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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
When the Russiagate predicate came out about social media interference, everyone can trace the timeline of this and look up the contemporaneous news reporting. When the CIA came out and said there was Russian interference on U.S.
social media and there were Russian bots and trolls and RT and Sputnik were supporting Trump, they tried to get Congress to not certify the election result on the basis of Russian interference in the election. And to my recollection, they got, I believe, somewhere between a dozen and two dozen or almost a dozen U.S. congressmen to agree not to certify that vote. Now, it's not nearly enough.
There's over 500 people in the House and 100 in the Senate. But if you can get that ball rolling and poach sitting members of Congress here in the U.S. eight years ago before they even built up this apparatus to be juiced and as powerful as it's become, Think of how much easier that task is and how far a little bit of money goes a long way in order to juice those networks in Romania.
Yeah. No, absolutely. That's what USAID does. They create the surround sound. This is part of the reason I call it the USAID Truman Show. USAID goes after every single category of institution in the country they're targeting. The media, control over social media speech, the unions, the workers' groups, the judiciaries, the parliamentarians, the arts and music and culture groups.
the universities and the academic institutions, everything, even folks in the commercial for-profit sector side. What USAID does is it does what it calls capacity building. It does a baseline assessment or strategic assessment of all the assets they have in the region, and then they look at the gap between what they have and what they need in order to accomplish a particular goal.
State Department foreign policy goal or a, you know, interagency-approved foreign policy goal. And then they close that gap by funding everything they need.
So, for example, if Georgia SKU is overwhelmingly popular with unions, they will bring in, they will fund the NED's Solidarity Center or other sort of, you know, CIA, you know, back channels or NED is, you know, this sort of squishy in-between between state and CIA. You know, there are non- nonprofit NGO that gets its funding from the U.S. government. It was created by the U.S. government.
It was conceived of by the CIA director in 1983, William Casey, for it to be born. Its founders even say that their job was to do what the CIA used to do. That's basically delegated them They have something called the Solidarity Center, which is their union arm, and they'll often work with the AFL-CIO's international branches. So they say, okay, he's overwhelmingly popular there.
Are those the people who are on board with our operational plan in place, for example, those people? have more disproportionate perception of political legitimacy for that, they will pump those up.
If they say, okay, well, Georgia Skew is popular, you know, in the media here or in these demographics, they'll do a demographic assessment, you know, by ethnicity, gender, religious denomination, and they will close those gaps. They'll do art and activism. You'll see musicians. You'll see performers. You'll see cultural figures.
They will all be approached by USAID-funded NGOs and interlocutors to do that. And that's That's effective enough in a country with counterintelligence antibodies because it's a sort of first world economy or a second world economy. In a place like Romania, the task of trying to stop the reach of those octopus arms is impossible.
Georgia right now has been in the news all year because they've been trying to pass our equivalent of FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is a rule here that criminalizes any U.S.
person or institution who is lobbying the American government to change policies or lobbying Congress or the executive branch, but is getting funds from a foreign country to do that and is not disclosing it because we consider that to be a totally existential counterintelligence risk.
If you don't have a FARA law to know which NGOs or which universities or which for-profit entities or whatnot are getting money from, pick your foreign country X, China, Saudi Arabia, UK, you name it, to do it, then That's an obvious counterintelligence threat. That's an intelligence operation, effectively, being run. When Georgia tried to pass that law, which is just U.S. FARA, what happened?
Well, there were the same street riots that were deployed that USAID was flat-busted, caught doing in every place from the Arab Spring to you know, to virtually every color revolution, street protest movement the U.S. has done, at least since the 1980s.
And so they're trying to stop Eastern European countries from even knowing the extent of the USAID Truman Show there and potentially even deploying their own rent-a-riot muscle to stop disclosure of that. So I don't know the extent in Romania, but I have to imagine If the truth is revealed, it would shock the world.
Every plot of dirt on God's green earth is influenced by USAID. I believe you said at the beginning of this that it was about 100 countries, and you mentioned Africa, Asia... Western Hemisphere, South America, and Eastern Europe. It's every country on Earth. For example, why is USAID paying tens of millions of dollars to British censorship NGOs and British censorship firms?
Why are they funding places like the Center for Information Resilience? Why are they funding all these British institutions if It has no impact there. Well, you're juicing the skids of these London civil society institutions when you do that. Institute for Strategic Dialogue and whatnot. What are those groups doing? What is Institute for Strategic Dialogue doing?
It is doing advocacy and high-pressure campaigns and liaising with the tech companies to censor Americans. Americans are targeted. USAID is attacking Americans. When USAID paid the OCCRP, this is the corruption reporting project that's under the... under the public limelight right now because of massive scandals that have broken out in the past several months.
This is the largest consortium of investigative journalists in the world. This is the group that broke the Panama Papers and other major world stories. Turns out half of their budget comes from USAID and the State Department. I believe in the beginning it was all of it or virtually all of it. They were effectively spawned out of USAID and the State Department.
Showing 61–80 of 855 · page 4 of 43
← Previous
Next →