EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,313 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- NANarrator
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays)
- MBMike Benz
Joe, hello.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mike, good to see you.
- MBMike Benz
Great to see you Joe.
- JRJoe Rogan
I've been looking forward to this one.
- MBMike Benz
Me too. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) All night, I was like, "Woo-hoo, tomorrow's gonna be a good one." For you, um, it must've been very exciting to have the vault opened, and to get a, a peak into the machine, 'cause you've been describing this. Th- the last time you were on the podcast, you went into depth about USAID, and it's very curious why they chose USAID as the first organization for Doge to investigate, 'cause it seems like they were the ones that resisted the most.
- MBMike Benz
Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, the joke that I tell here is it's, it's like what they tell you to do your first day of prison is, you go in, you walk up to the meanest, baddest SOB, and you punch them right in the mouth. I mean, that's basically what's happened here with the White House's first target being USAID, 'cause USAID opens up the entire world of the blob, or the foreign policy establishment, and its weaponization of what are supposed to be foreign-facing Department of Dirty Tricks operations against domestic opponents.
- JRJoe Rogan
And when it all got opened, and you started to see the numbers and the different organizations and NGOs that were getting them, was anything surprising to you, or was this all what you expected?
- MBMike Benz
No. N- in fact, I think w- we're at the tip of the iceberg, and what people are going to see on this is going to completely reorient their mental map of how they think the world works, uh, how they think American power projects into the institutions, um, and I think the calls for reform are going to get louder and louder as people realize the, the reality that's been constructed around them, um, is, is downstream of something that was started very long ago, when, when American statecraft to manage the American empire for the benefit of the American people, um, began to warp and distort every institution in American life, from the media, to now, the social media companies, to the unions, to the universities and academics, uh, to the NGOs and think tanks, to the prosecutors, to our conception of terrorism, uh, to our conception of, uh, activity in the drug trade, uh, to, uh, our e- every... you know, w- what, what we're really doing with public health programs, and, uh, and the medical establishment, and what drives that, uh, you know, all the way into poverty relief, and, and you name it. I mean, every institution is instrumentalized by this apparatus, supposedly to help us, but really starting... This has been done in US history before. This, this happened against the left, against the Democrats in the 1960s and '70s when the CIA and, and, uh, you know, to an extent, its sister orgs like USAID and whatnot were pumping money, uh, into domestic politics to stop the anti-Vietnam War movement. And this led to the reforms of the late-1970s, the Church Committee hearing, the Pike Committee, the Pike Committee hearing, the establishment of a Senate Intelligence Committee and House Intelligence Committee for oversight, but, uh, even that was a, was a very small glimpse i- into the window. The a- the analogy I- I give here is, like, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, you know, the Chronicles of Narnia where there's this whole cinematic universe. You're, you're living in this house, and you, there's this closet in the back of the, you know, of a wardrobe, and if you never walk through it, you never see that whole world. You can live your whole life without seeing it, but when you open that door and you step into it, you see there's an entire other universe here that's, uh, been right next to you this whole time.
- JRJoe Rogan
When you first started working for the State Department, do you had, d- did you have any inclination that y- you were gonna get involved, and did you have a- any inclination that this was going on? Like, did you know already that there was-
- MBMike Benz
Yeah, definitely.
- JRJoe Rogan
You, you already knew?
- MBMike Benz
Yeah, definitely. I had already been working on this for many years, um-
- JRJoe Rogan
When did you first discover it?
- MBMike Benz
Around August 2016. Uh, I, I was, I was deeply passionate about the internet censorship issue, um, and, you know, I had, I had some weird experiences playing chess as a kid, where, you know, I sort of came of age when Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue and AI took over, uh, you know, t- really, t- w- took the spirit out of a lot of, uh, a lot of the chess world, and it was a- apparent to me as a kid that these AI censorsh- th- these AI chess engines were going to out-compete humans, but when I was young, the sort of older people in the room were in denial about it. And when I saw that same thing in 2016, with the, the, the development of AI censorship super weapons, you know, I, I, I call those weapons of mass deletion, that they would be like weapons of mass destruction, but for speech. You know, a few lines of code would allow you to destroy entire political movements, governments, narratives. Uh, there'd be no escape from it. We would permanently change the face of political warfare or, um, domestic politics. Uh, you don't need a standing army of 100,000 censors if you just have one, you know, machine learning, uh, you know, e- a- uh, just i- ingested, uh, database, you know, of 900 million tweets that you can ingest and then make this sophisticated narrative network map of all the different keywords and, and concepts you wanna censor, and to me, that was, that was like the, this, this free speech version or the censorship version of the atom bomb. So I started, I started that quest in, in 2016, but very quickly, that research and the process of, of trying to, trying to write that, um, showed these international networks immediately. I mean, the, the NLP, the natural language processing sort of backbone of this was, was all being sponsored by DARPA, and, uh, to be able to monitor the speech of ISIS or extremist or terrorist groups, and when I saw that coming home, and being advocated here, I...I dug i- I spent my whole day, morning, noon, night, 20 hours a day basically, chronicling, archiving. That's how I know so many of these characters is 'cause I feel like I, I know them better than my own friends and family, having spent so many years watching this all, you know, um, develop.
- JRJoe Rogan
What did it feel like being one of the only people that was sounding the alarm for essentially eight years? Like, you get involved in 2016, and no one even... The, the general public, until you came on this podcast, I don't even think were aware that this was an issue at all. But even then, things got lost so quickly in the cycle of news, things just come and go so quickly. Until, Doge started-
- MBMike Benz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... unraveling all the spending-
- MBMike Benz
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and you start seeing things like $200 million allocated to transgender experiments on monkeys.
- MBMike Benz
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, what the fuck?
- MBMike Benz
Yeah. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, this is crazy. And that's just the tip-
- MBMike Benz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... of the iceberg. And, and then the NGOs, and then that map of 50,000 NGOs-
- MBMike Benz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... that was essentially just Democratic propaganda-
- 15:00 – 30:00
Is that the 2011,…
- MBMike Benz
organized political warfare, and what he said is, "We need to create a covert apparatus to hide what we do from the- from the rest of the world to do secret political warfare on the low, and the problem is, is the American people are not gonna like this. The American people, uh, do not understand the intricacies of international relations. They think there's always an easy political cure-all, and they do not underst- Uh, they, they think there's a fundamental difference between peace and war." And what he proposed is, uh- And this is just two months before this, before this would formally be given to the CIA to do, but at the time what he said was, "This was- this worked gangbusters in Italy. We need to replicate this everywhere. We need to create a capacity to do black propaganda, to do economic sabotage, demolition." There's a whole list of what's authorized under NSC 10-2. And, and what he says is, "You know, the American people are not necessarily gonna like this, and we're gonna need to effectively hide what we do from them because if they find out, then the rest of the world finds out. If we're trying to run an operation in Eurasia and we report this in US News, well, then any p- person in Eurasia who reads US News now knows about it." And so, that was authorized at the time with s- uh, simultaneous with the Smith-Mundt Act, which I'm not- Are you familiar with the Smith-Mundt Act?
- JRJoe Rogan
Is that the 2011, 2012 thing where Obama allowed people to use propaganda against United States citizens?
- MBMike Benz
Yeah, that was- What was done then under Obama was the- was the, uh, effective repeal of it. It was called the Smith Mund- Modernization Act. Um, but the modernization got rid of the whole purpose of it, the, the fire- the firewall, because at the time, the media and media control was seen as, as the linchpin crux of winning the Cold War, piping in pro-US, uh, media influence to- so that the- Because everything moved after World War II from kinetic warfare and military occupation. You know, we used to militarily occupy the Philippines, for example, after we won the Spanish-American War, but that was- that was banned under international law, territorial acquisition by military force in 1948. So, we had to win elections, and, and we had to influence the, the passage of laws in foreign countries by having an apparatus inside those countries that influenced the hearts and minds of people, which influenced who they voted for, which then determined the government. So, you had to move towards political vassalage rather than military occupation. And what the Smith-Mundt Act did is simultaneous with the creation of this in 1948. Congress recognized the Frankensteinian monster they were creating by authorizing a covert, permanent department of dirty tricks, and this is their phrase, not mine, uh, to do this cloak and dagger to in- to- to infiltrate and, and co-opt the universities, the unions, the media, the politicians, the judges, the whole swarm army. You know, what I have been calling for a long time, the USA Truman Show, because it's- you know, these people in these foreign countries have no idea, you know, how many, how many of the things they interact with that are effectively a- a movie set being constructed by the US State Department and its sister influence orgs. But the point that I'm getting at here is the, the Smith-Mundt Act in 1948 said, "Okay, you guys can do this."... State Department can to do this, CIA can do this, USAID, when it came along 13 years later, could do this, but we c- w- a- so there was a guy named Frank Wisner, who was known as one of the godfather figures of the CIA. He's known for creating what was called the Wisner's Wurlitzer, which was a ... it's like a church organ. And, eh, that he would brag that he could play the international media like a symphony-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- MBMike Benz
... to make any media narrative go viral in any country on Earth, because of the, the suite of CIA proprietary media functions, and its ne- and its distribution network, especially when the US had first mover advantage in radio, in print. It's basically the US and UK were the o- the only games in town, really, in having robust radio, film, TV, and print media. So the Smith-Mundt was d- said, "Okay, you can do that abroad. You can plant fake news stories in France. You can, uh, you know, you can, uh, have propaganda blare into Africa or Western Europe or Central Asia, but that can't come home. You can't psyop our own people with your propaganda organ abroad." Because the whole point of authorizing this is that we get cheaper gas, we get import/export markets. You know, we get a high standard of living because if a foreign government doesn't want to give up its resources or allow a US military base or, uh, allow joint partnerships or, or exports of, of goods or US multinational corporations to operate there, then the American people suffer economically. So it was always designed to say, "Listen, you can do this dirty stuff abroad, but it can't come home." W- we've e- and even that protection, which, which lasted for s- 70 years, and only ... we only lost it a decade ago. Um, we're up against a much, actually deeper, darker problem with this USAID scandal, and as people will see increasingly, the, the scandals that will break open at the Pentagon and the State Department, which is that we have a Smith-Mundt problem for funding and operations. It's not just propaganda. Uh, the blob, our foreign policy establishment, can fund groups that, uh, effectively work with prosecutors domestically, or that, uh, or that work at media, you know, dual, sort of dual use. We, we give them foreign grants to do media propaganda abroad, but they operate here. Or social media censorship, eh, to coerce foreign countries to pass foreign censorship laws that explicitly and are intended to attack US social media companies and, and US peer-to-peer speech. So we need that protection, uh, if we're going to keep this function at all. We need a hard firewall and absolute grotesque penalties for any violation.
- JRJoe Rogan
So when you're watching all this unfold, one of the things that I've been seeing is that there's been legal action to try to halt some of it. Uh, they've been told to destroy any information that they got from certain databases. Like, what's, what's your take on this and what, whether any of that is gonna hold up?
- MBMike Benz
Oh, 100%. Uh, well, 100 ... I don't know if it's gonna hold up. I think it's gonna be a, a legal dogfight. This is ... You know, it's funny, 'cause it's sort of a, a circular dragon eating its own tail, uh, because y- you're going after the s- the, the primary soft power projection organ of the blob because it's been weaponized against Americans, but what is the blob authorized to do? What, what is USAID authorized to do under statute? Well, something they call judicial reform, which is USAID, uh, poaching, uh, funding financially the networks around judges, around, uh, around courts, around the legal system, around the governance structure of every country on planet Earth. I mean, an- and Jamie, if you wanna just go through a fun exercise right now, you can even put on screen just a simple Google search so people can see just how open source this is, and I, I can walk through specific damning examples of this. But if you just type in, on Google, the word USAID and then, in, in a Boolean, quotes, "judicial reform." And what you're gonna see are, you know, basically 100 countries that USAID is going after the judges, going after the legal system in, uh, in order to rig the scales of justice in favor of the foreign policy establishment's interest there. And this has, this has fully come home, and I can, I can go through some examples of this. For example, there's, um, there's, uh, a group, a group called the OCCRP, which, uh, is, you can just think of as the Corruption Reporting Project. The, uh ... This is a group that, eh, half of its funding comes from USAID and the US State Department. Uh, OCCRP has to sup- has to ... Eh, eh, th- USAID and the State Department have a veto right over the staff that it can hire. This is the largest consortium of investigative journalists on planet Earth. This is, this is the group that broke the Panama Papers, you know, that got all these hacked documents. They got special access to it. I don't have any facts on this. I'm simply noting that it's an oddity that, uh, a, a, a group funded by a major CIA funding conduit, USAID, uh, while the CIA has the ability to hack, you know, any target around the world that's authorized, uh, by the National Security Council, you know, there's ... They're getting these s- special access documents, uh, that are reportedly either hacked or leaked, and they're being sponsored by, you know, the group that's connected to something with a hacking power. But I, I, I don't know that for a fact. I'm simply noting that for investigative purposes, for, uh, uh, oversight bodies who may wanna ask questions. But-They, uh, so they, they've won hundreds of awards. They've, their, their name has been, you know, so pristine for so long. They've been around for, you know, almost 20 years, and they were sponsored in order to do... They do investigative hit piece journalism about corruption. And what they do is they go after all of the State Department and USAID and DOD's opponents in the region. So for example, Jamie, I, I texted you this beforehand, but if the first thing you wanna put on screen are the first two images that I texted you. This is from the usa.gov website, and I think this will shock people, uh, uh, w- when, when they see this, uh, on, you know, with the usa.gov URL right there. And so that you can, you can see how... Yeah, so if you go, if you go to the, the, the first page that I texted, that I texted you, and then we'll, we'll, we'll get to this one.
- JRJoe Rogan
This is the first thing you sent me.
- MBMike Benz
Okay, I'm sorry, the second one, then? Yeah, okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
(clears throat)
- MBMike Benz
So here it is. This is USAID's Strengthening Transparency and Accountability through Investigative Reporting program, okay? (smacks lips) What you'll see here is you'll see the life of, of activity. This fund is, they are still being funded through this grant, and this is for Europe and Eurasia, and y- you'll see the countries, Eastern Partnership, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Western Balkans. If you scroll down, you'll see USA spending, USAID spending, USAID funding is $20 million, uh, $20 million that our taxpayers paid to ev- now, listen, they don't report on, you know, kittens, uh, being saved from falling out of trees. Everything they do is a hit piece about an instance of corruption that can be used by prosecutors in the area to arrest the political opponents of the State Department, and what you'll see here is capacity. Now, this is the phrase everybody has to know. Capacity building is what this is all billed under. That means pumping up the blob's assets. Whenever you see the word capacity or capacity building, it means, "This thing is useful to us. The more money we give it, the more powerful they are to project our influence." And so, so if you, if you scroll, if you go back to th- that, that page, which is page two of this USAID, uh, thing, here's what you see. So for $20 million of, of investment from, from USAID, here are the... And this is live on, on the website. You can find this in the Wayback Machine right now because the USAID website's down. This is, this is USAID, the US government bragging about the achievements of what they achieved by spending $20 million. F- uh, at least 4.5 billion in fines levied against targets of these hit pieces. Now, by the way, I should note that the head of the OCCRP was busted in a, in a major documentary that has very little distribution but I encourage everyone to watch, where he said, uh, because this was, this was, uh, this was, uh, uh, a, I think a year and a half ago or whatnot, but it was, they're up to over $10 billion now. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
What's the documentary?
- MBMike Benz
Um, it's, uh, it, it's on the WikiLeaks X page right now. It's by, uh, a group of, of German, uh, uh, journalists who had one-on-one interviews with the, the head of this group, OCCRP, as well as the USAID grant coordinator and others. And so it's straight from the horse's mouth, and they, they say, uh, he says in that interview, I believe his name is Drew Sullivan, um, that it's now over $10 billion, and he brags that that is a, uh, I think he said it was a 20,000% return on investment because all these dollars were, quote, "returned to government coffers." So for $20 million of, of mercenary media for the state, state sponsored hit pieces, uh, the government's got $10 billion back. That's pretty g- that's a, that's a 1995 Amazon level, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- MBMike Benz
...return on investment. But now let's get into the darker stuff. Five hundred and forty-eight policy changes by the government or actions by civil society and the private sector. Now, we don't know if these policy changes are good or bad. Do you think USAID would, would list them as accomplishments if they were not in furtherance of USAID's or the State Department's foreign policy goals in the region? What they are, are saying and, and trying to sort of, uh, speak through their teeth as they say it, is that they proudly sponsored hit piece journalism to ruin people's lives and go after political targets in order to ch- in order to change the policies of foreign governments from the inside. Now, it goes on to say 21 resignations and sackings, including of a pr- president and prime minister. Now, uh, uh, the head of OCCRP in this documentary openly says that, that their reporting caused, I think it was five or six different governments to topple and turn over and be transitioned, proudly. So, so this is state sponsored media hit pieces so that prosecutors can arrest presidents and prime ministers to regime change their government and install a more pro-US, uh, political vassal figure in the region. And then the last one is 456 arrests and indictments, and this, again, is listed as a USAID achievement. We don't know what these people did. We don't know, you know, whether they're, whether they're guilty or innocent or whether or not these were political prosecutions like you see right now wi- with the New York District Attorney's offices, which is a whole nother USAID-connected can of worms. But these are state sponsored hit pieces for hire in order to get the j- give the Justice Departments, the prosecutors in a region the ammunition to arrest the enemies of the state. The prosecutors don't have the capacity to do a whole investigative journalism dig. They might not have access to hacked documents that, for example, the CIA, the NSA, or deeply connected political insiders might be able to give to a group like OCCRP. Now, now, USAID gets a veto right over who they can hire. OCCRP
- 30:00 – 45:00
This episode is brought…
- MBMike Benz
has to submit an annual work plan to, to, uh, to be submitted to and reviewed for approval by the State Department and USAID, and, and here's the kicker of it all. USAID dug up... uh, I'm sorry. OCCRP...... paid for by us, US taxpayers, dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani's work in Ukraine. This is 'cause, you know, this was part of the 2019 impeachment and, uh, you know, Rudy Giuliani and his work in Ukraine. So, they went and d- and dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani, a domestic US citizen and high profile political figure, actually attorney to the US president. And then that dirt came home and was used as part of the basis for the 2019 impeachment of the sitting president, Donald Trump. That would've never happened unless USAID sponsored that, those, you know, that hit piece work. Uh, and then they did the same thing with Paul Manafort, because... And it's the same foreign policy blob that went after Trump in the first place, because of his foreign, his difference in foreign policy vision around Ukraine, Russia and other major-
- JRJoe Rogan
This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. People like to throw around all these red flags. You know, things someone says or does that you don't like, which is fine. But instead of focusing on the negative all the time, why don't we focus on the positive? If you're looking for a romantic partner, think about what traits you like to see in a person. If you like to work out and stay in shape, you might wanna find someone who's also health-conscious. Or if you like to travel, you probably wanna find someone who's just as adventurous. Now, once you're in a relationship, it's a whole different ballgame and things aren't always going to be perfect, but that's what therapy is for. Therapy is an excellent way to work through any problems, even the small ones. Like, say you and a loved one have been fighting a lot lately, but you still really wanna make things work. Therapy can serve as a mediary. It can help you identify the problem and teach you positive ways to address it. If you're new to therapy or wanna try something different, BetterHelp is a great place to start. It's convenient and affordable since everything is done online. It's already helped over five million people worldwide connect with a credentialed therapist. Discover your relationship green flags with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/jre to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, .com/jre.
- MBMike Benz
Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
The, the law affair against Giuliani is interesting. Like, w- what is, what is the case that he lost? It was in Georgia and he was accusing these women who worked at this, uh, election facility of something, some impro- impropriety, right?
- MBMike Benz
Right. This is a different case than that because that, you know, this was really the 2019 impeachment and all the Ukraine kerfuffle around the, you know, the quid pro quo call, allegedly, that, uh, President Trump made to President Zelenskyy. Which, by the way, we should get to USAID's role in the pros- in the Joe Biden quid pro quo side of this, uh, in a second. But, um, that case, I believe, related to two workers, uh, in Georgia. And it was related to the whole investigation of election fraud and, uh, and whether or not, you know, there may have been fraud, uh, you know, perpetrated in the, uh, in, in the, in the Georgia election in, I believe it was either 2021 or it may have been, um, I'm sorry, the, 2020. Um, I'm, I'm not... That, that case, I have not, I'm not deep in the weeds on but I, I have to say this as well. A- and Jamie, if, I don't know if, if, if the whole audience is familiar with this clip, but it's a, it's, it's an inc- credible scandalous clip. Do you remember when, when Joe Biden was at the Council on Foreign Relations-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- MBMike Benz
... and, um, and bragged-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- MBMike Benz
... that, uh, he got the top prosecutor in Ukraine, uh, fired by the Ukrainian government because he explicitly conditioned the firing of the prosecutor-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- MBMike Benz
... who was investigating Burisma. Uh, h- he expressly conditioned the, their receipt of a billion dollars in, in US financial assistance on the firing of, uh, Viktor, of Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor. And he said, and, "Well, son of a B-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- MBMike Benz
... "he was fired." And, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's... It's so crazy watching him brag about that publicly.
- MBMike Benz
We-
- JRJoe Rogan
It just shows you what an idiot he is.
- MBMike Benz
But you know what that billion dollars in financial assistance was? It was a USAID grant.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- MBMike Benz
Yeah, it's the carrots and sticks and it's like-
- JRJoe Rogan
Find that video, Jamie-
- MBMike Benz
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... 'cause it's a, it's a shocking video.
- MBMike Benz
And-
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause it just, the hubris that, and the ego that someone has to have to speak of this publicly while it's being filmed, not just publicly-
- MBMike Benz
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... not just in a room, not, not even just saying it out loud, but saying it in front of the Council on Foreign Relations' backdrop.
- MBMike Benz
And actually, before you play this, can I make one quick note for the audience-
- JRJoe Rogan
Sure.
- MBMike Benz
... so everyone can look up publicly? Um, the Council on Foreign Relations was... I'm just gonna, about to text Jamie another thing related to this that's, that w- I'm gonna pull up the USAID grant so that everyone can see this billion dollar USAID grant that he's referring to here and what's in the grant details. But when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, running the State Department that USAID answers to, right? It's, USAID is independent, but guided by the State Department, 'cause it's a State Department function. It has to advance US interests. Well, when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, um, the Council on Foreign Relations had just opened up a, a DC office. They're New York based. And she went over to them and she made a speech and she said, "Thank you, Foreign Relations, for opening up your DC office. That way I don't need to travel all the way to New York to be told what to do."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
W- we've seen- …
- MBMike Benz
connection, while Joe Biden is weaponizing, uh, it- it- it-
- JRJoe Rogan
W- we've seen-
- MBMike Benz
While Joe Biden is weaponizing USAID to, to, to protect Burisma. By the way, I should note, Hunter Biden's law firm actually pitched using Burisma as an instrument of statecraft to the State Department, because the more you capacity build Burisma, the more endogenous gas Ukraine, uh, is, is able to supply. And so that's less gas being exported into Europe from Gazprom and Russia. So they blend this ... It advances US national interests, but hey, it makes us rich along the way, so you know, it's the same reason Pfizer gets to keep all the profits, you know, for uh, you know, when, when they have, when there's a mand- a vaccine mandate, you know? They don't, uh, they say, "Well, we're just rewarding, you know, this is ... We're doing such good work." Well, why aren't you ... If, if this is a charity, why aren't you giving the money back to the American people, you know, of, of ... Well, shouldn't we put some cap on this? And it's, "Oh no, well, we're incentivizing this, you know, pioneering approach, and we're uniquely in a position to do it."
- JRJoe Rogan
And what's important about this is this explains, for a lot of people that are very baffled by obvious propaganda and misinformation that's being propagated by the mainstream media. When you look at mainstream newspapers and television shows saying things that are just factually incorrect and cl- you could research it. It's not hard to find out. And you, you see them propagate this stuff. This is all the same sort of thing. But this is happening on US soil.
- MBMike Benz
Oh, exactly. Well, actually, Jamie, if you pull that receipt back up, there's a, there's a paragraph there we didn't read, but that's, that's useful to this, and then there's another topic related to this that I think makes this point even harder. But look at, look at that fourth paragraph there. This is from the US State Department, which is in control of managing all of the media assets, those 90% of media assets in Ukraine, and the ones that simultaneously operate here. I would offer that Burisma's incentive to support could plausibly read, "The main objective of Burisma was to create incentives for journalists to offer sympathetic coverage."
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- MBMike Benz
So, so-
- JRJoe Rogan
Main objective of Burisma. The main objective. And it's an energy corporation.
- MBMike Benz
Yes, yes. Humanitarian aid, uh, you know, this is a for-profit company that's directly tied-
- JRJoe Rogan
This is such a wild statement. "The main objective of Burisma was to create incentives for journalists to offer sympathetic coverage of the company on energy issues."
- MBMike Benz
Yes. Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- MBMike Benz
Right. They, they wanna pitch is as a sort of, you know, patriotic, um, you know, uh, pro, pro-Western, um-
- JRJoe Rogan
They bought the media.
- MBMike Benz
They bought the media. They bought the media.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they bought the media here.
- MBMike Benz
(sighs) On that topic, can we talk about a, a related, uh, scandal and frankly, monstrosity that the American people need to understand the full extent of its, of its influence on American hearts and minds?
- JRJoe Rogan
No, we can't talk about that.
- MBMike Benz
Okay. All right.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- MBMike Benz
Well, let's go onto the next thing then. No, I'm kidding.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- MBMike Benz
Okay. So, um, Jamie, if you, if you go to X, um, I think probably the best thread on this currently published is the WikiLeaks thread on, uh, on Internews, which just reading some of the statistics in that, will help make sense of some of the, the clips and screenshots that I'm gonna show you, um, about its operations, uh, uh, that then impact domestic affairs and, and, uh, international governments that are allied with this, with the State, uh, with the State Department. So, if you just look up Inter- just type in the word Internews, one word, I-N-T-E-R-N-E-W-S, and, uh, and, uh, you go to search on the WikiLeaks profile, you'll see, uh, uh-... yeah, here you go. If you just top, that, that top one, you know, "US AID Has Pushed Nearly Half ..." So, so this ... So Internews, I've been, I've been talking about for a long time, but, but now the stage is sort of set to really, uh, show the extent of this. But (coughs) what we do is we create these pretty little predicates, these pretty little lie words, weasel words, to hide from the American people and, and especially from foreign governments, what we're really doing in the area. So we have a catchphrase, uh, at, at, at state and in statecraft, and it's called independent media. Uh, you can think of that as the State Department's word for good guy. Okay? It doesn't mean independent. They are funded by us. They are not independent from the government. They literally submit their work and approval plans for, y- their work plans for what they cover, for review and approval, to the US State Department. They are dog walked the whole way. But we call them independent because they are said to be independent from foreign governments whom, uh, influence. So basically, they're independent from the Chinese government or they're independent from the Russian government, so there's ... Just like with the word US AID itself that we talked about last time, it's your mind playing tricks on you. You're seeing AID but it's Agency for International Development.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- MBMike Benz
So n- n- th- th- but they do the same thing with independent media, i- which is that internally, to them, it means, "It's a good guy for us because it's independent from our enemies." But it's ... But when Americans see that, they think, "Well, independent, that means it's a, a f- a free actor who's not being sponsored by any government." But under the banner of US AID's independent media and media sustainability branches, we fund half a billion dollars a year to this network of, again, over 4,000 media outlets, um, uh, reaches 778 million people, 9,000 journalists trained. Remember last time we went over the train- th- the Atlantic Council with seven CIA directors and annual funding from US AID, as well as the State Department and Pentagon, how they were holding up "I CALL BS" placards and putting Trump tweets on screen to flag for disinformation? If you remember, we went over that. Well, this is what training journalists looks like, is they, uh, is, is not only do they have the direct, uh, spawn of, of, of, m- a media octopus, uh, under their direct sub-grantee group, but they then go out and train the journalists who work at all the other ones who aren't directly sponsored. So they reach everywhere. And you'll see here, for example, it makes reference to, uh, to, uh, you know, Jeanne Bourgault who, who is, uh, you know, making a, you know, half a million dollars a year there. And if you go now, I'm gonna show this, this domestic, uh, impact real quick, and then a couple screenshots. So if you ... This is, this has been going viral on X. I've been talking about US AID's role in the censorship industry forever, and if you look up, if you just look up, uh, Internews and you just plug in the name, you know, uh, if you just copy/paste that, uh, you know, Jeanne Bourgault thing, uh, y- phrase, you'll see this in, in the video section because it's everywhere now. So, so sh- she made speeches for, for a long time but this is a, this is a, a b- a big one, um ... Here we go, this one right here. Okay. So, "US AID-Funded Internews CEO Pushes for Global Advertising 'Exclusion List' to Censor Disinformation." This is a 28-second clip.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like what they did to X.
- MBMike Benz
Yeah, exactly.
- NANarrator
Disinformation makes money and it's abso- one of the-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's right.
- NANarrator
We need to follow that money and we need to work with the, and particularly, the global advertising industry that a lot of those dollars go to pretty bad, bad content. Um, and so you can work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists or sort of really try to focus ad dollars and challenge gl- global advertising industry all around the world to focus their ad dollars towards the, the good, the good news and information, the good, the accurate and relevant news and information. Disinformation still-
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Mm. That's a good…
- MBMike Benz
know that that w- d- did, you know, did, did we... Were we duped and the crime was negligence for letting our national security state believe The New York Times reporting on, you know, on chem- chemical and, you know, and, and biological and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Or did we make that happen? Did we, d- d- did, you know, was that e- was that something that we knew was not true based on our own intelligence, but because there was a useful thing there? And, you know, a lot of people have the same thoughts about issues around, uh, around 9/11 and any number of, of crisis events. And I, I suppose I have my own thoughts on it. They're not fully settled, and because they are beyond the evidence I currently have, um, I, I, I stay in the zone of, this is what they did to create it, this is what they did to cover it up.... here are the stars in the sky, draw your own constellation from there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm. That's a good way to put it. Okay, back to what you were just about to talk about.
- MBMike Benz
Yeah. So, well- so, again, there's, there's two simultaneous tasks that I have. One is to burn down these, these rogue institutions that have been weaponized domestically and salt the earth behind them, so that these kind of excesses can never come home again. The other one is w- we do need US soft power projection in order to maintain the standard of living and prosperity that we have. You know, I, I give the example all the time, no blob, no pencils. Can't even make pencils in this country unless you depend on governments in Malaysia, and South America, and, you know, parts of Africa. And if it's- if that's the, the case in, you know, for pencils, now do that exercise with petroleum, now do th- that exercise with cobalt, for example. There's only one, there was only one operational cobalt mine in all of the US and in 2022, that, even that mine shut down, so most of the cobalt's in the Congo. If you, if the c- if the Congolese government decides they don't want to allow you access to cobalt, well there goes your capacity to, to create any high technology or renewable battery or anything. There is potentially a need for some modified and more honest restrictions on our department of dirty tricks. For example, the CIA used to be allowed to assassinate world leaders, um, in the, in the 40s and 50s. You know, this is where we got in trouble in Congo with Lumumba or, uh, you know, Allende a- and any number of these, and then when those scandals got revealed, there were legislative reforms put in place and executive branch natio- national security reforms put in place to say, "Okay, you can do dirty work, but not that dirty. You can't do that." Um, the same thing needs to be done now for all of these things, you know, many categories of things. For example, we just played Internews and the Internews CEO, um, campaigning to, uh, governments and corporations and private sector civil society organizations around the world, uh, that they need to economically blacklist, uh, news sites that, uh, that operate on social media and those are US news sites. That's, this is the basis of, of lawsuits here in the US like Daily Wire and The Federalist suing the State Department for, uh, because US news sites are in these advertiser blacklists. And, uh, to that end, I, I wanna, I wanna note two things. First, if you, if you go to my X feed and you type in the word advertiser or advertisers and if you need to, you can plug in the word US Aid or CEPPS, C-E-P-P-S in this. A- and I wanna show you that, that this is not Internews gone wrong, this is not a, a, a gr- a half a billion dollar a year grantee of US Aid going rogue and being ideological about this. This is top down US government policy from the White House, and I'll show you the documents on that, uh, to the, you know, White House executive branch agencies like US Aid and State. Uh, okay, uh, is if you, if you go to search and you put in, uh, the word adverti- advertiser, yeah, um, and it could be advertiser or advertisers. Uh, okay, so y- there you go. So click on that left, the, the left image first. This is, now we talked about this group CEPPS last time, um, you know, in, in our, in our hit a few months ago. CEPPS is a, a program that is basically a joint baby of US Aid and the State Department and is implemented by the, by US Aid's key operational arm, the National Endowment for Democracy. But this is a US Aid program on countering disinformation, internet censorship is what they do, and we went over last time, remember we played that, that two-minute video where they were openly saying that the plan is to get foreign governments to, to pass l- legal reform, pass laws and regulations to stop the spread of misinformation on US social media websites. So US, US Aid would not be able to lobby the US government to do that 'cause we have a First Amendment, Europe doesn't, oth- Brazil doesn't. But here is from an internal document, February 2021, uh, of US Aid's CEPPS program, and now this is a 97 page document, they reference the word advertiser and advertising in this document 31 times in 97 pages. So this is, and that was three years before that clip we just saw, how, how far back in motion this is, and I can go back even further that in 2017 to show you clips on that and how this network coordinated the very ad boycotts that, that Elon is subject to and that brought Facebook and Google to their knees when they folded to advertiser boycotts. There you go, "In order to disrupt the funding and financial incentive," using the same phrases that the Internews CEO did to, to disinform, "attention is, is turned to the advertising industry, particularly with online advertising." So they, so it goes on to say, "Thus cutting the financial support in the ad tech space would obstruct disinformation actors." They're not human beings, they're not Americans with, you know, m- running mom and pop shops that depend on their Facebook page to be able to promo- you know, advertise their flower business. No, they're, they're reduced to the inhuman disinformation actors from spreading messaging online. So, "The efforts being made to inform advertisers of the risks such as the threat to brand safety." So this is US Aid saying, "We gotta talk to these advertisers and say, 'Hey, you know, brand safety is really important to all your little b- all your brands. It would be a shame if you were known for putting ads next to misinformation websites like Daily Wire and The Federalist.'" And it goes on to say, "Additionally, with this data, organizations," and these are partner organizations, this group CEPPS runs, you know, is together with US Aid and, and, uh, and the State Department there, run a network of hundreds of NGOs around the world that all jointly carry this out, this is what they're sponsored to do. It says, "The aim is to redirect funding to higher quality news domains and improve regulatory and market environments." Regulatory means laws, laws, laws about this, like the EU Digital Services Act.Redirect. So this is a top-down U.S. government plan to financially re-engineer the entire economics of the news industry in order to make it so that if you spread messaging against the state, or against a sensitive policy issued by the state, you are put out of business, you cannot professionalize. You can't compete with CNN or New York Times or MSNBC. Y- just like this is what happened to Breitbart, for example, and they got caught up in this web. They lost 99% of their advertising revenue. They were going up like this. And, however you feel about Breitbart, um, this, uh, these are the, these are the plain facts of this inaction. They were a rising star in the 2016 election. Steve Bannon, who was, you know, the head of that, went on to be the, basically the top White House advisor, directly. They got crushed when 99% of their ad revenue ... They, this is why everyone's having to switch to bilking their, our own citizens to pay for it, because the natural thing advertisers would want to do, a return on investment for putting ads, you know, on, on news sites or social media, they can't do because they're getting pressure from the government. And so now look at the bottom. Now, I don't have this, but any members of Congress or DOJ, or, uh, or House or Senate Oversight, or White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, I implore you, "A few ample- examples of advertiser-"
- JRJoe Rogan
(coughs)
- MBMike Benz
"... outreach are included in Annex III." I don't have that annex. It's not, it's not available, uh, you know, from, uh, from, on the USAID website that I, that I download this from before it went down. But USAID is giving out examples of advertiser outreach, how to pressure them in order to do this. And there's much more there. If you go to the next slide, for example, you'll see this is, uh, this is, uh, they have whole categories of what USAID wants, m- uh, media companies to do, wants, wants regulatory bodies to do, wants, uh, all of its other whole-society partners to do. But here are just the first two entries from this. What can technology companies do? So this is USAID telling Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, uh, TikTok, Reddit, Twitch, eliminate the financial incentives. Nuke their ad, nuke their ad revenue if, if, uh, if we don't like what they say. What could national governments do? Again, this is our government funded by our tax dollars telling foreign governments that they should regulate ad networks to kill the ad revenue of U.S. social media websites and U.S. news entities. Like, like has been caught up in, in the advertiser database at, at state and USAID under the Biden administration. And, and there, there's a million more examples like this, but, but if you wanna go to a really crazy one, there's a YouTube video that is, is still live. It's, uh, it's, it's by Globsec. Actually, before, before I turn to that, do, do you mind if ... Am I going-
- JRJoe Rogan
No, go ahead.
- MBMike Benz
Okay. I text you ... Before... We're gonna go to this 2000 s- May 2017 Globsec video, but before I do that, Jamie, I texted you an image of, um, of a piece that, that, uh, my foundation just published. If you, um, it says 23 EU organizations drive EU censorship law. Uh, if you, uh, yeah, if you scroll, scroll up or, or actually if you scroll down, um, uh ... Oh, you know what? Actually, maybe I didn't text you. It's, uh, it's at the top of my X feed right now. And you'll, you'll see it's, uh, it might be, like, the fifth or sixth one down. But, um, yeah, just, uh, down a little bit. Let me ... okay. Okay. Right there. Okay. So, um, so ... Oh, sorry. No, the, the, it's both the one above and below that. So before we get to the one above that, let's go to the one right below that. Uh, sorry, one, one more below that. One more, one, one more. One more, more. One, one, one, one more. One more. It's, it's that one. It's, it's, yeah. See those four screenshots? Yeah. So, so we just reported this. This is 23 US-funded organizations who are all signatories or implementers, signatories to the EU's Code of Practice on Disinformation, which if, if US tech companies don't comply with what the EU, a foreign body calls disinformation, the penalties for that are losing 6% of US social media companies' global annual revenue or get kicked out of the entire EU market, which is 550 million people. So, you know, we go through this, you know, in, in this, in this here. Uh, but if you, uh, y- so not only are they the signatories to it, uh, y- who, you know, basically helped craft this thing and put the US government stamp on this, uh, but if you, if you go to, if ... You'll see they're, they're also the implementers. They're the ones who are helping define disinformation in the EU that targets US social media companies and US news s- websites. So go to the fourth one, go to the fourth, the fourth thing right here. Now this, uh, my foundation just reported as well. Um, we got access to a, a w- a White House inter-agency working group for, for information integrity. This is one of these censorship weasel, weasel phrases, weasel words. Information integrity is what you just saw in that USAID document about high c- redirecting ad revenue from high qual- high-quality news outlets to low-quality news outlets. They make that determination by determining high-integrity news and low-integrity news. So basically if they like you, they call you high integrity. If they don't like you or you're publishing a scandal or you say, "Hey, the COVID vaccines might have some problems with them. Uh, hey, there might be some issues with, you know, what happened in the 2020 election. Hey, uh, you know, what's happening with our Ukraine aid?" Low information integrity. So this phrase, information integrity, is, is, you know, one of these evolving sets of, of weasel phrases in order to do internet censorship while making it look like the r- it's just an intervention to help you. We're making the information integrity ecosystem, uh, you know, uh, uh, better so that we have a healthier, uh, information environment. Well, this is directly from the ... This was centrally coordinated from the White House. This working group has 26 US government agencies and programs participating in it. They're partnered with 14 ou- outside, um, universities as well as a whole row of, of private sector firms. USAID is one of those, by the way. USAID is a, is a contributor to this di- in the Biden administration. This was, uh, this was started in December 2021, really got the wheels turning in December 2022. But this is from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy itself, where, where it's someone from White House, the other co-chairs are from ODNI, the Director of National Intelligence, the job that, uh, Tulsi Gabbard is currently, uh, you know, campaigning for. Uh-... it- DARPA, you know, the, the Pentagon's brain, as well as the National Science Foundation, which is the civilian arm that, that funds all the censorship work. But here you have, from the Joe Biden White House itself, engagement with international partners, that this, this is three years ago, uh, uh, be- before, you know, before this thing even really kicked in, in, in, in the way that it now is, engaging with our international partners outside the U- the United States on our censorship efforts, assessing, establishing a partnership with the European Union to provide US researchers. Now, that's their cover word, that's the big lie word of all of this, you know, these, it's operations, um, but they call them researchers to make it look passive rather than active. And I can go through a million examples of that to show how deep that lie goes. With access to social media data accessible under the 2022 EU Code of Practice on Disinformation, every single one of these researchers is connected to the blob, whether directly or indirectly, they're either part of organizations that are sponsored by USAID, the State Department, the Defense Department, or their transatlantic networks in, in the UK, like the UK Foreign Office, or they are indirectly part- or they're partnered with one who is. Every single one of these. They don't just like researchers, they gotta be creden- they gotta be accredited, they gotta be credentialed, they gotta be vetted. In fact, a lot of these- their- these internal documents talk about how, you know, only basically the, the trusted in- inside web should be able to get access to this. But what they're saying is, "The US government can't pry that out of Facebook's hands. We have a First Amendment. We can't c- we can't make them subject to a code of practice on disinformation."
- 1:15:00 – 1:23:02
Jesus Christ. It's so…
- MBMike Benz
There is no legislative bill that'll pass Congress that will force them to give o- that will force Facebook to give over the, you know, the, the private messages and all the, you know, internal algorithm and, and spread of information to a random US university like a, you know, you know, pick, pick your poison, the University of Washington or, or the University of Stanford, to a random university that everything you thought was safe and secure on the platform is now, is now being given to a private, you know, university because it was crowbarred out of your, out of your, out of the platform's arms by the government. This is the sort of thing the NSA does when the NSA has, you know, uh, secret warrants forcing Facebook to, uh, compel, you know, private information about the platform for the FBI and, you know, uh, when they're doing a, a co- uh, uh, an investigation, or the NSA when they're doing a national security one. This is doing it for private actors a- and they're using foreign governments to crowbar US companies because w- we, in their eyes are unfortunately bound by the First Amendment. There's a lot more there, but I can, I can pause.
- JRJoe Rogan
Jesus Christ. It's so amazing how thorough it is, like the, the people that want to think the government is completely inept and that conspiracies aren't likely because people are l- not motivated and not very good at their jobs, like the people, same people that want to say the government is terrible. The- they're- it's filled with bloat, they don't know what they're- they're not capable of pulling off something to this- with this depth. So when you see it, when you actually see it laid out and the mechanism in which it was done through NGOs and through these other o- non-government organizations, it's kind of astonishing. It's k- it's kind of impressive.
- MBMike Benz
Oh, it is. And, and you see how it all synchronizes, just like Wisner Wurlitzer did in, you know, from 1948 through th- you know, the 1970s when form- you know, formally it was supposed to have stopped, but just, that's why I say when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID. Uh, you know, the CIA used to do this work, uh, uh, under covert action, but USAID has a, has a couple of cute tricks that make it the, the, the central warehouse for all of this. And this is why, you know, when we started this conversation, I was saying, you, you know, "You ain't seen nothing yet. This thing is gonna get so deep and it's gonna connect to so many institutions that everybody thought," you know, like, like in The Truman Show, they thought it was their best friend, you know, they thought this thing was totally independent and these were authentic conversations you're having with the cashier. And it turns out, "Oops, okay, actually you're a part of this," you know, USAID sponsor network or the state or DOD or, or intel sponsor network because this is fundamentally covert action that's being done. And when, when the, when the CIA- the CIA is subject to restrictions on the kind of covert activity it can do. Every covert action the CIA does, which is our organ for organized political warfare, you know, George Kennan himself, as well as William Casey and Colby and- a- everyone, the expressed purpose of it was to carry out the subversive side of the political struggle, s- you know, uh, and so that we'd have a mechanism for influencing, uh, foreign, you know, the foreign affairs by creating an internal what, what looks to be an organic, bl- you know, uh, grassroots, authentic network within the country, but we're actually funding and directing their actions, their actions, to, to be favorable to US interests. But where I'm going with this is USAID is- has most of the worst scandals, uh, of US statecraft and covert action in the past two decades have actually been from USAID rather than the CIA, and there's, there's a reason for this. So after the big scandals against the Democrats and, and, and liberals and anti-war groups in the, in the '60s and '70s, reforms were put in place every c- and e- and some of this goes back to the, the '40s itself, but every covert action the CIA does has to be co- has to be authorized by the president in what's called the presidential finding to take that covert action. So if the s- if the CIA senior leadership were a- were just a rogue cell that's not even at the top of leadership, but just a, a rogue desk, a rogue portfo- portfolio, a rogue network, wants to run a covert action in a region but they don't think the president will approve, or the president doesn't want to formally sign off on it in case it goes, it goes wrong...... they can walk right over to USAID, who can do the exact same thing the CIA does, except they can call it "Discreet democracy promotion" because it's not technically an intelligence agency, so it's not technically covert action. So, it doesn't require executive branch approval or foreknowledge. And they've gotten in trouble on, on, in these cases in some pretty incredible ways. Can, can I show that?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, please.
- MBMike Benz
So, let's start with, with even the whitewashed version. Go to the Wikipedia of ZunZeneo, Z-U-N-Z-E-N-E-O, just on the Wikipedia, and then we- we can go deeper on this if you want. This was a, a scandal, uh, during Obama, the Obama USAID, um, era. Now, we were running a number of, of rogue USAID operations in Cuba at the time. By the way, I have to say for the record, I'm no fan of the Cuban government. I- I, I'm- and, and I'm not even weighing in on whether it's the right or wrong thing to do, you know, in terms of regime change there or, you know, liberating people there from autocratic excess by that government. I'm simply showing the American people where your tax dollars are going and how these things are structured in order to systematically fool you and to fool Congress and to fool the White House. So, for example, so this is, this is... And, and I'll show a couple other things in a second here but it... So, this is ZunZeneo, if... Yeah, so if you just scroll up for a second, we'll start with this, right? So, it was an online social media... Can you just scroll up one second? We'll start at the top here. It was an online social, social networking, microblogging service created by USAID and marketed to Cuban users. This was a, a Twitter knockoff. See, the background of this is, this is, uh, 2009, 2014, that period, the State Department and USAID were gangbusters gung-ho on the promise of Arab Spring-style social media revolutions to topple other governments. You know, the, the Arab Spring was a Facebook revolution and a Twitter revolution. USAID pumped $1.2 billion in, you know, and we, we sponsored these activist groups and these civil society organizations to learn how to use Facebook, learn how to use Twitter, lose, learn how to use, uh, hashtags. Learn how to coordinate street protests so that everyone knows where to go, what street to show up on. You know, what kind of slogans to, you know, to use in order to create the pro-democracy, you know, predicate for it. But the problem was, at the time, Cuba did not allow US social media in. So they said, "Hmm. So they're not allowing Twitter in. How can we get a Twitter there, but without calling it Twitter, without making it look like it's coming from the US?" So, what they did is they took the exact same thing as Twitter, same user interface, same like and retweet button. ZunZeneo, uh, is, uh, is the Cuban slang word for, for hummingbird. So just, it means it's a bird. It was the, the Twitter bird, the whole thing. Um, but the whole trick about it was you have to make it look like it's coming from the Cubans if you're going to do this operation. So, what you'll see is, um, it, it began running... So this is 2010, this is right, you know, during the Arab Spring. And what you'll see is they took funds, millions of dollars of funds, that were concealed as humanitarian funds designated for Pakistan. Now, I don't know if Joe or, or the audience, if you've looked at a map lately, but Pakistan is not exactly the next door neighbor of Cuba.
Episode duration: 3:22:26
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode XPPc8OVNngg
Get more out of YouTube videos.
High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.
Add to Chrome