Media Manipulation, Coup Playbooks, and Economic Warfare Unveiled by Mike Benz Part 1

Part 1 Shownotes In this eye-opening first part of a special two-part episode of "Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu," Tom sits down with Mike Benz—former State Department official, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, and a leading authority on the intersection of technology, media, and soft power. Benz unpacks the tangled web of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the shifting dynamics of global influence, and how soft power has supplanted traditional warfare in the modern era. Tom and Mike go deep into the true origins and motivations behind NGOs, illuminating how many of these organizations operate as statecraft tools, intelligence fronts, and economic levers for the world's elite. From the rise of philanthropic organizations as vehicles for influence to the coordinated manipulation of global media, Part 1 shines a light on the hidden infrastructure behind democracy building, narrative control, and regime change. Mike exposes the intricate interplay between hedge funds, government foreign policy, media, and activism—detailing how policy and profit become inextricably linked through a process he dubs "drafting off of policy." If you’ve ever questioned who really pulls the strings behind elections, color revolutions, and the headlines you read every day, this episode will give you a radical new lens through which to see the world. SHOWNOTES 00:00 NGOs as Instruments of Power 02:43 History of Elite Media Control 05:12 Media Manipulation and American Influence Abroad 10:44 Soft Power vs. Military Might 12:07 Hedge Funds, Donors, and Policy Manipulation (Soros Example) 14:35 The “Blob”: Inside the Foreign Policy Establishment 20:31 How Economic Interests Drive Foreign Policy 23:01 Color Revolutions: Playbooks and Statecraft 29:26 Can These Playbooks Be Used Domestically? (Transition Integrity Project) 32:24 The National Endowment for Democracy and Modern “Democracy Building” 38:28 Media, Music, and Cultural Warfare 44:39 Education, Language, and Censorship as Soft Power FOLLOW MIKE BENZ: X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/mikebenzcyber YouTube: Mike Benz Cyber https://www.youtube.com/@MikeBenzCyber Rumble: Mike Benz Cyber https://rumble.com/c/c-2134746 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikebenzcyber/ SleepMe: Visit https://sleep.me/impact to get your Chilipad and save 20% with code IMPACT. Try it risk-free with their 30-night sleep trial and free shipping. Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Hims: Start your free online visit today at https://hims.com/IMPACT. Linkedin: Post your job free at https://linkedin.com/impacttheory Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Tailor Brands: 35% off https://tailorbrands.com/podcast35 Found Banking: Try Found for FREE at https://found.com/impact What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call: https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/: https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:37Tom Bilyeu?

  From the 1940s through the Cold War, one-third 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, NGOs, and hedge funds working together to shape narratives, silence dissent, 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,

• 2:19Tom Bilyeu?

  this one is going to make your hair stand on end. Without further ado, I bring you Mike Benz.

• 2:28Tom Bilyeu?

  I have always considered NGOs 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 NGOs are and how they came to be in the way that we know them now?

• 2:52Speaker 03

  NGOs are essentially the kind of stem cell 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 playthings of billionaires as fronts for intelligence and statecraft operations. But they really came into the, into the fore of, of statecraft and intelligence work with changes to the tax code in the early 20th century. And then the, the role that they played, particularly in World War II, when relief agencies came to play this kind of outsized role in supplies

• 3:37Speaker 03

  and the supplies and logistics for the war through religious charities, through humanitarian and philanthropic relief. These organizations, which were philanthropic in name, began to be used as a way to move behind the iron curtain during the Cold War, to, to work in South and Central America as a way to have logistics, supply lines, run money, run guns, run supplies all over the world. And because it is deniable under the banner of aid.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  And because attacking NGOs looks like a crackdown on civil society, it's a little bit like, you know, there was a strange moment in the Israel-Iran conflict several months ago where Iran or Hamas would have, you know, military facilities under a hospital. And then when Israel got attacked, it turned out a bunch of their military apparatus and structures were also under hospitals. And so it's, so you don't want to attack a hospital because that will draw a kind of humanitarian outcry to the world. And so you end up having

• 5:00Speaker 03

  these, the things that sound best in names, end up being the most effective fronts for the dirtiest deeds.

• 5:11Tom Bilyeu?

  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. There's an author named James Burnham, who's had a huge impact on the way that I think in 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

• 5:53Tom Bilyeu?

  you is that the manipulation of the media landscape is even more coordinated and global than I ever would have imagined. And 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.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  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 even a blog. And so there was a kind of elite control over media because there were so there were so few messengers. And so being able to consolidate control over just a few messengers allows you to control all of the messages. And this

• 6:58Speaker 03

  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 the Spanish American War and Remember the Maine, and this is how we got an American empire in 1898. It was yellow journalism. It was just a handful of newspapers. The William Randolph Hearst set was able to effectively control all of American opinion in order to mislead the American population essentially into the idea that Spain had bombed the Maine in the Havana Harbor and that this was a

• 7:41Speaker 03

  military attack that necessitated the conquest of Cuba and ended up netting us the Philippines. And that persisted all the way up through Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkin. Again, you had you only had three news channels on TV at that time. You had CBS, NBC, and ABC, which all grew out of veterans from the Office of War Information. The Pentagon in 1941, 42 centralized media effectively in the United States as part of the World War II effort. So all of the radio stations, all of the major print distribution newspapers,

• 8:22Speaker 03

  journals, periodicals, Hollywood, 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, as the State Department and the 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 CI explicitly placing stringers

• 9:06Speaker 03

  and editors on almost all of the major distribution newspapers, not just in the United States, but all over the world. You had the State Department's focus on on public diplomacy and funding independent, 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 USAID being formed and this idea that, you know, providing funding for media outlets is is part of the humanitarian work of ensuring, you know, free speech around the world. That would come to be quite ironic when USAID would champion internet censorship after

• 9:51Speaker 03

  they too much free speech ended up losing elections. But 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. Yo. And then you, yeah, it's it's 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 before 2016, but the vote of the people 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.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  The demand for political vassalage 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 coterie of government agencies around the State Department, from the CIA to USAID to the US Agency for Global Media, to even things like the World Bank, the IMF,

• 11:17Speaker 03

  the 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, 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 Soviet communist boot heel.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  And so there was a real convergence between our interests and our values. And so a lot of this statecraft, this funding of media and support for media pluralism and media freedom was tied to our interests in that the more media we could pipe into Romania or Hungary or Poland 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 domestic referendum in terms of whether to allow a US military base

• 12:47Speaker 03

  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 that. All the little operations like influencing union groups or universities or members of the military in a country is all downstream of having this base of favorability in terms of hearts and minds.

• 13:15Tom Bilyeu?

  We'll be back with Mike Benz in just a moment.

• 13:19Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it. 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. 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 influenceable.

• 16:27Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 16:47Tom Bilyeu?

  The people who have an economic interest. And so you have made what I would say is a compelling case for, 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. One, have I understood that correctly? And if I have, talk to me about what it means to draft off of policy.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  I am so glad that you picked that up. That is such a central point.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  So few people appreciate kind of the magnitude and implication of that. And it's such an under discussed part of this. The Soros story is, it's a very clean example of what you just identified, which is that you have the Soros Management Fund, which is kind of the flagship hedge fund, private equity, alternative asset investments. These are all the different liquid and illiquid investments that the Soros empire makes in currencies around the world, in companies around the world, in industries around the world.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  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 racket works is that Soros will fund government agencies to push things that maximize what's best for the hedge fund. And will deploy this philanthropic front through the Open Society Foundation to push things that,

• 18:37Speaker 03

  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 Open Society network. So that, you know, 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 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

• 19:19Speaker 03

  deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, 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 is some force here that's bigger than us, that we can't take on. So this is a very bipartisan thing, 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 Corporation, all these foreign-facing influence operations that are designed to be, you know, best for American interests

• 20:03Speaker 03

  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 USAID 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

• 20:43Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  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, ExxonMobil and how much it's profited off of

• 22:47Speaker 03

  uh, partnerships in the Middle East or uh, or oil coming out of the the Caspian, uh, 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 USAID backed coup to overthrow the democratically elected government in Ukraine.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Viktor Yanukovych was ran out of office as the CIA effectively ran a January 6 operation. If you accept 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, described how the US government, through the State Department, USAID, 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 Maidan 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

• 24:18Speaker 03

  one poster for Chevron and another for ExxonMobil. And as when Crimea broke away and the Donbass broke away, the US State Department, through Ambassador Daniel Freed, led a sanctions, an international sanctions roadshow to cut Russian gas off of all of Europe, country by country, just 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 liquefied natural gas from Houston, Texas, paying huge, huge markups.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  But now it's a captured market because it's enforced by the barrel of a gun from the US War Department, which was literally taking the territory in eastern Ukraine, and by the US State Department, which was diplomatically pressuring every country in Europe to only buy from these multinational corporations who would get there. But 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. George Soros is a great example of Mongolia in the mid-2000s.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  The largest copper mine in the world was discovered in Mongolia. In, um, in, in the early 2000s, there was a fight over 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.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  The Open Society Institute led riots and protests against the Mongolian government to coerce more profitable deal terms for Rio Tinto while, while George Soros has a huge long position in Rio Tinto. So, you, 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, 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 a hundred million dollars to the Democrats last election cycle. The second largest donor was 40 million.

• 27:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, is it true that there's documentation on, like, literal documentation on how to launch a street uprising?

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Oh my God, there's, where do you want me to start? There's an entire field. It is not just like a document. I mean, it's, it, 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 McFaul, who was the US ambassador to Russia. He spent thirty years at Stanford, working on the body of work, the playbook on how to do it, the sequencing of events, all the different levers within a society you need to control in order to have it successfully play out. These models are constantly updated for emerging

• 28:05Speaker 03

  technologies like social media, for emerging laws and counter attempts by a government to resist a color revolution, like NGO transparency laws and the like. It's a huge, huge, huge field. And it started off in the 1950s, right in tandem with the construction of the intelligence apparatus in our country. Really, it all goes back to, 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 Gene Sharp was...

• 28:47Tom Bilyeu?

  This is so dark.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Well, to this day, I mean, Gene Sharp started this work in the 1950s, at a time when the US foreign policy establishment was in the absolute armpit 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 theory to reliably be able to go country by country, and develop this political influence apparatus, 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?

• 29:32Speaker 03

  And so, 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, Florida, you know, there's...

• 29:51Speaker 03

  It is a 101 for getting into this field that you learn about civil resistance. And it is a big part of what the State Department, what USAID, what the US Agency for Global Media does. But Gene Sharp, I mean, this started as a... I hesitate to even legitimize it with even the front term of academia, because you have to understand that this is a military, and if you want to extend it, a military statecraft and intelligence world completely. Gene Sharp got $50 million from the Department of War to do the research for this at the Harvard Center for International Affairs.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Now, for folks who are following along, I'll just let you play out the acronym for Center for International Affairs in your head. This is like right in your face. I mean, this is the Harvard CIA, which was created by Henry Kissinger, which was the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, recruited Gene 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

• 31:18Speaker 03

  supported by the US State Department could leverage influence of a minority of the population to do bottom-up, rather than top-down revolutions. Because prior to World War II, the way you did coups was primarily through the military. What you would do is the State Department, this is before we had a CIA, but the British would do this, the UK Foreign Office would work with military generals, or the US War Department would work with military generals, police, security forces, and because the guys with guns had a monopoly on violence,

• 32:01Speaker 03

  the way to do coups was always top-down. You would... You would work with 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 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 military, if you get it big enough, and that's a paramilitary. As the US military paradigm moved into what they called small wars,

• 32:45Speaker 03

  rather than big World War II-style things, the CIA, the State Department, USAID, they were all working with hillside guerrilla groups in Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam, or, you know, Chile or Colombia. 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 bigger. They outnumber them. 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

• 33:30Speaker 03

  or in a certain quotient of the police or military on their side as well, then you can do a bottom-up so-called people-powered 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, mixed with cash, essentially 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 an enormous body of work. It's democratization studies, it's civil resistance. It goes by any number of names.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  But yeah, 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.

• 34:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, have we ever run the coup playbook against ourselves?

• 34:32Speaker 03

  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 watchwords. Transition means we're going to overthrow your government. Transition, we call it a democratic transition. That is 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.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Just to, 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.

• 35:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  And basically on her experiences on how the military 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. And you see this now. I mean, there was a big scuffle at South by Southwest, I think in 2023 or 2020. Yeah, I think it was 2023, the Pentagon became one of the biggest funders of music festivals like South by Southwest.

• 36:03Tom Bilyeu?

  What?

• 36:04Speaker 03

  You know, you, you know, you have places like the-

• 36:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Were they doing that to control like what bands? Or I don't understand.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Well, essentially, now, this has been going on for a very, very long time. Music is, and 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.

• 36:29Tom Bilyeu?

  After this message, we'll be right back with Mike Benz.

• 36:35Tom Bilyeu?

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• 37:18Tom Bilyeu?

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• 37:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

• 37:43Tom Bilyeu?

  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 hear so many conspiracy theories and most of it sound like total BS to me. But what was the actual playbook run on us?

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Well, I can, okay, so we sort of have two open threads right now. One of them is this 2020 Transition Integrity Project. And I want to get deeper into that 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'll give you some specific ones. So every year, we as taxpayers give about $350 million to a group called the National Endowment for Democracy.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  That that funding is from us as taxpayers to the Treasury, to the to the State Department, to NED, the National Endowment for Democracy. The National Endowment 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 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 anti-Vietnam war movement, Democrats reacted very heavily against the CIA. They hated the CIA in the late 70s, early 80s.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Jimmy Carter rode to power on the back of that scandal. One of the first things he did is he put CIA Director Stansfield 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. 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. 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.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  And so, through the executive branch, he establishes the National Endowment for Democracy. In the words of its founder, Carl Gershman, 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.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  It 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 that's supposed to be working overtly on philanthropic work, it's a complete intelligence operation. The Biden State Department actually signed this stealth agreement with NED that every single one of their grants is under a total blanket sensitivity.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  So 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. 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 Washington Post in the 1990s, when CIA Director Bob Gates 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 Endowment for Democracy,

• 42:06Speaker 03

  and it's everything the CIA wants to be and more." Well, they have four courts 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. John McCain ran IRI for 25 years. Mitt Romney has been on the board of IRI for 15 years. Marco Rubio won the 2024 Man of the Year for IRI. Trump was the only Republican in the past. 25 years who was not on the board or running IRI. And this just goes to show how closely the CIA is effectively vetted presidents.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  There's a Democrat branch called the NDI. Hunter Biden was on the chairman's, the chairman's advisory board of NDI. Make of that what you will. But the chairman of the NDI was Madeleine Albright, who was the Secretary of State. So again, you have this State Department CIA nexus. But the other two cores are the Center for International Private Enterprise for the CIA and Chamber of Commerce and the Solidarity Center for the CIA and Unions. They also have a media arm to control media. Ned does. It's called the Center for International Media Assistance. This is yet another one of these CIA control over media vectors. But just to come back to this music thing.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  We overthrew the government of Bangladesh in 2024. The Biden administration did. There'd been a big beef between the Democrats and

• 43:47Speaker 03

  the Prime Minister of Bangladesh over a number of issues. Military, military base in the region, petroleum. 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. But the Biden State Department was losing hearts and minds in Bangladesh. They'd lost the last two elections. And the State Department had correspondence with the National Endowment for Democracy about what to do about it. After the loss, I believe it was in 2021, 2021, 2022, the elections there.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  The State Department worked with one of their NGO CIA cutouts, the National Endowment 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 to, instead of trying to win the vote, trying to organize a color revolution to get people in the streets and to destabilize. 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.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  For example, Ned with State Department money sponsored transgender dance festivals, really went after like the LGBT population, went after women.

• 45:19Tom Bilyeu?

  As a way to spark division.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  Yes, as a way to do street protests and to create an international human rights outcry as a way to to break down society and so that they wouldn't just have an ordinary vote. 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 outlet,

• 46:06Speaker 03

  The Gray Zone, who had a whistleblower at IRI, the Ned Republican branch. It was amazing what what what turned up. The CIA through IRI was funding Bangladesh rap and hip hop groups to sponsor musical and hip hop anthems targeted at young people, unemployed people, disaffected youth to take to the streets and to sow distrust in the Bangladesh, 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.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  And they had, you can actually go on YouTube and you can, if you run a search on my X account for Bangladesh, you'll, you'll, you'll see all the documents that that The Gray Zone published and that I've I've highlighted and but. 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 distrust or believe that their government was corrupt. And they were reporting on this, how the lyrics were "designed to get people in the streets and protesting." I believe one of the rappers in this group was also

• 47:33Speaker 03

  a visiting professor at a USAID-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 Seda Movement, where USAID sponsored one of the main rap and hip-hop groups and had this anthem about blood and... it wasn't blood and soil, it was like land and... it was something that was... it was "Apatria Evita", I think, was the name of it. And then got this, you know, this local rap group played on international radio and while they were working with the Assistant Secretary for

• 48:16Speaker 03

  Western Hemisphere and while they were funded by USAID. But you see this... the Biden State Department set up an entire bureau called the State Department Bureau for Music Diplomacy. Last year, they brought 22 different 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, USAID. I think FreedomBeat.org, I think, is one you can look at, where it's literally just civil resistance movements sponsored by

• 48:57Speaker 03

  the State Department 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 largest performing arts center is the Adrian Arsh Center. Adrian Arsh 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, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Then you you get this cultural entombment, 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 vassal government when Yatsenyuk was installed,

• 49:40Speaker 03

  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 Yatsenyuk.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Vladimir Klitsko is gonna have to sit this one out. We'll make a mayor of Kiev and, you know, he'll have to be satisfied with that. 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 credentialing body. And one of the red lines that the State Department, USAID and NATO, set for Zelensky 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 on any Ukrainian TV. They banned Russian access, you know, Russian-controlled social media accounts

• 50:36Speaker 03

  and Telegram accounts. They they banned the Russian language or any Russian affinity teachings in Ukrainian education. You also see, for example, Randy Weingarten, 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

• 51:01Speaker 03

  to work with the teachers' unions in Ukraine and effectively create this, you know, so that 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 Russian ethnic. We're not allowed to speak the language. We're not allowed to have any, you know, cultural glorification of anything Russian, so that their minds were controlled in a way that they would grow up to believe in Ukrainian nationalism and, you know, the entire purging of any kind of Russian affinity or any kind of alliance between Russia and Ukraine, which had existed.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  You know, for, for a set, 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 later confessed 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, as well as a CIA proprietary called the World Confederation for Organizations of the Teaching Profession.

• 52:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Hold on, when, when was this?

• 52:27Speaker 03

  This is the 1960s, 1966 to 68.

• 52:31Tom Bilyeu?

  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 NGOs and the like, USAID being the most famous right now, uh, of disseminating taxpayer dollars

• 53:15Tom Bilyeu?

  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 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

• 53:58Tom Bilyeu?

  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 has won, 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?

• 54:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Or is this an ideological standpoint that happens to get a lot easier? When a, someone like Larry Fink, 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.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  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 net worth, individual, family class, the sort of folks who have effectively control over the hedge fund, private equity, big multinational corporation folks. And they, they all have different interests. You know, the, the. You know, the head of ExxonMobil 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.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  And their own power waxes and wanes over time. You know, 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. It worked very closely with the CIA. And it also had a, you know, effectively, you know, controlling shares over the Ford Motor Company. And this is at a time when we were creating export markets for Ford cars. And this is a big part of, you know, it was tied into the petroleum, you know, world as well. But it's always been this way, but different stakeholders rise and fall in power over

• 56:47Speaker 03

  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 Biden administration alienated a lot of the traditional allies that were part of the kind of more left-leaning folks. And the Trump administration alienated many of those who were traditionally on the right. The Chamber of Commerce, for example, was traditionally a right-wing Republican institution representing all the largest US multinational businesses because they wanted free markets, low taxes, free enterprise, low regulation.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  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 articulating a foreign policy that was less interventionist, you know, less war-oriented, 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 big soup. And so they, they move in tandem. You know, George Soros.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  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 Clean Energy Hedge Fund. And you have these kind of consortiums, these kind of, you know, alliance structures that that pit against each other. And as elected leaders are favorable or sometimes they start all 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

• 58:58Speaker 03

  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 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, Elon was aspiring to be a kind of conservative or, you know, centrist conservative Soros and he would talk about Soros all the time. And Elon's businesses did benefit in the beginning, certainly.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  I know that he's gone, you know, 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, you know, under, yes, it's like eight, eight 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.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  You know, from the State Department, SpaceX plays a major role in 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 cyber cyber realm. And it's, you know, used in Starlink and the like. 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 natural stable equilibrium of a capitalist democracy. And I don't, I'm not saying that to attack capitalism. 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

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  helps. And that 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 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 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 Bolsonaro administration. And then went on to make, you know, like 150 million dollars from all the government mandates to help Soros invested

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  companies in Brazil from the clean ethanol mandates that essentially hurt these, you know, fossil fuel industries while while Soros was making giant long bets on clean energy, coos out the guy, you know, who was the fossil fuel person. And then, you know, rakes in from his own hedge fund while as while as open society institute is working with USAID to get everyone arrested who who backs Bolsonaro to get everyone censored on social media to to fund the union groups backing Bolsonaro, 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

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  out. And then they privatized NAFTA gas under threat of

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  MF, you know, loan tranche is 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, USAID, CIA. And so, but this is, this has always been, I mean, it's the same thing with Halliburton and Dick Cheney. It's the same thing with ExxonMobil in the entire 20th century. We had the CEO and chairman of ExxonMobil as the Secretary of State, if you remember, under Trump I. It's the same thing with Walmart. Walmart, you know, is, is a, is a massive logistics and retail operation that relies on, if you look at Walmart, they sponsor all of these USAID lobby groups like the Global

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  Leadership Coalition. And you have made billions of dollars off the US regime change. It's all the way down to Pizza Hut. Look, I, I played this on Joe Rogan when I was on there last time, and it's like, look at the Gorbachev Pizza Hut ad from the 1990s, where, you know, Mikhail Gorbachev is, is in a frigging 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 Gorbachev smiling in the background, they say, but you know what? We've got Pizza Hut, can't be that bad. And, and a big Pizza Hut ad.

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  Well, Pizza Hut got 200 million new customers for Pizza Hut because the Department of War, the Department of State, USAID, 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 awe, it, it helps analyze things with, with just, this is, this is the way the world works. And, you know, you have, if you start with that as a first principle, everything else

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  makes sense from there, and you can draft your own strategy and policy recommendations accordingly.

• 1:04:34Tom Bilyeu?

  That's it for part one with Mike Benz. Make sure you come back for part two. You are not going to want to miss where we go from here.

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