Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I didn't expect the speed of this. I think once they fixated on USAID, frankly, I think it was USAID's intransigence as the Trump admin and White House were just trying to simply audit things. And it was their reluctance combined with, I think, the scandals leading up to it that led them to zero in on it.
And I think that just because of the pure money outlays and how easy that picture is to understand for Americans, it's now challenging the entire foreign policy establishment from the operations of the State Department to the intelligence services to the defense establishment. I think it's validated already.
what had been percolating for a long time, which was this weaponization, not just of what the focus was for the past several years of domestic agencies like the Justice Department and FBI against US citizens, but actually our even dirtier
operations abroad are dirtier apparatus, are blob foreign policy apparatus, capacity for covert activity and political dirty tricks weaponized against Americans, which is just a fundamental assault on the premise for even having them in the first place.
Not. Not? You know, I mean, I speak... I think that a lot of the folks there pay attention to the things that I publish. I think so too. There's interaction simply through X and whatnot. They have an incredible job.
One of the things we're confronted by right now in this moment is it's becoming increasingly clear, I think, to the rest of the American population that it's this foreign policy establishment that's been weaponized against domestic citizens. But this was a nationalist movement from 2016 onward. Make America great again. America first, these sorts of things.
People joined it because they cared about their own country or their own neighborhood, whether their streets were safe, whether their school curriculum reflected their own values, whether there was waste, fraud, and abuse at the White House or D.C. level. They didn't think about, in large part, international affairs, foreign relations.
They may care about a few wars that they hear about in the news, but The MAGA movement did not really have, and is only now beginning, I think, to incubate a sort of foreign policy intelligentsia that both the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party has had for over half a century, and that the Democratic Party has had.
And so that process, I think, is forming right now, and people are trying to trying to form that North Star. And I think many of the things that I've published help go into that thought leadership soup.
Well, it's all related. This is one of the reasons when I – do my lectures and I show the chart of the foreign policy establishment, State Department for U.S. National Interest, Defense Department for U.S. National Security, CIA as a sort of covert player to covertly help the State Department or covertly help DOD. These things are all connected. So the DOD picture is...
A perhaps darker one and much bigger one to tackle in terms of cleaning that up. By the sheer size of it, USAID is about a $44 billion budget. The Pentagon's $900 billion. Depending on how you measure it, the black hole in their budget is somewhere between hundreds of billions to $35 trillion. Wow.
But the reason that I'm so overjoyed that it's starting with the USAID side is because it connects to all those points. And this is another thing that defenders of the establishment are now uncomfortably trying to find the right way to defend themselves, which is that if USAID is supposed to be humanitarian assistance and build the American people as a kind of international charity,
Why are they working with the U.S. Defense Department? Why are they working with Special Forces? Why is there even a civil-military coordinating branch for USAID and DoD? They have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes there or how dark many of the operations they thought USAID was involved in. And I think that this is part of what the blockade being set up right now to stop Doge
from finding out is about. They don't want them to have USAID's books. They don't want them to have the internal records. They don't want them to have the emails and communications. They definitely don't want them to have the transfer of money flows.
This was the sort of thing that even the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which directly oversees USAID, could not get access to until the present moment. Senator Joni Ernst had an ex-base with Elon Musk where she said when she tried to do oversight, she was threatened by USAID. When USAID ran the Zenzaneo op in Cuba in 2014 and the scandal popped off, who approved this?
And it turned out it was all in-house at USAID. What Senate staffers said was when they tried to get oversight of this operation along the way, they were told that if Senate staffers found out what USAID was doing, people could die. So they had to shield it from there. So we're opening up a Pandora's box And that's the threshold question is how much access to this is Doge ultimately going to get?
A few things on that. One is, it's true that almost 14,000 employees were laid off at USAID. It's true that the name has been covered up at the building. It's true that all the foreign operations folks have been recalled. I don't know still, as of the time that we're speaking right now, that it's appropriate to say that USAID
as a function has been shut down, given that I believe that the grants are still ongoing. There's been a funding pause, but USAID is funded through Q1, and there's going to be a dogfight in the budget about what to preserve, and the plan is to fold it under state. But to my knowledge, an executive order has not been passed formally abolishing it, and
Even if it did, there'd be the legal challenge, and the bills to abolish USAID are still just-born babies in the House and the Senate. And even assuming the closure and abolition of USAID, it is going to be inherited by the State Department. So that function will continue, but under the direct oversight of state.
But the warning signs to look for, I think there's no better description of what those warning signs are than what was said by U.S. ambassador turned legal hatchet man, Norm Eisen, I believe in an MSNBC appearance this week, where he called the Trump administration an autocratic regime, and we have tools to displace autocratic regimes around the world in, you know, People-powered revolutions.
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