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
We pump up these American fact-checker groups, and then they get sent to Myanmar, and they get sent to the Philippines, and they get sent to Brazil, and they get sent to Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia.
And, you know, like, for example, you know, in this story about Bangladesh that I've been talking about a lot lately, where you have a lot of this USAID and, you know, International Republican Institute NED funds to – places like transgender dance festivals and rap groups there and, you know, supporting, you know, picking sides in the political thing there?
The guy who is now the top foreign advisor was the former Bangladesh foreign secretary. During this period before he retook power here recently in 2024, he was brought in by USAID. USAID ran a countering misinformation workshop hosted at the U.S. Embassy in Bangladesh. Who did they have as the featured speakers to teach
bangladeshi journalists about how to counter misinformation it was the guy who would be would get catapulted into the you know into the top foreign advisor position with with the new government and the guy who became the head of it is the clinton global fellow initiative i should note i mean it's basically a pro-us uh you know government now and uh
And who was the other person that was the co-leader of this? It was the executive director of PolitiFact. The U.S.-based PolitiFact. The, you know, flagging you here for misinformation and disinformation.
You know, pressuring the social media companies and always having that latent threat of advertiser boycotts and potential legal noncompliance, I should note, with the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation because it is, in July, effectively going to be illegal to spread disinformation in Europe under this EU Digital Services Act. And if I can stress this to any,
people presently in charge of White House or State Department policy on this,
The EU Digital Censorship Act, technically called the Digital Services Act, has to be stopped through whatever diplomatic means necessary to stop it because it will absolutely destroy freedom of speech in this country as we know it, as Americans will not be allowed to talk to Americans about topics that a foreign regulatory body calls, in its sole discretion, disinformation unless you stop it.
Every U.S. ambassador in Europe has to apply carrots and sticks pressure. The U.S. ambassador to the EU has to apply this pressure. The U.S. ambassador to NATO has to apply adjacent pressure. The White House has to. This thing is one of the craziest assaults on free speech in America our country will ever experience. And I should note, USAID and our foreign policy blob made this happen.
In fact, my foundation's publishing this report. 19 U.S. government-funded... entities are signatories and nine of them are helping implement this very EU code of practice doing this. That's a full 20% of the signatories are from the US government and most of the major ones that have a lot more clout.
The critical node is coming from inside the House because the Biden White House actually had a formal policy goal. It's Information Integrity Working Group, which is something that I've now published. It's on our foundation's website to get Europe and help Europe pass this thing and tighten the disinformation regs.
USAID had a formal program through CEPS to help the EU and other countries pass disinformation laws because the First Amendment wouldn't allow it. So they're working with the international partners.
I support the White House's current reforms. I do believe fundamentally and if nothing else, symbolically, the complete and total abolition of USAID, uh, alone sends a chilling message to not do this kind of dirty work in the future if you ever begin to look like the former disgraced, folded-up USAID. You can imagine whatever form USAID takes in the future, whether they call it U.S.
OOD or whether it's the Bureau of International Development at State, people are going to be tempted to do this. We have... This is like... God and the devil. This is like, there's an eternal struggle here. And sometimes the moral area can look great. Sometimes different elected governments are going to have different defined national interests about what governments to deploy US soft power in.
And it's going to look to one side like it's freedom fighting, one side of the American electorate like freedom fighting or liberation. It's going to look to another side like regime change, coup mongering, and black ops dirty tricks. That will always be there, as well as the potential for profiteering or for doing that –
you know, index finger trick in the domestic thumbie war of a fair fight of two, you know, Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, whatever it is, whoever can weaponize the blob can take out their domestic political opponent.
And we need, so what I would like to see happen is during this education process, while everyone is learning about the sheer extent of it, and we are just begun to peel the onion on this, is that in whatever stage of, The aid function continues to... The critical thing is putting in a Smith-Munt style protection for funding and operations.
Smith-Munt was supposed to protect us from foreign propaganda or... distributed inward. And even that was destroyed by Barack Obama's presidency with the NDAA modernization that removed that protection. So we are now completely Smith-Mutton-less than we have been for 12 years.
But there's something even worse going on with USAID, which is the Smith-Mutt problem of foreign propaganda rigging the domestic information ecosystem. But this is for funding and operations. USAID's function can fund U.S. organizations for their international work, and now they are pumped up on steroids with their capitalization for their domestic work.
And also, their foreign operations can target U.S. citizens, like we mentioned with the OCCRP example. How are there no criminal penalties passed by Congress?
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