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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Appearances
So it's no wonder that they jointly coordinate this. But it's the specific immigration wing of the State Department for refugee population migration, together with USAID, a billion and a half dollars just in, I believe, a single year alone. It may be the whole Biden administration alone.
to a web of over 200 NGOs who, every step of the way, capacity build illegal immigrants to make the voyage safely and comfortably and can pay their whole way through in order to violate U.S. immigration law and to illegally... enter and make their new lives here in this country. And some of this gets really, really ugly. And I'll give you an example of this. USAID is doing that.
And it was administered for the whole of the Biden administration by Samantha Power. Samantha Power's husband, and I don't normally feel it's appropriate to mention family members, but they are both political and in the Biden administration's government doing a one-two punch on this issue. So, you know, this is not about the personal. This is just because these two things are connected.
Cass Sunstein was a very infamous figure in the conservative world for a long time because he was the author, I believe in 2008, 2007, 2008, of a famous white paper called Conspiracy Theories, which made the argument that the U.S. federal government needs to infiltrate the online space and infiltrate the cognitive intelligentsia of alternative movements.
At the time, he was concerned about things like 9-11 conspiracy theories on YouTube, undermining the diplomatic posture and standing of the United States and our military posture. If these theories gained steam, it would... He massively degraded the ability to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq and build an international coalition.
And so he made the argument, and I'm not weighing in on this, by the way, substantively, but this is simply what he said, and everyone can look this up. This is Samantha Power's husband, who then joined Samantha Power on the other end of this. Actually, maybe I'll start with that side of the story.
He moved over while Samantha Power was head of USAID, running this program, spending a billion and a half dollars to fund illegal immigrants to make their way from foreign countries into our country illegally. DHS is responsible for managing that and stopping that and catching them.
Cass Sunstein moved over to DHS in order to help run the immigration policy, where he was basically a senior advisor on immigration policy around the open border that left the whole thing open. So you have the one-two punch. Samantha Power is funding the machine so that they all get here. And, you know, her husband is a DHS...
creating and popularizing and implementing the policies that make sure there's catch and release and the whole thing's open and we can't do anything to stop them once they get here. Interagency approval, you might say, but it's all in-house right there. But
The other part of this is this gets back to the role of USAID in psychological operations and why USAID needs to lie about what it does abroad and why it needs to lie about what it does to our own oversight organs and the people, the US citizens who vote for it.
So Sunstein writes this conspiracy theories thing and he argues, whether you agree with it or not, a lot of people will never even think about that when they're considering the merits of such a thing that these things, if they gain steam, have massive diplomatic implications. You're going to convince France to contribute to the war effort.
You're going to convince Germany and the UK while they see things on YouTube that make their own parliamentarians or prime minister question the predicate for it. You can understand the national security impulse to want to do this work. I'm not saying that's the thing to do, by the way. Believe me. So it was called Conspiracy Theories, this initial paper, and it made the argument that the U.S.
federal government needs to develop a new capacity to infiltrate these movements and develop methods to either neutralize them or reroute their cognitive thought leadership in order to avoid the outcome that results in free and unfettered alternative media popularizing ideas that could undermine the workings of the State Department or the U.S. military.
Then quickly thereafter, he writes a book called Nudge. Nudge is basically the Holy Bible for the censorship industry. And it's basically required reading for anyone who wants to have a career in countering disinformation or disinformation studies, if you will, or information integrity or digital resilience or media literacy. This is the sort of It lays out the gospel.
It's called Nudge because it's a book about how to get people to do things without top-down coercion, the appearance of autocratic coercive control, but getting them to do it anyway. How do you, Steph, shove people to do it because that's what Russia and China do. Nudge them.
Find a way to get them to do it without your fingerprints being on it, without it drawing the same critiques that would have if the Russian or Chinese government decided to do this. And what it's about, you know, it's about creating this kind of whole-of-society surround sound. The State Department wants to do it, DOD wants to do it, CIA wants to do it, USAID wants to do it. Okay?
We don't need to make it formal government policy. We don't need to throw people in jail for they do it. If they do it, we need to create, you know, and Nudge itself was primarily about the behavioral role of this, but also the behavioral psychology behind this, but also about the role of institutions in making this happen.
But what you do is you, instead of doing top-down, you astroturf a bottom-up and you create a middle-out and a whole society. You want people to feel like their lives will be over if they challenge it, but you can't criminalize it. We have a First Amendment. Well, what if you raise the costs of that behavior? It's incentives. It's carrots and sticks. How do we heighten the cost of doing that?
What assets do we need in civil society in order to achieve this? Well,
If they're deplatformed, they can't access their wedding photos and baby photos because they're kicked off Facebook, or they see a friend of theirs was and can no longer DM with grandma because they posted about, hey, these vaccines may have come from the Wuhan lab, or these vaccines may have been funded by the US government, or they might not work, or we shouldn't go through with a mandate.
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