Kind: captions
Language: en
From the 1940s through the Cold War,
onethird of the CIA's entire budget was
devoted to media manipulation. They do
not want you thinking for yourself.
Today, the same tactics have gone
digital and are far more ubiquitous.
Former State Department official Mike
Benz joins me to expose what he calls
the censorship industrial complex. a
coordinated web of government agencies,
NOS's, and hedge funds working together
to shape narratives, silence descent,
and weaponize culture itself. And it's
not for your benefit, it's for theirs.
This interview is one of those rare
occasions where someone fundamentally
alters my mental map of how the world
actually works. So, strap in because
even if you already know Mike Benz, this
one is going to make your hair stand on
end. Without further ado, I bring you
Mike Benz.
I have always considered NOS's to be
pro-humanity philanthropies, but in
researching you, you make them sound
more like an extension of the CIA and a
way for global elites to control the
power structures of the world
essentially for maximum personal gain.
Can you explain to me what NOS's are and
how they came to be in the way that we
know them now? NOS's are essentially the
kind of stem cell of of the influence
world. They can they can take any number
of forms. They can play a wide role in
organic and grassroots movements in the
play things of billionaires uh as fronts
for intelligence and statecraftraft
operations. But they really came in into
the
in into the for of uh of statecraftraft
and intelligence work with changes to
the tax code um in the early 20th
century. And then the the role that they
played particularly in World War II when
relief agencies
uh came to play this kind of outsized
role in supplies and the supplies and
logistics for the war through uh
religious charities through humanitarian
and philanthropic uh relief. These
organizations which were philanthropic
in name uh began to be used as a way to
move behind the iron curtain uh in
during the cold war to uh to work in
South and Central America as a way to
have logistics supply lines uh run
money, run guns, run supplies
uh all over the world. And because it is
deniable under the banner of aid
and because attacking NOS's looks like a
crackdown on civil society, it's a
little bit like, you know, there was a
strange moment in the uh Israel Iran
conflict uh several months ago where you
um Iran or Hamas would have uh you know
military facilities under a hospital and
then when Israel got attacked, it turned
out a bunch of their military uh
apparatus and and structures were also
under hospitals. And so it's so you you
you don't want to attack a hospital
because that will draw a kind of uh
humanitarian outcry to the world. And so
you end up having these the things that
sound best in names end up being um the
most effective fronts for the dirtiest
deeds. Mhm.
>> Now the big thing that I really want to
understand. So I by nature I'm not a
conspiratorial guy but modern life is
pushing me more and more in that
direction. Uh there's an author named
James Burnham who's had a huge impact on
the way that I think. And his thesis is
there's always been elites. There will
always be elites. No matter what there's
going to be a small group of people that
basically control the way other people
think. All throughout human history,
they've been able to control the
narrative because they could control the
dissemination of media. Now though, in
the age of social media, we're being
asked a question, which is what's going
to happen when you lose control of the
ability to control the narrative. So the
worldview that I'm updating as I
research you is that the manipulation of
the media landscape is even more
coordinated and global than I ever would
have imagined. And um I want to figure
out if that's me sort of letting my
imagination run wild or if really we are
as a populace being intentionally
controlled at the level of narrative.
>> Well, it's always been this way since
the printing press because of just the
the cost that it took to run a media
business. It couldn't be done in an
amateur way because everyone didn't have
their own platform for free like you
have on X or Facebook or YouTube or
Instagram or Twitch or or even a blog.
And so there was a kind of elite control
over media uh because there were so
there were so few me messengers. And so,
uh, being able to consolidate control
over just a a few messengers allows you
to control all the messages. And this
was a big part of the American
influence apparatus around the world,
even even before World War II. I mean,
if you look at things like this, the
SpanishAmerican War and remember the
Maine and this is how we got an American
Empire in 1898. It was yellow
journalism. It was just a a handful of
newspapers. the William Randph Hurst uh
set, you know, was able to effectively
control all of American opinion in order
to mislead the American population
essentially into the idea that Spain had
uh you know bombed the main in in the
Havana Harbor and that this was a
military attack that necessitated the
conquest of Cuba and ended up netting us
the Philippines and
that persist. existed all the way up
through Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkan.
Again, you had a you only had three news
channels on TV at that time. You had uh
CBS, NBC, and ABC, which all grew out of
veterans from the Office of War
Information. The the Pentagon in 1941-42
centralized media effectively in the
United States as part of the World War
II effort. So all the radio stations,
all of the major uh print distribution
newspapers, journals, periodicals,
Hollywood, uh they they all ran through
the Pentagon as part of centralizing
propaganda and ensuring support for the
war as well as working with
international partners in Europe and
around the world. That that relationship
maintained itself during the cold war.
It greatly expanded actually uh as the
State Department and the uh what's now
the US Agency for Global Media, but at
the time it was CI proprietary media
organizations like Radio Free Europe,
Radio Liberty, Voice of America, Radio
Free Asia. You had things like, you
know, Project Mockingbird where you had
the CIA explicitly placing stringers and
editors on uh almost all of the major
distribution newspapers not just in the
United States but all over the world. Uh
you had the State Department's focus on
on public diplomacy and funding independ
so-called independent media outlets all
over the world. So even if they weren't
CI proprietaries, they would be
effectively on US government payroll.
That exploded after the 1960s with USID
being formed and this idea that uh you
know providing funding for media outlets
is is part of the humanitarian work of
ensuring uh you know free speech around
the world. That would come to be quite
ironic when USAD would champion internet
censorship after they too much free
speech ended up losing elections. But uh
but it's it's a huge part of it. I mean
a third of the CI's budget in the 20th
century went to media. And then you
>> Yeah, it's it's a it's a huge amount.
The world is moving from this kind of
military occupation imperial model to a
soft power influence model where
everything moves through democracy. That
is the vote of the people. At least this
is how they used to define it for 2016.
But the vote of the people uh to give
legitimacy to the government so that the
government has the consent of the
governed. And in that world, the desire
for empire is has not gone down at all.
The demand for political vaselage
control is still there. But now you
can't use guns and napalm and tanks and
tens of thousands of casualties in every
country in order to enforce that. So how
do you do it? Well, now the new
battlefield becomes hearts and minds and
influencing the electorate in every
country to make sure that they vote the
way the US state department wants them
to vote. And so that is why you have
this codery of government agencies
around the state department from the CIA
to USAD to the US agency for global
media to even things like the World
Bank, the IMF, uh the ex export import
bank, the development finance
corporation who all put their levers on
the various media institutions. For
example, oftentimes there'll be a
condition of a World Bank or IMF loan
that you must allow free and independent
media, which they define almost
exclusively as meaning pro-state
department media. At the time this was
attached to this concept of free speech
diplomacy and a way of showing that the
free world, the capitalist uh you know
inspired economically
skyrocketing United States and western
allies were a better system of
government than a closed system, a
closed society under the iron curtain or
under the the Soviet communist boot. And
so there was a real convergence between
our interests and our values. And so a
lot of this statecraftraft, this this
funding of media and support for media
pluralism uh and media freedom was tied
to our interests in that the more media
we could pipe into Romania or Hungary or
Poland uh or anywhere in Central and
Eastern Europe or in places in Africa or
Asia or Central America that were
tilting Soviet. The more funding, the
more control we would have over the
hearts and minds, the more control we
would have over their elections, over
their elected leaders, over their uh
domestic referendum in terms of whether
to allow a US military base or to go
forward with a trade agreement or allow
an American oil company or mining
company to operate profitably in the
region. And so everything is downstream
of of that. All the the the little
operations like influencing union groups
or universities or members of the
military in a country is is all
downstream of having this base of
favorability in terms of hearts and
minds.
>> If if that works and you can influence a
country enough, ours or anybody else's
through media, like if you've got Andrew
Tate and it's like, oh, he's actually
going to sway people like we've got to
shut it down. you get why people are
like that. Uh Charlie Kirk was just
assassinated again for things that he's
saying. But it's like if these things
work then it you can begin to map why
the immune system response to Andrew
Tate was so extreme. You can understand
why somebody felt like, okay, I don't
like what Charlie's saying, so he
absolutely has to be taken out. In some
ways, it's almost more distressing that
we're that easily influencable. Um but
okay so that's piece number one. Piece
number two is that at some point in the
story this stops being about foreign
policy is good for the let's just take
an American context foreign policy
American foreign policy stops being good
for Americans and it starts being good
for um the people who have an economic
interest. And so you have made what I
would say is a compelling case for um
you can think of something like George
Soros's open society as being a hedge
fund that has an NGO attached to it in
order to make sure that they get the
policies that they need. Um one, have I
understood that correctly? And if I
have, talk to me about what it means to
draft off of policy.
>> I am so glad that you picked that up.
That is such a central point. um so few
people appreciate kind of the the
magnitude and implication of that and
it's such an underdisussed part of this.
The Soros story is it's a very clean
example of of what you just identified
which is that you have the Soros
management fund which is kind of the the
flagship hedge fund private equity
alternative asset investments. These are
all the all the different um liquid and
illquid investments that the Soros
Empire makes in uh in currencies around
the world, in um in companies around the
world, in industries around the world.
And then you've got two different things
that the hedge fund rides on. One of
them is the relationship with the US
government and the other is the civil
society institutions.
And in each case, the way the the racket
works is that Soros will fund government
agencies to push things that maximize
what's best for the hedge fund and will
uh deploy this philanthropic front
through the Open Society Foundation to
push things that from the from the So
the government does the top down
influencing and then the civil society
organizations do the bottom up
influencing And it all drives profits
towards Soros Inc. which then also gives
more money to influence politicians and
more money to feed into the uh open
society network. So that you know the
the racket just keeps growing and
growing and Soros is by no means the
only one who does this. I mean there are
dozens hundreds of of of hedge fund
folks who operate this way. Now, the
second thing that you asked was about
how you can draft off policy. And this
is when I when I refer to the blob,
which is a term coined by Barack Obama's
deputy national security adviser, Ben
Rhodess, when he was trying to describe
the foreign policy establishment in
Washington that's more powerful than the
presidency. This is the Obama White
House saying there's some force here
that's bigger than us that we can't take
on. So, this is a very bipartisan thing.
uh and deliberately so but the there's I
talk about these kind of three layers to
the blob. You've got the inside guts of
it which is the state department, the
CIA,
USAID, the department of war, the you
know the export import bank, the
development finance corporate all these
foreignfacing
influence operations that are designed
to be you know best for American
interests as they as they describe it.
Then you've got underneath that the
civil society layer which is all these
interstitial partnerships between the
government and the boots on the ground,
the universities, the media
organizations, the unions, the
universities, the the members of the
legal profession, the members of the
public health profession, all their
different trade associations which will
get US aid funding and will work with
the US embassy in the region. But on top
of that, you have this donor drafter
class. And I I use that term because you
can think of it like a bike race. In a
bike race, you don't want to be first
because the person who's in first cuts
the wind uh for everybody else behind
them. So, it's more
metabolically, energetically expensive
to be number one in the bike race until
the end of the race because everybody
else gets to draft off draft off the
wind that you've cut for them. It's the
same thing for businesses, for hedge
funds, for multinational corporations
who serve as, you know, oftentimes
portfolio companies for these uh big
private equity interests. you don't want
to, let's just say you're an oil company
and there's a huge amount of oil in
Venezuela, but it's controlled by a
communist dictatorship. Now, what what
used to be done in the in the 19th
century is, you know, you had a lot of
these companies try to effectively wage
their own wars. Uh like United Fruit,
for example, would go into Guatemala and
Nicaragua and they would go in with a
mercenary army. They would literally pay
uh you know hundreds of people from
Miami and Tampa and New Orleans uh to
you know get on ships essentially and
and and they would back a military coup
themselves and then they would work with
the State Department and the War
Department for some top up protection
and diplomatic support. But what ended
up happening was is this relationship
between big business in the United
States and multinational
corporations that get their supplies
from overseas, that have their markets
overseas, that have their labor
overseas, it became more and more
important for the war department, the
state department, the intelligence
services to the the more they did for
those corporations, the more they cut
the wind for it, the more profits those
corporations would have because they
wouldn't have to do it themselves and in
many cases most cases they can't do it
themselves. When you look at, for
example, Exxon Mobile and how much it's
profited off of uh partnerships in the
Middle East or uh or oil coming out of
the the Caspian, you know, the the
Caspian basin or you look at what
happened for example in the 2014 to 2022
uh Ukraine situation, the the the
profits of Exxon and Chevron and Shell
and British Petroleum completely
exploded
uh after the particularly after 2022 uh
as the but really after the 2014 coup as
the state department led a sanctions
campaign against Russia after 2014 that
was the Maidan revolution that was the
CIA USID backed coup to overthrow the
democratically elected government in
Ukraine. Victor Yanukovich was ran out
of office as the CIA effectively ran a
January 6 operation. If if you accept
the the official story on January 6,
that was literally what was done by our
CIA and State Department. Victoria
Nuland two months before that coup uh
described how you how uh the US
government through the state department,
USAD and other government agencies had
given over $5 billion of US taxpayer
money to the very right sector groups
who ended up setting the entire Maidon
Square on fire and violently ousting the
democratically elected president out of
office. when she gave those remarks at a
US State Department event, she was
standing behind one poster for Chevron
and another for Exxon Mobile. And uh as
when Crimea broke away and the Donbass
broke away, the US State Department
through Ambassador Daniel Frerieded led
a sanctions an international sanctions
road show to cut uh Russian gas off of
off of all of Europe country by country
just cutting uh cutting off the market
for Exxon and Chevron's competitors. So
now they can't get gas from cheap
natural gas from Russia. They have to
buy much more expensive liqufied natural
gas from Houston, Texas. uh you know
paying huge huge markups but now it's a
captured market because it's enforced by
the barrel of a gun from the US war
department uh which was literally uh you
know taking the territory in eastern
Ukraine and by the US state department
which was uh
diplomatically pressuring every country
in Europe to only buy from uh you know
these multinational corporations who
would get But it's it's that way with
everything. Every business works this
way. Every industry works this way. It's
the same thing with mining, for example.
You know, George Soros is a great
example in Mongolia uh in in the mid
2000s. Um the largest copper mine in the
world was discovered in Mongolia in um
and in the early 2000s. There was a
fight over uh which mining companies
would would get the rights to this mine.
And so the US State Department, the US
Embassy in Mongolia worked with the
George Soros Open Society Foundation.
This is all in Wikileaks by the way. You
can just go to the Wikileaks cables and
just run a search for Soros or Soros
Mongolia and you can see this out right
out in the open. But the the US State
Department effectively worked on uh with
the Open Society Institute in order to
make sure that Rio Tinto got the deal
got the deal. uh essentially and got it
on favorable terms. The Open Society
Institute led riots and protests against
the Mongolian government
>> to coersse more profitable deal terms
for Rio Tinto. Well, while George Soros
has a huge long position in Riointo.
>> So, so you know, you've got street
protest movements all over Mongolia.
You've got huge amounts of money pouring
in from the Open Society Institute and
from USAID grants and US State
Department grants to astroturf this
movement. And it's it's all redounding
to the secular insular profits of the
largest donor to the Democrat party. I
mean, Soros has gave $100 million to the
Democrats last election cycle. The
second largest donor is 40 million.
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And now, let's get back to the show. Um,
is it true that there's documentation on
like literal documentation on how to
launch a street uprising?
>> Oh my god, there's Where do you want me
to start? There's an entire field. It
It's not just like a document. I mean,
it's this is democratization studies,
you know, international relations 101.
Now, college kids learn how to do this.
This is this is how I mean, think about
someone like Michael McFall, who is the
US ambassador to Russia.
He he spent 30 years at Stanford uh
working on the the body of work, the
playbook on how to do it, the um the
sequencing of events, all the different
levers within a society you need to
control in order to have it successfully
play out. There's these models are
constantly updated for emerging
technologies like social media uh for
you know emerging
laws and uh you know counter attempts by
a government to resist a color
revolution like NGO transparency laws
and the like. It's a it's a huge huge
huge field and it started off in the
1950s
uh right in tandem with the construction
of the intelligence apparatus in our
country. I mean really it all goes back
to
they you know they all call themselves
scholars and academics in order to try
to you know I always say you can't spell
academia without CIA but the fact is is
Jean Sharp was
>> so dark. Well, to this day, I mean, Jean
Sharp started this work in the 1950s
um at a time when the US foreign policy
establishment was, you know, in in the
absolute armpit of the of the Cold War
and trying to figure out how do we now
that the nature of war has moved into
the political realm rather than the
kinetic military realm, how do we
develop a body of of theory to reliably
be able to go country by country
and develop this political influence
apparatus uh in order if we lose an
election, what do we do in that event?
How do we still have a kind of civil
society resistance? How can that take
power even if we don't win an election?
And so this this body of work that is
now every major university and I'm not
joking when I say that whether it's
Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth,
Berkeley, Arizona State University, uh
Florida un there's
it is a it is a 101 for getting into
this field that you learn about um civil
resistance and it is a big part of what
the State Department, what USID, what
the US Agency for Global Media does. But
Jean Sharp, I mean, this this started as
a
I I hesitate to even legitimize it with
with even the front term of academia
because you have to understand that this
is a military
and and if if you want to extend it, a
military, statecraft, and intelligence
world completely. Jean Sharp got $50
million from the Department of War to do
the to do the research for this at the
Harvard Center for International
Affairs. Now, you know, for folks who
are following along, I'll just let you
play out the acronym for Center for
International Affairs in your head. Um,
you this is like
right in your face. I mean this is this
is the Harvard CIA uh this which was
created by Henry Kissinger which who was
the national security adviser and
secretary of state recruited Jean Sharp.
They got $50 million from the department
of war and not just from the department
of war but from the psychological
operations center of it in order to
build the body of work for how groups
that were supported by the US state
department could uh could leverage
influence of a minority of the
population to do bottomup rather than
top- down revolutions because prior
prior to World War II who the the way
you did coups was primarily through the
military. What you would do is the the
state department um this is before we
had a CIA, but the British would do
this. the the the UK foreign office
would work with uh you know uh military
generals or the US war department would
work with military generals, police,
security forces and because the the guys
with guns had a monopoly on violence all
the the way to do coups was always top
down. You would you would work with a
the generals, the police, and then you
would simply have a military takeover of
the country and then you would have an
interim head of state and then you would
try to kind of roll out democracy in a
managed way in these vassal state
countries.
But uh as it became apparent that you
could actually not just have top down
revolutions, but you could have bottom
up revolutions. It turns out there's
something that's effectively the same as
a as a military if you get it big
enough, and that's a paramilitary.
as as the US military paradigm moved
into what they called small wars rather
than big World War II style things, the
CIA, the State Department, USAD, they
were all working with hillside gerilla
groups in Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam
or, you know, Chile or Colombia and and
and what they found is actually, you
know, if you get a big enough crowd,
it's basically like a military. If the
mob is so big that the police can't take
it on or if the police end up shooting
someone in the crowd, the mob will just
kill the police. They're they're bigger.
They they're they outnumber them. Uh in
many respects, in many cases, they're
armed or they've got kind of small arms
or they've got bulldozers or Molotov
cocktails or uh or and a certain
quotient of the police or military on
their side as well. then you can do a
bottomup so-called peoplepowered
revolution. And the magic behind that
was essentially winning enough hearts
and minds through the media to accuse
the democratically elected leader of
being illegitimate or corrupt. Uh mixed
with cash essentially these these groups
being funded to do it through USAID or
the State Department or flow through
entities like the National Endowment for
Democracy or the US Institute of Peace.
But it's it's an enormous body of work.
It's it's democratization studies. It'si
civil resistance. Um it goes by any
number of names. But um yeah, it's you
can get a comfortable job at a US
university, any US university or even
law school teaching that field to young
aspiring coup plotters.
>> Now, have we ever run the coup playbook
against ourselves?
>> Absolutely. There was a group
specifically dedicated to do it by a
professor in the field who was also
number three at the Pentagon. It's
called the Transition Integrity Project
in 2020.
Transition is one of these uh watch
words. Transition means we're going to
overthrow your government. Transition,
we call it a democratic transition.
>> Uh that is uh when when we don't like
the government that's in power and so we
are going to transition it to a new
government. And in 2020, a group was set
up called the Transition Integrity
Project. It was run by Rosa Brooks, who
was a very, very high ranking Pentagon
official for the Obama administration.
Just a not to put too fine a point on
it, but she wrote a book in 2016 called
How Everything Became War and the
Military Became Everything.
>> Whoa. and uh basically on her
experiences on how the military uh can
take over the civil society space and
all the different examples of how you
know the military would fund operas in
Eastern Europe to influence hearts and
minds and this is you know everything
whether it's media operas art murals you
know graffiti
dance festivals uh and and you see this
now I mean there's a big scuffle at
South by Southwest I think in 20 23 or
2020. Yeah, I think it was 2023. South
by uh the Pentagon became one of the
biggest funders of music festivals like
South by Southwest. Uh you know, you you
know, you have to control like what
bands or I don't understand.
>> Well, essentially now this has been
going on for a very very long time. Uh
music is and not to not to detour too
hard into this, but the arts and
cultural space is a big part of hearts
and minds and and culture control and
politics is downstream of culture. This
is how you see
>> Yes. But are they literally like
becoming ANR executives? Like I don't
how does this because one thing I want
to understand is okay this has been used
against us then as recently as 2020.
This is very recent. So what do they
actually do? like how much of this is
astroturf? I I hear so many conspiracy
theories and most of it sound like total
BS to me. But what was the actual
playbook run on us?
>> Well, I can Okay, so we we sort of have
two open threads right now. One of them
is this 2020 transition integrity
project and I and I want to get deeper
into that to to immediately answer kind
of like how the playbook works in
something like the music industry. I can
give you some great specific examples
and I can talk about the general
structure of it. I I'll give you some
specific ones. So, um, every year we as
taxpayers give about $350 million to a
group called the National Endowment for
Democracy.
Uh, that that funding is from us as
taxpayers,
to the Treasury, to the to the State
Department, to NED, the National Down
for Democracy. Uh the National Down for
Democracy was created in 1983 by the
Reagan administration as a response to
the Democrats in the late 1970s severing
many of the powers of the Central
Intelligence Agency when uh the Church
Committee and Pike Committee hearings of
75 and 76 ended up revealing the CIA was
manipulating domestic politics in order
to stop the left-wing antivietnam war
movement. Uh, Democrats reacted very
heavily against the CIA. They hated the
CIA in the late 70s, early 80s. Jimmy
Carter rode to power on the back of that
scandal. Uh, one of the first things he
did is he put CIA director Stanfield
Turner in charge of the CIA and
immediately fired 30% of the entire
operations division of the CIA in a
single day. It was called the Halloween
massacre. Uh then in 1979 the US lost
control over Iran with the Iranian
revolution. The national security state
blamed that on having a weak CIA who
could have stopped that coup from
happening in Iran. Uh Ronald Reagan wins
the presidency, wants to give the CIA
their old powers back, but has a problem
which is that the Democrats controlled
Congress at the time. They controlled
the House of Representatives.
And so through the executive branch he
establishes the National Endowment for
Democracy in the words of its founder
Carl Gershman uh who he told I believe
it was the Washington Post in 1986
Democrat groups around the world used to
get in trouble when they were seen as
being subsidized by the CIA. We have not
had the power to do that in a long time.
That is why the endowment was created.
So literally, you have a direct quote
from the founder of the group that they
were set up to fund the groups that it
would be too embarrassing to the group
or too scandalizing to a group if the
money came from the CIA. The idea for
the National Endowment for Democracy
came from the CIA. came from William
Casey and one of his right-hand man
guys, Raymond Green, who had worked in
the Propaganda and Disinformation Bureau
of the CIA for 30 years, who went on to
directly draft the legislation
establishing the National Endowment for
Democracy. The CIA gets a copy of every
single grant the National Endowment for
Democracy makes. We don't get any
transparency over that. So even though
it's an NGO uh that's supposed to be
working overtly on philanthropic work,
it's a complete intelligence operation.
Uh the the Biden State Department
actually signed this stealth agreement
with Ned that every single one of their
grants is under a total blanket
sensitivity.
So it's uh it's it's it's even more
secret than the CIA in the sense that
even Tulsi Gabbard can't just demand
access to it because technically it's
not classified. Uh, so it can't just be
immediately unclassified. It's got this
sensitivity blanket that if any of the
oversight organs know, then everyone
involved in these programs could die
because it would put them at such risk
to know they're being sponsored by this
group that's effectively more secret
than the CIA itself. In fact, the the
Washington Post in the 1990s when when
CIA director Bob Gates was was up for
confirmation, the Washington Post wrote
an article saying we don't even need to
confirm a CIA director this year because
we have the National Down for Democracy
and it's uh it's it's everything the CIA
wants to be and more. Well, they have
they have four cores at at NED. The way
it's structured operationally, they have
a Republican branch called the IRI.
Basically, everyone who wants to run for
president has to go through the IRI. Um,
John McCain ran IRI for 25 years. Mitt
Romney has been on the board of IRI for
15 years. Uh, Marco Rubio won the 2024
man of the year for for IRI. Uh, Trump
was the only Republican in the past
25 years who was not on the board or
running IRI. This just just goes to show
how closely the CIA has effectively
vetted presidents. Uh there's a Democrat
branch called the NDI. Hunter Biden was
on the uh chairman's
the the the chairman's advisory board of
NDI. Make of that what you will. Um but
the chairman of of the NDI was Maline
Albbright who was the secretary of
state. So again you have this state
department CIA nexus. But the other two
cores are the uh center for
international private enterprise for the
CI and chamber of commerce and the
solidarity center for the CI unions.
They also have a media arm to control
media NED does. It's called the center
for international media assistance. This
is yet another one of these CIA control
over over media vectors. But just to
come back to this music thing, um
we overthrew the government of
Bangladesh in 2024. the Biden
administration did. Um there had been a
big beef between the the Democrats and
um
uh the the prime minister of Bangladesh
over a number of issues. Military uh
military base in the region, petroleum,
uh Hillary Clinton at one point when she
was secretary of state threatened to
have the IRS go after the prime
minister's son who was living in the US.
Um but the state the Biden state
department was losing hearts and minds
in Bangladesh. The they lost the last
two elections and the state department
had correspondence with the national
endowment for democracy about what to do
about it. uh after the loss I believe it
was in 2021
uh 2021 2022 the elections there
um the state department worked with one
of their NGO CIA cutouts the national
down for democracy about what could be
done in Bangladesh because despite
running all this money into the
opposition they still got crushed in the
election and what was proposed was a
destabilization campaign uh to in
instead of trying to win the vote uh
trying to organize a color revolution to
get people in the streets and to
destabilize the the country in order to
essentially break it and induce a
crisis. And one of the ways they did
that was through funding not just
students and universities and all the
different cleavages in Bangladesh
society who felt disaffected. For
example, Ned sp with state department
money sponsored transgender dance
festivals. uh really went after like the
LGBT population, went after women
>> way to spark division.
>> Yes. As a way to do street protests and
to uh create an international human
rights outcry uh as as a way to to break
down society and so that they wouldn't
just have an ordinary vote. Uh it would
be chaos. It'd be destabilized. And this
is what happens if you can't win an
election under stable conditions, induce
a crisis, things break and then there's
movement and then sometimes you can just
overthrow the government like was done
in Ukraine and like what was done in
Bangladesh. The prime minister had to
evacuate the country because once again
the CIA backed mobs surrounded the
parliament building and then just took
power. But but within those those
documents that were produced by the
investigative uh outlet the Greyzone who
had a whistleblower at IRI, the Ned
Republican branch. It was amazing what
what uh what turned up. The the CIA
through IRI was funding Bangladesh rap
and hiphop groups to sponsor musical and
hiphop anthems targeted at young people,
unemployed people, disaffected youth to
take to the streets and to seow distrust
in the Bangladesh in the in the
Bangladesh government. In fact, this was
in the baseline assessment report of IRI
to the state department. They bragged
about this, you know, they had columns
for all the different grants and what
they were doing and they had, you can
actually go on YouTube and you can if
you run a search on my ex account for
Bangladesh, you'll uh you'll you'll see
all the documents that that uh the
Greyzone published and that I've I've
highlighted and but the the CIA through
IRI was reporting to the State
Department about the different musical
anthems that were being produced with
State Department money to get people to
take to the streets to get people to to
distrust or or believe that their
government was corrupt. And they were
reporting on this how the lyrics were
quote designed uh to get people in the
streets and protesting. I believe one of
the rappers in this group uh was also a
uh visiting professor at a US aid
sponsored university that was one of the
launching points for these student
protests. But you see the same thing
everywhere. This happened in Cuba with
something called the Santa Cedra
movement where USAD sponsored one of the
main rap and hip hop groups and and had
this anthem uh about um blood and um
blood and wasn't blood and soil. It was
like a land and land.
It was something that was it was Apatria
Evita I think was the name of it. and
then got this, you know, this local rap
group played on international radio and
while they were working with the
assistant secretary for Western
Hemisphere, uh, and while they were
funded by USAD,
but you see this the the
Biden State Department set up an entire
bureau called the the the um the State
Department Bureau for Music Diplomacy.
Uh last year they brought 22 different
hiphop and uh hip-hop and rap musicians
from 14 different countries to the state
department for training for activist
training.
You have revolution music sponsored by
the US state department USAD. I think uh
freedombeat.org or I think is is one you
can look at where it's literally just
civil resistance movements sponsored by
the state department uh to to to sponsor
riots and revolutions and this is a
checklist item in the same way that
music is and you'll see this in Miami
where I am the the largest performing
arts center is the Adrien Arsh Center
Adrien Arch is is one of the largest
financial sponsors of the Atlanta
Council which has seven CIA directors on
its board and gets annual funding every
year from the War Department, the State
Department, USAD and the National
Endowment for Democracy. Then you you
get this cultural intunement. By the
way, this is a big part of when we
overthrew the government of Ukraine in
2014. One of the first things we did
with the new vassel government when
Yatsenuk was installed, not by a vote,
installed by Victoria Nuland, and she
bragged about this on a hot mic that was
caught when she said, "F the EU. We're
going with Yatsenuk." Um, Vladimir
Klitsko is going to have to sit this one
out. We'll make a mayor of Kiev and, you
know, he'll have to be satisfied with
that. Uh, one of the first things that
happened was they moved the Ministry of
Education, the control for it out of
Ukraine and into this EU credentiing
body. And, uh, one of the red lines that
the State Department, USAD and NATO set
for Zalinsky, his first month in office,
the May 2019 red lines memo, was that
none of the reforms put in place between
2014 and 2019 about education and
culture could be reversed. They banned
the Russian language, for example, on uh
on any Ukrainian TV. They banned uh
Russian access, you know, Russian
controlled social media accounts and
Telegram accounts. Um they they banned
the Russian language or any Russian
affinity teachings in Ukrainian uh
education. You you also see for example
Randy Weine Garden the head of the you
know American Federation of Teachers
making you know half a dozen pilgrimages
over to Ukraine to work with the
teachers unions in uh to work with the
teachers unions in Ukraine and
effectively create this you know so that
this the kids don't get to have any sort
of cultural affinity with the political
influence within Ukraine even though
half of the country was was Russian
ethnic were not allowed to speak the
language, were not allowed to have any,
you know, cultural glorification of
anything Russian. uh so that their minds
were controlled in a way that they would
grow up to believe in Ukrainian
nationalism and the you know the entire
purging of any kind of Russian affinity
or any kind of alliance between Russia
and Ukraine which had existed
you know for for a you know going back
to the Crimean War in the 1800s I mean
going back forever but completely purged
because the CIA ran a coup in 2014 and
they didn't want mean reversion after
the Crimea referendum in 2014. But you
see this everywhere and it's it's so
it's full spectrum. It's the media. It's
the teachers. In fact, the CIA was
busted funding our own teachers unions
in in the US
>> through something called the Vernon
Fund, which which the CIA would later
confess was a
>> was a CIA front philanthropy that gave a
million dollars to the National
Education Association.
>> That's the largest teachers union in the
country. uh as well as a CI proprietary
called the World Confederation for
Organizations of the Teaching
Profession.
>> Hold on. When when was this?
>> This is in the 1960s.
>> 1966.
>> Jesus, man. Okay. So, uh let me put a
bow on this and see if I'm tracking this
accurately. So, uh dear public, if you
can hear my voice right now, what Mike
Benz has just told us is that the right
way to view all of these things is that
warfare is no longer kinetic, at least
if we can avoid it. Uh the real warfare
is soft power. There are people that
fully understand the way that we are
indoctrinated whether it's music,
education,
uh arts, on and on. And they are finding
ways to get money into those places
through NOS's and the like. US aid being
the most famous right now uh of
disseminating taxpayer dollars around
the globe uh under the guise of being
philanthropic but actually being soft
power warfare that these are effectively
agents of uh you you were very careful
to say they're not all agents of the
government but but certainly what we're
talking about right now that some subset
of them are agents of government foreign
policy and they are the one thing that
we haven't really pulled in really
tightly yet, but this idea of uh
drafting off the policies. You've got
these hedge funds that are like, "Hey, I
have economic interests here." And the
reason I don't think we've quite pulled
that one in yet is you'll say we lost an
election or we won an election, but we
haven't defined exactly what that means.
Like who the blob, like who's
considering it to be a win or a loss?
I'm guessing the blob and Trump are sort
of diametrically opposed. So would it be
as simple as if the blob is one Trump
mega ideology has lost and vice versa?
Like I get the economic part, but is
there like a thing that guides the
economic thing or is it just like well
Soros happens to be shorting them today
and so we want them to lose. Oh, he's
actually hoping this one will win so we
want them to win. that that part I'm not
entirely sure like how sort of one for
one this is like is this an economic
battle where we use useful idiots on the
ideological standpoint or is this an
ideological standpoint that happens to
get a lot easier when uh a someone like
Larry Frink who I think of as using
social movements as cover for economic
gain where he's like oh I'm just going
to pull this green blanket on top of my
investing strategy and I just know what
policies are going to get yeses, what
policies are going to get no. I don't
care if it's green or not. I just know
green's an effective way for me to make
more money. So, if you can help us tease
that out, whether ideology is driving
this, whether economics are driving
this, that would be I think really
helpful. Yeah, I would say economics.
It's easy. There is a weird kind of
democracy within the blob in the sense
that you do have this big stakeholder
soup and the way foreign policy usually
gets made is through a consensus of
stakeholders within the kind of high-
netw worth individual family class the
sort of folks who have you know
effectively control over the hedge fund
private equity multi big multinational
corporation folks and they they all have
different interests you know, the the
you know, the head of uh Exxon Mobile is
going to have different interests than
the head of Walmart is going to have
different interests than the head of a
clean ethanol company. And their own
power waxes and waines over time. You
know, there there was a time when, you
know, the biggest game in town in the
NGO world was the Ford Foundation by
far. I mean, it was it was the biggest
NGO. uh it worked very closely with the
CIA. uh and it also had a you know
effectively you know controlling shares
over the the Ford Motor Company and this
is at a time when we were creating
export markets for Ford cars and this
was a big part of uh you know it was
tied into the the petroleum you know
world as well but it's always been this
way but different stakeholders rise and
fall in power over time as different
industries and you know and different
alliances form and and reform and and so
we're in an interesting moment I think
right now as the the Biden
administration alienated a lot of the
traditional allies that were part of the
uh kind of more left-leaning folks and
the Trump administration alienated many
of those who were on traditionally on
the right the Chamber of Commerce for
example was traditionally a a right-wing
Republican institution representing all
the largest US multinational businesses
because they wanted free markets, low
taxes, free enterprise, low regulation
and that was something that was
typically associated with the Republican
party and the Republicans and the
Democrats would, you know, offset that
with media unions, Hollywood,
universities and the kind of limousine
liberal hedge fund class. And so but but
Trump lost a significant amount of the
Chamber of Commerce with by by
articulating a foreign policy that was
less interventionist uh you know less
war oriented uh less you know less money
to these democracy building so-called
you know institutions that would secure
markets for chamber of commerce
companies and so you saw a lot of but
but all these things are a big soup and
so they they move in tandem you you know
George Soros
doesn't really go in alone so much as he
goes in with the Bill Browder, you know,
banker types from London or he'll go in
on, you know, with the the clean energy
folks from, you know, Al Gore's uh clean
energy hedge fund or and you have these
kind of consortiums, the these kind of,
you know, alliance structures that that
pit against each other and as elected
leaders are favorable or sometimes They
start off favorable and then they become
unfavorable and then alliances shift
from there. So you know there is a kind
of weird evolutionary democracy within
the donor drafter class that ends up you
know what we see as politics is really
kind of a proxy war that plays out
within that network. It was obviously
for example when Elon came in and
supported Trump in the 2024 election.
You can make the argument and I I love
Elon.
I mean more than I can describe. I think
he's truly a great man of history. The
fact is is you know just looking at it
under that same lens you Elon was
aspiring to be a kind of conservative
uh or you know centrist conservative
Soros and you would talk about Soros all
the time and Elon's businesses did
benefit in the beginning. Certainly, I
know that he's gone, you know, uh, to
pay back a lot of the subsidies and has
worked to make his businesses
independent. But the fact the fact is is
Tesla benefited enormously from the coup
in Bolivia for lithium in um, you know,
under this is like 8 8 years ago now.
And Elon was on Twitter, proud proud of
that. At the time SpaceX got, you know,
rockets that were effectively
intermediated in the very beginning
from,
you know, from the State Department.
SpaceX plays a major role in uh in in US
diplomatic and power projection. they
were SpaceX had a role at the table when
I was at the State Department in charge
of the the the cyber cyber realm and
>> uh it's you know used in Starlink and
the like and but the millions millions
of dollars in subsidies for Tesla and
SpaceX and the like and so you can make
an argument there was a donor drafter
class side of that it's simply the the
the natural stable equilibrium of a
capitalist democracy and I don't I'm not
saying that to attack capitalism I I
love capitalism this simply is what it
is in that sense and you have to contend
with it with the recognition that money
absolutely helps and then but sometimes
there's only so much money can buy
because you can push things too far and
no amount of propaganda will shift you
uh from certain things. That's why they
had to turn to censorship because the
propaganda they couldn't turn it up past
10 anymore. So, you know, they they had
to move to to nastier toolkits. But I
guess what I'm trying to say is you see
you see th