Destroying USAID To Save America

Hey, everybody. A whole episode with Mike Benz. We go deep, deep, deep into USAID. Any questions you have about USAID are answered in this episode.

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Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. Joining us now is Mike Benz, who is the expert on all things disinformation, USAID. First, Mike, are you feeling better? It seems like you were down for the count for quite some time. Yeah. Yeah.

No. Earlier, I think, yeah, right after inauguration, I was a little bit walloped by, you know, by a flu. But we are, you know, sunlight is is a disinfectant that evidently cleans up not just institutions, but viruses. Well, you were probably poisoned by a bio weapon funded by USAID. So with that segue, what what is what is USAID? We have the full hour, Mike. You have so much to say about this. I'm not going to interrupt you.

The floor is yours. Yeah, well, USAID is probably the dirtiest standalone institution in the American government because it's allowed to be and because it's the ideal place to creatively structure the absolute worst kinds of activities that you could not get away with directly, either at the State Department, the Defense Department or the CIA. And so let's just talk about what USAID is supposed to do.

So USAID is supposed to be a humanitarian NGO sponsor that makes the world a better place, but in the process advances U.S. foreign policy. So American foreign policy, you can think of that as management of the American Empire, right? We have an American homeland where we live and we have an American empire, which is where we have our import export markets.

It's where we extract critical natural resources. It's the basis of our national security and where we put our military bases. It is what makes the American homeland rich is that we have a huge amount of influence over the course of internal events that happen throughout the rest of the world. And that is made possible in large part by USAID. That is what USAID is supposed to do, basically make us richer, make us more safe, make us have more control over the affairs in foreign countries, but at the same time be a plucky group of cherubic warriors who are making the world a better place along the way.

That's sort of the idea behind it. But just to make that clear, there's no aid in USAID. The aid that you see visually with your eyes there is designed to fool you. It's the Agency for International Development, not aid. And international development is development of institutions, development of assets. The money goes to groups, not to people. It doesn't go directly to the people that a grant will say that it serves. It goes to the groups administering it, which allows USAID to be the way to capacity build assets that the CIA or the State Department or the Defense Department want to pump up in order to carry out activity in a region. Now, the reason that I've been on a crusade for the past year and a half, two years, saying that USAID is worse than the CIA is because USAID can operate like the CIA, but without the restraints that are typically put on the CIA. So from the 1940s until the 1970s, the CIA was a totally rogue agency in the same way that USAID currently is. It was not until the scandals of the 1960s and the 1970s, primarily against Democrats in this country, for example, Operation Mockingbird, Operation Chaos. There was also the COINTELPRO side of FBI, Operation Midnight Climax. The CIA infiltrating left-wing student groups on college campuses, co-opting left-wing thought leaders and poets and artists and musicians.

When all this stuff broke in the 1960s and 70s, the CIA was forced to undergo a series of reforms. Chief among them was the requirement of a presidential finding wherein any covert action the CIA does has to be formally authorized by the U.S. President. Well, what happens if a rogue cell at the CIA wants to do something so dirty that the President would never approve of it? Well, then they can't get a presidential finding for it and they can't do it. Or what if the CIA wants to run an operation that actually targets the President himself?

The President would obviously never sign off for that. Well, welcome to the wild world of USAID, because what they can do is they can walk over to their partners at USAID and have USAID simply creatively structure the necessary parts to carry out what the CIA would have wanted to structure it as. But USAID can simply structure it as humanitarian work. For example, let's just say that the CIA wanted to fund ISIS terrorists to topple the government of Syria and President Trump did not want to give money to ISIS. Well, so the CIA would not be able to get a presidential finding, would not be able to get Trump to sign off on that covert action. If they wanted to do it anyway, they could simply have an informal conversation with USAID and USAID could simply structure its humanitarian work in the region to funnel money to ISIS-K or funnel money to the Taliban. They could put, for example, military supplies, as they've gotten caught busted doing, in medical vans or in USAID public health facilities.

They could, through a Byzantine layer of wire payments, end up funneling the money to terrorist groups because USAID, amazingly, and credit John Solomon's Just the News for breaking this this week, the OIG at USAID just this week revealed that USAID actually does not require its contractors to pass, to go through the OFAC and anti-terrorism vetting requirements, which means that USAID contractors can freely give money to designate terrorist groups. So, I mean, what I'm trying to say is- This is shocking stuff. I mean, so it sounds as if this is a slush fund and an ATM machine for all the deep state actors and their activities, both abroad and a little bit domestically. Yes.

Yes. Now, the abroad thing is bad enough on its own. But, you know, the domestically is where it really borders on the criminal.

I mean, and if not the criminal, at least the predicate for completely shutting down the agency and salting the earth with its remains. I mean, take, for example, how USAID hoodwinked Trump Term 1.0. USAID systematically targeted every single aspect of Trump world during his first term, and I don't think Trump world even knew it. Not just USAID declaring internally, doctrinally, that populism was an attack on democracy and using that as the basis to try to topple the governments of all Trump's allies in Europe and in Brazil, the right-wing populist parties and movements, for example, of Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Matteo Salvini, the box party in Spain, the AfD party in Germany, but also to try to topple Bolsonaro's regime in Brazil, but also targeting Trump himself. USAID has mercenary media for hire. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year paying media outlets to write whirlwind surround sound news cycles to favor the blobs intended political events in the region. So one example of that, a classic, is a real doozy, I should note, is something called the OCCRP, which you can just think of as the Corruption Reporting Project. It's the largest consortium of investigative journalists in the world, hit piece journalists in the world.

USAID paid this group $20 million in 2018-2019 to write hit piece journalist investigations on the blobs' targets in Ukraine, and they dug up dirt on Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, at the height of Russiagate and tried to insinuate that Paul Manafort was a Russian agent, and they dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani's work in Ukraine to use as a basis to impeach Donald Trump. Gentlemen, let's get real for a second. Are you frustrated with today's woke dating scene?

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Right. So USAID has a media development program, development in the same way that business development means soliciting donors. Media development at USAID means acting as a donor to media organizations. So this is state-sponsored media.

This is mercenary media for hire. When USAID's programming goals want the media in a particular region to print certain news stories or to demonize certain individuals or politicians in the area, they pay media outlets to produce the dirt on them, and this ended up spiraling back at home against Trump World in a massive way because USAID paid $20 million to the OCCRP, the largest collective of investigative journalists, hit piece journalists in the world, the same group that broke the Panama Papers and suspiciously gets access to hacked documents and then is first to break them because they mysteriously obtain these hacked documents. Not exactly a good look when you're getting your money from a CIA cutout like USAID, but maybe that's a story for another day. But what they did is they wrote, OCCRP took that $20 million and they wrote hit pieces on Rudy Giuliani and his work in Ukraine, and then that ended up being used as the basis for part of the Trump impeachment in 2019 and Trump Ukraine and Trump World and Rudy in Ukraine. And so USAID is directly sponsoring the production of hit pieces to impeach the president under which USAID is nominally supposed to serve. This is the sort of thing that is insurrectionary in the ultimate, but because USAID does not require presidential findings for its work, they don't need a report.

The president can be kept totally in the dark. All the grant administrators need to know, all oversight is told is we're supporting free and independent media in Ukraine. We're supporting free and independent media. And what they don't know is that they're working with their state-sponsored media to dig up hit pieces on their political opponents sitting in the West Wing of the White House.

But you see this all over. USAID does the same thing in Western Hemisphere. USAID sponsors media that operates in Brazil in order to target Bolsonaro and his supporters all over Eastern Europe, basically in any country with a Trump ally, Pakistan with Imran Khan, you name it. But this gets back to this Truman Show point, which is that you're seeing these veneer of white shoe media, you know, institutionally celebrated. OCCRP has gotten dozens of awards for high integrity media and breaking the most important media stories. And, you know, it's hit pieces for hire. It's like Paul Krugman getting, you know, a Pulitzer.

But I mean, the whole thing's a hoax. Has USAID, only two minutes in here, been involved in coups like the Maidan revolution in Ukraine? Has this money been used for such activities? Yeah, coups is a particular specialty of USAID. USAID is the arch coup monster all over the world. For example, USAID spent like 1.2 billion dollars pumping up the Arab Spring protests and, you know, giving money to the protesters and protesting groups and the institutions sponsoring them in Egypt during the Arab Spring in 2010, 2011. They did the same thing in Tunisia. They did the same thing in Ukraine in 2014. Victoria Nuland bragged on tape in December 2013 that USAID and the U.S. State Department and NED collectively paid 5 billion dollars to the very institutions that spearheaded the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government just two months after she made that speech in February 2014 at the Maidan Square. And this is one of the reasons that USAID is spending tens of billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to continue to pay these groups in Ukraine. You get them all on payroll, and so they'll do the dirt anyway. And a great example of this is, you know, a document that I produced about a year and a half ago, but I re-upped it this week and everyone should read it, which is the Mark Milley, Joe Biden Pentagon special forces planning manual that involves how USAID can assist secret special forces psychological operations work.

There was a scenario in this public government document that I produced, the special forces manual from 2021, that goes over a scenario where the special forces is planning a race riot in Africa in order to create a cleavage between African workers and Chinese business interests and a Chinese government attempt to purchase a port in West Africa. Charlie Kirk here, and this new year it's going to be exciting. 2025 is bringing a regime change in America, a chance to reorder and make things right again in our country. Why not do the same thing for you and your family? Now's the time to hit your financial reset button. And my friends, Andrew Del Rey and Todd Avakian with Sierra Pacific Mortgage are the only ones I trust to help you do that. Andrew and Todd are your friends in the mortgage business, like-minded individuals who can make your financial goals a reality. They can help you reduce your overall monthly payments, pay off those high interest credit cards, and have money to fund that big project.

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Christian, they share our worldview. Go to andrewandtodd.com. Mike, continue your thought. You were talking about West Africa. Yes. So what I was referring to was a special forces document, a strategic vision blueprint produced in 2021 during the Biden administration control over the Pentagon, during the Mark Milley hold over the Pentagon, which laid out a strategic vision for how best to synchronize special forces psychological operations work with USAID and related partner groups assisting the psychological operations activity. Now, psychological operations is not like just some big bad voodoo work. What it usually refers to is the fomenting of cleavages within a society being targeted by the U.S. foreign policy establishment in order to achieve some national security or national interest end in the country. And so it's justified by keeping us safe and by making us wealthier. And what it usually refers to is a nice way of ginning up and generating riots in the country and street protests, all street protest activity that's organized by special forces or civil military or any Pentagon equity usually has some component of galvanizing people to take to the streets to protest the government and create a democratic predicate for regime change by portraying the government as being unresponsive to the people protesting and then categorizing police crackdowns on the Pentagon or blob-sponsored protesters as a humanitarian or human rights offense. But in this government document, which everybody can go to right now on my X page, it's at Mike Benz Cyber. I put the link there and the page is 16 to 17.

It's currently still up on the U.S. military's website. And what it calls for is, it goes over a hypothetical scenario for how special forces could best carry out its mission during the Biden years. And they give the example of countering Chinese influence in Africa, which is a noble goal, genuinely, truly is. We should be working to counter Chinese influence in Africa. But there are certain bounds on the dirty tricks that I believe the U.S. should put in terms of how it carries that work out.

Rather than creating a Truman show out of all the institutions and population in the area where we're doing such dirty deeds, especially out in the open. So in this scenario, the U.S. military caught wind of a Chinese plan to purchase a port in West Africa, which would therefore give the Chinese access to the Atlantic Ocean and to therefore project influence against the U.S. Navy. And that could be a national security threat if China is buying up ports in West Africa.

Totally agree. But in the scenario, they go over how the special forces would play a role in stopping this. And they give the example of what happens when the U.S. ambassador to that West African country tries to tell the African government not to build this port. And what if the African government says, no, we want to still build it.

How can the special forces still stop the production of that port? And so the special forces there laid out a plan where what they would do is they would generate race riots to, quote, inflame racial tensions of the African population against the Chinese businesses in the area and against the Chinese interests in the area and get the Africans to riot and do protests in the streets, as well as to quit their jobs so that they stop working for Chinese companies. And the special forces laid out the scenario where one of their key partners would be USAID, because USAID, under the mask, under the false predicate of doing jobs fairs, would provide no-show jobs to the striking and rioting Africans so that they would be financially incentivized to quit their jobs and participate in the riots to destabilize the African country.

And that economic destabilization of the African government would force the African government to come back to the negotiating table with the U.S. State Department, where, in a sense, we would turn off the riots if they turn off the deal to buy the Chinese ports. But in that case, you have USAID as being the key partner by funding the capacity to do these riots. And you see USAID doing the same thing with the Maidan Square riots in 2014 that ousted Yanukovych. You saw the same thing with USAID funding the street riots against the prime minister of Bangladesh that successfully ousted her from office four months ago. You see the same thing with USAID funding the riots that successfully ousted the government of Tunisia during the Arab Spring. The same thing with USAID funding the riots that produced the, that ousted the government of Egypt during the Arab Spring. Time and time and time again, whether it's Western Hemisphere with Venezuela or Bolivia, whether that's Eastern Europe with Ukraine or Georgia, whether that's Middle East, North Africa with Tunisia and Egypt, whether that's Central Asia with Bangladesh, USAID is the primary sponsor of a blob rental riots. And most disturbingly, that even comes back home because USAID has a very curious relationship with Black Lives Matter. You can look at Black Lives Matter having direct partnerships now with Samantha Power's USAID. These are public documents about Samantha Power's commitment to support Black Lives Matter programming. You also have USAID paying $27 million to Black Lives Matter's chief organizational structure parent group, which is called the Tide Center. USAID paid them $27 million while you had USAID adjacent riot planners in 2020 who openly contemplated through a group called the Transition Integrity Project that Black Lives Matter should be capacity built in the middle of their riots to serve as a potential destabilization force to oust Trump from office if he won the 2020 election.

So how would we go about defeating this beast? Is Elon going about this correctly and President Trump? That's a complicated question. And I sincerely hope the people who are at the tip of the spear in terms of White House policy really know what they're doing, because we are conducting open heart surgery on the body of the entire American empire right now.

And I'm not fully sure that the folks who are doing that open heart surgery fully understand the anatomy of the body they are operating on. Oftentimes for the past several years when I crusade on this, people hear what I'm saying and say, okay, well, we need to eliminate this entirely. This thing is so corrupt and evil, and it is corrupt and evil. The issue is it also plays a critical role in projecting U.S. influence around the world. And I always say, while the Blob is the key antagonist, the chief villain on the other side of the story about how America can become great again, it also does play an indispensable role in securing U.S. interests around the world. I've talked about, for example, the Milton Friedman analogy of the pencil. Milton Friedman has this very viral popular video that he recorded decades ago about the power of the free market for the creation of pencils, that no one person can make a pencil. The reason we have pencils in America is because of the magic of the market operating to get us wood from trees in South America, and graphite from mines in Argentina, and gum for the pencil eraser from trees in Malaysia. Well, what happens if, for example, the Malaysian government decides that they no longer want to allow U.S. corporations or the export of gum tree products to pencils? America would be potentially without pencils unless we had some capacity to influence the internal events of Malaysia. Same thing, for example, with the graphite in a pencil. Let's just say there's a labor strike in the country in South America with the graphite mines that we use to make pencils.

Well, if the unions go on strike there against American corporations or South American corporations that are producing that graphite, well, then no pencils. The U.S. has perceived and potentially sincerely does need a mechanism to be able to influence the activity of those unions or influence the nationalization of natural resource policies in foreign countries. And that sometimes involves dirty work, infiltrating those unions, putting pressure on foreign governments. But the problem is this license to do dirty work has become completely unchecked, especially at U.S. aid, where it doesn't even require a presidential finding to do this covert act.

And so, I did not – it was unseemly, but perhaps okay when this was being done to protect U.S. interests. But when U.S. aid began to be weaponized against sitting presidents beginning in 2016, that's really when the bets are off, because the whole purpose of having an American empire is for the benefit of the people of the American homeland. If the foreign policy establishment controls the affairs of the American homeland too, then we don't even have a democracy. We have a blobocracy, and we have no control over our own internal affairs.

We're not even setting our own foreign policy at that point. We have a serious challenge in front of us. We have the USAID fight.

We have the Doge fight. We have this funding issue in front of us. Mike Benz, if you were to say one, two, three, we only have four minutes remaining.

One, two, three. What are the one, two, three action items on how we should finalize this USAID situation in front of us? Number one, shut down the agency and move it into a branch of the government that goes through the traditional oversight process. So, for example, I think this plan to shut down U.S. aid in Tuckah understate is a very interesting one.

I'm not sure if that's ultimately the best place for it, but as an interim matter, I think it's potentially the right move. What's really important is, and I say this time and time again for the past week and a half since this saga has been playing out, but simply ending U.S. aid as an organization does not end U.S. aid as a function. If U.S. aid grants and contracts and operational structuring remain the same, but headquarters simply shut down and moved over to state, well, state just inherits a U.S. aid herpes infection.

It simply will have the same problems that U.S. aid had if that structuring fundamentally remains. This is the same reason there really wouldn't be much change in the CIA if you simply shut down Langley and moved CIA to be directly understate. In fact, this was the original plan in 1948 for the CIA. George Kennan, who authored the National Security Council 10-2 plausible deniability doctrine, which gives the CIA its private cloak for all of its covert action work. George Kennan, three months before he penned that doctrine initially, wanted the CIA operations division to operate directly at state under what he called the Bureau of Political Warfare. You can read the 1948 memo called the inauguration of organized political warfare, where he goes over that exact structure. The fact is the CIA would still be doing CIA work.

It would just be warehoused within state. Right now, U.S. aid is about to undergo that exact process. Now, the nice thing is because state works very closely with the White House National Security Council and there is a tremendous amount of constant communication and oversight between White House and state, in theory, it will be much easier to catch the malfeasance at state than it was at U.S. aid. But the problem is everybody in Washington is in on the take at U.S. aid. This is a bigger problem than Democrats and Republicans. As I mentioned, a huge portion of the Republican Congress is directly or indirectly, whether personally or their constituents or their donors, are dependent on either U.S. aid funding directly or U.S. aid covert influence work to support their activities.

I'll give you a great example. Rex Tillerson was the chairman of Exxon Mobil for the first few years of the Trump administration. Exxon Mobil has been a stalwart donor to the Republican Party for decades. Well, who was Victoria Nuland standing in front of when she made that speech that I referenced in December 2013 about all the billions of dollars U.S. aid had pumped into the rental riots in Ukraine in 2014? When she made that speech about U.S. aid's funding of the rental riots, she was at a sponsored event by Exxon Mobil and Chevron. The literal signs for the Exxon and Chevron sponsors were behind Victoria Nuland when she said it, which is to say that it's not just the direct U.S. aid folks in the Republican Party who are going to push back on the attempt to cut these grants while they're at state. It's not just going to be the Liz Cheney types. Liz Cheney worked at U.S. aid. It's not just going to be the Bill Kristol types. Bill Kristol is a part of an organization that gets millions from U.S. aid. But it's going to be key donors to the Republican Party who are going to want to keep these grants and contracts and covert operations flowing.

And there's going to need to be a very difficult conversation by highly informed Trump World foreign policy architects about how to make American statecraft more consistent with American norms and values in the years ahead. Mike, that was terrific. We have to have you on again. I mean, we barely touched the surface here, but thank you, Mike.

We learned a lot. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Charlie. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always. Freedom at CharlieKirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless.