sized Facebook page." And it was
like this thought experiment to the room
of all these military generals and CIA
uh you know, case officer types and you
know, NGO leaders of giant media
conglomerates and they're all having to
take in like wait, play this forward a
couple years. What happens if the New
York Times is really just a medium-sized
Facebook page? How do we maintain the
rules-based international order? If we
can't determine elections in most of the
of the world's countries,
>> that's crazy. That's crazy. I don't know
if I love that or hate that. And we'll
get to it in a minute because we need to
wrap up the censorship thing. just to
plant a flag for people. Uh one of the
most interesting questions that you've
asked that we need to answer in this
interview is while it is unnerving that
we are being manipulated as much as we
are uh and we want transparency, we also
want uh global power and we don't want
America to be toothless in the face of
uh international powers that will
leverage all of these same things
against us.
>> Uh so anyway, uh we will get to that. I
want to plant that as something uh that
we are building towards. So
wrap up the censorship part for me
either by um explaining the Elon thing,
my my take on that as just being foolish
or explaining how and why that has been
so transformational that not letting
them scrape enough data in real time
fundamentally change something on a
global scale. That's my hypothesis.
>> Yes. Yes. Well, that was uh you know
what you're referring to are these
weapons of mass deletion, these AI
censorship capabilities to be able to in
real time control narratives. Uh this
was just like with almost everything
else we've talked about. This was a
military project that started off um I
mean arguably going back to the Google
days, you know, Google started as a u as
a DARPA project. It was called the the
massive digital data systems program
when Sergey Brin and Larry Page were
Stanford PhDs.
They were they got grant money from this
uh DARPA program which was a joint CIA
NSA program in order to track how quote
birds of a feather flock together online
in the mid1 1990s. This was um this was
at the time when web 1.0 know, you know,
during the search engine wars before
Google, you know, completely dominated
the field, you had Los and Ask Jes and
you know, there were there were dozens
of these and they were all competing for
market share
>> and the the the CIA and NSA were trying
to use search traffic in foreign
countries as a uh early warning
political radar system. And so they
funded, I think it was called uh back
page, the uh this the Google predecessor
at Stanford uh in order to to map speech
online
and use that for for statecraftraft and
intelligence purposes. And then this
when social media came came about in um
you know in 2004 with Facebook, 2005
with YouTube, 2006 with Twitter and then
2007 with the smartphone.
this uh social media immediately became
the the main game. This this happened
through um you know this very very
unique individual named Jared Cohen who
was on the policy planning staff at the
State Department and convinced the State
Department and CIA to use social media
for color revolution and
counterinsurgency work because it was
much more scalable and speedy and
comprehensive than running operations
out of US embassies or consulates or CI
station houses. You could mobilize rent
to riots or street revolutions or access
hearts and minds way more effectively
and at scale on social media than you
could uh through the traditional analog
you know everybody show up to this
church on you know 3 and sundown at 12
you know 12 p.m. you you get you know 20
people as opposed to 200,000 people if
you do it on Twitter or Facebook or you
know YouTube uh organizing and so u but
then as that
as that ecosystem on social media
matured there just became huge amounts
of data to analyze in order to um be
able to run successful operations and to
counter uh various political movements
or counter counter intelligence threats.
uh and so the military worked on this
technique called natural language
processing NLP which is is a way to
create uh these machine learning models
these uh essentially you you
take any political narrative or any
political movement and you take all the
associated keywords the slangs the you
do a linguistic mapping and so it's
essentially there's a kind of political
science sociology element to it to
create a code book a lexicon on the
prefixes, the suffixes, the slogans, the
hashtags, the dialect. You can you can
tweak these things with what's called
sentiment analysis in terms of the
proximity of different constellation of
words together. Then you have your
computer scientists, your quants
essentially plug that code book, that
linguistic lexicon and constantly
updated keywords, you know, into this
model. you ingest hundreds of millions
in 2020 to censor for example opposition
to mail and ballots or early voting
dropboxes or or electronic voting
machines. This group EIP ingested 859
million tweets
>> during that election cycle in order to
conclude that 22 million of them were
misinformation. Uh you know that's not
manually reading 22 million but and then
the US government funded all this. This
again this started off to stop the
military justified this building this
field of AI censorship because of ISIS
recruiting allegedly on Twitter and
Facebook in 2014 2015
um during the uh Garland attack in in
Texas and the attacks in France and the
like. They said we need to stop ISIS and
we just can't stop them fast enough. So
we need to create this linguistic code
book of how they talk to each other and
the words they use. And then essentially
when Trump won the 2016 election, all of
this money, you know, billions of
dollars of investment from the State
Department, USAD, the civil affairs
branch of the US military, it went into
stopping Russian disinformation, which
is now the bigger threat than ISIS. Uh,
and then they simply said, you know,
Trump supporters are are Russian, you
know, are a Russian operation. And so
>> what came first though? Were they upset
about Trump and they were actually
trying to stop him and so Russia becomes
just the thing we're going to use or was
Russian interference actually hyper
prevalent and they were just addressing
that and it happened to impact Trump?
>> No, it was it was the first one. They
never proved anything about the Russian
influence. In fact, it was a total joke.
The Justice Department dropped all of
its cases against the so-called Russian
bot farms. The people who were
identifying the Russian bots themselves
got caught creating Russian bots like
New knowledge. If you just look at the
New York Times write up, for example, on
the New knowledge scandal where the the
same group that wrote the Senate
intelligence report on Russian
interference on social media was
creating fake Russian bots and
subscribing them to Roy Moore's
Republican Senate campaign and then
going to the media and saying, "Look,
they're fun. Look, they're they're being
backed by Russian bots. And um the media
reporting it without having any idea
that the very group that uh told them
they were being backed by Russian bots
created those Russian bots. You just buy
a bot farm and you set the VPN to
Russia. Now suddenly you've got your
Russian bots. Um but this was this is a
giant predicate. Without the Russia side
of it, none of this could have been ever
created in the first place. Before this
got normalized with COVID and it and
disinformation was a threat to
democracy, they had to use a foreign
they had to break two and a half
centuries of free speech precedent uh
presidents in this country. And and they
did this with a national security
hammer. They said, "Well, listen,
you know, this is a national security
threat. This is not like a free speech
issue at all. This is a hostile foreign
mallayion influence operation. So who do
who is our agency to stop hostile
foreign malign influence threats? It's
the Central Intelligence Agency. So just
like that, the CIA gets to move into
Facebook. The CIA gets to move into
Twitter. The CIA gets to move into
YouTube. The ODNI gets to, you know,
work with the back end of the trust and
safety team everywhere. All of the CIA
and State Department USA funded NOS's
get to get billions of dollars in grants
to stop this darn Russian threat which
which is only backing Trump supporters.
And now we're reporting tens of
thousands of ordinary course Trump
supporters because our definition of a
bot is anyone who has uh you know spews
misdinformation about NATO uh while
posting 20 or more times a day. So it's
like everyone was a bot under that
definition. If you look at the way the
German Marshall Fund funded by USA ID
and the State Department defined a bot,
it was literally as simple as that. It
was like um you know uh consistently
uh amplified Russian talking points
while while uh posting consistently 20
or more times a day. It was like that's
half of Trump's supporters. And nobody
gets to check the math. Nobody gets to
see actually how the digital forensics
are are cooked up. They just see, well,
it's a Russian bot. I don't know
anything about digital forensics. I
guess maybe these are Russian bots. And
it and the fact is is the Trump
administration. You know, a lot of
Republican media didn't have a problem
with this because they were their
opponents were getting censored. Fox
News's opponents were getting censored.
uh you know a lot of uh you know big
Republican accounts were being
challenged from the b from the bottom up
by proTrump media and it wasn't until
Trump himself got hit that and I can say
this definitively as Trump's speech
writer at this time and I wrote a speech
for Trump about censorship in the summer
of 2020 and he
like explicitly he declined to read it
got you know halfway through through the
introductions and looked down and said,
uh, you know, everyone says censorship
is this big deal. It's, uh, you know,
but let them try to stop me. They tried
to stop me before and it's like, I mean,
they they really were completely under
unprepared.
Um, and at the time they I think they
didn't want to go after big tech because
it was what was making the stock market
so successful as the Trump campaign was
running for re-election. You know, they
were they were saying MAGA, Microsoft,
Apple, Google, and Amazon. And so no one
wanted to, you know, touch the golden
goose and um the goose got cooked.
>> Woof. Now, do you think that there was
something uh unique about Trump that
made the blob unified and wanting to
censor him and his uh proponents? Or is
it whoever was um in power in the what I
call the deep state? I'm not trying to
put those words in your mouth, but that
feels like the right term to me. uh that
whoever was in control of the deep state
at that moment has a new technology and
they're just like, "Oh, we've got a new
technology. This guy won. We certainly
weren't expecting that. We don't want it
to happen again, so we're going to shut
him down." Like if the roles were
reversed,
would the deep state have used that tool
against a Democrat or
>> Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. They they
they were using this against Bernie
people at the time. Now, you remember
Bernie Sanders in 2016 was a whole
different animal than than he is now. I
mean, Bernie is folded on all this
stuff. He's a
>> he's a lawn chair. He just folds up
whenever anyone sits on it. But in in
2016, Bernie was a I mean, he almost
beat Hillary for the for the Democrat
nomination. They had to use all these uh
you know, super elector you know you
know all these different tricks in order
to you know ensure Hillary carried the
DNC nomination. Even within that there
were these Bernie bros. Uh but you can
listen to people like Anders Fog
Rasmusen who was the head of NATO during
the Obama administration and is was a
huge force but behind the censorship
industrial complex. He effectively
created the censorship industrial
complex through uh through NATO setting
it up after 2014 in Ukraine and then
rolling it into the UK after Brexit and
then the US after uh after Trump won.
and Anders Grass Muen in
2015 2016 was on TV all the time talking
about you know Trump and Bernie threats
to democracy they they went after um uh
Jeremy Corbin in the UK the UK Labor
Party the same way it doesn't matter
it's not a partisan thing it's it's a
blob thing it's
Bernie Sanders was calling to cut the
Pentagon budget and foreign
interventionism
uh to you know all this color revolution
and democracy building and war work
because he wanted the money to be spent
on universal health care and free
college tuition. It was Jeremy Corbin
was calling for the same thing out of
the UK Labor Party and then they regime
changed him out and put Carmer in and
now Care Star,
>> you know, is completely destroying the
United Kingdom and whatever freedom is
left there. But it it's it's just a
foreign policy thing. It's it's
and and you brought up something earlier
which is you mentioned Black Rockck and
Larry Frink and I feel like maybe
circling back to that now is kind of an
opportune moment because if you look at
like the biggest uh influence lobby for
USAD and the for international affairs
budget in DC it's this group called the
global leadership coalition. It was set
up in 1995
uh at a time when the American public
was trying to scale back State
Department and USAD and US Agency for
Global Media and Pentagon funds because
the cold war was over. And so a bunch of
multinational corporations all get
together
with uh the the NOS's.
You have these like Republican
multinational corporations at the time
in the 1990s. It's before the Trump
split. And you had these left-wing NOS's
who were all on government, you know,
grants getting together. They called
this a strange a coalition of strange
bad fellows. So you had the the
Republican big business and the
Democrat, you know, big nonprofit
complex come together to create this uh
GLC, Global Leadership Coalition, which
was the came to be their lobbying arm
in Congress on the Hill uh in, you know,
local and state national races for
politics to make sure that everybody in
DC keeps funding USAD. In fact, gives
them more money than ever. Keeps funding
the State Department. Keeps funding the
Pentagon. Keeps funding the US Agency
for Global Media. Keeps funding the
National Down for Democracy. Keeps
funding the Carnegie Endowment. Keeps
funding the Ford Foundation. Keeps
funding the Bill Melinda Gates Fund
through the International Affairs Budget
even though the Cold War was over even
though and and to and this, you know, on
the on the board of of the GLC right now
is is a guy named Tom Donolan. And I
bring this up because you you mentioned
Black Rockck. Well, Black Rockck has an
in-house think tank that uh guides the
$10 trillion worth of assets under
management at at Black Rockck and it's
called the Black Rockck Investment
Institute. Its chairman is Tom Donalan.
Tom Donalan was the national security
adviser for Barack Obama. So, it's the
head of military intelligence and state
craft. That's the guy the president
meets with every day more than the
secretary of state. It's the head of the
National Security Council. Before that,
uh, Tom Donolan was, uh, a high level
state department operative in the 1990s,
responsible for NATO expansion. In
between that, he won the CIA director's
award uh, and uh, had a very prominent
role in US intelligence, but he never
been a banker until uh, you know,
basically past his 50th birthday. Then
suddenly he becomes the head of the
Black Rockck Investment Institute and
sits on the board of the of the lobby on
Capitol Hill to give more money to the
International Affairs budget which then
Black Rockck drafts off of for all of
its portfolio company investments. So if
USA if if you if they're invested in
Hallebertton and Hallebertton has the
rights to the oil processing and
infrastructure development in eastern
Ukraine they can make sure that US
taxpayer money is going to fund the
military reconquest of eastern Ukraine
and the state department pressure in
order to privatize NAFTA gas or to give
the government contracts to Black Rockck
portfolio companies. And Tom Donalon by
the way was Joe Biden's first pick for
CIA director. This is reported by the
New York Times. Tom Donolan turned it
down.
>> He said, you know, he would rather run
the Black Rockck Investment Institute
than be
>> than but it's the same job. It it's
simply making a lot more money because
>> they get to control the lobbying arm in
order to make sure the the money keeps
going to to Black Rockck. And then Tom
Donalan's brother, Mike Donalan,
was the top uh White House uh senior
adviser to Joe Biden and had been since
1986 for 40 years Joe Biden's kitchen
sink or kitchen cabinet they call it.
You know, not the cabinet of
secretaries, but the close inner circle
at the White House.
>> The most important person in the kitchen
cabinet was Mike Donalan, who was his
political groomer for 40 years. And it's
the brother of the guy running the
investment decisions at BlackRock. So
think about but this is like national
sec this is like insider trading on
national security secrets. It's the same
thing George Soros has been doing. It's
the same thing the Donald do. It's the
same thing the all of these people that
they're in the na I mean you got the guy
who was first picked to be CIA director
won the CIA director's award was the
national security adviser and now he's
the head of the investment institute for
black rockck well he's got an immediate
line he could just call big brother and
immediately know you know what the white
house is going to do on Ukraine and so
he can decide whether or not to invest
in rare earths or mining or natural gas
or agriculture And you can do that on
but that this is why they all bid on
these guys. What is what is Mark Millie
right now? Mark Millie, Arch Blobster,
chairman of the joint chiefs of staff
for SAR general. He's a banker now. He's
a JP Morgan Chase. How about uh Jared
Cohen, who I mentioned, who established
the CIA protocol for using social media
for color revolutions when he was at the
State Department policy planning staff
in 2007 and convinced Connisa Rice to
run CIA operations out of Facebook
instead of CI station houses. Well, he
then went to Google and then worked with
uh, you know, worked with the CI and
State Department at Google through
Google Jigsaw. What's he doing now? He's
at Goldman Sachs running the uh you know
geopolitical futures and macroeconomic
trading strategy. The they it all of
these blobsters go into banking because
the the multinational corporation profit
strategy is to use the battering ram of
the war department, the state
department, the CIA, US aid and all this
media control to maximize their own
profits. And and Trump threatened to
throw a monkey wrench in that by have by
daring to have a different foreign
policy being unvetted by these little
CIA incubator programs at Ned like all
the other Republicans were.
And the media control has been
threatened by free speech on the
internet. It just the the power of one
small voice amplifying all the other
minnows has turned out to be a more
powerful force than than a shark. And so
now we're in that world where we've had
all the success here in the US, but now
they're moving upstream with
international law to try to make it so
that even if we want to have free
speech, we won't. It'll be illegal under
international law or foreign country
jurisdictions like the UK, EU, Brazil.
>> Okay, there is something interesting
going on there in terms of um the EU
leveraging their own laws to try to
influence what social media does. uh
because if you make something illegal
there then now it's like okay do we just
stop doing this everywhere or is there a
vulnerability that's created in terms of
how much data we have to hand over in
the EU. Um so I'm going to set that
aside for a second though because the
thing that I really want to understand
and I will be mortified if we get to the
end of this interview and we haven't
tackled which is what is going on right
now and I'll be specific about what I
mean by that. So I said earlier for me
looking at what's happening in the world
right now from a populist uprising
standpoint from just through an economic
lens I can explain precisely why people
are in a populist sentiment but the the
specific thing that's yanking us the
left in one direction and the right in
another direction that I don't have
mapped and so I would love to understand
when I look at what's going on in uh
Nepal, when I look at the UK, when I
look at um the response here in America
to Charlie Kirk, uh what's going on in
Germany, what's going on in Italy, like
there there is to me a theme that runs
through it all. When I saw people in the
UK marching in the streets for the Tommy
Robinson protest, holding Charlie Kirk
like vigils and signs,
>> I was like, hold on a second. This this
is what looks like to me to be a
singular phenomena just playing out all
over. Um
I when I start to make that specific
though, I know that I am reaching in the
dark. So, I'll say what I think it is,
but I would love for you to um say if
you think that this is crazy or what,
but the specific phenomenon to me seems
to be that we have a um the blob putting
forward what I'll call a progressive
agenda, just to be as neutral about it
as I can. And that's been going on now
for quite some time. Possibly uh
reaction to um Trump and what that
represents. But you've got that pulling
the left in that direction as fast and
hard as you can. Uh, and then on the
right, you have what I'll call is a
rebound effect to those voices being
pushed down. And I think that there's an
evolutionary reason why it breaks left
and right that my audience will have
heard me talk about a gazillion times,
so I won't bother relaying that out. But
the very short hand of it all is um
evolution realizes to create a stable
society, you need both the deeply
compassionate left and you need the
personal responsibility right. And so
you're always going to have those two
voices. So if you push one of them down,
like holding a a ball inflated ball
underwater, as soon as you take the
pressure off, it's going to pop back up.
And so when Elon came in and made it
impossible for the censorship apparatus
to work because you just couldn't scrape
enough data that that was the hand off
the ball and boom, it's just popping up
and it's popping up here. It's popping
up in Germany. It's popping up in the
UK. Obviously, there are real policy
reasons for that. Shorthand it to
unchecked immigration. Uh
yeah, I'll I'll leave it at that. So,
um, that's my sort of rough
approximation of the specifics that are
pulling us left and right. Um, what's
your take on the connective tissue
between all these theoretically
disperate uprisings?
>> Well, quick thing on the scraping of
data. It's important to I think for
maybe your audience should just because
it's kind of a legal technical thing
they may not have heard but this new EU
censorship law actually compels US
social media platforms to hand over this
data that the to uh what they call
vetted researchers which are just
basically all these little
>> CIA MI6 cutout organizations. these same
NOS's are now under under threat of
billions of dollars in fines are going
to be able to get you know get back the
the raw materials to be able to boot the
Death Star back up in terms of uh
narrative control unless the US state
department and white house can step in
and stop the Europeans and that's what
stalled the trade deal currently the
economic trade deal between the US and
EU has been stalled uh I I would say
thankfully and I'm very grateful that
that This administration is so
passionate about defending America from
foreign free speech threats that they're
willing to I think a lot of Trump donors
would much prefer to have the trade deal
and don't necessarily even care about
the free speech issue buted
they're putting the country first which
is which is incredible to see. um you
know in in terms of the kind of
political left right of it you know it's
really interesting when the blob is so
weirdly
political and apolitical at the same
time. Um
it's it is fundamentally apolitical but
it manifests itself as political from
season to season. Like a great example
of this is Ukraine. I mean, Ukraine um
in 201 I believe it was 2013 2014 um I
believe Democrats put a resolution in
Congress forbidding any government funds
from going to the Azoff battalion
because they were uh right-wing
neo-Nazis. So, this is one of these um
Ukrainian factions. There's there's a
very um kind of ethnationalist
strand within some of the Ukrainian
nationalist movements. A lot of this
goes back to, you know, kind of the
immediate postWorld War II era uh kind
of times and just how things developed.
But uh essentially, you know, you you
Ukrainians were seen
the most militant, most aggressive
uh most willing to die for their
country. Ukrainians were um rejected by
Democrats in uh in 2014, pre-Russian
counter coup because they were uh you
know, Nazis and hard hard ultraist
right-wing types.
Then when the Democrats needed them to
serve as muscle against the Russians
after the US State Department under
Barack Obama lost control over uh the
Oblasts and lost control over uh pretty
much everything east of the Nepa River,
everything in Crimea through the
referendum. Suddenly we needed the
loudest, craziest, most aggressive
military battalion folks in Ukraine. And
so Democrats began funding them. Um,
magically Facebook, which had banned the
Azoff battalion, not just banned them,
but banned anyone from talking about
them in a favorable way. They um after
after uh I think in around 2016 2017
Facebook designated the Assoff Battalion
as a dangerous organization which not
just forbids them from having access to
Facebook or Instagram but means that you
can't glorify them without yourself
committing a terms of service. You could
only mention them in the context of
condemning them. But as soon as the 2022
conflict broke out, um, all of that
reversed. Suddenly, Democrats were
backing, you know, effectively Nazi
groups and uh I would not be surprised
if the Victoria Nuland political affairs
state department leaned on Facebook to
remove them from the dangerous
organizations group and allow them to
not just get back on Facebook and
Instagram, but allow everyone to support
them around the world. That's
>> and then then they're getting standing
ovations from the Democrats in the in
the you know but a lot of this is
because George Soros's economic
interests were threatened to be
destroyed by the the Russian incursion
in into Ukraine and all of the you know
the the massive energy play around the
European the Ukrainian gas market. I
mean this was what Bisma was. Berisma
was a Ukrainian gas company funded by
USAID. Uh so you know we
You could have like, you know, Democrat
aligned Wall Street and London investors
uh making money off of this grand
Ukraine energy play being administered
by the Obama State Department. But so so
it's not really like you will have
progressives funding Nazis and you will
have Republicans funding Bangladeshi
transgender rap groups. Like like I
mentioned, that was the that was not the
radical far-left side of the CIA doing
the funding of the Bangladeshi rap
groups, uh, you know, to oust their
conservative government. That was the
Republican side of the I'm not convinced
that the P the same people who are
funding Bangladeshi rappers uh you know
would like to live next door to them or
would like their daughter to meet them
in church they they want the petroleum
they want the military bases and they
are quite agnostic on both sides whether
that's you know the the Democrat side of
the blob funding right-wing nationalist
movements
uh or it's the Republican side of the
blob funding, you know, left-wing street
anarchists. If it's what creates the
necessary power vacuum to secure their
own economic interests, things can
stabilize from there. You can bet, for
example, that after the, you know, Nazi
faction in Ukraine outlives its
usefulness, um, the gay pride parades
will be back and forth. You can bet, you
know, if if uh you know, the after a,
you know, left-wing, you know, kind of
like uh you know, coup in in Bangladesh,
you're going to you you're going to have
the IRI putting in, you know, pressure
for a kind of strongman, you know, type
uh to contain, you know, the anarctic
forces who are complaining about fossil
fuels. Like, but you need to create that
power vacuum first, which means working
with strange bad fellows to do it. And
this is the exact lobbying force behind
USAD and the War Department and the
State Department and media control funds
in the first place.
>> All right. So I is that schizophrenic
nature um creating the wild bifurcation?
So I and man, if you think that I'm
shoehorning something here, please tell
me. But I look at Charlie Kirk getting
shot. I see it as somebody who whether
he grew up Republican or not, it becomes
irrelevant in the face of being
radicalized and seems like it was
somebody who has been radicalized to
left-leaning ideology. Is this just like
no, it is what it is. Like it's
collateral damage. We're not
intentionally trying to um build any
sort of long-standing divide. We just in
any one moment we need this and then the
next m moment we need that. But these
things take on a life of their own. And
so, uh, we've just got these two sides
racing away from each other. Like, what
what is causing that? Like, why, uh, how
have we gotten to a place where silence
is violence, words are violence, uh,
people that say a thing that I don't
like get shot and killed? Like, it's,
um, I am very eager to have an answer
for that so that I can make whatever
small contribution I make by talking
into a microphone to begin unwinding
that. But I have to understand it before
I can unwind it. And if it's collateral
damage from the system of soft power
around the world where it's all hearts
and minds all the time, uh, but it's
completely mercenary and therefore
there's no like real ideology and any
ideological
um, derailment of the train like what
I'm saying we're seeing right now is
purely accidental. At least I know. But
like what do you think
what do you think about that hypothesis?
Is there something that better explains
what we're seeing?
I don't have a a fully formed opinion
yet on um
the ne
what to attribute the Charlie
assassination to beyond that shooter and
the local community for example in Salt
Lake that it appears the the FBI is uh
looking into this armed queers group and
folks who appear to have uh fornowledge
of it and and the like. you know, you
can you there's there's a lot to be said
about how those groups um have served as
pawns of US foreign policy for for a
very very long time. I mean, the CIA was
working with Antifa groups in Syria uh
in during operations timber sycamore. If
you just look up Antifa Syria, Operation
Tim, you know, timber timber sycamore,
um the I I' I've talked for years before
this this happened about how the
transgender population is is
disproportionately
sought after by the State Department and
by intelligence linked NOS's because
they are the frontline radicals who are
often um very quick to be the frontline
muscle to take to the streets against
governments. You're looking for crazy
people. You are when when you are trying
to create start a revolution, you you
need bodies in the streets and you need
people who are willing to take big
risks, who are willing to get arrested.
I mean, I'm literally just reciting to
you right now the the US Institute of
Peace call to arms. I mean, they
literally I I have videos on my ex
accounts of of their own civil
resistance guide books, 300page guide
books on how to plan a revolution and
how uh in and they have an online video
series with 170 videos about how to do
this. This is funded by us, the
taxpayers. Um was created by the Reagan
administration in 1984 during the cold
war right after the national down for
democracy.
They explicitly say like you know we
train people like you know to to get
arrested to become martyrs for the
cause. They need we, you know, we we um
we look at the different protest
movement demographics by their risk
tolerance and we need you know a lot
most younger people have a higher risk
tolerance and
um you know people who are unemployed or
people who are on drugs or people who
are criminals or people who are
transgender tend to have a much higher
risk tolerance. They tend to go in
after, you know,
they have often times a very serious
hatred of a government that they feel
not included by or not representative or
they feel like in the event of a
revolution, their lives would be
dramatically better because they would
get to set the terms of what's norm
normative or not in society. And so they
are easily poached, they're easily
bought, they're easily radicalized. And
this is how you have, for example, the
Republican side of the CIA funding
transgender dance festivals in
Bangladesh or, you know, just giving out
money in Haiti to LGBT groups. Just give
them out. Just literally. I mean, I um I
think one of the State Department grants
that I uh you know, showed was in the
Caribbean for and the name of the grant
was just being LGBT, just money for
that. And but you end up and you end up
getting in and you know lots of arts and
culture and university and um and you
know youth radicalization through that
um and you know when I look at
how those are used in armed revolutions
in the past 10 years I think uh you know
it's I mean look at something like
riot which was which was working on the
same kind of you know LGBT kind of like
gender fluid type. This is funded by
USAD, housed by the national down for
democracy. The lead singer is appearing
at the State Department at the podium
with Tony Blinken and actively
deliberately fmenting riots on the
streets of Russia. This is what ended up
getting USID kicked out of Russia, I
should note, under Barack Obama when
they tried to do this left-wing, you
know, sexual profanity riots. I mean,
it's in the name. The name of the group
was Riot. Uh, you know, that was
But what I'm getting at here is I know
that there's there's a tendency in
I I'll give you an example with the Ryan
Ralph thing. I I immediately saw the
network, right? Day one, I recorded a
4-hour live stream and immediately found
um that this individual was connected.
Now, not saying that he was a master
Ryan Ralph, the Trump attempted
assassination after Butler
um was clearly a crazy person, but that
doesn't folks underweigh
the crazies that are worked with. I
mean, you talk to special forces guys,
anyone who's been in the operation side
of of CIA or anyone who's been in the
political affairs division of state,
crazies are very, very, very useful.
They are party starters. They they start
the spark. They have a lot of energy.
They are willing to be the you get
enough of them together, you got you got
a protest movement. And often times
because they're crazy, they're not able
to hold down a regular job. So NGO grant
money goes a long long way because it's
their alternative to being homeless or
or being, you know, in a very desperate
state. And so they're very loyal in that
sense as well. But what what I'm getting
at with with Ryan Ralph, that was an
individual who was doing the kind of
thing you can't do unauthorized legally.
This was somebody who was working
directly with the US State Department to
get terrorist fighters into Ukraine from
Afghanistan,
Syria, Iran,
uh Libya. He was g getting, you know,
ISIS. He was getting uh military
fighters into all of these conflict
zones. Uh
spending his entire day trolling
WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook in order to
get stacks. He claimed to have over
5,000 front and back passports of ISIS
and al-Qaeda fighters and then working
with the US State Department to get them
no look fastpass visas so that they
could serve as cannon fodder for the
NATO war against Russia. at the same
time that we were working that there was
a serendipitous flood of folks from
Afghanistan and Syria as as topup muscle
to the Ukrainian military in Ukraine.
While Ryan Ralph had a business card
saying he was the director of uh the uh
a Ukraine NGO, the Ukraine volunteer uh
volunteer center the forget the exact
name but essentially the volunteer
center of Ukraine I think is what it was
called. Uh which itself was a dark money
NGO. So, we don't know whether it was
directly sponsored by USA ID, but it was
it was it got its 501c3
as a American nonprofit through this
other group called Mother of Ukraine,
which was profiled by Voice of America,
literally a CIA media proprietary that
was spun off from the CIA in the 1970s.
And it's still US government media. The
whole thing is like uh, you know,
running through this government money,
government media nexus. and Ryan Ralph.
So he's like you've got military
fighters uh you know these intelligence
networks from Timber Sycamore in Syria,
you have the State Department through
the visas. You have the US aid through
the NOS's. Uh he gets picked up by DHS
in 2023 and Customs and Border Patrol
calls for DHS to investigate him because
the story doesn't check out and and they
refuse to investigate him. the guy's
been, you know, arrested 50 times but
never spent a day in jail. Um, I mean,
you can, the Ryan Ralph connections to
the blob are immediately apparent. You
know, you have you have
Trump was running against what the blob
wanted on Ukraine. And we don't know how
deep it goes in terms of who within the
blob may have had advanced knowledge,
but you know that this was a blob
creation. This was a guy whose entire
life was serving the blob's military and
financial interest in Ukraine day in day
out and it was a political assassination
attempt for that purpose. And now the
Justice Department has classified all
the new evidence in the Ryan Ralph case.
So, we don't even now, and I'm
speculating, but I presume this is
because um a lot of that evidence about
Ralph's motivations and his prior life
is going to flow through this NGO
network in Ukraine that he was a part
of. And they don't want the world or the
American public necessarily knowing. I
think I think you could undermine the
war effort if it turns out that all
these NOS's
um had intelligence links and so now
it's classified as a matter of grave
national security. We're not allowed to
know the new evidence in the Ryan Ralph
case. That is a very clean one to me. I
don't know about Tyler Robinson yet.
Obviously, the way it's looking is, you
know, it looks Antifa. It looks, you
know, it looks classic, you know,
anti-fascist. the the engravings and the
like. We know that at least it's been
reported by the FBI he had a transgender
boyfriend at the same time. I believe
the transgender boyfriend. It's being
reported now. I don't know when this
comes out if this will hold up, but I
think that the transgender boyfriend is
actually cooperating with the FBI or may
have played some role in turning him in
in conjunction with the father. Right
now, my focus as things currently are is
trying to make sure that the
institutional response to this is
correct in terms of honoring Charlie's
legacy. We've seen, you know, lots of
that, whether it's NASCAR, the UFC, the
Chicago Cubs, the New York Yankees, the
Dallas Cowboys, um 38,000 new uh TPUSA
applications for both colleges and high
schools. I would like to see a TPUSA
chapter in every American high school.
If if that's the end end result of this,
this would that would go an unbelievable
way to stopping this mind virus we're
seeing around this because people get
radicalized in college. It looks like
Tyler was rad Tyler Robinson was
radicalized in college. It looks like he
came from a Republican Trumpup
supporting family and then went off to
college and he became an antifa, you
know, furry transgender adjacent crazy
person. um if there had been a TPUSA in
his high school and he had a community
that he could fit in with. Because this
thing, if you call yourself a
conservative on a college campus that
doesn't have a TPUSA,
you're you're socially ostracized. You
can't get a date. You can't have
friends. You have no no one to support
you. And TPUSA completely changed the
game on that. And so I'm delighted to
see that play out. And the institutional
response, I think, has been very
positive. Um, but you know, the folks
who are condoning assassination,
uh, um, I mean, that's FBI stuff right
there. You you you can't call for
assassination of your political
opponents. That's that's incitement to
murder, and we can root that out. Now,
>> you're the king of pulling everything
into the spotlight. Um, sunshine is the
best disinfectant,
but how do we make sure that America
doesn't end up losing its teeth on the
international stage? How do we have
both?
>> You can simply use transparency. And
I'll give you an example. The National
Endowment for Democracy uh that we
talked about this CIA cut out funded by
the State Department that moves in
conjunction with the Central
Intelligence Agency on everything it
does. Um it at least in the beginning uh
arguably when it was most effective in
its first uh 20 years
it it used to say it does overt action
instead of covert action unlike the CIA
which hides all of its operations and
you're not allowed to see who the CIA
funds and um you know they could at
least make the claim that it was overt
action in the beginning. Now it's
covert. It's completely covert. I can't
foyer it. I can't get access. Even the
White House can't get access. And
there's a battle about that right now.
It's, you know, congressional oversight
couldn't get couldn't get uh access when
um you know, when and it's the same
thing with USID. USAD is more secretive
than the CIA. And everyone always laughs
or thinks I'm joking when I say that,
but it's way more secretive than the
CIA. the the president of the United
States has to issue a a presidential
finding a a written authorization of
every single CIA covert action. US A has
none of those restrictions. So you can
just run covert operations out of US ID
when and then you can completely fool
people with a grant description that
bears no resemblance to anything that US
ID does or did like the Zunzano case. I
talk about this all the time and it
bears repeating. If you went on
usaspending.gov,
the Zunzano grant, this was the Cuban
regime change operation from 2009 to
2014,
um, when the the USAID in tandem with
the CIA constructed a a fake Twitter
knockoff. um it named after the Cuban
slang for hummingbird and ordered to
recruit 100,000 Cubans onto uh a fake
Twitter application at a time when Cuba
had banned Twitter uh in order to get
them to do a Cuban spring like the CIA
got the riots popped off in the during
the Arab Spring. They wanted to uh lure
according to USAD, they wanted to lure
them in um with promise of a social
media platform focused on sports, music,
and hurricane updates. But then after
they hit about 100,000 subscribers, they
would uh seow discord and distrust and
promote uh basically users uh to to do
revolutions against police and against
the security state and take to the
streets and riot and this is all in the
USA documents. But the grant was
earmarked for humanitarian relief in
Pakistan.
So
>> okay,
>> it bears no relation whatsoever to what
was actually done. Like take you know
USAD's save the children operation. Save
the children is a British uh a British
NGO for for public health and childhood
vaccines. It's also has an American side
of it but it's centered in London but
it's a frequent US ID partner. In 20 24
2014 2012, the CIA tapped USID to uh to
collect the biometrics of the Pakistani
population through save the children by
having the USAD. So the CIA gets USA the
USAD mission representative
uh to recruit doctors at Save the
Children for Childhood Vaccines and and
then convince local doctors in Pakistan
um to collect the biometrics of the
local Pakistan population so that it
could be analyzed by the CIA for them to
match uh you know with who they called
potential terrorists. So, so now you've
got USID corrupting a childhood vaccine
uh NGO
for a CIA operation to collect people's
blood. Like you can't do foreign policy
this way. They got busted by Pakistani
intelligence. I believe the doctors
associated with that are still in jail.
Uh, you know, this was, you know, this
is something that was
when the CIA got busted in this in it
took them 18 months to issue a
declaration that they would no that the
CI would no longer use vaccine clinics
for CIA operations. Well, USAD never
said that that they'd stop doing it. I
mean, the what the solution is not to
get rid in my view. I'm I'm not I'm not
calling for an end to dirty work,
but you can make dirty work a little
less dirty. There there are certain
things you can't do anymore.
There are certain things that are too
much. You know, um one of the things
that came out of the reforms of the CIA
in this in the 60s and 70s is we put an
end to assassinations. Can't do that
anymore. used to. Now look, okay,
technically, yeah, the CIA runs the the
drone program, so technically the CIA
does, you know, assassinations every
day, but it was at least you have some
process around, you know, the
who's on the terrorist list and whether
or not the
in the first 30 years of it, it was a
wild west. You didn't need presidential
signoff which meant that the president
could have plausible d there was a whole
power dynamic within the CIA is do do we
tell the president that we're going to
do this.
Well, maybe the president actually
doesn't want us to tell him that we're
doing this because then there's no he
wants to maintain plausible deniability
and it's our job to have plausible
deniability. And so there became this
whole subgame within it to hide from all
the other branches of government what
the CIA was doing. And as as USAID took
over more and more of the CIA portfolio,
USAD hi, you know, hides from Congress.
They told, for example, in the Zunzano
case under Obama that the Senate Foreign
Affairs Committee, they told the senior
investigator,
the head of oversight, the senior
staffer in charge of oversight, who
himself was was named won an award for
top CIA analyst before he moved over to
the Senate side. They said you're not
allowed to know anything about the
Sunzeno operation or else people could
die because if somebody leaks from the
Senate uh foreign relations committee
then the whole network could be busted
and so the Senate's not allowed to know.
The National Security Council is not
allowed to know. Foye investigators
aren't allowed to know at this. So what
happens is is you have soft power that
people are paying for in the United
States without knowing what the heck
they're paying for because there's no
internal process for containing the
corruption. And so then you get these
crazy stories where they're giving out
$550 million of kickbacks to their own
friends because no one's allowed to do
oversight. And so the this the USAID
grew in large part because handcuffs
were put on the CIA in the 70s. This is
when USAD really began to take off and
and have grow to have a three times
bigger budget than the CIA. We are now
at that moment where USID whatever
function it continues to have at state
needs the handcuffs. And there will be a
moment where all these other little USA
ID adjacent places like the Export
Import Bank and the Development Finance
Corporation and the US Agency for Global
Media, which are still technically
alive, are going to there's going to be
this flow to attempt corruption and
setting your own foreign policy in line.
And we're going to need to be vigilant
and whack whack-a-ole to stop that. But
USID needs to go through the process the
CIA did in the 70s and and then we'll
contain the damage and reform the
institutions from there.
It's a wild moment, Mr. Benz. It is a
wild moment. Where can people follow
you? This has been incredible and I
imagine many of them are going to want
more.
>> Thanks. You can follow me on XMike
Bencyber. I'm also on YouTube and Rumble
and Instagram. It's Mikeben Cyber
everywhere.
>> I love it, man. Thank you so much. Like
I was saying earlier, you have
completely shifted the way that I
understand how the world works. Uh, and
it is not often that that happens. So, I
really appreciate you taking the time.
>> Well, thank you. And and you've you've
done your homework and um you know,
would love to run back another time and
get deeper into some of the technicals
of some of these topics.
>> Oh man, I would love that. Speaking of
things that I would love, boys and
girls, if you have not already, be sure
to subscribe. And until next time, my
friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
If you like this conversation, check out
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