Piers Morgan Uncensored - Can America Handle The Truth? Trump USAID Cuts With Eric Weinstein

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Now that President Donald Trump is back in America’s driving seat, his plan to slash spending, particularly to foreign countries, is moving ahead practically unencumbered. The United States Agency for International Development aka USAID now sits squarely in the crosshairs of MAGA, with questions like; “Where is our money going?”, “How does this help America?” and “Why weren’t we told about this?” being shouted rather than whispered. Conversely, there are those who wholly support USAID and say the influence it affords the US is invaluable. Piers Morgan dives deeply into this issue, joined by Harvard mathematician and physicist Dr Eric Weinstein. former USAID head and national security adviser to Donald Trump, Ambassador John Bolton, commentator and Babylon Bee contributor Ashley St Clair and Sunday Times columnist Matthew Syed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

USAID is clearly in the job of trying to bring about regime change. It has secret bank accounts, shell companies. USA gets 50 billion a year in US taxpayer money. We are undergoing a process of what I've called jesipization. The transformation of a previously open free society by actors within its governing class to one in which the electorate cannot be trusted with even a basic outline of what is happening. That's what's going on. We don't actually know our own country. These are some of the insane priorities that that organization has been spending money on.

$1.5 million for a production. $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia. As an American taxpayer, I don't want my dollars going towards this crap. I'm going to show you my farewell president from AID. You can see it's a hand grenade. This is a style of government. The problem is people like John Bolton. He holds up his award from USAID and talks about how reform was needed decades ago and did absolutely nothing.

We're actually paying to provide low-cost pagers and walkie-talkies to Hezbole as well as giving them tech support. Are we out of our minds? No one's going to understand it except us. Let me finish the point. Oh, here we go. Is it not incumbent on governments occasionally to not tell their people the truth? Could America handle the truth? President Trump's dismantling of the U.S. Agency of International Development is either a belated triumph or a dangerous disgrace, depending on where you get your news.

U.S. AID supporters say it's a vital tool of American self-power, which supports life-saving health programs in the world's poorest countries. Critics say it's tantamount to a shadowed government, pushing policies divorced from the Trump agenda, and wasting millions of dollars billions, perhaps, in the process. President Trump was unrepentant about the policy when quizzed by journalists this weekend on his way to the Super Bowl. The ones that have been, the few that have been legitimate

in terms of getting legitimate money, will probably put it through the State Department. handled by Marco Rubio, highly respected man, Secretary of State. There's no reason for USAID. When you look at the politicians that have been in there sucking the blood out of it, when you look at all of the fake deals. I mean, look, all you have to do is get a list of all of the things you can see by the headache. It's fake, it's fraudulent, it's probably kickbacks. There has, however, been a blizzard of the policy. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton is among those arguing will undermine vital U.S. alliances in an ever more dangerous world.

We'll hear more from him later. The Harvard mathematician, a podcast superstar Dr. Eric Weinstein, however, sees things very differently. He says the destruction of USAID shows everything pivotal since World War II was in part unreal. Well, here to unpack us what he means by that is Eric Weinstein. Eric, great to have you back on Unsensored. I just want to read you a few things that have emerged that were being financed by USAID. $100,000 for bicycle safety equipment for Hispanic immigrants, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $1.5 million to advance DEI and Serbian workplaces, $20 million for Iraqi Sesame Street,

hundreds of millions to fund growing poppies in Afghanistan. Now, these are the sort of headline-grabbing elements of this, which people have generally responded by going, what the hell are we doing, spending American taxpayer money on such apparently ludicrous things. But you think there's a more serious thing at play here. Tell me about it. Well, I think the problem is that Americans in general have not been brought into a circle of trust with our foreign-facing apparatus, the Defense Department, State Department, and the intelligence services. And so they don't know about the concept of hybrid warfare. And they're looking in part at this bizarre laundry list that is comprised of actual aid, attempts to destabilize other regimes, including democratically elected ones,

pure payoffs so that we can keep certain people happy as well as paying, you know, just graft to our own people who are part of the system. So what you're looking at is an incredibly heterogeneous laundry list of bizarre items that you can't sort easily and you can't figure out, you know, where is somebody trying to reduce malaria and where is somebody paying for a transgendered rock opera to be performed in Tehran? You know, it all looks very, very bizarre because you don't understand that what we are in is a continuation of hybrid warfare into an actual. hybrid civil war. You're in the middle of a civil war that would be understood if you'd understood the concept of hybrid war to begin with. The question is, do you understand who the two sides are? You said an interesting thing. You said it's equivalent to the you can't handle the truth scene in a few good men, the Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise movie. Is this a case of America

just can't handle the truth? Well, I think you don't, people don't understand what that film was. we remember it as Tom Cruise playing Lieutenant Caffee as the good guy, and Jack Nicholson playing Nathan Jessup, Colonel Nathan Jessup, as the bad guy. And that's not at all what Aaron Sorkin actually did. The reason it's a great film is that those are two halves, representing two halves of America, the Deep State represented by Nathan Jessup, and the effectively lackluster-turned heroic Lieutenant Caffee played by Tom Cruise, And what's happening in that scene is that you have the culmination of two very important and very different points.

Colonel Jessup is actually making an incredibly important point. At some place that you don't like to talk about in parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. That is the correct part. He also realizes that he has to defend something which can't be explained to ordinary Americans, which is the concept of the code red that was ordered, that there are certain ways in which our country. country actually functions that cannot be discussed that are not on the books and that these are actually an incredibly dominant part of our national identity being way of life and the mechanism by which our peace and prosperity has previously been provided. What happens in that scene that we

all remember is that Sorkin very carefully destabilizes things in favor of Lieutenant Kaffi at the end because Jessup is sort of driven mad by power and he stops actually being able to manage the lies on which he sits atop. And I think that in part, what I've said is that we are undergoing a process of what I've called jesopization. If you don't mind, I'll just read what I gave as the definition of it. I said, jesipization is the transformation of a previously open society. The transformation of a previously open free society by actors within its governing class to one in which the electorate cannot be trusted with even a basic outline of what is happening. And why, via the abuse of need to know, happening in why, via the abuse of need to know or sources and methods privileges. Now, that's what's going on. We don't actually know our own country.

And so right now you're reading a laundry list of bizarre items with no context in which to put them, partially because what you're seeing is graft and partially because it's destabilizing other nations. You have a friend, Mike Bentz, he's been at the forefront of this story and says, of anything, he goes further than you, saying USAID is a rabbit hole. I want to play the clip from him. I've been saying for so long, I mean, there really is a sort of U.S.A. Truman show that much of the world lives in. You know, many people found out for the first time this week that 90% of media in Ukraine is funded by USAID. Many people are just now finding out, you know, the extent of U.S. media organizations that are funded by USAID.

You know, they're finding out the reach of it and everything from the unions to social media censorship to pandemic. and gain of function research, to, you know, strange ties even to things like terrorism and the drug trade. And there's that sort of these institutions that everyone thought were private and independent, being corrupted by, you know, USAID's $44 billion-odd dollar year budget. I mean, fascinating to hear that. Dave Rumin said the USAID story is way bigger than most people realize. it's not that they funded Politico and New York Times, etc.

But that the articles in those publications were used as sources all over CNN, NBC news, etc., to further push their agenda. This is how they laundered the lies, the narrative, as he puts it. And that certainly will be the belief of skeptical people here, won't it? It'll be, hang on.

So taxpayer money was being directly pumped, millions of it, to media organizations here and in other countries, and was then being used by those media organizations to put out whatever narrative suited them. So effectively, the taxpayer is funding whatever narrative that media entity wants them or wants to put out.

It's way worse than anything either of those gentlemen are saying. I don't really know how to talk about it. It's interesting. I didn't know you were going to play that clip. When Israel was commenting in the wake of its Pager and walkie-talkie attacks about what the intelligence community actually is. They gave an interview to CBS making the following statement. We make like Truman Show. Everything is controlled by us behind the scene. In their experience, everything is normal. Everything was 100% kosher, including businessmen, marketing, engineers, showroom, everything. Shell companies over shell

companies to affect the supply chain to our favor, we create a pretend world. We are a global production company. We write the screenplay where the directors, where the producers, where the main actors, and the world is our stage. This is how the I see, the intelligence community worldwide, sees itself as this thing that sits atop normal civil society. And in so doing, it presents us a world that is simply untrue, and it's untrue at many levels. It's untrue scientifically. You talk about taxpayer money. That's really how Elon is going to track what this network is and how it functions. If you go after the money and then you're going to end up going after, once you do that, you're going to go after the data. So what he's really going to do is he's

going to get access to the data and he's going to figure out as you cut things off what stops functioning. No one quite knows that I know how the New York Times is wired to Harvard University. is wired to the Brookings Institution. And as such, it's very strange when you see a spontaneous consensus, because consensus effectively never forms in human experience. Think about any Thanksgiving dinner you've had as an American or any family gathering you've had like a Christmas dinner worldwide. People don't in general come to consensus.

They have very interesting different points of view. That's what makes humanity interesting. These large consensus positions are effectively all orchestrated. And that is essentially how government has functioned. So what these people are talking about is imagine waking up to find out that in particular the last 55 years, I would say, certainly post-63, but things got really intense around 1970, where effectively we live in a fabric, in a fabricated world in which we agree that we won't ask too many questions.

And that's what all the concern is about, are you a conspiracy theorist? It's like, surely you're not going to go poking around in the back of house of the United States of America, are you? The case of the defense was presented by the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and U.S. A.R.D. administrator Samantha Powers. She appeared on a late show with Stephen Colbert and said this. So this is an investment in our stability, in our security, in our security. in our alliances, and that is what USAID has done since Kennedy created it, helped eradicate smallpox on the verge of eradicating polio.

Again and again, USAID is on the front lines of some of the hardest challenges that our country faces and that some of the most vulnerable people in the world face. Now, presumably, Eric, amid all this absurdity, there is also a lot of very good work that was being done by this program. But on that part, I would say, say that I watched a fascinating thing with a sky news presenter here called Yardah Hakim, who had set up a thing in Afghanistan, she's half Afghani, to help young Afghani girls get education. And she said that when she went to American official government bodies for help,

they offered her immediately, here's 100 million. And she only wanted two or three million. And she said it was staggering to actually suddenly have this arm of the federal government in all its guises, just throwing money at this because it sounded like a good idea. And she just said, look, in their case, they said, no, we only need whatever it was, two to three million. But she wondered how many other people took the hundred million when it was completely unnecessary? In other words, there's clearly a lot of waste going on, even for very well-intentioned programs, but there must also be a lot of good stuff being done as well. So is the danger here that in, I mean, I think you've compared what Elon's doing as analogous to the money lenders and the temple by Jesus,

but the danger is it in trying to get rid of the money lenders, the whole temple, i.e. America, crashes down in the process. There's a lot to unpack, I know with what I've just said, but just simple terms. Is there good stuff as part of his program? And are you worried on a bigger scale that Elon could bring the whole pack of cars crashing down? Sure. Let me just say it like this. Historically, USAID, which is how I've always heard it pronounced, did a lot of good

because you could always do well by doing good in a time in which the Soviets couldn't compete with us in terms of all the wonderful things we could do for another country. So you've always been tempted to lead with doing well by doing good, but then at some point you do well by doing bad to some people. and then that changes things. So USAID has always been this bizarre instrument of both good and evil. The whole spectrum goes through it.

So when Samantha Power, who I know said that, she's being somewhat disingenuous, and I would actually wonder what happened to Stephen Colbert and how he suddenly became a part, as all the late-night comedians in the U.S. seem to be of one mind, and they speak with one political voice. I think that in part,

you don't even know when the Truman shows, show is appearing. I totally agree. I knew Samantha Powers. Yeah, I was talking to, on that point, I was talking to Jay Leno about this. And he was pretty apolitical. He used to take the Mickey out of all of them. But he also said that Johnny Carson, who was the biggest star of them all,

had a complete sort of monopoly when he was on the airways. No one ever knew what his politics were. And yet now we're in a position where I think every single late-night host, with the exception of Greg Gutfeld now, who was launched on Fox and his number one in the ratings, probably not a coincidence, that every one of the others sounds exactly the same when it comes to how they cover politics. They're all left-wing Democrats. Well, again, it's not really left-wing. The issue is the institutional consensus. The problem, in some sense, is that the civil war, the hybrid civil war, comes out of something called the

whole of society approach. Now, a lot of Americans and people abroad aren't tracking the idea that this concept, which appears to have originated an Asia-Pacific security think tank named after Daniel Inouye around 2010, is basically soft fascism. And the idea being that a hybrid war, a war that is distributed between the kinetic and the internet data, hearts and minds, entertainment, etc. has to be fought in a different fashion in which you get all of the participating institutions of society to row together and to speak with one voice and sing from one hymnal. All of the non-conforming individuals who don't even know that there is something called a whole of society approach or where it was innovated or what hybrid warfare isn't are potentially viewed as the enemies

because they think they have free speech and they think they have a right to dissent. So the whole of society, which is hysterically funny as the title, is not remotely the whole of society. Then what happens is that from their point of view, there was this group that you can call the backward rest of society. And the backward rest of society, the deplorables, are the people who spoke out and say, I don't understand why we're in Ukraine, I don't understand what the issue is with the vaccines, why are we claiming that this had to have come from a wet market. And the whole of society then started taking this infrastructure that they'd built up to destabilize resubilies. and started just targeting individuals. And you could say, well, okay, that's all at the level of data or words. But now, Trump has faced at least two assassination attempts,

and my guess is that that number is not two. And in particular, I would say that Elon had a son, who I think he believes, was targeted by this transgender movement attempting to induce people to reproductively mutilate themselves and terminate their line. In this situation, I would say that both Elon and Trump feel that they have been joined in a physical hybrid war, and they are now returning fire.

So the question is, what is it that Elon is trying to preserve? When you had an actual civil war in the U.S., were both sides trying to preserve the infrastructure of the country that they hope to rule over at the end. This is what I don't know. I don't know. Mike Benz and I are actually quite close together on this. We've both been praying for the day

that we could actually clean house with this terribly frightening architecture that grew up in the CIA State Department nexus. But Mike has compared this to performing open-heart surgery. And you're trying to protect the patient from both, let's say, I don't know, a spread of cancer while they're on the operating table, but also a surgeon that appears to be very cavalier about risk mitigation. I cannot believe that in some sense, Elon and Trump are not surrounding themselves

with more strong voices, given how much is on the line. We're not taking over Twitter here. Twitter never had a thermonuclear deterrent. Right. I mean, you said an interesting thing about a possible link between the Trump golf club assassination attempt by a guy called Ryan Ruth. He said Ryan Wesley Ruth and USAID are both strongly tied to discrete American interests, asset sources and methods in Ukraine. Who was paying Ruth in Ukraine, Afghanistan, etc.? is there no connection whatsoever?

I mean, to which I would say a very legitimate question simply because we know so little actually about either of these people. that wanted to kill Trump, because, you know, a party, I would say is what you just said, that the very liberal skewed mainstream media moved on incredibly quickly. I mean, if there had been two assassination attempts on a Democrat running for president, one of which hit him, and then within weeks there's another attempt that is very, very close to being successful, four minutes away from killing Trump. And we know so little about the killers or the attempted killers, it would be a specific. staggering state of affairs, and the media would have carried on and on and on.

But they just dropped it. I mean, the first one in particular, Ruth, obviously, we know a little bit more about, and those connections to Ukraine are intriguing. But the young kid that shot Trump in the ear, literally nothing seems to exist about this kid, and we've all just accepted it. You know, people I know in the intelligence community talk about the use of Patsis to commit crimes. They talk about pre-planting cover stories in mainstream public. As soon as I heard that, I immediately went to the New York Times search engine to find that I think in 23 there was an article about weirdos in Ukraine who would never be allowed near the front lines of an American war in which Ruth is featured, which is consistent both with him being a complete lunatic and also pre-planting a cover story in an Allied media.

You have to recall that when World War II was going on, the New York Times. Times had a paid journalist from the government to write the atomic weapons pieces. So the reporter was actually paid by the government to do its bidding. J. Edgar Hoover used Joyce Haber at the Los Angeles Times to destroy Gene Seaberg. There is a long tradition of using media confederated to the U.S. deep state to accomplish things with no trace. And in part, you have to remember that the idea of the CIA's intelligence is what they say, but if it was called the COA, the covert operations agency, you'd know that the word covert means

deniable. Deniable means gaslighting. It is the only organization that is chartered to gaslight should its activities become discovered. And that is why there's so much pressure never to even ask a question, what was a lunatic like Ryan Ralph doing in Ukraine, who was paying him, why was he trying to get fighting? from Afghanistan to the front lines in Ukraine. This is a very strange sort of hobby for a former construction worker.

Where is the line? In terms of transparency, there must be some things which even you would think should remain secret, as far as US government information. You know, when I remember what happened with Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and so on, when you put all those guys together

and you see the attack on them was that they were revealing stuff that was not in America's national interest. Others defended them saying, well, no, no, we need to be as transparent as possible. But clearly there's a line between those two positions. You know, you don't want to put the details of every single, you know, CIA operative around the world because they'll get killed, for example. So there is clearly a line.

But where... Well, so where is that line? I mean, in terms of what Trump and Elon Musk are doing now, There's something incredibly energetic and refreshing about what they're doing in lifting the lid off all this stuff. And they're going to do it apparently department by department and even down to the JFK files and what the government knows about UFOs and so on and so on. But there's got to be a line, isn't it? I mean, you can't just Edward Snowden it, WikiLeaks it, where everything goes out. They will find out that when they've screwed up really badly.

At some point, they're going to do something like end up releasing a lot of sources and methods. using this showmanship that they do better than anyone else on earth. And, you know, the concern that I have is that those of us who've been fighting this battle for, like, I don't know, in my case, 35 to 40 years against this thing are nowhere to be found. We're looking at a bunch of people who have crossed over relatively recently to being okay with this whole structure. I mean, I hate to say it this way, but if you look at like Mark Zuckerberg, and and, you know, the board of Facebook,

they were participating in this thing until they switched teams. Yeah. So in part, those of us who've been looking at this for a long time know the dangers of disclosure, and we've always worried, like, we need to get at the cancer, but we can't risk pretending that, oh, you know,

sunlight is the best disinfectant. First of all, any moron who always says sunlight is the best disinfectant doesn't understand that something like Busella gets worse than sunlight. They're infections that actually get much worse than sunlight. And so, you know, the problem is that you've got this very simplistic point of view. And if you don't subscribe to the simplistic point of view, either of the first group, which said that this is all normal, there is no conspiracy, or the second, which is, let's just destroy the whole thing and take the whole thing out. Let's saw off the tree limb on which upon which we sit.

neither of those is the right course, and I'm exhilarated by getting rid of the rod. I think that they're going to do a great job, and I'm never going to stop rooting for them to succeed. But my God, do they even understand what they're looking at? I don't know. Fascinating. Eric, stay with me. We're going to debate all this with Matthew Saeed and Ashley St. Clair in a moment. So we'll spend a couple of minutes talking to one of the biggest critics of U.S. AID's demise.

They include the Pope, whose envoy called the measures reckless, and unhuman. humanitarian grounds. Others, like the former Trump National Security Advisor, John Bolton, say it weakens U.S. foreign policy. And Ambassador Bolton joins in a. Ambassador, great to have you back on on Sensen. Nice to see you. Why are you so opposed to this? Because I think properly directed USAID in a bilateral foreign assistance program can enhance American national security. It's throughout history begin with reading Caesar's commentaries about how he used economic means in the conquest of Gaul. There is a lot to criticize about AID.

There's no doubt about it. But the approach that the administration is taking reminds me of that Army briefing officer in Vietnam who said we had to destroy that village in order to save it. I might say I've got some personal experience here. I was in charge of policy and budget at USAID during the Reagan administration. when we undertook a major effort to fix it. And I'm going to show you my farewell present from AID.

You can see it's a hand grenade. And it says on it, John R. Bolton, truest Reaganot, AID, 1983. This is a style of government. And that's the way we approached it. Well, hang on, John, if you don't want me saying, I mean, giving you a grenade as a leaving president, people could say that was sending another message altogether. Well, it was a style of government. We felt that AID needed to be shaken up, and I'm sure it needs to be shaken up today. But when you destroy it, you're eliminating an important instrument that we need. If you want to cut the budget and redirect it, that's fine. What I would do would be to eliminate all American contributions to the World Bank and the multilateral development banks. And much of the contributions we make to the U.N. system, I think the U.S. benefits by the direct bilateral

provision of foreign aid, much, much more than to these multilateral institutions. We get no credit for what they do despite our paying 25% roughly of their budgets. We get the credit or we get the blame when we do it directly through our own bilateral program. The problem is, though, that when you have a list of things which have been given money from this program, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia. workplace, it's $20 million for Iraqi, Sesame Street, and so on. When Americans hear that, they understandably go nuts, particularly when cost of living is at such a ruinous

and ravaging level at the moment in America, where people can't even afford to buy eggs. And I think the problem is the optics of this are awful in that there's clearly been noticed. Let's talk about reality, though. Let's not talk about optics. I would agree completely. I'd go nuts over every single thing you mentioned.

But if providing $1.5 billion to Egypt, for example, helped enforce the Camp David Peace Accord of 1979, was that not something that benefited the United States? There's no doubt, particularly in the recent Biden and Obama administrations, we've seen a division within the American body politic over what the bilateral aid program is for. conservative Republicans generally believe it's to advance American foreign policy interests. Liberal Democrats think it's to be a welfare agency to the world. That's the wrong approach. But having the instrument is critical, and it derives over a long period of time. Some people now talk about turning AID over to the State Department. That's certainly an option.

But anybody who thinks turning it over to state will solve all the problems needs to think again. Donald Trump said about it is absolutely absurd. seen dangerous, bad, very costly. I mean, virtually every investment made is a con job. There's nothing of value to anybody unless there's a kickback scheme going on, which is possible. I mean, you know, can you say emphatically that's not happening? Or is a lot of this stuff dressed up in a way that actually hides the reality, which is just America wanting to scratch the back of a country for a particular reason?

Well, I think scratching the back of a country that benefits the United States, makes some sense. I think those kinds of comments by Trump show he doesn't understand what he's doing. You know, with Trump, it's all one direction. The idea of a complex situation doesn't occur to him. I don't have any doubt, as I didn't in the time I was at AID in 1981 to 83, major reforms were necessary. And I'm sure they're necessary now. But once the reforms are made or at least underway, you need a vehicle to provide this kind of assistance to regimes that we need. on our side around the world. This was a lesson one would have thought people learned during the Marshall Plan. We weren't providing economic assistance to Europe because we were nice people, although we are. We were providing it to get their economies back on the feet to buy products

from the United States. You know, when Dean Atchison, the Secretary of State, wanted to sell the Marshall Plan, he went to the Delta Council in Mississippi to speak to a bunch of redneck southern farmers who grew cotton. Why would he defend foreign aid to them so that they would get cotton they could send to Europe to make a lot of money off of, which they did? When you were working there, how much of the money

in reality was just being used as a tool to destabilize foreign governments? Unfortunately, almost none of it. I would have been happy to use some of it to destabilize some of the governments that were faced around the world. That was handled more by the clandestine side of the CIA. What we were trying to do was help governments that we felt we had an interest in.

Now, I don't think we had perfected that by any stretch of the imagination, and there are reasonable people who can disagree about the country levels. You'll notice in this entire three weeks of debate, nobody's talked about, is the allocation to country X high enough, or is it too high? They just talk about, you know, the DEI programs, which are small amounts of money. The real budget allocation question is, are we spending enough in support of the governments that we need support from? Should it just not be just completely transparent? In other words, give it all to the State Department and say, right, here's a list of all the investments we're going to be making into all these countries, and here's the real reason why.

And we're no longer going to be financing any of these absurd things like Iraqi Sesame Street. we're just going to say, we're going to give Iraq 20 million, and here's why, and be judged accordingly. But at least it's transparent. Yeah, look, if it were looking at AID, I tell the Hill every single thing we did. In fact, I spent a lot of my time, as did much of the rest of the staff in Washington, telling Congress all these things, the amount of reports we had to do, the amount of internal reports that were just incredible. I mean, the amount of paperwork was overwhelming. It made the whole place less efficient.

I think the administrator of AID has to be prepared to defend the expenditure of every single dollar. Ambassador Bolton, always good to have you on our sensor. Thank you very much. Glad to be with you. So who is right when it comes to USAID? Those who think were right to dismantle it or those who want to see its soft power influence protected. Do you want me to debate all this, Sunday Times columnist, Matthew Saeed, author and political commentator, Ashley Sinclair, and Eric Weinstein is still with us. Matthew, you've been listening to all of this, first to Eric, then to John Bolton.

You wrote about this at the weekend. Does anything change your mind? Well, I don't doubt there's a great deal of corruption, bureaucratic empire building, woke ideology, infiltrating the judgments that were made particularly during a Democrat administration. But I don't doubt that they do good things too. And I think it is a sensible thing

to have a forensic accounting for a department that does seem to have been somewhat out of control. But I hope people who critique the department also recognize a malaria program some malaria programs, saving lives, and there are synergistic benefits for the American taxpayer, too, in the way that John Bolton described. But I'd also add that this is a trivial issue in one way. The annual budget of this department, USAID, what is it, 50 billion, something like that. The level of the federal debt is 35, 36 trillion. And if this is an existential risk to the United States,

States. And Donald Trump has talked about balance in the budget. I see no prospect of that happening with the tax cuts. Most of the independent think tanks think he will add trillions to the deficit. The interest on this debt is something like a trillion a year. And unless there's a reduction in entitlements, unless there's a willingness to crack down on corrupt tax avoidance, the infiltration of Congress by lobbyists, monopoly power in the corporate sector, I don't. don't think that this existential risk is going to be alleviated by this battle over a pretty small department, even though I think in and of itself it's worth doing. I mean, see, that's interesting because like your last words, even in itself, it's worth doing because actually they're going to

start somewhere. This is where they chose to start. Trump said yesterday, next is the education department. Elon's going to get stuck into that. Then every other department, the Pentagon, everywhere. And actually, I feel that most Americans are completely on board with this. They're like, there's clearly all sorts of crap lurking under the bonnet here and they're going to get it out and they're going to use these young geeks who are brilliant computer whizkids

to root out where the overspends come. Now, there are inherent dangers which Erica thought outlined very skillfully. But Ashes and Claire, I mean, I just, if I was an American, I'd be like, yeah, get stuck into this. It's clearly the tip of the iceberg. The American people are all for the crap.

ancient scroll kid going in and dismantling all of this under Doge. And the problem is people like John Bolton who go on here and I'm starting to realize why Trump revoked his security clearances and called him a very dumb person because he sits here and he holds up his award from USAID and talks about how reform was needed decades ago and did absolutely nothing. Instead we're sending Big Bird over to Baghdad for $20 million. We have $10 million being sent for meals that are inadvertently funding and supporting al-Qaeda backed groups in Syria, this is absurd. And the American people are tired of this.

This has been terrorism, bureaucratic terrorism, against the American people. And a lot of people are upset because, guess what? They're going to leave the federal government, and they're going to have to actually acquire marketable skills and work for a living. Because this has just been, as Mike Cernivik said, white-color welfare, and these people are making obscene

amounts of money. They are in the top 5% of earners running these NGOs that are being funneled through USAID and making forward. $400,000 a year to disperse DEI in Serbia. It's insane. Eric, was everything that John Bolton said right? I mean, did you find yourself nodding to anything he said?

You know, you're in a situation in which he's talking about a bit of ancient history from the Reagan administration. There's been a huge change in what USAID does recently. It's always been problematic. It's become much more so. And I think one of the things people have to realize is that, in place, part, they view this as funding the war internally on dissenting Americans. I don't think it's any accident that Elon has started here. I don't think that this thing about the Wiz Kids, you know,

we're starting to create this theater around what Elon is doing. Elon is very clever in making this about a monetary outrage when the deeper question about it is why is a portion of the U.S. government targeting non-participating Americans who don't even know that they are against this whole of society approach because nobody ever signed them up, nobody told them it was going on. And there is a suspicion that basically our federal apparatus has moved into destroying American lives for dissenting Americans. And I think that that's really the issue.

You can talk about wizards and line item issues and the fairness about how people got rich. And that's not really the key thing. real thing is that this is a hybrid civil war. Matthew, I mean, I keep thinking to myself how much I'd love Elon Musk to get stuck into, say, the NHS here in the UK, a health system that has become consumed with bureaucracy and massive wasting of money and so on. You just think someone with his brain and drive and vigor getting under the bonnet of the NHS could only help us.

So, I mean, do you not think that there's a sort of force? for good essentially here, albeit a slightly flawed one. Yeah, the thing I was most excited about by Trump winning the last election is what they would do at Doge, because the British state and many other Western states are massively radically inefficient. We can't build things, massive overspend, the NHS you've described. Most of the government departments haven't had a proper audit for years. So this is highly disruptive, and I think people find it completely infuriating. The thing that you said about these departments working with the media to mark their own homework

is a complete rip-off of the taxpayer. Give you one tiny, it might seem like a trivial example. But I used to be a sportsperson, as you know, many years ago. Very fine table tennis player. Former Olympian. And there is a department, a quango. So quasi-autonomous department of the state called Sport England that had to try and increase the amount of sports participation in the UK, had a huge budget and failed miserably.

So the bureaucrats changed the criteria on which they were judged. But they put it in the small pin of the reports that they pump out there. But I look through the small, as a journalist, I thought, I'm going to look through this. And I pointed it out in my column in the Times. And what do you think, what do you think happened? They came back and started quibbling. And I thought, OK, I'm going to engage with the press officer here. The press officer paid for by the state should try and defend the waste of the state.

And when I won that argument, they brought in a contractor on a very high fee to defraud. us even more. Now that in microcosm is what happens with the the empire building. You know many sociologists have talked about this. And you look at the number of regulations that keep increasing year by year, but there's no department to start, as it were, shaving away. And Musk has talked about, was it, Gulliver, with all these regulations string, you know, what does he call it, you know, like nooses around the neck of the American economy. That is a coherent argument. But I do worry about Musk himself. Some of the

the tweets he's put out about the UK, which I know well, a completely fantasy. And I worry that he's not applying the empirical rigor that we see in his business to some of his political interaction, his flirtation with the far right in Germany, worries me deeply. Yeah, I mean, Ashley Sinclair, he's a curious one, Elon Musk, because I kind of agree. A lot of his tweets can be very ill-informed, intemperate, or plain wrong. You know, he's called for the British Prime Minister to be in prison, for female ministers to be prisoners on for no good reason that's based on any evidence, which I, both Matthew and I would share of view that we think that's completely over the top and just inaccurate. However, when it comes

to building amazing companies in America or now getting his teeth stuck in to the biggest company of all, the federal government, and really crunching those numbers, I can't think of anyone better equipped to do it. So, you know, it's not like I think everything Elon does is right, But I do think he's an unbelievable breath of fresh air to destabilizing and dismantling very, very, very restrictive, bloated, overspending government institutions. I would agree.

And I think people like Matthew, I'm so tired of the same old arguments. It's very reminiscent of Trump in 2015, 2016, 2016, 2017, 2018 about the mean tweets. Everyone likes to obsess over Elon's post on X. But it's just a tired of. argument and what he's doing, he was the first person to go in and say, where is all of this money going? Are we even able to audit this? Why have we not been able to pass an audit

literally ever? And he is the person to go in and do the job. And he's done a phenomenal job at this throughout his companies. And many people will say, well, the federal government's not a company. It is wasting as if it is a bloated company. And he's going to do a fantastic job at getting rid of these federal bureaucrats who are doing nothing. They're getting paid for no-show jobs. was the first person to actually ask, where is this going? Why can't we just go in there and audit all of the data? Why don't we have one area where we can see exactly where all of the money is being spent? So I think this is going to be a net positive for the American people. And I think anyone's saying otherwise and trying to redirect to his far right tweets in the UK is really just upset that he's doing

the job and doing it well when nobody else could. Yeah, Eric, this issue of transparency, I touched some of us earlier, but just to hone in. For example, the JFK files, or what we know about UFOs, taking the few good men analogy in America, you can't handle the truth, if it turned out that hidden in the JFK files was evidence that the CIA killed JFK, if it turned out that there are indeed a bunch of aliens being held and some of them could destroy the entire planet in 10 seconds, etc. In other words, if the worst nightmare scenarios were stuck away in these files and Donald Trump and Elon go, here you go, bang, and out it all goes and it causes utter mayhem and perhaps even civil uprisings and so on, you know, could America handle the truth? Is it not incumbent on

governments occasionally to not tell their people the truth? The level of non-truth-truitheling is the issue. the easiest win for both Elon and Trump is to show that the other side, that is the traditional side, both Republicans and Democrats, cannot be trusted. Then you will rebuild trust in those who finally flung open the vaults and said, we are the ones to tell you.

That is the easiest move. And to disagree slightly, I think, with Ashley, you have a situation in which the easy part is doing the disclosures. The hard part is understanding what they mean. Imagine you were in Israel, and in the wake of October 7th, you did a line item audit of the security group, and you said, I can't believe it. We're actually paying to provide low-cost pagers and walkie-talkies to Hezbole as well as giving them tech support. Are we out of our

minds? You know, the problem is when you're looking at all of this, you don't know what you're looking at. Now, the standard way of doing this if you're doing a corporate takeover. This is why waste has gone on Just a second, Ashley, let me finish the point, please. Just a second, Ashley, let me finish the point, please. Just a second, Ashley, let me finish the point. Just a second, Ashley, let me finish the point. There's a point at which sometimes a CEO goes into a new company and stands over the server rack with a can of root beer and says,

oh, this is the server we need to protect, and they pour the root beer into the server. And then everybody gets the message, no, no, no, we're not kidding around. This is deadly serious and there is nothing sacred. Now, I believe that in large measure, that is the way that Elon is going to get everybody's attention. I understand the logic of it. I have tremendous admiration for many of the things he's doing.

But you're watching something that is itself not transparent. This is not clearly what's going on. And a lot of the focus on money is actually a focus on getting a hold of the data. Yeah, can I imagine? Yeah, Matthew, final word to you. Well, a bigger point. And I really want to do it. I don't know what, final world would come to Ashley after Matthew.

To be fair. I wanted to make a point to Ashley. You seemed upset that I criticised something that Musk had said. I think a lot of what Musk has done in the state working for Trump is good. What he did in the private sector is good. But I'm willing to criticize him if I think I disagree with something that he has said. Ditto Donald Trump. I worry a great deal about what you might call unadulterated sycifancy,

where people like Trump so much that they'll agree with anything that he says. I hope that a rational person is capable of disagreeing with Trump when he does something that is wrong. Like, for example, denying the result of the presidential election. And I hope you would be prepared to criticize Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It's like a bingo card. You know what they're going to say. A lot of people are just fawning.

Forning. That is not what a rational society does. Ashley, final word to you. Are you a sycophant to Tony to Donald Trump? No, not at all. I have criticized both Trump and Elon. Musk where it's due. I think a lot of this. Eric, maybe they should call you. I wonder why they haven't yet to talk about this. But I really think that they're doing a fantastic job. I don't think

anyone's pouring root beer over the server racks here. And I think they're going to do a fantastic job at aggregating this data so that people can see exactly where the money's been going. I don't think that we need to be led into the circle of trust, as Eric said, for the deep state. In fact, they've been deliberately hiding this from us so that they can enrich themselves. And the American people are tired of it. Okay. Obviously, We don't know whether Eric's been asked to be involved. I strongly suspect he probably has, but I wouldn't expect him to confirm either way. So we'll leave it there on a cliffhanger for the public watching.

Thank you all very much. I appreciate it. Thank you, Pierce.