Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)

Mike Benz: “USAID is effectively a rent-a-riot operation. That raises questions about the Black Lives Matter protests.” (00:00) The USAID Rabbit Hole Runs Deep (05:29) Trump Is Performing Open Heart Surgery on the Country (09:50) Is USAID Truly a Humanitarian Operation? (19:41) What Is the Point of Funding Transgender Surgeries in Foreign Countries? (27:13) How USAID Secretly Organizes Riots Around the World (50:23) Is The Blob a Necessary Evil? (57:24) Joe Biden and USAID’s Role in Social Media Censorship Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN: Get 4 extra months free at https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker Heritage Foundation: https://Heritage.org/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tucker Carlson?

  So you, more than anyone for the past couple of years, have been awakening the rest of the country and the world to this nexus between public and private sector, NGOs, nonprofits, US government agencies, whose acronyms you don't recognize. And you've described an entire complex that affects censorship, regime change, all kinds of sinister, unconstitutional outcomes that most Americans don't know they're paying for. And I'm from DC, so as you've explained this to me a couple of times, it all has made total sense. But sometimes I wonder, like, do people believe what Mike Benz is saying? And now, over the last week, since the USAID files have dropped, mostly on X, people are discovering what you have been talking about and learning that it's 100% true.

• 0:43Tucker Carlson?

  And I just wanted to ask how that feels for you.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  It's a sort of somber moment, actually, more than anything. And it's, I found myself very reflective this week and hit by the weight of history of it, if that makes sense. And there's a lot to this. I mean, a lot of people have said, aren't you so happy? You've been fighting for this so long, and now it's happening. And so they're expecting cartwheels and spiking footballs. And that's not how I feel, really, at all. Because the task here was to break the halo of this angel that turned into an angel of death. I don't think we've had the success of the 20th century without having a soft power influence arm. I think this is how we had cheap gas and affordable homes

• 1:51Speaker 01

  and middle-class prosperity and export markets for our manufactured goods here. The task is to be able to make it be righteous and virtuous again. But you couldn't do that while it had this halo. And so the halo had to be broken. The mask had to be taken off in order to implement reforms. And there have been, I feel...

• 2:23Speaker 01

  The global impact of fundamental changes to US foreign policy that are happening now, because, you know, as I've been saying for so long, I mean, there really is a sort of USAID Truman Show that much of the world lives in. Many people found out for the first time this week that 90% of media in Ukraine is funded by USAID. Many people just now finding out the extent of US media organizations that are funded by USAID. They're finding out the reach of it and everything from the unions to social media censorship to pandemic and gain-of-function research to, you know, strange ties even to things like terrorism

• 3:08Speaker 01

  and the drug trade. And there's that sort of, these institutions that everyone thought were private and independent being corrupted by, you know, USAID's $44 billion dollar a year budget. And, and when, I think a lot of people, that was a process that I felt was necessary to tell the story of internet censorship. Because for me, my journey of discovery on this was like everybody else, I thought internet censorship was a domestic story at first. And so I start following the trail of it and then I see, oh, that's weird, at this disinformation conference, the next panel is on energy geopolitics.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  What are they doing together? Huh, that's weird. And then you go over to the energy geopolitics people and you see, okay, well, their fellow panelists are all military contractors. Okay, all right, so the military has something to do with social media censorship and the energy pipeline politics and Ukraine have something to do with it? Okay, that's interesting. And then you keep going down the line and you see, okay, there are these Chamber of Commerce partners and then you see, oh, there are these suite of humanitarian aid organizations like USAID, NED, the whole suite of NGOs, you know, State Department grantees, National Science Foundation grantees. And you start to see that this is...

• 4:34Speaker 01

  In order to tell the story, I felt, of internet censorship and what to do to stop it, you had to explain a totally different world than the one people thought that they lived in. And for the first several years of this, when I would do my little private briefings and bring my PowerPoints around the country, and it was very hard, it was impossible frankly to crack through, even when people saw the receipts on screen, they saw the source documents, and they just couldn't conceive that the world actually works this way, that our country does these things. And they have a hard time squaring the morality of it with the operational

• 5:19Speaker 01

  side, if that makes sense. Like, they don't want to believe certain things, and so even if it's six inches in front of their face, they won't. But I guess getting back to this sort of, why am I neutral rather than happy right now, is because we are conducting open heart surgery on the vital organs of the American empire. And I am pro empire, to the extent that it helps the homeland. I don't think we'd have a prosperous homeland without an empire. And the patient needs open heart surgery. It has to be done. I

• 5:53Speaker 01

  am 100% agree with the decisions that have been made on policy so far on this. But I want to make sure, and I feel a great sense of duty and obligation, to try as best I can to help identify the organ you're operating on, because in the zeal to carry out radical reforms, you can...

• 6:27Speaker 01

  If you don't, if, if-

• 6:29Tucker Carlson?

  Take out the wrong organs.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, or if you don't, don't even know, you know, how the atriums, how, how the organ works.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  It's directionally correct to do the open heart surgery, but the patient can die on the table if you, if you do it wrong. And, uh, all of that has to be, like, this is just the beginning of the fight to reform this, in my view, but we are now in the arena and, and a blow has been struck. This is, in my view, this week is really the first time maybe in American history with, with few exceptions, maybe in the, in the sixties and seventies, that the blob, the foreign policy establishment that impacts so much of domestic affairs and sometimes controls it, has had to answer to the people that fund it.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  This, this is a shot across the bow. There, there have been so many tactics that they've been able to deploy to shift the course of domestic politics in order to ensure that their global vision stays the course. And there's been a blitzkrieg. I don't think they saw this coming.

• 7:42Tucker Carlson?

  I, I understand exactly what you're saying. I don't think Americans even now really understand the degree to which our foreign policy establishment use, uses other countries, particularly the Five Eyes, the other English-speaking intel services against us here.

• 7:59Tucker Carlson?

  You know, I've almost never met a British reporter in the United States who wasn't acting on behalf of some intel service against the United States. It's like, it's absolutely crazy. I dealt with one today, actually. Um, do you know what I'm talking about?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  I, I don't know the individual you're referring to, but-

• 8:12Tucker Carlson?

  You're familiar with the trend? Um, so, but I guess what I hear you saying is Americans, when they learn just how corrupt the system is, may lose faith in their country.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Milton Friedman gives this example about the pencil. Have you ever seen this video? No. He, um, he talks about it in the context of libertarian economic theory. He says, "Look at this pencil." And he, you know, holds up a pencil and it's got a lead tip and graphite and gum. And he goes, "No, no single person in the world can make this pencil. The gum comes from trees in Malaysia and the lead comes from, you know, some mine in Africa. And the graphite comes from graphite miners in South America. And it's the magic of the market that all makes it possible, you know, everyone doing it for their own self-interest economic gain, but it creates this magical web of cooperation where everyone

• 9:09Speaker 01

  profits and that's how we get cheap pencils in the US." And I think what we're, what we're about to walk in on is the, is, is the, the flip side of that, which is that people have been lied to in this country where they've thought that, they've been, they've been sold that this was humanitarian aid and, and co-signed it. And, and I got, let me come back to this point about the pencil, because maybe that'll just appear a little bit later in the story. Um, and I'll just sort of hint at it now, but right now, the people who are trying to defend US aid are stuck between a rock and a hard

• 9:54Speaker 01

  place. They, they, they want to defend it on humanitarian grounds and then they get totally deluged with all the ways that it has gone wrong and all the horrible things that's funding. So then they, they then turn to layer two. This is sort of like Lindsey Graham defending our operations in, in Ukraine when it was, you know, "We need to do this for democracy, democracy." And then we say, "Okay, well, you canceled elections, uh, you know, you've, you're..." You know, there are all these non-democratic things that are happening. And he goes, okay, okay. Layer two of my defense is there's $14 trillion worth of natural resources under the soil there.

• 10:32Tucker Carlson?

  So, right.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  You know, having it be a US vassal state is advantage to us because then we can exploit those $14 trillion worth of resources. I mean, that's what's implied there, right? Why would Americans benefit from Ukrainians exploiting that 14 trillion? Now, by the way, that's not a knock on Ukraine, but you can, you simply saw that shift happen. When, you know, as it got harder and harder to defend it on the basis of democracy promotion, the, the mask had to slip in order to defend it at the deeper level. It was to, to let people in, okay, here's what we're, here's why we're really doing it. And every USAID program operates that way. It is, getting back to this rock and the hard place analogy is that they want to say

• 11:16Speaker 01

  it's humanitarian aid, but it's clearly done so much harm in so many places. It's doing such terrible things, funding the Wuhan lab. Uh, you know, not to, to mention, you know, the whole rest of the USAID Truman Show. But then they go, okay, okay, well, it's US soft power. It's a, it advances US strategic interests. And so you say, oh, okay, so it's not aid? And, and then it becomes very schizophrenic to defend this thing because it's, it's a labyrinth of lies. USAID's access and its reputation completely depends on its perception as being a kind

• 11:57Speaker 01

  of quasi-charity, even though, you know, it's nowhere, charity is nowhere to be found. It's a US foreign policy instrument. Aid isn't even in the name. You know, I've said this many times, but it's the Agency for International Development. And when you see aid, is your mind playing tricks on you?

• 12:13Tucker Carlson?

  And by the way, when, growing up, my dad worked with USAID. It was called USAID, not USAID.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:21Tucker Carlson?

  To make it clear to everybody it was not an aid organization.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:24Tucker Carlson?

  Right. But now they call it USAID.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I mean, you know, I mean, I'm, I'm sure in the Ronald Reagan building, the, you know, the, but, but how it's colloquially known, I mean, and how it's described to the voters. It's described as humanitarian assistance. And you go, okay, well, you know, and we can, you can get into the, the depth of the scandals, but.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I guess the fundamental feeling that I have right now is this is going to get a lot worse as people go through this self-discovery process of what's happening. We were talking a little bit earlier where I mentioned, you know, eight years ago when I was writing my, you know, little book attempt to try to explain all, everything that was happening in our censorship and I felt like I had to explain all these other, you know, tectonic plates of American society and global affairs, just to understand who and what and why is, why they're censoring the internet. But, you know, I would, I would spend my whole

• 13:27Speaker 01

  day in USAspending.gov, you know, to the exclusion of everything else, friends, family, a social life and just going through that, this can't be true, this can't be true. Oh my God, it is. Oh my God, it is. And there are, there's a sort of five stages of depression that plays out as you discover it yourself, going into these grant databases and seeing the receipts with your eyes like that. Because that's what I've seen on my newsfeed this week. It's been just hundreds of people, all with huge megaphones who are just spending their day, like saying, hearing about, oh, wow, there's all this corruption at USAID.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Let me plug it into the, the search database. Let me fish around a little bit. Oh, here's what I found. And now everyone's contributing to this common knowledge, which is, which is really amazing. But I still feel the, already faith has been shaken. But there are layers to this that I think are going to truly shock people when they begin to try to put their, their minds around it. And I, I believe fundamentally in US soft power. I believe in soft power projection. I believe there is a role for projects in foreign countries

• 14:50Speaker 01

  that have a dual function of helping the people there and helping secure import-export markets for us, helping secure natural resources, you know, helping secure, you know, US national security goals in, in the region. There is a role for that. And

• 15:12Speaker 01

  I just, I feel that many came into this movement around MAGA and nationalism because they cared about their schools and the woke agenda in their schools. They cared about their streets and their neighborhoods and whether they were safe. And they cared about, you know, corruption from the US president or their local representatives. They never had to think about Pakistan, Bangladesh, Estonia, Tanzania. They never had to think about how you make a pencil and how the goods and services

• 15:54Speaker 01

  that give them the advantaged life that we have in the United States versus other countries depends on the battering ram of this blob apparatus. And so as they learn more and more, the depths of depravity of the blob, I am, I myself am in a hard, sort of between a rock and a hard place where more than anyone, maybe in, that I know, have been spearheading and trying to lead the charge to break the blob's halo. Now I'm in a sort of curious position where I feel I'd be remiss if I didn't spend this

• 16:38Speaker 01

  time at least fleshing out that I don't believe that it should be, it should be vanquished entirely. It's family, if that makes sense. You know, I was, I was thinking about this the other day with, we talked about Ukraine several times when we've spoken, and we've talked about the 2014 Maidan toppling of the democratically elected government. Coincidentally, the person on the pro-US aid side who's leading the charge to fight the White House's reforms is Senator Chris Murphy. Chris Murphy bragged on live national television that the US toppled that government.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  It was only because of US pressure and US support on the ground for the movements there that toppled that government.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  But leaving aside the morality of whether that was the right or wrong thing to do in the name of democracy, when Victoria Nuland made her speech in December 2013, two, three months before that, you know, those protests, you know, changed world history, you know, she bragged about the $5 billion that USAID and NED and related, you know, humanitarian assistance orgs had given to, you know, to effectively the very same Ukrainian civil society organizations that would, that would lead that charge. And when she did so, she was at a sponsored event by standing in front of signs for Exxon Mobil and Chevron. And I've reflected on that picture because it's very easy to look

• 18:13Speaker 01

  at Victoria Nuland as a sort of angel of death figure who knocks on European countries' doors and tells them, hey, we're about to topple your democratically elected government. And it's very easy to look at the excesses of, of big US corporations. But we do need oil. We do, we do want cheap oil and gas. We do want energy dominance. And so, you know, I'm, at this moment, when we're seeing the, really the first vulnerabilities, certainly in my lifetime, of this blob monstrosity, I'm, I feel a strange sort of sympathy for

• 18:52Speaker 01

  the devil, which is that they've done, they've done terrible things and we should not do them again. And they've gone rogue and there's no oversight and horrors beyond your wildest imagination. At the same time, these are still parts of the American family. There is some vestige of a function there that I believe our foreign policy planners have to at least know was there and was responsible for much of our prosperity before it's.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  As they try to reconstruct the patient, does that make sense?

• 19:37Tucker Carlson?

  Of course it does. And I think maybe that's the whole point of this is that, you know, any nation, particularly a big one like ours, that controls a hemisphere, has a foreign policy and has all sorts of ways to affect it, including the soft power that you referred to. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's essential. The question is, why are you doing it? Are you doing it, A, to serve your own interests, to preserve, you know, import and export advantage? Are you doing it to secure energy that you need to have a functioning society? Those are all, are you doing to, you know, bring peace to your hemispheres? You don't have a lot of like craziness and lawlessness and civil wars

• 20:17Tucker Carlson?

  and all that? Yes, those are all good things. Or are you doing it to sow chaos for its own sake? So, I mean, I guess the problem that I have with USAID and with the State Department and with CIA and with all of the ways that we project power abroad, is not that they exist, it's that they're not serving us and they're not serving sort of like the basic goals you would want for any great power, which like peace, security, sort of continuity, reasonableness, freedom, democracy, like they're not doing any of that. They're like sowing bizarro destabilizing sexual politics into other people's cultures. Like, why would you do that? I don't understand. Like, what US interest is served by having all of those agencies that I just named, go to some other country and say, no, you

• 21:01Tucker Carlson?

  need more trannyism or some, you know, we need to structure the family differently? Like, why do we do that? How do, who wins when we do that?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Well, I'm really glad you asked because that is the exact example I've been using to try to, um, to try to give a window of entry into this larger sort of point about, we need a much larger vision about the role of US foreign policy if we are going to get rid of the shortcuts that USAID provides. And so, you know, you just mentioned, you know, why would USAID be promoting, you know, trans, take the example of transgender dance festivals. That's something I've been talking about a lot this week.

• 21:47Tucker Carlson?

  Take the example of transgender dance festivals. Yeah, right. Love that sentence. It used to be only crazy people thought they were being watched all the time, surveilled, the guy mumbling next to you on the bus, but now anyone who knows what's going on thinks that because it's true. Your phones are listening to you. Tech companies tracking all your online activity in order to profit off of what ought to be private information. Governments are watching too. It's a corrupt system. It's frightening and the worst part is it's all legal. Government certainly will not help stop this, of course, the intel agencies love it. So it's up to you to protect yourself and that's where ExpressVPN comes in. ExpressVPN, which we use here, is an app that sends 100% of your online activity through secure encrypted servers.

• 22:28Tucker Carlson?

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• 23:08Tucker Carlson?

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• 23:18Speaker 02

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• 24:18Tucker Carlson?

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• 25:22Tucker Carlson?

  That's joyandblokes.com/tucker. Use the code TUCKER. 50% off labs, 20% off supplements. Joy and Blokes: Get Your Edge Back. What is a transgender dance festival? I haven't never been.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  So, that is when USAID or USAID's companions, Star, National Endowment for Democracy, or other related NGOs will fund an event in the form of a sort of cultural exchange. And that will, they will bring together people from that country to come to a dance festival that's comprised of transgender individuals and is intended to both create a sense of unity within the transgender population there and to expose and normalize and curry favor with other parts of the demographics there in order to... Expand the network node of of US entities who are working with the activists and leaders there.

• 26:18Tucker Carlson?

  Why, what American interest is preserved or protected or advanced by pushing transgenderism or any kind of sexual politics or family politics, including family planning? Why is it our business how many kids other countries have? I don't, I've always been confused by that. Like, what is that? Why are we doing that?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  I wish that was rhetorical, but and I do believe in in many instances, it is ideological excess, you know, driven to madness. But, well, give an example from just a few months ago. I believe it was this August this year, there was a prime minister in Bangladesh who was basically ousted in a sort of military coup coupled with a color revolution. And Gray Zone News, Max Blumenthal's outlet, published this report that I've been talking about a lot for the past week because it's just a really, really clean example of all of the different facets of the dynamics I'm talking about, which is so.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Basically, starting in about 2028, 2018 through 2020, it appeared that that US statecraft was not particularly pleased with Sheikh Hasina winning this, you know, the prime minister winning the election. And baseline assessments were submitted to the State Department about how to prop up the opposition group, the Bangladesh, Bangladesh National Party, the BNP, which was considered more favorable to US, US interests. The, the leaked documents don't get too in the nitty gritty about what US national

• 28:06Speaker 01

  interests is served, but there were many conflicts between that Bangladeshi prime minister and the, the US foreign policy establishment. For example, it was revealed in WikiLeaks that Hillary Clinton, while she was Secretary of State, threatened- To have the IRS do an audit of her son while while she lived in the US. And and she is that prime minister has come out publicly and said that, you know, she believed that she was overthrown because of or basically, there was a conflict around around the construction of a US military base in the region, which is a very common conflict that we have. Oftentimes, foreign countries don't like having a big fat US military base installed, you know, on

• 28:51Tucker Carlson?

  They don't want foreign troops on their soil. Who does?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Right. They don't want 500 acres of their land. You know, they don't want to provoke, you know, foreign powers. This is what's playing out Romania with George's Q and the, you know, the cancellation of the elections and he

• 29:04Tucker Carlson?

  It's just like a giant NATO base right now.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Right. Well, they're building the world, the Europe's largest NATO base. I currently, which, you know, faces straight out at the Black Sea, Crimea. But there was this, but she had been refusing to build a US military base. So let's just.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  But as I walk through this, let me just make some assumptions and make it a harder issue than or something a little bit more, I guess, accessible. Let's just say it really is vital to US national interests to build that military base in Bangladesh to counter Chinese influence. And the Bangladeshi Prime Minister doesn't want to do it. And so our foreign policy planners decide we need to do regime change. And that in whether or not you agree, that's a good or an evil thing to do. I'm not even weighing into the morality of it. What if it is the

• 29:57Speaker 01

  declared or discreet policy of the US government, the State Department and the White House and the National Security Council all agree this government. Yeah, we should pursue regime change, all options to destabilize that country in order to weaken the existing government and to build up a our network of democratic institutions and activists in order to either win the next election or in order to, you know, do a color revolution style, you know, ousting where the, you know, the prime minister has to flee in a helicopter. And

• 30:32Speaker 01

  What was done in this case in Bangladesh, and these leaked documents from the grave zone show this in gratuitous detail, is that the National Democrat for Democracies Republican Arm, the International Republican Institute, they have four core forces, but two of them are political branches. There's the NDI, the National Democratic Institute for Democrats, and there's the IRI, the International Republican Institute for Republicans. And what the IRI submitted to the State Department in 2019, 2020, after they got walloped trying to back the Bangladeshi National Party in the recent past election,

• 31:13Speaker 01

  was a plan to destabilize Bangladesh politics. That's a direct quote, "destabilize Bangladesh politics," by working with, they listed 170 pro-democracy activists, 304 key informants, and then they did a baseline assessment of the different ethnic groups and cultural cleavage points that they could exploit in order to effectively either destabilize the country's politics or prop up the political alternative. And in the process of doing

• 31:52Speaker 01

  that, they sought the LGBT population to Bangladeshi ethnic minority groups, and young students and student groups who had already been protesting earlier that year because of some local politics issue there. And they noted that rap music was popular and young people were listening to rap music in Bangladesh. So what do they do? They turned around and they took US taxpayer funds. They get 100% of the money from the State Department

• 32:33Speaker 01

  and they work closely with USAID. They actually administer USAID programs all over Bangladesh and all over the world. And they funded Bangladeshi rap groups to produce songs and music videos insinuating that people should take to the streets and do street protests and the classic peaceful protest that has the upside of being a riot.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  In, you know, one of, in, in IRI's baseline assessments submitted to the State Department, they talked about how one of the songs they paid for was, was designed to sow resentment at the sitting government and, you know, basically undermine people, the popularity of the government. So you have one sponsored song to get people to take the streets, another sponsored rap song to get people to, you know, to distrust their government. And then, you know, basically, the baseline assessment revealed that, that these groups were the ones who would be receptive, that they, those were the contacts in the region. They do

• 33:45Speaker 01

  fieldwork when they do these baseline assessments. What if the baseline assessment, the strategic assessment, happens to reveal that the highest ROI for soft power projection is with very unseemly groups and activities? This is, for example, what, how we end up funding terrorist groups and paramilitaries and, and, and very extreme, because oftentimes, when you have a popular government, it's the coalition of the fringes and the extremes and the weirdos and the criminals and the prostitutes. This, this was in an NED memo in 2009 for Cuba, where they, where, where the National Down for Democracy, you know, they have something called the Journal of Democracy and, you know, they, they talked about this exact phenomenon,

• 34:29Speaker 01

  that they might be able to mobilize the Afro-Cuban community to, you know, leveraging racial animus against the, you know, mostly, you know, white Cuban government and, you know, taking note of, you know, proclivities for, I think it was prostitution, crime and drugs, and how, how USAID would be, and would, might be able to swoop in and, you know, mobilize these people because a lot of them are really unemployed. And also, USAID should fund the rap groups there because these, these populations all listen to rap, and they did. And this is another great gray zone.

• 35:03Tucker Carlson?

  You're making the hair on my arms go up because you're describing what's happened in our, in our country.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:08Tucker Carlson?

  You're describing the 2017 Charlottesville march, the Nazi march. You're describing what happened on January 6th. You're describing the riots after George Floyd was murdered. You're describing the rise of rap music and drugs in our city and all of... You're describing, you know, tranny story hour and you know, like you're describing all the trends in our country that seem to arise out of nowhere, whose net effect is to destabilize America, to fray the social fabric, to divide people from each other, to make them easier to control, and in the case of Trump's first term, to undermine the White House, right? I mean, I don't know that any of that's true, but like what you're, what you're describing

• 35:51Tucker Carlson?

  that we did in Bangladesh is what's happened here. And so it raises the question, like, was that all by design also? And of course, of course it was, right?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Well, there's, there's a lot there. USAID gave, um, uh,

• 36:05Tucker Carlson?

  Like, am I crazy to ask that?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  No, not at all. I mean, that, that is, to me, the, the final, the final blow. US, it's, it's bad and there's the moral question about whether to do, to do this sort of dirty work abroad. And that comes down to different schools of foreign policy thought and to different views on the relative morality of different ways of attacking the issue of, of US soft power influence abroad. But then there is the, the breaking of the firewall where our foreign policy hounds are never supposed to bite, you know, the owner who, uh, who feeds them. And that is, I mean, that, that is to me, why this is a no brainer, the reforms that are happening.

• 36:52Tucker Carlson?

  And, but do you think it's, I mean, look, just to go through them, the 2017 Charlottesville march, where all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there are all these Nazis, like, who knew we had so many Nazis in our country? Um, right? And guys, one, I'm thinking one particularly-

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, USAID has never funded Nazis, by the way.

• 37:11Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, right. Right, so but like, out of nowhere, Trump gets elected and all of a sudden Charlottesville, Virginia, home of UVA, not a right wing town, there are all these people showing up, led by a couple of people who are just so obviously feds, it's like not even a question in my mind, and they're like marching with candles and we're going to restore the Fourth Reich or whatever, and then that, the next day is used to delegitimize Trump. And we're think, we're supposed to think that's like all organic? I mean, that sounds like exactly what groups like USAID do in other countries.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know about the Charlottesville case. You know, I can see enough domestic antibodies on that with the FBI and whatnot. And the fact is, is-

• 37:53Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I'm not saying USAID did it. I'm just saying it's the same template.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Oh, right. Oh, of, no, of, well, the ability for the, the battering ram of our cloak and dagger, dark arts, only supposed to operate abroad, to be laundered at home-

• 38:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Is, is, is really the, the reason that I believe the current open heart surgery is a no brainer. And I fully support the total abolition of USAID as an agency and tucking it under state and putting it through, you know, having it mend. And then if at some point it needs to be rolled out and spun out into, into a different independent agency again with, with reforms in place and the, and the appropriate, you know, staffing structure, we can have that conversation at a later time. There is the-

• 38:43Speaker 01

  The, the domestic one is, is a huge one. There's so many data points there. I think it's, it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be terrifying to a lot of people who are just now experiencing this. But I do sort of want to close the loop on this, on this foreign side because my concern is when you try to attack these things at the level of, there's no US interest that's served in it at all.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  It's totally crazy. You, you're, you're going to encounter very strange layers of resistance trying to attack it from that argument. So, okay, so here's an example I've, I've been giving this week and, and I'll, I'll hit you with a thought experiment. What, let's just assume, and I have no inside knowledge about this. I don't, I don't talk to, to folks on, on, yeah, at that level or anything, but- Venezuela has very, Trump has had a very contentious relationship with the government of Venezuela during his first term. You know, we declared Juan Guaido, the sitting president of, you know, the elected president, you know, he was standing ovation from, you know, both sides of the aisle.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  I could see a situation where this White House, where President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, either in a declared or discreet fashion, seek to deploy US soft power institutions to pursue a policy of regime change in Venezuela. Again, I have no inside knowledge about that.

• 40:14Tucker Carlson?

  I do have inside knowledge, and they've been working on that for years. There are Americans in Venezuela, fact, because I talked to one of them. As of last year, there are Americans in Venezuela working to overthrow that government. Right. You know, so that's true.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  But I'm going to give a narrow example here, but the problem fundamentally that I'm describing is fractal across all of this waste, fraud, and abuse we're seeing. What if the State Department, and together with its new USAID function, puts out basically, you know, a request for proposals to all the different NGOs for how best to capacity build civil society institutions and activists and people who will be willing to, you know, spread pro-democracy media and take to the streets and protest against the police and

• 41:07Speaker 01

  live dual lives effectively as, you know, working with effectively US spy craft while nominally being Venezuelan citizens, or doing the daring and dangerous deeds of, you know, transporting supplies despite, you know, Venezuelan counterintelligence monitoring them. And what if, what if the strategic analysis or the baseline analysis that comes back from, from these NGOs is...

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Well, the transgender population in Venezuela, and I know nothing, I know nothing about this in Venezuela, but I've been using this as an example for everywhere. What if the cold hard fact is that the demographic in that, in that country that is most effective at destabilizing that country's, uh, democratically, that country's government, or, or that will be most, um, the, the highest return on investment for foreign assistance funds given? You know, what if $2.7 million to a, a series of 12 different transgender dance festivals?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  If they, if the analysis reveals that we need 5 million votes, you know, to, to win this next election that we don't have, and everybody who converts from being heteronormative to transgender effectively goes from being a Maduro person or a, to a, to a, you know, pro-US one, and everyone who norm, who normalizes or, or is, um, or believes that, you know, transgender people being oppressed by the government are more likely to vote against the government, you could see a cynical, self-serving, cold hard, calculated decision for a, um, for

• 42:52Speaker 01

  a MAGA State Department to fund transgender dance festivals. And I, this is important to keep in mind, in Bangladesh, it was the IRI who funded that. It was the Republicans who funded the transgender dance festivals and rap groups. You know, Republicans are not known for loving rap.

• 43:11Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, but it's John McCain, I mean McCain ran it for years. I mean, they're actually all for that.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  But Trump is a winner. Trump likes to win. And think of the feather in the cap that it would be for Marco Rubio to be the person who brought democracy to, what I'm saying is, is... Leave aside the transgender issue.

• 43:26Tucker Carlson?

  I get it.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  This is going to happen in everywhere and, and I think people just don't understand that, that aid is a dirty deed.

• 43:34Tucker Carlson?

  With Donald Trump returning to the White House, this country has a unique opportunity, maybe our last opportunity, to save ourselves from the anti-American and anti-human left. But our efforts may be stymied by the deep state. That's what happened to the first Trump term. Permanent Washington stands in the way of all efforts to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. And right now, they are scheming to do the same thing to the second Trump administration. They are determined to keep their stranglehold on power regardless of elections, anti-democratically, that is a fact. So what do you do to fight them? How do you defeat the deep state?

• 44:17Tucker Carlson?

  Well, one way you can is by supporting the Heritage Foundation, which is in Washington and understands exactly how it works in such a way that they're a threat and they're under attack. You know who's effective because other ones under attack. Heritage has a comprehensive plan to dismantle permanent Washington and restore the country to its democratic foundations. It's important. Visit heritage.org/tucker to learn more and to support this critical effort. And when you make a gift today, you get a free pocket constitution to make certain that you are equipped with the founding principles on your person at all times. It's amazing to read it. Again, that's heritage.org/tucker. I, I agree with that.

• 44:58Tucker Carlson?

  I, I think my, I have a, like a macro problem with this, which is, um, you know, one, it's not at all clear that like overthrowing Maduro is in America's interest. I, I think there's like a, a loud exile community in Florida that wants it. More foreigners have come here, brought in, bringing their stupid feuds into our country and using political donations to make the US government settle their scores. It's like, get out of here. This is totally not our problem. Leave us alone. Um, that's how I feel about the Cubans, the Venezuelans, who, all of whom I like personally, but like, these are not our problems. And I feel that way about the Gaza thing. It's like, take it to Gaza. Okay. Not our problem. I think it's a fair, as an American, I think it's a fair position to have.

• 45:43Tucker Carlson?

  But, so there's that, you know, like, is this actually in our interest or are we just being paid to care about this?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:49Tucker Carlson?

  Two, there is a moral quality to it. If you're gonna say the United States is better than other countries, then you can't just, you know, assassinate people you don't like. You can't just like totally destroy their social fabric. You have to make a straightforward honorable case and allow the people of that country to decide using democratic means because you're for democracy. And if you're not for democracy, then don't say you are. And I do think that like there's something so morally corrupting about the means that our foreign policy establishment uses to achieve its goals, that it actually does affect our domestic life. Like January 6th was an op by, you know, by the, I think primarily by DOD is

• 46:32Tucker Carlson?

  my impression. And it like kind of wrecked our country and put all these people in prison. And like, who would even think to do something like that? Well, they've been trained for years doing that sort of thing in faraway nations. That's my view.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Right. I totally agree.

• 46:46Tucker Carlson?

  Does that make sense?

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yes. And I'm glad that you're saying that because that is ultimately, we need to square the circle, which is that, you know, imagine a situation. I think right now, the thing that I'm heartened by, more than the technical victories, is the national consciousness raising that USAID does infect all of these institutions and that there is this bleed over between foreign and domestic. When people see that media companies that are writing hit pieces on them are being funded by USAID, when people see that, you know, the, what I've written about the, you know, social media censorship and the USAID, you know,

• 47:31Speaker 01

  primer documents and the USAID SEP program that, you know, formally plotted to get foreign countries to censor, to pass censorship laws to target US tech companies. It's the sort of thing that we would typically, you know, have, run a sort of USAID covert, covert operation to stop another entity from doing it. It's our, they're doing it. And so, but, you know, from all the way down the line, from the unions to the universities, to the for-profit companies, to the media, to the social media, to the terrorist groups, to the, you know, gain of function and, you know, pandemic, I mean, there's, you know, how corrupt does an agency need to be? Drugs, terrorism, pandemics? I mean,

• 48:19Tucker Carlson?

  But it corrupts the country after a while.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Of course, of course.

• 48:22Tucker Carlson?

  It's like you don't allow your cops to just like, they know who all the drug dealers are, but you don't allow your policemen to walk up and execute them.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:29Tucker Carlson?

  Because that, I mean, that's not our system and we become as bad as the criminals we're fighting if we behave like that.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  But part of the reason there has been such little transparency about USAID, and I always say, you know, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID. For a number of reasons. Yeah, yeah, and I, I think if there really is a sort of USAID files that, you know, that we get from this administration, I think, this is why I'm saying, I think people are going to want to not necessarily put a new heart in this, in this patient when they see how deep it all goes.

• 49:08Tucker Carlson?

  So, but just to recap some, I think you're making a really important point and I just want to make sure it doesn't get lost in the details. Correct me if this is not a fair summation, but I think you're saying, when we look at, we were discovering all these things, all the transgender dance contests or whatever that they're funding, it's easy to say, well, they're just like dipshit liberals who are like doing dipshit liberal things. And what you're saying is, no, these are hard edged instruments of policy.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yes. Now, of course, the personnel, you know, 97% of USAID employees donate to Democrats.

• 49:40Tucker Carlson?

  Of course, right.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  But, but, you know, Liz Cheney started her, her career, you know, she is at the, at USAID, at the Eurasia portfolio of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary.

• 49:51Tucker Carlson?

  A lot of this is destabilizing. Have you noticed, like, I thought a great power, the reason the US is better than the Soviet Union was, we brought stability, predictability, markets, democracy, and they brought, you know, war and instability. And I always thought that like, good leadership, good stewardship, good parenting. brought stability and it does seem like we are intentionally showing stability dis- you know disunity and instability around the world.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, I, I literally just quoted you a I R I document implementing USAID programs where they literally wrote to the US State Department that the purpose of, of this, you know, baseline assessment was to gather as many activists and informants and network nodes, quote, to destabilize, you know, Bangladeshian politics, but apply that everywhere, you know, and this is, you know, fundamentally what I believe happened during.

• 50:44Tucker Carlson?

  Big picture, do, do you really want that? Like, isn't that shameful?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Of course it's shameful, but, but the, I think people don't fully understand how products arrive on the shelves around them. Um, I was, I was mentioning Milton Freeman's pencil example. Well, what happens if Malaysia decides to nationalize, you know, to, to block exports of, of gum from the gum trees and the, the African miners decide that they are going to go on strike and not allow, you know, not allow, you know,

• 51:21Tucker Carlson?

  Graphite.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  graphite or, or lead, you know, and

• 51:27Speaker 01

  no blob, no pencils. If you don't have a mechanism to influence that foreign government, to stop the nationalization law, to hit it with carrots, carrots and sticks, uh, or if it's, if it's a problem within the population, sub-government, if it's a particular, this is what happened in the Cold War, when, when the CIA was breaking up union strikes in, uh, in France and, you know, the, the, you know, the docks and the, the longshoreman strikes and the CIA infiltrated the unions and they worked with the, you know, AFL CIO slash AFL CIA and, uh, and, you know, for the, they all have union arms and, and so you need a method to be able to go into the unions if you want to be able to have pencils. Now, okay, you might say you can live without pencils. But how about no petroleum?

• 52:12Speaker 01

  What if, what if it's, what if it's something that's, what if these are really critical resources for us to be able to have microchips, for us to be able to have renewable batteries, for us to be able to have, you know, build computers, for us to be able to put gas in our car or heating in our home? There is a potential necessity, and this is why I feel it's so imperative that what's happening right now is happening, and I'm thrilled that it is, but there's still much more to internalize about this because you're gonna need to reconstruct the history of the entire past century as you disentangle this whole thing.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  If we had not toppled so many foreign governments in service of big oil, would we have, would we have had cheap oil? Well, does a president want to? This is where I come back to this Venezuela example. Trump wants to win. And again, we don't, we don't have to call it Venezuela, we can call it random, random country X. We're going to be hit with a choice as we, as we reduce the USAID function, if we reduce the USAID function. To my knowledge, the, the staff has been radically cut from 14,000 to something like 290. But my, my understanding is that most of the grants, you know, it's $44 billion, at 14,000 employees, it's about a billion dollars of employee overhead, you know, a year.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  So 43 of the 44 billion presumably are still going to all these, you know, Frankensteinian monster projects. But you're, you're gonna be hit with that choice of, of, do you want to win fighting dirty? Or do you want to potentially lose fighting fair? And, and that's gonna play out in every industrial sector, in every region. And I'm okay, and I, what I'm concerned about is that-

• 54:09Tucker Carlson?

  So you're saying the US economy can't continue, um, our prosperity can't continue unless we like wreck other people's countries?

• 54:17Speaker 01

  No, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that that is something, there's, there's a micro fractal portion of that argument that is going to play out and is going to be a sort of siren song every step of the way, at every regional desk, at the State Department, at, at every National Security Council interagency coordination, and there are some lines that I believe we cannot ever cross. Like, for example, on the social media censorship side. The fact is, is it was, according to Biden's foreign policy, Biden declared populism a threat to democracy, his State Department did, his USAID did, and so the best populists were popular online in Europe, so the White House had a whole information integrity working

• 55:02Speaker 01

  group to have the US-funded NGOs lobby the European Union effectively and push, uh, the different, uh, sort of influence and spindle groups comprising the, the regulatory body around the EU Digital Services Act to add more and more censorship regulations to target their political opponents. And what you're doing is, is these people could not do that at home, because we have a First Amendment, but Europe doesn't have one. So they, so if you declare populism to be an attack on democracy, then it's easier to win by advocating censorship. But that, to me, is a violation of fundamental American values-

• 55:41Tucker Carlson?

  And not just censorship, but putting a lot of people in jail, using violence, that is a form of violence, incarcerating someone, putting them in handcuffs.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  And that's what USAID does. USAID's role with the prosecutors is unbelievable, the, the depth of that rabbit hole. But if I, if I can just complete this point here, because I, I want to make sure I'm-

• 56:01Speaker 01

  There's a lot of nuance to what I'm trying to say here, which is that

• 56:07Speaker 01

  people need, and especially at the policymaker and White House and House Senate Oversight Committee side, they need to get a sort of topographical map of the scope and spectrum of our dirty deeds done in the name of USAID in order to make a triage assessment of what kind of things can be dual purpose. Because everything USAID is dual purpose. It has to be. It's a US, it's, everything has to advance US national interests in some respect, whether we're irrigating poppy fields or doing poverty relief programs or public health, something about doing that act has

• 56:50Speaker 01

  to advance some sort of US national interest. Now, part of the reason it's been so difficult to oversee USAID or get answers from them is because they can't tell you those dual interests honestly in a public forum. Take this transgender dance festival in Bangladesh thing. Imagine a hearing on USAID and, you know, high-ranking Republican senator holds up, you know, you're funding Bangladesh, you know, you're funding transgender dance festivals and you're spending $2.7 million on this. What possible US interest does that serve? Can that USAID administrator on live television say to the world, "Well, that was a cynical, you know, we determined,

• 57:31Speaker 01

  actually, we were running a covert operation to overthrow that country's democratically-elected government and it actually wasn't about that, you know, that at all. This was just, the whole thing was a total front for..."

• 57:44Tucker Carlson?

  "We were building a coalition to challenge the government in power because we didn't like that government."

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Right, but saying that undermines the advocacy of all other USAID programs.

• 57:53Tucker Carlson?

  I understand.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  So it becomes...

• 57:54Tucker Carlson?

  I get it.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  My concern is, there's some things you can't do. Assassinations, promoting internet censorship, full-on regime change that mobilizes the ugliest assets in a society like terrorist groups, or extremist groups sort of thing. But there's a lot of squishiness in between that, and I'm not sure that the MAGA foreign policy establishment, being very new, not Marco Rubio, but Marco Rubio is newer to MAGA than the rest of the White House. And he was approved, what, 99 to 0 or something?

• 58:40Speaker 01

  He was in the Senate, he was the easiest one to pass. And I think he's done a phenomenal job so far, by the way, if I can say it. But I feel like most of the people who came to the MAGA movement came to that for nationalist reasons, and don't see, understand the interplay between the national and the global. And as they are finding that out, they are seeing how horrible the deeds are done of the global, and there is going to be this impulse to destroy this thing, completely destroy this thing. And by the way, that's not even my principal fear, because I actually think, the other

• 59:23Speaker 01

  part of this is that I could very easily see most of these grants being preserved, simply through the State Department. Yeah, right, simply through the State Department. I mean, this is what happened with Brexit. Everyone who was pro-Brexit celebrated Brexit the day it happened. That, to me, is like the closure of the USAID building. But the fact is, is they effectively stopped Brexit Yeah, it never happened. Post-Brexit, because of the, there's so many layers of resistance at implementation. And that, we're going to run into that here, which is why I'm using this time to be able to talk with you today on something that is, on this, which is that you're going to need to understand the purpose for these things, and the scope of it, and be able

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  to look at just how bad it is with clear eyes, and not necessarily, I mean, have your rage boiling, your anger moment. And when that clears...

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  A fundamental reorganization of the way we carry out soft power is going to have to replace what we used to do if we don't do these dirty deeds anymore.

• 1:00:33Tucker Carlson?

  But it has to be in the service of goals that, you know, are worth achieving. You know, like having a strong and free country.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Right. The only problem with that is Trump represented something very different than that vision that was expressed by the Bush Biden blob uniparty that had been there. And in countries that are not stable, elections completely change everything.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  And this maybe gets to whether or not, you know, the problem is not necessarily just the institutions, but rather the sort of legacy of momentum of all these previous political forces, because you could see a situation where then, okay, every time a MAGA type populist candidate wins an election, all of our foreign policy institutions switch radically in one direction, calling that American interest. And then a sort of internationalist blob, globalist person wins an election, then all the institutions switch all of that. And so, you know, you can't, you can't even build permanent structures in foreign countries or permanent networks because everything's so schizophrenic.

• 1:01:50Tucker Carlson?

  Or in your own. I mean, this is, this is the problem with our system is that it doesn't have continuity. And the whole purpose of the deep state is to provide continuity. I mean, no one ever says this, but I grew up around it. The purpose of the deep state is provide continuity in a democracy in which leadership changes every four or eight years. So how does that work exactly? So you have the political structure that runs everything at the request of the population. That's called democracy. But then you have, you know, longitudinal interests that have to be represented regardless of who's in power. And so, you know, the deep state arose in response to an actual need. You have to have continuity.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Right. Politics stops at the war's edge, right?

• 1:02:29Tucker Carlson?

  That's exactly right. But then, unfortunately, but at the same time, the deep state has to be in some deep sense responsive to the population or else you have tyranny.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:39Tucker Carlson?

  So like, it's a very, you know, democracy is not an easy system to administer. It's an easy one to talk about. And it, you know, it doesn't work that well in some ways, obviously. I want it to. I'm not against democracy, of course, being an American, but it doesn't, you know, it's hard. So, no, I agree. I think the big change is the deep state. These institutions were taken over by incredibly dumb, short-sighted, selfish people. I don't think the problem is, you know, having an elite. The problem is having an inadequate, mediocre, selfish elite that doesn't actually like the country they're running. So that's just my personal editorial position on that. But I, I see what you're saying. I mean,

• 1:03:22Tucker Carlson?

  I've seen it a lot. But here's, I want to get back to something you said at the very beginning, which is the corrupting effect on America, the country, the place of 350 million people of this kind of behavior and the bleeding over of these tactics into our country.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Tucker Carlson?

  So, like, for example, I was, the one thing that really shocked me about these disclosures was that a lot of our domestic media, as government media, didn't know that. Politico, which is garbage, utterly garbage publication, and it's become much worse, I would say, in the past five or six years, takes $8 million a year from the government, secretly, sort of, semi-secrely. What's that?

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Well, there's, there's a distinction, I think, that's useful to draw here between public agencies paying for premium services of, of US news websites that, foreign-facing ones. So, for example, the State Department pays for premium subscriptions to various news sites in order to be able to have access to, you know, all of the, you know, New York Times or Politico, you know, to be able to get behind the paywall for their employees so that while they're doing their job of soft power influence abroad, they have the maximum amount of knowledge at their fingertips. It's the same thing with-

• 1:04:44Tucker Carlson?

  But that's all fake. I mean, Politico Pro, there's literally, it's written by 25-year-olds. You know, there's like nothing in there that's real. They're paying off Politico.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Well, that's right. But there's, there's two forms of that. And, and I'm, and I'm just also trying to educate people as they go through this discovery process about the extent of it, because you're going to see it's, it's everyone. But there are two forms of it. One is, one is, you know 100% it's pernicious. The other one has-

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  There's smoke, but there's not necessarily fire. And so when I say the smoke, obviously creates an incentive to please the people giving you these government procurements. For example, if the, this is, this is what I published, for example, about Reuters, you know, the Biden administration, you know, government agencies, you know, tallied something like $300 million to various Reuters, sort of sister, sister company groups between their, between their news agency, between their, their Westlaw arm and between their, you know, sort of like forensic and like accounting services. But you see these big, like $60

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  million worth of grants from the Justice Department. And now the Justice Department's paying, paying for Westlaw, you know, which is a Thomson Reuters thing. It still makes Reuters richer, but Reuters is writing hit pieces on the very people that the Justice Department is going after. And so it's, it's softening up, you know, the enemies. And in fact, Reuters won a Pulitzer Prize for its hit piece for its investigative series on malfeasance by Elon Musk at all his portfolio companies, Tesla, X, Neuralink, SpaceX. And meanwhile, the Biden administration had 11 different regulatory agents, regulatory agencies going after all of those. And so the, the media getting paid by the government

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  was providing the ammunition for prosecutions and regulatory, regulatory and disciplinary actions against the very stated targets of the government. And so you, you don't have a, you don't have a stated agreement in that case. You have a very, very perverse incentive. But there are places where you have, where it's even worse because there's, again, there's there are two forms that can take in the form of, you know, paying for services, but then also there is the affirmative sponsoring of media. So, you know, for example, the state, I believe it's the state, maybe USA does pay like the Reuters news agency for, for work abroad, but it's a lot less than the premium services, but, but more, more

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  to, like, here's a really clean example that gets to the heart, I think, of what you're talking about with this domestic and how this all ties together. The, the world's largest consortium of investigative journalists is a group called the OCCRP. And you just think of it, the Corruption Reporting Project.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  They have, since the very beginning, been... They were initially, I believe, fully funded by the US government, or they were the anchor fund. And now, I believe, half of their funds come from a combination of USAID and the State Department. And these are supposed to be independent journalists, and they're investigative hit piece writers covering the topic of corruption. If there's something that's published on OCCRP's website or through their media network, it's never about "The sky was blue today, and someone saved a cat from a tree." No, it's all investigative hit piece work exposing some aspect of corruption in a country. And so, and this was something that the US began funding...

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Really, I mean, this type of work over a decade ago, and really, around... This is before OCCRP, around the time of Yugoslavia and whatnot, because we wanted to create a predicate to arrest the political enemies of the State Department in the region by cooking up corruption scandals that prosecutors can then use to arrest them on the basis of corruption. And so, the problem is prosecutors don't know what to look for. And also, it's not necessarily politically feasible to prosecute somebody who's got a halo on them. So the halo has to be broken by hit piece news articles, by investigative journalists, who often get proprietary access. For example, OCCRP, this Corruption Reporting Project,

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  has gotten very strange special access to hacked documents while they're being funded by, you know, what many believe to be a CIA front group, you know, in the form of USAID. When they get special access to documents hacked from a computer and use that as the basis for the Panama Papers, well, you know, they're reporters. You can't ask them their source. But the interests align. These are the targets of the US State Department who happens to be funding them. They are mercenary media for the state. Now, I want to mention two aspects of this scandal, because this plays out everywhere, but this one, it's just... It's simultaneously clean and dirty enough that I feel like it's just an anecdote everyone should remember forever.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  One, directly on US politics and targeting of Trump, as you mentioned. OCCRP got their Eurasia, you know, it covers like seven or eight countries that they're supposed to dig up dirt of, you know, of corrupt politicians and corrupt, you know, oligarchs in those territories. And they're Eastern Europe, Europe, $20 million for their Eastern European operation. And so that covers Ukraine. And so what did they do in 2019? They dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani. And then that dirt ended up being used as part of the impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  So they, so they, this is the State Department funding mercenary media to then dig up dirt on high-profile US citizens, metastasizing into that very evidence being entered into the congressional record to successfully impeach the President of the United States. So in that case, if there was no, you know, if there was no State Department USAID funding to OCCRP, they wouldn't have, you know, presumably had the capital to go out and dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani. And then Americans wouldn't have been hearing, you know, these, and they also, you know,

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  wrote hit pieces on Paul Manafort and his, I believe, his relations with Julian Assange. But basically, you had this foreign policy blob apparatus who hated Trump and wanted to take him out. And just like State and USAID were paying OCCRP to dig up dirt on foreign oligarchs and foreign presidents, the net result, and we don't know if there was any sort of, and I'm not saying that there wasn't necessarily, you know, a direct agreement to do that. I'm not privy to that. But the fact is, is... That is, that is in effect what happened. The, the faction of the foreign policy establishment that most detested Trump and wanted him out.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  He was being impeached because of his foreign policy around Russia and Ukraine. And it, and so USAID spending to journalists in Ukraine comes back to be used to impeach Trump.

• 1:12:04Tucker Carlson?

  Well, and, and to smear me as a Russian agent.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:07Tucker Carlson?

  That's been reported, it's out there, it's proven. So my tax dollars go to impugning my character and calling me a disloyal American. At a certain point, you're like, we kind of need a revolution. I mean, that's, why should we put up with that for a second?

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Well, we're, we're in a sort of, you can, you can feel, I can, you can feel the, the passion around this, this week and, and people sensing how much of their world has been usurped without their consent by these institutions. But just to complete this on, on, on the corruption reporting project that gets half of its funding from the State Department, USAID, and the US government has the formal yes, you know, yes, yay, yes, no, about who they can bring on as staff. And they have to, you know, submit basically, you know, what they're going to do, you know, the, the year ahead.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  But on USAIDspending.gov, I'm sorry, on USAID.gov, the USAID website, before it went down this weekend, but I have all the receipts and I have all the PDFs on my social media feed. They, they have a sex, they have a whole document on this corruption reporting project and how, how amazing it has been for, for US, you know, for, for USAID's anti-corruption humanitarian work. And it, it shows the entry, it says $20 million and here the, you know, several countries they operate in. The next page has something which is just absolutely devastating to the, to the concept of, of, of The firewall between our humanitarian aid organization and prosecutors.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  It's called, it's the accomplishment section. And there are four bullet points in this accomplishment section. Again, this is on USAID.gov publicly boasting about hit pieces for hire. Mercenary media to call people corrupt, call citizens, call. So the first line item is over a billion dollars worth of assets seized. So they're basically saying, hey, great return on investment. We spent $20 million. We were able to seize a billion dollars. But you did that by paying journalists to dig up dirt on people. What if the journalists got it wrong? What, you know, what if, uh?

• 1:14:23Tucker Carlson?

  There's no legal process, by the way. I mean, it's not like people went to court and were found guilty or anything. We just took the stuff.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  Well, act, well, this is, this get that.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  We'll get to that, actually. That's bullet point four. But bullet point two was, it was something like, um, somewhere between 100 and 300 policy changes. Um, in different government and civil society institutions in these countries. So this USAID saying us paying for political black ops hit pieces generated hundreds of policy changes at the government level and, and at the institutional level there. Well, we're presupposing all of those are good. Uh, you, I mean, they, they wouldn't be calling them an accomplishment unless the USAID thought they were good. So they're, they have a catalyzing change that they want to do to the policies of foreign countries.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  And they think the way to do that is to pay mercenary media outlets to dig up dirt on people and then use that as the predicate to force through policy changes. Then they have a section on all the different government officials that they got, that, that were, um, that were forced to resign, um, because of, uh, their states, USAID state sponsored media. And I think the list was like six or seven, but they said, including a president and a prime minister. So they, they are bragging effectively in this, in this document that, hey, what a bang for the buck. For $20 million, we were able to topple two governments. And then the fourth bullet point is, is the one that winds through its whole, this whole USA prosecutor story.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  It says 456 arrests and indictments generated on the basis of OCCRP's reporting. So this is the State Department bragging about the incredible volume of human beings whose lives and liberties have been taken from them because of sponsored hit pieces by the US government. We don't know how many of those people were innocent. We don't know, you know, what even they were charged for. When you read that USAID.gov document on OCCRP, it doesn't even list their crimes. We just know it's a good thing that 456 people got arrested because we paid for...

• 1:16:41Tucker Carlson?

  What do their families think?

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Right. And prosecutors then use that as the basis for a criminal indictment.

• 1:16:47Tucker Carlson?

  They really become hated in the rest of the world by behaving this way.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Well, how many foreign leaders have you seen, you know, other than maybe one I can think of? But how many foreign leaders have you seen who have been making impassioned floor speeches this week about the tens of thousands of people who are going to die if USAID leaves? I'm wondering where all the leaders of African countries have been this week, or, you know, low-income Central Asian or Western Hemisphere countries are. Why are they all either silent or, like in the case of El Salvador, relieved that this is happening? None of them are getting the money. In fact, many times, USAID is forced on them as a condition...

• 1:17:28Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know. I know some of those leaders, and they don't want our aid at all.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Right. Oftentimes, USAID institutions are forced into their country, or forced into different regions in their country, as part of a compliance measure that the State Department is imposing. You know, you need to have a certain level of human rights, you know, monitoring, or, you know, you're...

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  Your water levels have to have this, you know, certain percent purity, or you need to be able to maintain, you know, this, you know, your energy development has to be this consistent with climate change. Or else, you know, we're going to, you know, destroy you in the, in the, you know, with the, with our trade relations, or we're going to put sanctions on you unless you put our humanitarian aid organs in there. And so boom, just like that, under the banner of aid, we're in control of your energy infrastructure. We're in control of your river systems. So, you know, I think the reason that the only people that we really see who are, who are defending USAID right now are people here in the United States or in NATO, you know, that are directly or indirectly on the take, or their, or their donors or constituents are.

• 1:18:38Tucker Carlson?

  So in September, we went across the country, coast to coast, 17 different cities on a nationwide live tour. And it was amazing. We brought the entire staff with us like we always do, because we all work together for so long and enjoy traveling together. And one of our producers is a documentary filmmaker. And so he decided to make a documentary film about our trip, a full month across America with some of the most interesting people around. Different people join us every single night. Bungino and Russell Brand and Bobby Kennedy and JD Vance and Donald Trump, et cetera, et cetera. We had the best time. And the fruit of that is a documentary called On the Road, the Tucker Carlson Live Tour, which is available right now on TCN. On the Road, Tucker Carlson Live Tour is hilarious. You will like it.

• 1:19:27Tucker Carlson?

  So I, I got an email from a friend of mine, a text from a friend of mine yesterday. He's such a wonderful guy, actually conservative from Fan, but a recipient of USAID money. And he said, it's totally corrupt, you're right. But he goes, they don't understand, you're going to tank the economy of Northern Virginia if you shut this bigot off.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:47Tucker Carlson?

  And I thought, maybe that's the one perspective people watching in the US don't understand is how totally dependent the DC metro area is on foreign policy spending.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:57Tucker Carlson?

  It's not making it to Congo, it's stopping in Arlington.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  Well, that's why I said donors and constituents, right? Because those are, like, think about the congressman in those, representing those districts. And, you know, you, you see that. That's exactly right. It's, it's, it's our own, you know, it's our own economies. And, and then, you know, the point I was making earlier is that, you know, you are going to have this sort of Follow on trickle down economic impact if many of our multinational corporations who form the bedrock of our, you know, stock exchanges and Chamber of Commerce, if the

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  dirty deeds that USA does are cut out, are they still going to have as, will that impact their profitability? And so that's why I wanted to, you know, spend the time in the beginning, just talking about that, that tension because in the oil and gas case, like Trump has a plan around that drill, baby drill, right? Like, you know, we might not need to fund transgender dance festivals in order to, you know, like you go to the CIA world book, you know, everyone go on CIA.gov and just look at every country and CIA has a world book of all of the strategic resources in every country. And so, you know, Burma is top strategic resource petroleum. Okay, let's, we don't need to necessarily have

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  the sticky issue about whether or not we need to extract those foreign resources from Burma if, if the sitting government there doesn't, if we are drill, baby drilling at home. Right. There's creative offsets that can be done to replace dirty tricks. You know, for example, like, you know, with ISIS and, and the dynamics in Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan, if there are ways to reconceptualize the way we do trade in the region or do creative, you know, joint partnerships or, or try to make inroads into other, you know, parts of the population that were not, you know, tested as, as robustly. But you're going

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  to need to think a lot more creatively about that when you don't have the access to the, the dirty deeds done dirt cheap. And that, and so that's just, I feel like that, I just want to impress that point because I think a lot of MAGA Republicans are going to think that it's

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  It's easier than it is to reorganize that and there's just a lot of surgery that needs to be done if you're going to cut that function out, which I totally support doing in nine out of 10 cases, but there's a, you know, there's going to be a remnant and we need a doctrine that's cohesive and sellable to the American people because the problem was is we had built such an elaborate labyrinth of lies that you couldn't even honestly talk about it with people. This is the whole oversight thing that I mentioned, you know, you, this happened with the Zanzig scandal with USAID in, um, in, from 2009 to 2014-ish, there was, um, you know, we, USAID and NED were at the forefront of the

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Arab Spring and toppling democratically elected governments in Tunisia and Egypt and all over, um, you know, in these street color revolutions that were powered by digital diplomacy, you know, we've discussed this before, you know, where USAID was funding people in, you know, to do, do youth engagement for how to use Facebook hashtags and, you know, uh, and, and how to mobilize street protests so that everyone knows where to go and, and what kind of, uh, you know, slogans and slang to use. And so, you know, they wanted to, they want-

• 1:23:35Tucker Carlson?

  Kind of like the George Floyd protests.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, kinda like the George Floyd protests.

• 1:23:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, kinda.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:39Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, can I just ask you to pause and, and just remind us why exactly the Obama State Department would want to topple, say, the government of Egypt?

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  Um, there's, there's a, a lot, I, my understanding is, is a lot of it has to do with the natural resources and, um, you know, the sort of Middle East, North Africa, um, you know, I mean, the fact is, is, you know, like, I mean, Egypt is the, you know, sort of the lip of, of Europe that way and, um, but I think there's probably Middle Eastern politics that play into it as well and it's a, it's a complicated picture. Um-

• 1:24:17Tucker Carlson?

  But I think we, we can say 10 years later, more than 10 years later, it was not a clean win for the United States.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  Oh, right. No, totally.

• 1:24:25Tucker Carlson?

  I don't see how killing Gaddafi, the Iraq war, like, I don't know that any of this was going on now in the Middle East, Syria, etc. I don't, I don't see these are obvious victories for us.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  I don't think they do either, actually. There's, there's been a lot of where did it all go wrong in the years post-revolution. But in those early years, they were really jazzed up about this new internet, social media superpower that they had deployed to topple those governments. And so they sought to do that in Cuba by creating what they, what USAID called a Cuban Spring. And the problem was, at that, at that time, Cuba had banned US social media companies, calling them, you know, a tool of US imperialism. And so there was no Twitter allowed. And so USAID pulled off this operation to create a, a company called Zunzania, which is, it was, it was a Twitter knockoff. It had the

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  same user interface, it had the same like and retweet button. And that was, I believe, like the Cuban slang word for, for hummingbird. So it was basically, even had like the bird. And they, they knew that they couldn't, it couldn't be an American company. So they had to convince, I think it was two Cuban businessmen to set this up. And they ran it as, they ran it through USAID. They ran it as, what they did is they took humanitarian relief funds earmarked for Pakistan, and they ran it through a Byzantine labyrinth of shell companies and money laundered through Cayman banks and Panamanian banks and, and, you know, BVI banks. And so that it got to these Cuban businessmen to set it up so that

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Cuban counterintelligence would not suspect that it was a US thing. They, this, USAID contracted out to a group called Creative Associates International, CAI. It's not CIA, it's CIA. And they're very creative. And, and what the, the internal documents showed when this whole scandal blew up at USAID, is that USAID's plan was to recruit about 100,000 Cubans onto this, onto this platform, luring them in with, with algorithms and vibes favoring sports, music, and hurricane updates were the, were the, the main things. And then they said, once we've, and, but the- Same time, we're actually going to be taking all their personal data on the back end. And we're going to be using AI for all the metadata and all the websites that they visit and all the cookies.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  We're going to take that to aggregate a political recept, political receptivity map of the of the categories of users within these hundred thousand that'll be most receptive to take to the streets in a violent revolution against against the government. And what they what they plotted is that at the at the appropriate moment, once the critical nodes, once they had a critical mass of users on the platform, and they had enough support from other civil society institutions that were that were being funded by USAID and state and any at the time, that they would then activate what they what they called smart mobs. They would, they would switch the algorithms. They would, they would switch the algorithms and they would selectively target news distribution of of messages to to users on the basis of their political proclivities

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  in order to get them to take to the streets in in violent street protests and over overthrow their government, basically the same, you know, pull off the same thing that was that happened in the Arab Spring, but do it in Cuba. And all they needed was enough people on the user base. That was their, that was what they

• 1:27:44Tucker Carlson?

  Can I just pause again and and just remind people that I I think if most Americans had been aware that this was going on in 2020, the Black Lives Matter protest would have been instantly recognizable as a government sponsored revolution, co-revolution against Donald Trump, because that's what it was.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Well, I want I want to come back to, because there's actually a lot there that is.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  I think will be more even more impactful after just kind of finishing this this one point on on USAID here, which is that because, you know, you mentioned if Americans had known this is going on. Well, what was really interesting about the scandal is nobody knew that that USAID was doing this. This was clearly CIA style covert action. You know, the construction of a private sector for profit, social media company that that gets its funds from nonprofit humanitarian relief funds earmarked for a country 13,000 miles away.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  with the express stated interest of doing diplomatic, you know, work with extreme diplomatic implications, overthrowing the government of a foreign country. And so as this scandal all broke open, um, the, the media and what had happened was is Senate oversight had been completely blocked from any information about this operation. This is what you heard Joni Ernst, Senator Joni Ernst tell Elon Musk earlier this week when she was explaining how she was totally blocked by USAID. It was a total black box. They, they, uh, you know, it's all in-house. It's all subject to the inspector general there. And if the inspector general says no, the Senate gets nothing and there's nothing they can do.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  And it's less accountable in many respects than the CIA. Because the CIA, when they do covert action, they have to get a presidential finding. This is part of the reforms that were done, you know, in the 1970s, when it looked like, okay, the CIA was going rogue. And so every CIA covert action has to be formally authorized by the President of the United States. But what happens if the president doesn't want to approve something? Well, and you still want the deed done. What if, for example, you know, you belong to a certain wing of the foreign policy establishment? That's a dot is with the president. And you know, the president's not going to approve it. So how can you get that done? Like say for, you know, the funding of ISIS groups, for example. Trump was, wanted to crush ISIS.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Hillary Clinton and Jake Sullivan said ISIS is on our side in Syria. The Biden administration kicked billions of dollars in the aggregate to ISIS and, and al-Qaeda groups just are now the sitting government of Syria. And in fact, right now, the current head of the government in Syria, uh, Mohammed Al-Jalani was, there was a $10 million bounty on his head as being a al-Qaeda terrorist. Uh, that, that tweet is still live on the US Embassy in Syria. But he's now our friend. Right. But if Trump wouldn't authorize the CIA covertly running funds to the, uh, to ISIS, but that cell within the CIA still wanted to do it, all they need to do is walk on over to their

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  friends at USAID and USAID can do it without a presidential finding. They can call, now they can, all it takes is creative structuring. They can just do it through humanitarian, you know, relief funds to, uh, you know, to a certain, you know, part of the, you know, certain. Certain region that has a disproportionate amount of ISIS K in it, they can fund the educational institutions, or they can water the air. There's another thing USAID got in trouble for is when they were, they were, they were essentially sustaining that the heroin, the world's heroin supply. Ninety-five percent of the world's heroin supply, you know, came from, came from Afghanistan.

• 1:31:30Tucker Carlson?

  Why were they doing that?

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Well, I, the, so, USAID's, one of their, one of their close partners, is another USAID-adjacent entity called the US Institute for Peace. Its, its office is right next to the State Department in, in Washington DC. It gets, it was created by Congress. It gets fifty-six million dollars a year from taxpayers. And in, uh, last, in, in 2023, the US Institute for Peace, um, wrote a, a white paper that said, uh, that told the Taliban not to shut down the, the heroin, not to shut down the poppy fields because it would create a, quote, "economic and humanitarian disaster." Uh, that basically, um, I mean, this is, this

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  is the State Department. They're fully funded by the US State Department. They are, they are sort of the policy arm, uh, of, you know, many, many of the aspects of USAID. Whereas USAID is forty-four billion, they only have fifty-six million, but they, they all advance US foreign policy in a cohesive vision for a region. And they're both operating in Afghanistan. So while US Institute for Peace is saying, "We need to keep the heroin flowing," it was USAID who was doing all the, the water irrigation of the poppy fields, uh, in order, that, that allowed that propagation of the heroin to continue. And that gets into, you know, a, a darker story around the role of, of narco, you know, narco activity and narco

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  gangs as instrument of state, instruments of statecraft. You know, this was, you know, the Mujahideen that were pumped up by Zbigniew Brzezinski and our CIA and, you know, in the nineteen seventies and eighties. And, you know, they were, they were being funded by drug money from the Golden, from the Golden Crescent and it being laundered into Pakistan banks, like the CIA bank. You know, BCCI and everyone can read about the Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal and the and that, but you know, it was it was narco-terrorism funding for US-backed terrorist paramilitary groups that we were propping up as freedom fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan. You know, if you remember seeing the old, you know, Osama bin Laden puff

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  piece, you know, freedom warrior on the road to peace with, you know, when he's back in the Mujahideen days. But what I'm saying is you see this play out everywhere. You know, this was a this was a big part of, you know, how how right-wing capitalist movements were in in Western Hemisphere were propped up against left-wing socialist and Marxist, you know, opposition in the 1950s and 60s. And and you see this run through everything. I mean, think about what's happened with El Salvador. You know, why did why did Buchanan say that, you know, basically was the first one on X to say that, yeah, USAID is awful,

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  it's got to go, countries don't want it, look at my case? Because USAID was trying to regime change them from there. The Soros groups, I mean, they all said that his attempts to clean up the drug trade were humanitarian, you know, were were, you know, humanitarian violations of the rights of drug cartels. Have you seen that that, you know, the government of Mexico appears to actually be quite quite happy with the move to abolish USAID? There's a piece in Newsweek about this Trump's strange allies in the in the, you know, in the fight to end USAID, and it's it's the Mexican government. They don't want it either. Well, there what I'm saying is, is the scope of our dirty deeds done through USAID and State

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Department grants and through CIA covert activity that is only made possible because they're working with assets whose budget is funded by USAID, or or budget is funded by state, or budget is funded by the National Network for Democracy, or others. You know, a lot of that work is just liaising with assets that are that are there. They don't have that big a budget. USAID is a three times bigger budget than the CIA. And so they depend on working with State Department USAID cultivated assets. And so we're going to have to disentangle this whole spider web in order to form a cohesive foreign policy vision that isn't evil.

• 1:35:53Tucker Carlson?

  And I think that's, I kind of think that's the point, that isn't evil. Because, I mean, in our system, I'd really think in any system, even a monarchy, the people have to think that in general, the government is, you know, doing things they approve of, isn't actively evil, isn't, you know, in business with the drug cartels in Mexico, which our government is, as you know. Because there's, if the people of a country don't think their own government has legitimacy, like, it can't last very long. It doesn't last, right?

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  Right. Absolutely.

• 1:36:28Tucker Carlson?

  So, um, are you concerned that when people learn, like, what's going to happen when these stories penetrate? That, yes, your government has been paying to wreck a lot of other places and, you know, is working against you using your money?

• 1:36:48Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, what, it's kind of hard to unknow that.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Right. And, thank goodness, because we're going to need that level of national consciousness about these scandals in order to create the moral buffer against the temptation to be evil again.

• 1:37:06Tucker Carlson?

  That's exactly right.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  And, you know, so, I do think that this is all, because this is, this is a, this is a dogfight to the bone. We are going to be, at every level, at the, every year in the budget, there's going to be this fight. I mean, now, and, you know, here's a question, how much more does the State Department get in the budget? You know, if since, you know, I had like a $35 billion budget, now it's getting USAID's $44 billion, but what fraction of that is Trump going to? I've been saying here for, for, for a long time, because everyone talks about how USAID is funneling things to left-wing causes. And, very easy to see that. And we talked about the 97% of employees at USAID who donate to Democrats.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  But to me, the main issue here is the remnant of internationalist Republicans in Congress, who can form a critical majority bloc with, in the House or in the Senate, in order to get their way on this issue. Like, you could see a situation where their own vested interests, their own constituents, are so dependent on either USAID's funding, or the results of USAID operations, that they will side with the Democrats in order to inflict damage on the Trump White House Of course.

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  Budget vision. And so, that's gonna be a constant fight, and my, what I'm hoping evolves over the next weeks and months, is a moral north star for America-first nationalist, or populist, or MAGA, or centrist, or simply, you know, reasonable liberal, or center-left folks, where you have the current level of American prosperity, you remove that evil in the labyrinth of lies, something needs to fill that gap. You know, like, we talked about the oil and gas prices, drill baby, drill for oil. Okay, but now do that for

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  semiconductors. You know, like, and now do that for every critical mineral. And, and maybe the answer is, I mean, what I've been trying to sell is that if you're going to do the dirty deeds, and you do believe they're necessary for statecraft, then there has to at least be an obligation to be honest about them. You know, like, I thought it was very honest, you know, when Lindsey Graham finally came out and said the strategic vision of the United States is the, you know, the $14 trillion worth of natural resources. Relying on the humanitarian predicate for it allows voters to be deceived, and for them to then turn around and be totally, feel totally hoodwinked when they find out that,

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  hey, why are you paying for the unions, the media companies, the, things that are, they're acting here on the homeland? We have this tumor that we're removing from the body of the American project.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  But there was blood flowing into that and it's connected to all these arteries. My, the thing that I want to make sure happened that is midwifed appropriately is, what are you changing about our foreign policy structure? So that when you remove the tumor, um, you know, you, the blood still, you know, flows in the way that you want it to, you know, you're not ripping the heart out with open heart surgery.

• 1:40:43Tucker Carlson?

  I get it. I'm just a less confident than you are that we're reaping some massive reward for this. I mean, I remember people muttering darkly about, you know, the purpose of the Iraq war in 2003 was to seize the oil in Iraq. Well, that didn't happen, didn't happen in Libya. I mean, I don't, it's, it's hard to, I guess I don't have a clear picture of the material benefits that we're receiving from this.

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  Well, look at, look at the benefits to the, to the stock price for Chevron and Exxon when the war broke out and, and the, the US State Department strong-armed every country in Europe to divest from Russian gas and they all were forced to buy expensive, uh, North American LNG. Uh, their, their stock prices went to the moon. They, they had something like, you know, triple the, you know, the profits or something for, for a certain period of months, uh, you know, following that and reap these windfall benefits. Um, and you know, the, the, this is, we're sort of confronting the ghost of Ronald Reagan here because, you know, the, the, the reason you do that for statecraft purposes is trickle-down economics.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  What's good for ExxonMobil is good for the American citizens. And so if, if so, a dirty deed done to advance, you know, uh, big oil, you know, big oil, big ag, you know, uh, big tech, whatever it is, anything that's good for them is good for us. And so, anything that the, that the US government can do in the form of overt or covert diplomacy or covert influence in the region that tips the scales in favor of those US corporate interests or US multinational interests will ultimately trickle down to the people itself. I mean, that's the logic and you need to confront that.

• 1:42:25Tucker Carlson?

  I understand. I just, I, I don't, I don't think it's a holistic view of, of it. First, it assumes that the interests of big publicly traded companies are identical to those of the United States, which is not true. Second, it assumes that weak neighbors make a strong America, also not true. Destroying the economy of Western Europe is actually not in our long-term interest at all. It just helps China. And it changes the balance of power globally east. That is not in our interest at all. And so I'm not confident. I think the people running this are dumb fucks, actually. I don't think they know what they're doing. I don't think they even understand, you know, the big picture grand game type diplomacy. I just don't think they're capable of it. I think they're dumb. They're like on Twitter. And so I just don't have confidence in their judgment. I guess is what I'm saying.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:10Tucker Carlson?

  Fair?

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  No, I think it is.

• 1:43:12Tucker Carlson?

  Because if your measure is like short term stock spikes, okay. Those are pretty easy to affect. That's like, you know, but that's not the same as like long term prosperity. But maybe they're smarter than, maybe I'm the dumb one.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  All right, take the Pepsi coup in 1973.

• 1:43:27Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  The, you know, we overthrew the government of Chile. We toppled, you know, the Ayende government.

• 1:43:33Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  You know, 30 years later, 35 years later, files were declassified that showed that the chairman of the Pepsi Cola company had lobbied the secretary of state to that, that US national interests in the form of Pepsi Cola bottling operations were going to be devastated if Ayende was allowed, you know, one, it was allowed to remain in power. And I forget if he was nationalizing some element.

• 1:44:06Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  But basically, you know, Pepsi had these bottling operations there. It was going to massively, you know, tank their capacity to produce the cans for Pepsi bottles. And so a meeting was organized between, it was like, it was, it was the CIA director at the time and, and the chairman of Pepsi Cola. Everyone can look up the Guardian article on this. Just type in Pepsi coup Chile. And so the, the chairman of Pepsi and the, the head of the central intelligence agency have a planning meeting about the best way to overthrow a government in order to preserve Pepsi's profits. And they even bring in to the meeting, the meeting minutes show, they bring in basically

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  the state department's media guy for the region who ran a web of, of print media and radio stations so that the media guy could be brought into the propaganda, you know, that was being cogenerated effectively by the CIA and Pepsi. Well, I mean, this plays out everywhere as multinational corporations.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  can benefit from US government pressure on foreign companies apply to them.

• 1:45:17Tucker Carlson?

  That's that's clearly true. I just I just I you know, I think that American business interests have a very obvious recent history of trading short term profits for long term strength, you know, selling all your industries to China at 40 cents on a dollar, you know, clearly makes a small number of people rich, but it's like it's not a long term plan for prosperity, actually.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  Well, you know.

• 1:45:40Tucker Carlson?

  There's not good at this.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  In a way, it's a miracle that this is happening because it's forcing us to confront all the related issues as we put together a more cohesive vision for US soft power, which is that that Reaganite style trickle down economics 1980s thing may have made sense when those corporations were American corporations.

• 1:45:57Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  With American manufacturing facilities employing American labor. But now these are nominally, you know, American companies, but they are but there's no there's no trickle down because it's not like that substantially increasing American jobs when they're going overseas to East Asia.

• 1:46:15Tucker Carlson?

  Jobs in the first place.

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  Right, or or it's not, you know, providing, you know, enhancing the security of our supply chains because it's, you know, it's giving more more for our factories because we don't have the factories anymore. And so Trump is doing all this in tandem, you know, he's trying to onshore things, he's trying to bring back domestic manufacturing. And some of that may be how we approach statecraft, which is that, you know, the the kinds of entities that we consider to be US national interest are the ones that, you know, have a certain amount of American investment. You know, you can't be a sort of American in name only.

• 1:46:50Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:46:51Speaker 01

  And, you know, have, you know, you know, so much of your workforce in China or have so much of your, you know, you know, operations, you know, I mean, there may be a sort of.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  We need to sort of have a cohesive vision of what national interest is if we're not going to-

• 1:47:14Tucker Carlson?

  Completely agree. I mean, companies basically owned by the sovereign wealth funds of our rivals, who are only here to benefit from our enforcement of copyright, et cetera, et cetera. No sense really, American. Why are we wrecking the world for their benefit?

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:30Tucker Carlson?

  So I just want to end on, just to get deeper, if you don't mind, into this question of the effect of our foreign policy on our domestic life. And you just can't escape the suspicion that our politics are really volatile, we're way less free than we were, in part because of, you know, methods of control refined overseas. Like, I just look back the last five years and I'm like, everything you've said about what USAID and NAD and all these other groups or the State Department are doing abroad, I'm just seeing that here. So am I being crazy?

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  Oh, not at all. I mean, there's a million direct examples of this. There's something that you've brought up several times so far around Black Lives Matter, and I feel like-

• 1:48:14Tucker Carlson?

  That was so obviously fake. Like, this armed robber porn star drug addict gets, dies of a drug OD on the street after passing, you know, a counterfeit bill and like, all of a sudden, America collapses? Come on, dude!

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  Right, right. Well-

• 1:48:32Tucker Carlson?

  And Osama bin Laden planned 9/11. I'm like, the whole thing is just too dumb for me. I can't deal with it.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  Right. No, and there's, there's a few, a few pieces to that. So first, Black Lives Matter is, you know, one of the main NGOs that serves as the Black Lives Matter clearinghouse is the TIDES Center and the TIDES Foundation. And USAID gave the TIDES Center a $27 million grant.

• 1:48:57Tucker Carlson?

  Okay, now, here, here we go.

• 1:48:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And now nominally, that grant is for the TIDES Center institutions to solicit, secure concrete investments from foreign countries on issues related to US national interest. So basically, the USAID has deputized this, you know, group that's-

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  You know, in the center of the nest around around Black Lives Matter, to secure commitments from foreign governments from a formal US government agency. They're deputized to act as a sort of long arm of the State Department and they're getting 27 million for it. And by the way, when they get, actually before before I go deeper on the the Black Lives Matter stuff, because there's a there's a lot there.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  I've been calling this the the Smith-Mundt problem for USAID, right? We had a Smith-Mundt Act from 1948 until 2013 with the modernization under Obama that effectively got rid of it, that prohibited foreign propaganda or fake news stories intended for foreign audiences from being circulated here at home.

• 1:50:02Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:50:03Speaker 01

  They got rid of that. With USAID, it's even worse because as bad as it is for propaganda, USAID has the Smith-Mundt problem for financing and operations. USAID can provide money to international institutions or to NGOs for their work abroad. But then they turn around and and now they have all this money. And they now are wealthy and powerful and deeply ingrained, highly pedigreed institutions because of all their money from state and aid and and ned. But there's nothing blocking them from also operating on US soil.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  So, you know, give an example of like, there's a, you know, this this for-profit, private sector censorship mercenary firm called NewsGuard. And got a $750,000 Pentagon contract to, you know, help the Pentagon trace the information for fingerprints of Russian missing disinformation. Okay, maybe there's a strategic interest in the Pentagon mapping out pro-Russia narratives in in regions around the world. But NewsGuard targets US citizens. NewsGuard has, you know, the the former head of NATO on its board.

• 1:51:19Tucker Carlson?

  I've I've been targeted by NewsGuard, so I know.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, of course, but.

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  They, whether or not the grant is for, like, they don't have, there's a lot of domestic censorship grants that the Biden administration gave to pump these things up domestically, like the National Science Foundation did this a lot. But in this case, it's, what you're doing is you're making the institution more powerful. You're buffering its revenues, you're padding its profit margins. So it's now more powerful to be able to take you on, even if the grant isn't for that money. Exactly. And Exactly. So it bleeds into it. And this, this happens with every institution USAID works for. And when you under, again, coming back to the fact that USAID is at the heart, you know, USAID is, is the swing player between the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon. And, and it works with all three of those. And, you know, you never know when you see a USAID program, which

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  of those three ops is being run. But you know for certain, it's one of those three. You don't know if it's to advance, you know, a stated, uh, State Department diplomacy, uh, uh, priority in the region. You don't know if it's being used in order to advance a US national security interest in the region, or you don't know if it's being used to advance an unstated State Department foreign policy goal being pursued by the CIA and it's, and it's functioning as an intelligence. And I'll give you some examples of this. In 2021, I've, I've talked about this a few times, but under Mark Milley and, and Joe, President Joe Biden, the, the first special forces, um, you know, uh, vision statement prospectus, uh, pages 16, 17, everyone

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  can look this up. It's a, it's on, it's a public doc, you know, government document you can find online. And it's, it presents a, a way to synchronize the, the psychological uh, operations and civil military affairs work that the special forces does, um, with the different organ, with, with the different, um, foreign policy agencies can play supporting roles. So they give an example of They're trying to block the Chinese from buying a port in China. And the African, I'm sorry, in Africa, the African government doesn't want to go through with it. I'll just try to make this as simple as possible. Basically, what ends up happening is the State Department can't get the African government to cooperate

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  and agree to cancel this, you know, this port construction. And so they need to buy time before the port is completed for the State Department to have more carrots and sticks, more leverage, to be able to force the African government to relent and cancel it. That is, they need more, either more appropriations and allocations to be able to bribe them with, or they need more sticks to be able to punish them with, you know, leverage from something harm that's being done that they can offer to make the pain stop. And so this is what the Special Forces document envisages, which is that the role of the Special Forces in that scenario, in the name of great power competition and Special Forces role in

• 1:54:25Speaker 01

  countering, you know, peer competitor from China. And they also argue there's a national security basis because this would give China, it was a West African hypothetical country, so it would give China access to the Atlantic. But what they did in this scenario, and they war-gamed this all out, is how they would effectively induce race riots to get the African workers to all go on strike and boycott and take to the streets and protest against the Chinese business interests. This would also devastate the country economically. It would effectively bring the, you know, it would also humiliate the Chinese business interests in the area. And so it would create this international scandal. It would scandalize the port construction and the destabilized economic state would allow the US ambassador to walk back in and say,

• 1:55:10Speaker 01

  "Hey, you know, all this pain can stop, just cancel the port construction." But what's really interesting is in the Special Forces' perspective.

• 1:55:18Tucker Carlson?

  Can you imagine writing that, like, let's incite race riots?

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  And they, well, their quote was "inflame racial tensions" or "inflame tensions."

• 1:55:24Tucker Carlson?

  Can you imagine?

• 1:55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so what they did is, I think it was "inflame tensions", but they explicitly say, you know, it's Africans versus the Chinese there. And what they did is, the role of USAID in this special operations.

• 1:55:40Speaker 01

  Scenario, literally printed, you know, by the US government, was that USAID would swoop into the scene and provide job fairs. US taxpayers would, they do job fairs in the exact region where the, you know, rioters and protesters were striking in order, because they wouldn't, the special forces concern was that the people they needed in the streets in this, you know, protest to destabilize the country would not want to, would not, were too poor to leave their jobs. They would not want to go on strike in these Chinese-owned factories and businesses. So they needed a replacement source of income. And that was where USAID came into the operation. USAID would do job fairs.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  And so the African protesters would be subsidized to do that protest, street protest destabilization activity, and don't need to worry about whether or not, you know, it's going to cost them their jobs because they're now on the payroll of USAID. And, but that was a special forces operation. And, and you see this, you see this with everything USAID does. But, you know, to come back to this, you know, thing on, we were talking about, I guess, BLM and some of this domestic, you know, foreign thing is,

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  sorry, if you want to draw down that and ask me a question. But what I'm saying is USAID plays this military role as well, with support assistance.

• 1:57:09Tucker Carlson?

  But I mean, treating US citizens like you would treat foreign enemies or adversaries is something I never imagined would happen, but it is happening.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  Well, because once, when they defined populism as a threat to democracy, because it undermines public faith and confidence in democratic institutions, they were able to effectively categorize the sitting president of the United States as an attack on democracy and Good thing we're democracy promotion programs because that we are the white blood cells in of the immune system to stop, you know, the virus of threats of democracy.

• 1:57:46Tucker Carlson?

  So of course, you know, populism is democracy, a demand for majority rule.

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:50Tucker Carlson?

  But yeah, okay.

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  No, of course, but they say, you know, we need democratic institutions to provide the bumper cars to stop demagoguery.

• 1:57:56Tucker Carlson?

  Can I just ask you something like, so Nina Jankowicz famously was, you know, played a censorship, domestic censorship role, absurd, absolutely absurd figure, like, pulled from TikTok, but human. She gets fired because people are like, who is this woman? And she winds up at USAID.

• 1:58:13Speaker 01

  Well, she winds, she winds up at the Center for Information Resilience, which is a, which is a London-based, it's basically a British statecraft organ. She had to file a FAR registration. She became a registered agent of the United Kingdom for, you know, for her.

• 1:58:29Tucker Carlson?

  But they're recipients of USAID money, aren't they?

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, they were, yes, recipients of USAID money. Although I believe she, I think she wrote that she left there several months ago, sometime in 2024. But the fact is, is it's still that same network.

• 1:58:42Tucker Carlson?

  But a lot of these people, I mean, not just, you know, being a kid in DC and you'd meet people who had served in the foreign policy apparatus and, you know, they, whatever they were doing, killing Mossadec or whatever, but they were pretty smart. I thought, I always thought, I mean, they were. It seems like the current generation is a lot of Nina Jankowicz's, like, just sort of low IQ.

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know.

• 1:59:06Tucker Carlson?

  People, like, do you know, I mean, what, what's the caliber of the people administering these programs?

• 1:59:13Speaker 01

  Well, I actually think there's, there's, there's layers of sophistication to Nina and.

• 1:59:19Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, is that true?

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do, I do think so. And I don't have any personal experience. I mean, she's written a lot of.

• 1:59:29Speaker 01

  Not flattering things about me and you know and I've pointed out the what I consider to be massive you know conflicts of interest when you know the the entire field of professional internet censorship that is you you get paid you pay your mortgage with paychecks that come from your job censoring the internet I mean I fundamentally I fundamentally do not believe that that Nina's field that you know this this you know disinformation of you know censoring citizens in our own country and leave aside you know the sort of you know maybe more nuanced issue about whether there's a role of countering foreign propaganda and how robust that is the fact is is you know what was done here was just to like

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  straight up saying that domestic misinformation is a threat to democracy and so the US government should be you know should be had played the task of of censoring its own its own people through this whole society network but you have I mean there's so fundamentally I don't believe that that job should exist and it is you know part of what I consider to be my my purpose in life to try to bring freedom to the internet and to the extent that that that field exists as a profession you know that is those those two things are in conflict and then you know the the other you know part of it is the conflict of interest right when when you can see how these very censorship institutions that are being being funded by

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  USAID and so many of them are it's unbelievable I mean USAID is a formal censorship program I believe we've even talked about it before but now it's uh now I think people are starting to you know appreciate the significance of it and in fact its website just went down a few days ago and um it's it's under I believe an extraordinary amount of scandal but you know which is that these

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  USAID takes taxpayer money and creates lobbyists for more USAID. Because all the people who, it creates a conflict of interest between their own personal piggy banks and what the actual national interest of the country is. If, if, if your whole field is, is getting funding, you know, in, in significant part from USAID, well then, you, if you want to really make it in this world, you have a moral hazard, a perverse incentive to become a tiny little lobbyist to explain why it is that censoring the internet is, is, is essential to US national interest.

• 2:02:04Speaker 01

  And, and to sell a whole ideology and a whole, you know, completely different vision of what our country even is and what we're even fighting for. Because the more that our public grants and contracts, the more that our procurements, the more that the USAID piggy bank funds that, the bigger the pie of that field gets.

• 2:02:29Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  And so, but you see this in everything that USAID touches, you know, from the, from the media to the social media, to the universities, to the, to the unions, to the anti-corruption, you know, prosecutor work, to the humanitarian work around, you know, in, in drug zones and, and in, and in paramilitary zones. And, and so it's, it's, you know, I think it's what Elon would call a self-licking ice cream cone. And, uh, you know, the, the ice cream's gone bad, but with the BLM thing, it gets, it gets very strange. You know, because, because USAID is a professional rent-a-riot organizer. I mean, is, is I even, I mean, leave aside the countless documented cases of USAID rent

• 2:03:14Speaker 01

  riots from, you know, as, as we mentioned, the Arab Spring, which we, you know, we went over, the rent riots there, USAID pumped 1.2 billion dollars, you know, into the region, uh, you know, during that, during that period. We have literal USAID documents, uh, explicitly doing operational planning to create smart mobs and people to take to the streets in riots. Um, you know, you see it in Georgia, you saw it in Belarus in, in 2020, it's, anytime there are-

• 2:03:42Tucker Carlson?

  What about Minneapolis?

• 2:03:43Speaker 01

  Well-

• 2:03:45Speaker 01

  This is where it gets interesting in the role of these foreign policy institutions and their domestic, you know, things. So there's one other, so I want to mention one quick adjacency before we go into that, which is around USAID funding to the Tide Center, which I mentioned, you know, has this Black Lives Matter adjacency. But the Tide Center is also the fiscal sponsor of a group called Fair and Just Prosecutions, which is the central group that manages, at least according to reports from, I believe, Daily Wire and write-ups in the, I think it was Federalist and such, but I believe it was a Daily Wire investigation, based on Media Research Center report, that Fair and Just Prosecutions is,

• 2:04:30Speaker 01

  you know, bill themselves as sort of left-wing progressive criminal justice advocacy group. And they, Media Research Center published a long report, you know, essentially saying that they were the managing control group of Soros prosecutors, because what they do is all these Soros, now they don't fund the Soros, they don't fund the election campaigns of the, at least to my knowledge, of the Soros prosecutors like the Open Society Foundation does. But what they, what they do is, they, they fund, they manage, you know, they get the prosecutors, the Soros prosecutors to sign pledges about what they're going to, you know, what they're not going to, you know, to not enforce certain laws that are

• 2:05:12Speaker 01

  on the books in the region. You know, they pressure them to prosecute certain political targets. They give them social media hashtags and talking points. They help write their press releases. They meet with them every, you know, every week and, you know, they, they're, it's, you know, prosecutors, you know, at least according to this reporting, which has some pretty damning, you know, inside documents to, you know, to make this case. But you basically have prosecutors being managed by this shady NGO who is effectively, you know, puppeteering these

• 2:05:50Speaker 01

  Prosecutors who are dependent on continued funding for their election campaigns and continued election funding for their future careers, you know, what's, you know, AG Attorney General is, you know, the joke is, you know, it's short for aspiring governor because, you know, this is, you know, the, so it's a path. You want to cultivate these donor networks forever. But the Tide Center, which gets $27 million from USAID just on basically, you know, two grants alone for the foreign work, is the fiscal sponsor of FJP, the, this group that is, you know, liaising with, you know, all these prosecutors and securing these pledges.

• 2:06:28Tucker Carlson?

  Why, can I just ask one, let me just ask a final question. Um, just to kind of, so from everything you've said, um, and particularly your point that the grants haven't stopped, the staff has gone, they've been Twitterized, but the money's still flowing and it's just going to move to the State Department, which oversees USAID anyway. Um, you need some way to stop the poison that they're inspiring overseas from coming in here. Why, why couldn't you just get a variety of the Smith Act again, that said, there's like no destabilization effort, there's no society changing effort, there's really no effort that we project abroad that can be brought here?

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  That's what needs to happen. For example, you can't share the same corporate entity. You can't, you shouldn't be able to, you know, if you're, I mean, imagine if Raytheon, who is paid by the US military to drop deadly lethal, you know, munitions clusters on foreign countries and, and your professional job is killing people. And they were getting billions of dollars from the US Pentagon and they, they opened up a, you know, a Raytheon, you know, and Raytheon started creating a new line of business for domestic countering misinformation projects, where they, where they monitor the internet for COVID skepticism or, or, you know, climate change, you know, denial.

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  You would look at that and you would say, Raytheon is getting paid by the military to kill people overseas. And I know their grants, you know, their, their, their contracts with the Pentagon are not for that work, but they have more muscle and money to play with. They're being pumped up by steroids administered overseas.

• 2:08:03Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  I mean, you saw that with the Bangladesh case too, by the way, you know, the, when the, the person who is now the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Bangladesh after the coup, by the way, the, the new, the new head of state there is a Clinton Global Initiative fellow, but the, the, the, the foreign minister was brought in by USAID for, for formal training on countering misinformation. And you know who, uh, who led that? It was a, another, you know, State Department, USAID contractor, a, a group called Politifact. It was the executive director of Politifact who does, you know, who writes hit pieces on you and me that were conspiracy theorists for talking about January 6th or whatever. And they are acting as an

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  instrument of statecraft to, uh, you know, to get money from our paychecks to do international work to, to, to train foreign journalists and foreign ministers, uh, how to censor or, or stop, you know, the spread of information the State Department doesn't like. But now they're, now their margins are padded by that.

• 2:09:04Tucker Carlson?

  Well, and that's the point is that the things that we do abroad affects us here. We're paying the Ukrainian government and they're assassinating people, like literally assassinating people, trying to assassinate American citizens, fact, selling weapons to the drug cartels in Mexico, fact. And you end up like wrecking your own country with the things that you do abroad.

• 2:09:24Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I'll tell you what we did in the financing space. And I remember being a corporate lawyer and watching that evolve and, and play out. Yeah, we, we had things like, you know, these anti, we had anti terrorist financing, you know, OFAC style laws that prevented laundering, you know, and.

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  Even if you could technically do it, you didn't want to risk it because there were criminal penalties for doing it.

• 2:09:49Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 2:09:49Speaker 01

  And there were financial penalties.

• 2:09:51Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  And so in something like this, imagine if the grantees had to pay treble damages in the amount of their grant if they tripped one of those foreign domestic firewalls. If they had to, if their grant was for $30 million and they have to pay, they're liable for up to $90 million if a US court finds that they violated the USAID Smith-Munt Act. I mean, this is something that Congress could put in, you know, put in today. I mean, you could, you could add criminal penalties, but you need, right now, there's no penalty whatsoever. The only penalty is that, is that people might find out and it might cause a political

• 2:10:31Speaker 01

  scandal and it might make the USAID grant coordinator less likely to give you the next grant in the future. Where's the clawback? Where's the, where's the restitution damages? You know, people shouldn't maybe even be able to sue the US government body administering the grant for failing to do oversight of the NGO receiving that money. You might create a cause, a private cause of action against the State Department or whatever new form USAID costs. That can be done legislatively and the message that, I mean, first of all, that would, that would go a huge distance to being able to deal with this problem because you're going to have this problem whether USAID exists as an outside, as an independent agency or

• 2:11:14Speaker 01

  whether the State Department just inherits a USAID herpes infection and just lives with it inside the agency.

• 2:11:20Tucker Carlson?

  Mike Benson, you go on forever. It was your reporting, your dogged, single-minded, almost monomaniacal, I will say, effort to, to bring, you know, to, to public view this web that I think started all of this, so.

• 2:11:37Speaker 01

  Well, and you.

• 2:11:40Tucker Carlson?

  It is a vindication, by the way. I know you have mixed feelings about it and you're worried about the whole edifice collapsing, which is a fair concern, but I do think, you know, anyone who called you a nutcase has to apologize at this point.

• 2:11:53Speaker 01

  Thank you for saying that and it wouldn't have been possible without you as well. I do just want to clarify, I, I. It's, I don't believe that I have mixed feelings. I actually, I 100% endorse directionally and technically everything that I've seen so far. But I, I appreciate the weight of the moment and that you are dealing with something much more delicate than simply, you know.

• 2:12:16Tucker Carlson?

  Stopping the trainee dance contests.

• 2:12:18Speaker 01

  HUD turns up a couple billion dollars worth of waste, fraud and abuse in the city of Chicago and it's a, it's a local issue and it's a, it's a big scandal. We're, I, I feel an obligation to, to help midwife this and, and, but I totally support it and I just, to me, the, it's, it's reflection rather than, rather than hesitation.

• 2:12:42Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it sounds like you're on the side of US interests abroad, which exists. We do have interests and we should protect them jealously, I would say.

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  But America first.

• 2:12:51Tucker Carlson?

  Amen.

• 2:12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:53Tucker Carlson?

  Mike Pence, thank you very much.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tucker.