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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Special Forces for great power competition has to meet some threshold of how much investment they're doing on the American soil, how many Americans they're employing on U.S. soil, how many contributions they've made to Americans and the American economy. You can't have this You can't have American taxpayers funding this globalist gut.
If this is done for nationalist reasons to help Americans, Americans have to be the beneficiaries of that. So this is all part of this.
I'm saying that's part of the reforms because people need to keep this in mind as a sort of nascent – Trump world foreign policy establishment. There was a Republican foreign policy establishment for the past six years, but they've all been the neocon faction that represented the McCain, the Romney, the Liz Cheney, the Nikki Haley types.
And I'm not even trying to draw a personal beef when I say that. You can make the argument that this is sort of the foreign policy school that Marco Rubio was substantially supported by and that drew that distinction in 2016 between Rubio and Trump at the time. But I think Rubio, like J.D. Vance – J.D. Vance was not a Trump ally in the beginning either, but they've –
I think that Rubio is doing, frankly, an incredible job so far. But the whole of Trump world is going to need to synchronize what their North Star is for these foreign policy visions. And I'm trying to say that it's a package deal.
The thing about USAID was because of how flexible it was and because of how dirty it could be, again, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID and it's been this way for 20, 30 years at least. it was a shortcut. It was a shortcut that could close gaps quickly. And it's also a shortcut, for example, if you're not going to do regime change work,
And the highest ROI to be able to secure the petroleum, to be able to secure the lithium, the cobalt, the aluminum, the copper, the zinc, the timber, the import-export markets, the military bases, well, you're going to need to find other ways to offset that. the power you've lost by doing this.
So for example, Trump in the oil and gas space, Trump is, you can see a creative way of trying to offset this. Like for example, let's just say a country who we depend on for petroleum access, goes rogue, shakes off the yoke of U.S. soft power in the region, say Azerbaijan or something, and you lose the petroleum because you lost your ability to influence those elections.
Well, now you need to offset that. Well, in Trump's case, he's saying drill, baby, drill domestically. So there's ways that you can maybe offset that. Or maybe you could, you can... Find other levers for carrots and sticks that don't rely on tapping into this dark arts sorcery work.
For example, I believe one of those things that just like with banning the CIA's ability to do assassinations after the 70s is banning social media censorship diplomacy. USAID's huge role in social media censorship. that's one of those assassinations level things that has to be completely banned by law in whatever continuing function USAID has.
And any USAID administrator or someone who's caught doing that, there should be criminal penalties. There should be civil penalties with treble damages for every US citizen who's impacted by that. And because this is, This is impacting U.S. taxpayers paying to have this cloak and dagger work target them. There has to be recourse for that.
So you can create those categories, but it also has to touch the corporate side for the stakeholder group, because otherwise, who are you doing this for? What are our American national interests?
I hesitate to concede that they fully had their legs chopped off. because of a number of reasons. One is, even assuming so, they're moving over to the State Department. Now, what I've been telling, you know, I do all these private live streams for my ex-subscribers, and for 14 months, I've been telling every lecture I've done, I've said, x-ray through every time you see USAID, and look, and
you have to see the State Department everywhere. They are not USAID. They're State Department. They've always been State Department. There's never been an inch of daylight. Now, let's sort of start with that because there actually is in the sense that it's a switch player between these other interagencies, and they have more flexibility to do this rogue work than State.
But they are fundamentally supposed to be a State Department function. They are independent, but they are supposed to be guided by State. And they only exist to advance the foreign policy stipulated goals set by state. But what difference does it make? Leave aside the flexible covert action under discrete democracy promotions.
Leave aside the accountability, get out of White House approval free card aspect of it. What difference does it make to shut down USAID if you move everything over to the State Department? It's a State Department role anyway. There was intense debate about whether even to make it an independent agency because it's fundamentally the State Department.
It's the same debate that George Kennan had with his peers in 1948 when they created the function for covert action in the first place for the CIA.
George Kennan was the guy who authored NSC 10-2, the national security memo that established the plausible deniability doctrine for the Central Intelligence Agency to do covert action, political warfare, economic sabotage, propaganda, and information black ops, the whole gamut of everything that the CIA is authorized to lie about so that our government can deny to us and to the world that they're actually doing it.
two months before George Kennan authored NSC 10-2 and gave us the national security structure that we currently live under. He wrote this memo that I talk about frequently called The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare. This is on April 30th, 1948. This was two weeks after the CIA's first
mostly unauthorized, covert action to rig and influence the course of and ultimately win the Italian election in Italy, which was the first election in Italy after World War II that pitted a US-backed, pro-Western candidate against a communist, Soviet-backed candidate. And the CIA did all sorts of dirty work in there.
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