The DeVory Darkins Show - Mike Benz drops a CHILLING WARNING for Far Left NGO's in America

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Mike Benz drops a CHILLING WARNING for Far Left NGO's in America. This comes as the independent journalist exposed the deep level of corruption within USAID and NGO's domestically in America.FOLLOW MIKE BENZ HERE:https://x.com/MikeBenzCyberhttps://foundationforfreedomonline.comFOLLOW ME:https://www.twitter.com/devorydarkinshttps://www.instagram.com/devorydarkinshttps://www.rumble.com/c/devorydarkinsBUY ME A COFFEE:https://buymeacoffee.com/devorydarkinsSHOP OUR MERCH STORE:https://store.devorydarkins.comADVERTISING INQUIRIES:[e-mail]/SUPPORT INQUIRIES:[e-mail]

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From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. All right, welcome back to the DeVorey Darken show special guests here with us. Mike Benz. He is a former U.S. State Department official, also the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. But you should probably know him for exposing exactly the fraud, waste, and abuse that happened under USAID. And he has recently taken a position within the administration. So I'm very grateful that he was able to make the time with us here virtually to come onto the show and really catch us up on what's happening with that, what his plans are moving forward. and really want to get into some of the digital side of what's happening in our country.

So Mike, thank you for being on the show today. How are you, sir? Great. Thanks for having me. It's been an exciting, we're an exciting pivot point in history right now. Exactly, exactly. And so I just want to get right into it. Let's just start with easy stuff.

So USAID, you're pretty much the person. I think most Americans, if they were interested in the topic, heard your side, like when you were on Joe Rogan and other podcasts really exposed it all. What do you think is the main lesson that you got out of all of it at this point? Well, I think the main lesson to draw is that there is this vast connective tissue between the government and the private sector and the NGO Plex and that the idea of a kind of philanthropic front for funding economic development initiatives is a very easy way to disguise all manner of political and intelligence and state craft-oriented black ops.

I mean, one of the things that I think was very instructive for people to see case study after case study around was the use of USAID to do things that used to be done by intelligence services or used to be done by private philanthropists if they wanted to, you know, secure oil reserves in a certain country or copper or aluminum or swing in election. I think one of the phrases that I would go around saying and still feel quite adamantly about is when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID. And the reason for that is actually logistical. Any CIA operation that goes on for a particularly long period of time, the more it stretches

out, the easier it is to run it under USAID, the bigger it is, the more, because if you think about the logistics of an intelligence operation, you have, everybody's got to have a security clearance, you have to have your communications in a skiff, you have to launder the money because the paycheck can't say that it's coming from an intelligence agency or else the covert operation is blown. And so logistically, it's just much easier to run things out of a government agency that's allowed to give the money, that's allowed to get people in on the operation without them getting a security clearance or without them being on a need-to-know basis. Anytime you need to mobilize tens or hundreds of thousands of people, it's much easier to do it through USAID than to do it

through the CIA. And in fact, this is much easier for the CIA to work, for example, through the State Department than it is the CIA. That's why the CIA, for example, when the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh got bombed last month in Saudi Arabia, the news was U.S. Embassy bombed, CIA station substantially, you know, destroyed. And so, well, what is the CIA station doing inside the U.S. Embassy? But that is the case pretty much everywhere, which is that, you know, almost half of our State Department political affairs employees don't even work for the State Department. They work for the CIA under diplomatic cover, and it's the same thing with the USAID.

But really, there's this NGOplex that is used for all manner of soft power and influence. And so what I'm hoping to be able to do in the next six months is to be able to bring forward tranches of files so that the American people can see what they've been paying for all this time when they thought they were funding this kind of philanthropic development front. Right. You know, it's interesting because it sounds like it's just USAID is just another arm of the CIA essentially. And I like how you actually put it because a lot of people think when they hear about operations, they forget nothing happens without, you know, the logistical side of it all. So, yeah, that's a really good point. You said NGOs. So can we explore that just briefly? Do you think not just the NGOs overseas that are involved in a lot of this stuff because the CIA?

What about NGOs here in our own country? Do you find that? Like which one is a bigger problem? Well, I see it as the same problem because the big ones that operate at home in this country also operate internationally and are often the recipients for huge amounts of grants overseas. and there's no firewall between that and their domestic work. So a great example is something like the Open Society Foundation, the Open Society Institute Network, which is George Soros' network.

Now, that is a network that became hugely popular and powerful in the 1980s as a NGO parallel influence track to defeat communism in Eastern Europe. It worked very closely with all of our U.S. embassies in Europe. They worked very closely with USAID. They deny it, but it would be hard for me to. There was never a point of conflict, let's just say, between them and the Central Intelligence Agency's goals during the Cold War. But regardless of how you, at the end of the day, it did, George Soros did help us win

the Cold War, if you will. The Open Society Foundation was started in 1979 in South Africa, according to George Soros as a tax shelter for his kids, basically, but then very quickly, when Reagan came into office, they began working, you know, setting up all over Europe. And the fact is, is they are now in pretty much every country. I covered, for example, the Open Society Foundation's work in Mongolia to help get a preferential mining deal that would allow foreign direct investors to profit from the discovery of the world's largest copper mine in Mongolia, the Open Society Foundation worked very closely with the U.S. Embassy in Mongolia to make that happen. They

organized street protests in order to make sure that this set of reforms passed. And then at the same time, George Soros's hedge fund, his family office hedge fund, which is worth billions of dollars, was massively invested in Rio Tinto, the British mining firm that got the mining rights that the U.S. embassy pushed for and that his own NGO foundations was organizing street protests to maximize the profits of a company that George Soros was invested in. But the fact is, is Open Society Foundation works at home in the U.S. beginning in 2004. George Soros announced that Open Society would begin to do it in the United States

what it had done for the 20 years before that abroad. And in fact, to this day, well, I should say at least up until mid-last year, the Open Society Foundation was one of the key implementing partners of a USAID program to organize street protests around the world. They're literally a direct recipient of these funds and implementer of these programs. And while that set of funds is not to organize street protests at home against, say, the Republican Party or something, the fact is getting that huge swath of funds allows you to build personnel. It allows you to build clout. It allows you to develop a giant influence system.

And so I liken it to, you know, if Raytheon gotten the business of flagging social media posts and Raytheon continued to get billions of dollars of military industrial complex grants, even though those grants are not for countering disinformation, I think everyone would be kind of more than a little freaked out if Raytheon, you know, We were, they were a government funded, almost wholly government funded organization that was built, built this enormous clout system and globespanning power and then was siphoning off that to be able to censor your tweets. So that's kind of the heart of the NGO complex at home that I think can be substantially neutered by cutting its branches abroad. Got it. Let me ask you this question because when you were explaining that, especially the social media piece,

and these campaigns that they can run that are based on misinformation. So, and I think you're the perfect person to ask this question. What do people do that? Like people who are out there listening to you, to me, other alternative media, how do we find out the actual truth? I mean, what is true anymore? I mean, based on what's happening on social media, I mean, whether it's as simple as bots or that these, I mean, what we see on exile,

there's a lot of accounts that are not even based in, America. What can the American people do to combat this, essentially? Well, I think what you, the best practice is to try to listen to as wide a number of sources as possible. And I think everyone falls into a kind of, you know, pocket of a kind of constellation of news sources that they semi-trust. I think that the one of the issues around the way our democracy worked until the social media age is that if you think about it, we have. had three news stations for the entirety of the Cold War. We had basically NBC, ABC, and CBS. And then CNN and Fox News came about in the late 1980s and 1990s, respectively. But from World War II,

basically, up until the end of the Cold War, there were only, you know, it was Coke, Pepsi and some, you know, off-brand coal. I mean, it was, it was the same, it was the same thing. A very small number of, and so we, I think people were pretty easily fooled by propaganda. There was not really, I think when you look at kind of the boomer class reaction to social, there's a kind of, we miss the Walter Cronkite days. This is almost what you get from a lot of folks when they talk about social media misinformation. I wish we just had one trusted news anchor that we could just defer. We wouldn't need to think so hard.

We wouldn't need to wonder, is this true? Is this not true? And my response to that is that the American people slipped on every banana peel in that era. I mean, you could say anything. And the fact that there was a very close back channel between the public broadcasters and our intelligence services and military, I mean, if you just look at the origins of those, the big three during the Cold War, every single one of them was started by a graduate of the Office of War Information in World War II. these very close Pentagon ties.

And so I actually think that there's a check and balance put on power by having a large number of pretty much authentic citizen journalists who accrue their audiences organically, for the most part, on the basis of personality and reputation. But reputation gets litigated every day. I people may be upset that a lot of large accounts are not always accurate or sometimes they're flagrantly wrong

or they you know it's 50 50 and you can't trust them but they've got a huge amount of influence well that that credibility is always mixed against people's awareness of their bias I don't think that there's a large content creator who is known to not always be you know fully accurate

whose biases are not on full display and people tend to align with the podcasters and influencers and media voices who align with their own biases as they go through their own philosophical and political evolutions, they will branch into, you know, into other creators and the like or become creators themselves. And I actually find that to be a hugely democratic process. And I like that we are in an era where people don't just see something in the news. and turn their brain off and believe it. I think that that's actually a healthy check on government.

Yeah, that's really good. I'm glad I got to hear that because having to talk about this every day on my podcasts, even I tell people, I'm like, I don't know. I'm not standing next to the president. I'm not in his mind. I'm not, you know, like, so I can't really tell you what's, you know, 100% true. We could just go based off what the results show and then try to, you know, fill in the blanks.

when we can, when it's practical. But one thing I just want to shift to here, because I think it's in relation to what you were just talking about. So this upcoming film, this documentary, I was just telling you before we went live that I pledged to, can you just tell people what it's about? Because I think it literally is the foundation of what you were just saying

and how we should have a broad choices of who we listen to, but also what are we up against when attempting to do that? Yes, so thank you. So the film is called Shielded by Power. It's put, it's being produced by a group called them Power Oversight, which is the group that basically helped bring, bring to the public the story of the IRS whistleblowers against the kind of Biden campaign machine and the Biden big guy machine. And it's essentially a kind of autopsy and deep review. kind of movie storification of what happened around the Biden administration and many of the corruptions and abuses around Burisma, Hunter Biden, the censorship industrial complex, and what all was set up during that era that we have inherited so that we've got kind of an official, as official as possible, you know, kind of history of what all went into that. Because there were many of those pieces, a lot of those news stories while they were big and everyone sort of remembers that, you know, that the Hunter Biden laptop story was censored by Facebook or whatnot.

They don't necessarily remember things like the Aspen Digital, you know, three-day conference set up to organize the presensorship of that and how the Aspen Institute continued to get government funding and how it's, you know, a branch of many influences of our. many aspects of our foreign influence to this day and had been for 40 years before that. And so my role in the film was essentially to talk about the censorship industrial complex that was set up. I mean, to be fair, it was not set up under the Biden administration. It was scaled. It went from zero to one under the first Trump administration. I think without the Trump administration knowing it until it was too late. But it went from, you know, one to a hundred very quickly under the Biden admin.

And the concern is that it will snap back in place the moment, you know, there's a new administration that wants to tap into that capacity to be able to quell dissent. And, you know, what that really involved was a clever workaround against the First Amendment. The First Amendment bars the U.S. government from basically censoring civilian speech. And what they set up was a NGOplex to be able to fund it by the government. It's almost like we've legalized contract killings. Everyone, like if you want to murder someone, God forbid, you want to murder your spouse or something. and it's the First Amendment prohibits you from taking the gun, putting your finger on the trigger, and pulling it. But the First Amendment, as currently interpreted by the Supreme Court, does not

necessarily prevent you from hiring, going on Craigslist, hiring a contract killer as the government, and having the contract killer use the gun to fire the bullet to carry it off. And so they called this the whole of society technique, the whole society framework for countering misinformation, which is that you've got four quadrants. You have the government, the private sector, the civil society, and media. And private sector is the for-profit businesses. Civil society is the NGOs, the foundations, the community groups, the activists, the fact-checkers, and media sort of creates these escalations. And the idea is every one of the four quadrants pulls its own lever against misinformation, which is just, you know, was basically defined to

anyone who disagreed with the government. The government provide the money. The NGOs provided the muscle. The private sector contorted the economics of it, and the media created the pressure and cover for it. And it was through that that you could basically coerce the social media platforms to make the business decision to go forward with the censorship.

I mean, Jack Dorsey, when he banned Donald Trump from Twitter, he said it was a business decision because Twitter was under a huge, advertiser pressure plus regulatory pressure. The Democrats were threatening mass investigations. They were threatening antitrust lawsuits against meta and alphabet. And so the companies felt like they were under the gun on the finance side from the advertisers, on their business model side, from the regulators. And the media was legitimizing both of those. And so there was no counterpressure on the other side until Elon basically, you know, awoke.

and we awakened the sleeping Elon, and then he helped galvanize a government response through Jim Jordan's subcommittee on weaponization and then carried a lot of that momentum into the early Trump administration. And in those first three months that Elon was there, we took down USAID. We peeled back the Global Engagement Center at the State Department. Just last week, it was announced a $700 million budget cut to SISA, which was the DHS censorship arm. So we've made a lot of progress, but now they've all migrated to Europe. And what I've been trying to call for is for this administration to set up a task force to make sure that international regulators can't attack American social media companies

in the way that they've been doing. Yeah, that is really good. I guess it takes us to the next question that once Trump leaves the White House, do you believe it will come back to the way it was under the Biden administration, if not worse? Well, they're licking their chops. I mean, it depends. I think if you have a J.D. Vance who inherits the throne, so to speak, I think J.D. is very fixated on this issue and understands its importance. He famously gave the Munich and Paris speeches in 2025, basically trying to take it to the Europeans around their censorship industrial complex there. But I'd like to see him at the top of a task force to actually give that diplomatic heft beyond the rhetoric.

But I think he's at least attuned to the issue. I think that, I mean, if Gavin Newsom, for example, wins in 2028. His wife was just on a panel, I believe, last week, calling for the arrest of social media company directors and officers. if they allow young boys to listen to Jordan Peterson. I mean, I think she literally cited my kids go on Facebook and they are toxified by Jordan Peterson. And I believe that Mark Zuckerberg should be arrested. They're recommended.

His wife said a lot last week. Yeah, there was a lot that she got to say. Yeah, so based on whoever the president is, I totally get it. Look, I know you can't hold Gavin to that. And look, look, they say that the, you know, the husband is the head, but the wife is the neck. Right, there you go. But the fact is California, I should note just along that, California has actually proposed or variously proposed and passed a lot of this has been, is going through the court system as we speak. But they have passed misinformation laws at a state level with Gavin Newsom as governor to force X, for example, to turn over.

proprietary insider data so that and report on various like misinformation, hate speech, conspiracy theory, things directly to the California government and to try to build up at the state level since this has not been successful at the federal level with Trump at the helm, a kind of comparable law to what the Europeans have. And in fact, I believe the head of the digital commission inside of California is, was the former head of the information integrity. program at USAID. So if Gavin Newsom wins, I think not only is this going to slam back with interest, but you're going to have basically everyone who's living in London or Paris or, you know,

Frankfurt right now is going to be coming home with cushy, plushy, you know, godpower jobs to reentrench the censorship industrial complex here. Yeah, it reminds me of that that law that he passed trying to ban AI memes for election campaigns, and then the Supreme Court was like, no, you can't do that? Yeah. Do you think there is a world where, let's say, we go down that road, that it helps give birth to maybe a different type of Internet or different type of platform that essentially is the opposite? Do you think that's possible?

Absolutely. I mean, you're having this balkanization happen right now. I should note the other thing in California under Gavin Newsom that went through is a mandatory digital literacy education for all K through 12 students, which is a totally sick development. Media literacy, digital literacy is this, it effectively means if you don't read the right media sources, you are media illiterate and you need to get your mind right.

So it's kind of a clockwork orange type program, where in the name of media literacy, you are forced to only read. And oftentimes this means that the public Wi-Fi's at the school will not allow you to access, like, conservative-leaning news sources. Like Breitbart might be basically firewalled off from the Wi-Fi or, you know, like, Blue Sky will be allowed, but, like, Rumble won't be. Like, I know that actually at USAID, but, like, Rumble is, like, not a lot. You can't access Rumble on the USAID intranet.

I mean, it's insane. It's because it's, now obviously that was a Biden era thing, but it's, I mean, just think about that. It's like you can go to YouTube, you can't go to Rumble. It's, if, you know, there were 65,000 people employed at USAID and you're just hard banned from that. And that was, I assume that that was probably under some sort of digital literacy. type thing. But what they're saying is basically you can't cite new sources that are not media literacy approved on research tests. So for example, if you're doing a social studies assignment

to, you know, analyze the revolutionary war and, you know, America's coalescence is a country in 1776. And you're writing about the Declaration of Independence, like you can't cite There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road, and the car that hulls groceries and hockey teams, or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going,

start your search at ototrater.ca, Canada's car marketplace. you know, under a media literacy program, you might not be able to, typically you might go to something like Hillsdale or something and, you know, listen to Victor David Hanson's account of, you know, the 1789 first meeting of Congress. But if that, it basically works like Wikipedia, where you just have reliable sources, whitelisted sources, and everything else can't be cited. And under these programs, you can cite the New York Times, you can cite CNN, you can cite the Washington Post, but you can't cite basically anything right of the bulwark or Bill Crystal. And so, but that was under California.

But what that also does is that requires tens of thousands of people to be hired as teachers and professors. And so then you have this entrenched interest class where you now have tens of thousands of people whose career is dependent on this law and whose ability to make money in the future is dependent on more and more funding for these media literacy type programs. And so it creates kind of a not only a self-licking ice cream comb, but it creates a lobby for the censorship industrial complex to grow bigger and bigger. Illinois passed a similar law, so that's Chicago, New York passed a similar law. So, you know, what's happening at the state level is very troubling there, but what's happening at the international level to go back to your question about whether the Internet will look different, I think about this Eurosky project that Europe is building right now, which is really interesting.

So Europe is trying to find a way to rid itself of X. There was a lot of political hand-wringing about the influence of Elon Musk and about how he's supporting either financially or rhetorically, the Reform Party in the UK, the AFD Party in Germany, the national rally in France, and that X is a platform that's being used to drive the popularity of these things. And so the problem is, is there is no comparable competitor right now to X in terms of just micro blog speech.

I mean, there's no other, I mean, YouTube is video only. You know, meta and Instagram, you know, Facebook and Instagram have a very different culture where it's much more personal rather than political. But so they're trying to build up this, what they call the Euro Skystack, which which is basically blue sky, all of the European blob institutions are getting on blue sky and they're getting rid of their X accounts. And they've now, the EU is now pouring tens of millions of dollars into a blue sky stack for text, video, personal accounts and whatnot. And the plan is to basically, once this Euro sky stack is in place and it's fully compliant with the EU

Digital Censorship Act and it's, you know, they've got it all up and running and scale. to a certain amount, it will be much easier to ban X or to effectively force X to leave the country under threat of billions and fines if there is a comparable alternative that most people are already using. And so I find it kind of horrifying that you have this homegrown, you know, Blue Sky. And Blue Sky is not even subject to these regulations right now. The Digital Censorship Act doesn't even touch Blue Sky, but X has to pay hundreds of millions of dollars of fees. So they are trying to balkanize the internet. We saw China do this. We saw Russia do this, but now we're seeing Europe do it, which is a whole other threat level in terms of, you know,

American platforms being able to set the kind of international highway for information online. And maybe I don't understand the infrastructure of it all, but is there a world where the internet would be decentralized, I believe is the actual term? I mean, is it possible that we would get there to a point where anyone in the world could access the internet without being banned in the way that you are talking about as far as Europe is concerned? Well, this is where it gets really funny because the State Department USAID have all manner of programs to fight censorship and to stop people from getting banned online. I mean, I'll give you a funny example. Let me just take a sip for a sec. I believe this was in 2024.

The U.S. government, I believe, I believe, indicted or passed some sort of criminal sanctions on the Iranian government and two private companies that assisted the Iranian government in trying to get various Iranians. Iranian dissident social media accounts banned on social media in Iran. And the idea was that we were sanctioning the Iranian government for using private companies as a cutout to coerce the social media censorship of freedom fighters in Iran. And of course, that irony was not lost on me in that moment as you had the exact same structure at home. You had the Department of Homeland Security, you had the State Department, you had USAID,

you had the national, all funding private companies to pressure social media companies to ban dissidents here in the U.S., but because we were in favor of the protesters in Iran and the dissidents in Iran, we, you know, in the name of fighting censorship, we sanctioned them, yet we were funding that exact same structure at home. And I think that you will continue to see that where the U.S. government is always trying to fight censorship of various assets around the world, and that comes down to how much diplomatic financial security, trade aid, arms, sanctions, whatever toolkit of influence the U.S. government is willing to inflict or exert in order to protect

voices online that are seen as key nodes of influence for U.S. government foreign policy priorities. If I have a gripe right now, it's that I would like to see more of that being done because my concern is, you know, X just got hit with $140 million in fines. What happens if that's $140 billion? What will we do then? What if they say you can't host basically any JD Vance supporting account? They won't say it that explicitly, but they'll say anything that's anti-democratic speech. Because that's one of the things that, for example, in the EU gets you subject to the Digital Censorship Act. And they just say that they're promoting anti-democratic speech. And here's a list of a thousand accounts and 10,000 narratives that are no longer allowed to be hosted. That

means that basically everybody's show, podcast, social media account, X handle can't be hosted anymore unless, what if it's 140 billion? I mean, in that case, you've got a bankrupting size fine. Right now they're boiling the frog and my concern is we do not have a robust infrastructure in place to be able to we've teed into this by banning the visas of various government censors in Europe. There are about six different countries where some of the regulators themselves are no longer allowed to visit the U.S. because we pull their visas. but that doesn't hit them nearly as hard as some sort of sanctions or financial penalty or something that actually allows you to, I mean, they can retreat to Fortress Europe and still cast $140 billion and fines a month ahead of the election.

And what do you do then? So I really think that this needs to be more a part of the toolkit, our diplomatic toolkit than it currently is. And it will need to be forever going forward because this threat is always lurking. Yeah. It's really frightening because essentially a part of what you're saying is we have to be masters at censorship in order to stop it. I mean, essentially, you know. Well, we need to be masters of influence over the prospective censors to be. There needs to be something that keeps them in check. I mean, they're allowed to, we wouldn't, they're allowed to say anything they want. I don't care if someone, in London or Pakistan or Shanghai or Brasilia says Elon Musk sucks or says I suck or say, you know, you shouldn't say that or you're an evil person if you say that.

I care if they take my bank account and they prohibit, you know, the ability to earn a living or to have peer to peer communications. if they destroy the market place of ideas, basically, by just eliminating anyone participating in that marketplace who doesn't have the idea they have. So they're free to say whatever they want. But the moment that gets converted into government fines, penalties, regulatory bans, we need a regulatory authority or regulatory task force that says, no effing way, because we're going to inflict more pain on you than you're going to inflict on these people

in order to, you know, have, of nothing else a kind of mutually assured, you know, destruction that if the censors try to censor people, they themselves will, you know, feel, they will not get away with it, Scott Freight. Right. Let's get to the final part here. And I believe you can answer this. because I think part of the media has probably played a role here. So this whole thing with Iran, we know there's a potential ceasefire

or a ceasefire that was announced and the vice president will be there tomorrow for peace talks, etc. Do you think the American people have not actually been told the truth about Iran? I'm not saying from the president. I'm talking about over the past 20 years about how the media has covered the actual country, what has actually happened inside that country. Where are you at overall? And what do you think the American people might be missing?

So this is one of those topics where I think in six months, I'll be able to speak about that more directly. I think with the role that I have currently, it's I know that this is a highly sensitive issue. What I'll say is I think that everybody's got to come to their own opinion about this. This is something that has very, you know, serious implications for everything from our budget to our posture to what, what America First means as we are kind of approaching the second half of the Trump administration and there will be jockeying for, you know,

who inherits the throne, so to speak, from Donald Trump. And I suspect that this is going to be one of these litmus test issues for the primaries ahead of 2028 and something that, you know, is going to have an impact potentially on the midterms in 2026. And what I would say is just try to get as wide a opinion perspective as you can on it, you know, and, you know, try to, the more you can understand the history and evolution of how we got here, the more informed, you will likely find yourself as each new development and each new twist and turn happens. I think that right now, you know, they're, yeah, so I would just say cast as wide in net as possible. Don't necessarily place your trust in any single source of truth or whatnot.

Just try to, you can get 100 people's take on it and just make up your own opinion. having heard all the facts and data points, that will, I think, arm you to be better informed than 99% of folks who are maybe dug in on a few data points. Yeah. It's interesting because that's literally what we say on the show every day. I try to show everybody like all of the sides,

not just left and right, but like different points of view and then let them make up their own mind. because how else do we react to? I guess it's a given a curse. It's a gift because we now have so many places to go to get information. But it's a curse because it's like, okay, which one's telling the shirt? So, yeah, I appreciate that.

I guess my focus is more just like as far as the internet and like mainstream media and how it has been reported that the state media, doesn't allow certain coverage. And that in itself is a form of censorship, as you were talking about. We literally sanctioned them for doing it. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So it's interesting because on one hand, you know, there are polls that, you know, American people aren't for this. And it's not for me to tell people what they should be for. But I don't blame them because, like, what do they really know about the country? I mean, it's not like Iran is like a major talking. point on mainstream media, except now, obviously, because of what's happened over the past month. But most of the time, the best we've heard, even in Hollywood and TV shows, is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. It's in TV shows, you know. So it's, it's, it's, it's in movies.

I mean, that was that was Top Gun Maverick, Top Gun Maverick Part 2. You know, that was, that was basically about Iran's, you know, prospective nuclear missile program and the bunker buster bombs. I mean, it's amazing how well that actually tracked Operation Midnight Hammer. It's like we actually did the movie plot to a T. Exactly, exactly. All right. So final thing here for us, Mike. Now that you'll be working on the USAID files,

what do you think is just the main goal for you? Like once it's over and you're able to walk away from it, what would be a big win for you? Well, I find myself, you know, because there is a tradeoff, you know, I think I was posting on X like a hundred times a day, you know, coming into, coming into this. And, and, but as I see it, you know, whenever I would try to look up something about George Soros's involvement in the State Department files, I would find I would have to go to Julian Assange's, you know, what, what our government has now called. illegal under the Espionage Act, publication. I have to go to wickleaks.com and have to look at hacked files just to see, but it was incredible. I mean, I went in there and I saw that the State Department had been working with the Soros family since before George Soros. They were

working with Paul Soros in 1973 with the U.S. Embassy trying to get Paul Soros 100 million dollar port development deals in Africa and in pre-revolution Iran to get George Soros's older brother, the shipping titan, to get port access to the, you know, Persian oil. I mean, it, and that's how I found, for example, the Mongolia thing that I talked about in 2006, the world's largest copper mine. And I find myself frequently going back to things like the, the 1976 church committee hearing documents where you can, you know, you can get hundreds of pages on Project Mockingbird or M.K. Ultra or Operation Chaos or Cointel Pro. And, you know, that was, that was something that was dug up by investigators. If they had not taken the time to go through the documents and cheerly for the

transparency of it, we would not have the ability to talk about that publicly, to be able to cite it as the basis for doing or not doing something on a policy basis, to be able to potentially pursue lawsuits around it. This is another thing is that I believe a lot of these activities that we're done, there's restitution that should be paid. And there are a lot of prospective plaintiff's lawyers who don't even know they have a case because they don't know what happened to their prospective clients because no one's ever turned up the files. And so, you know, for the next six months for me, I'm essentially going to try to do a kind of church committee type role where, you know, just going into the files and trying to propose for publication as much as possible

so that we can get a true and accurate account of how we ended up here, at least through the lens of this kind of behemoth government agency USAID. Thank you for explaining that. I know I said the final thing. I just have to ask this because I've said this myself, and I want to make sure you can fact check me. Is it true that we had people in Congress that some of their family members were serving on the border directors of some of these.

NGOs. Is that accurate to say? Yes. Okay. Yes. This is a very common thing. I mean, look, I mean, a great analogy in the space is, I mean, John Bolton was the head of policy and budget for USAID in the 1980s. And, you know, now, I think if you just think about that in the context of the Republican Party power base from the 1980s to present, when you think about the John McCain and the Mitt Romney and the Bush family type folks. And, you know, this, John, Bolton was the national security advisor under, under Trump one, and represents a highly influential military, industrial complex, bulwark within the Republican Party. And when he left, he presented this on Pierce Morgan. He was given the, a hand engraved USAID hand grenade. It was literally a golden

hand grenade with USAID engraved. And so, you know, when you think about the Republican Party and its power structure, a lot of it goes back to the military industrial complex and a lot of the NGO blacks around USAID is to facilitate, you know, that, like for example, the refugee programs at USAID are primarily, they're refugee programs for Afghanistan. We're basically bringing over a government in exile. We're giving them tons of money. They send it back home in remittances, so it ends up as being supplemental war funding. Same thing in Syria, same thing in Somali, Same thing in Iran. You know, there's now talk about an Iranian refugee program.

So the NGOplex is closely tied to the military industrial complex, and that's really how you have a lot of the Republican benefactors where frequently the wives or the, I mean, think about this. So you had Dick Cheney as the vice president, you know, S&L would dress him up as the grim raper, where they, you know, saying he was the president, and, you know, he was like the shadow president. He was obviously, you know, the former chairman and CEO of Halliburton,

which got the $7 billion no-bid contract for reconstruction of Iraq when after Dick Cheney bombed it into oblivion. But Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz Cheney, where did she start her career in politics for the first decade at USAID? I mean, coming up, you know, literally through that same network. And it was Hillary Clinton who really gelled it together with what she called, the 3D model, which was that basically defense, diplomacy, and development all have to be treated as the same thing. So anytime we do military activity, there has to be USAID. Anytime there's

diplomatic activity, there has to be USAID. And so it really is kind of the holy hand grenade of our military industrial complex. And I hope to be as useful as possible to bring as much transparency as can be brought. I love that, Mike. First, thank you for making the time today and say thank you for your service to our country and really taking the time out to do this because it's obviously going to take up what you've been doing recently. So yeah, thanks for that. And I really wish you much success. Likewise. Thanks for doing this. Absolutely.