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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with Ukraine, and NATO is presently in the process of building the single largest NATO base in Europe in all of NATO history, 100% bigger than the Ramstein base in Germany. And in fact, NATO is, as we speak, moving arms, supplies, jets, and drones to that base because it points...
Straight out at Crimea and will be the the place of force projection And you know, this is this is the the military hard power Play on on Crimea is which is absolutely essential to Russia in their view as this is what kicked off this conflict to begin with really there was the effective secession of eastern Ukraine, but it was
russia's warm water port access uh in in crimea and obviously their military base there that was it was the crime crimea referendum to join the russian federation that kicked off all of this including the the you know the rattles snake nest that that trump walked into with ukraine and russia and whatnot and so you know georgia skew has has effectively campaigned on
being friends with both sides, enemies of neither. Neutrality does not want to antagonize Russia by building the NATO's largest lethal warfighting capability right on Romania's coast. It makes Romania a target. Obviously, from NATO's perspective, the moment Russia bombs Romania and extends the fight beyond Ukraine, that would be a major international incident.
But the attempt to remove Georgia skew is the same thing that happened with Imran Khan. The Intercept published leaked cables Who was that? Imran Khan was the Prime Minister of Pakistan. And again, there's this deep relationship between Pakistan and Romania here because Pakistan was essentially how we trained and funded the Mujahideen in the 1970s and 80s against the Soviets.
There's a lot of military capacities that we warehoused there. There's a lot of money laundering through those. There's the famous BCCI Bank, Bank of Commerce and Credit International, sort of CIA proprietary bank that went down in web of scandals around Pakistan.
Great Britain, the UK, which has massive interest in Eurasia, just built an air bridge between Pakistan and Romania for this exact purpose. And so, but Pakistan also, Imran Khan, the prime minister, did not want to... He did not want to... This is shortly after the 2022 Russia-Ukraine military fiasco kicked off.
The US and UK foreign policy folks thought that, in their own words, when they were effectively bribing the political class of Pakistan, and this is all in The Intercept, everyone can look this up, these leaked cables, it showed that
Carrots and sticks were offered by the Biden foreign policy establishment to parliamentarians in Pakistan in order to oust Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote, an impeachment that would take him from power. And then he was arrested shortly thereafter. He's currently in prison, even though he was the wildly popular elected head of state.
And the reason cited by the State Department for carrying out this coup operation was that Imran Khan had taken, quote, an aggressively neutral position because Khan had said that he will continue to have Pakistan do trade with Russia. He does not want to allow Russia. weapons, you know, to go to killing Russians.
And given how central that Pakistan is in this Pakistan-Romania corridor, Georgia skew, I see, is the same way, aggressively neutral. But that's all it takes. That was all it took for the State Department there. And can I continue just on this point? Absolutely.
Going after the courts in order to nullify elections or influence the activities of the elections is the beating heart of what USAID and, to a related extent, the State Department, CIA, and civil military folks at DOD do.
USAID is in their charter to pursue so-called judicial reform, which allows them to effectively bribe and try to rig the decisions of judges and the judiciary and the rise and fall of laws in foreign countries. And USAID made a special project targeting what they call EMBs, election management bodies. which are the bodies in countries that adjudicate elections.
So, for example, it's our Supreme Court that decided, you know, the Bush versus Gore hanging, you know, hanging Chad's, you know, election in the U.S., 20 years ago. In Brazil, the EMB, the election management body, is what's called the TSE. It's basically a subcomponent of their STF Supreme Court. That is the Demorais Voldemort judge who banned X, seized assets from Starlink, and is basically...
criminalized pro-Bolsonaro support on Brazilian social media. And they were sought after by USAID. USAID, I have their internal documents where they've, in just a few meetings alone, they'll gather together representatives from 12 different EMBs across the world and have USAID basically convince them, train them on what kind of ways to structure their court or what task forces to set up.
in the disinformation space in order to allow those courts to have a to not just adjudicate the elections, but to be able to effectively criminalize questioning the elections or speech during the election cycle. This is part of how the power in Brazil of that court expanded to such a huge size.
USAID was pumping money into that whole network around that court, pumping up the academic thought leadership, pumping up the legal advocates who were making pitches to the prosecutors and to the disinformation task force itself. And if they're going after every EMB, election management body in the world, effectively, to get those courts to criminalize populist speech.
You can bet your bottom dollar they're doing that to criminalize populist election results. In those same SEPs documents, this is the Political Process Strengthening Center at USAID, In that program, they define the enemy as populism.
They say that part of the purpose is to prevent the evolution of populist thought leadership because they define right-wing populism as a threat to democracy because it undermines the efficacy of democratic institutions, U.S.-backed NGOs and civil society institutions in the area. Well, guess what George's view is?
He's a right-wing populist, or he's a populist at least, however you want to define it. He is, in their view, the virus that the white blood cells of USAID are custom-built to take out. And I just have to stress this point. This was attempted against Donald Trump when he won the 2016 election.
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