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
The USAID and the State Department have approval over what staff they can hire. They closely coordinate on the kinds of stories or category of stories or workload that they can carry out. On USA.gov right now, everyone can see this in the Wayback Machine with USA.gov currently under maintenance, shall we say.
There's an incredible document at USAID bragging about the accomplishments that this investigative reporting group has done. Now, these are hit piece journalists that are carried out to capacity build independent media, not independent from government. It's our government. It's independent from you or what we say independent from other governments.
But they use this lie phrase independent media for all of their sponsored media assets. And so under the banner of supporting free and independent media in Central Europe, because they operate in Ukraine and about nine or ten or seven or eight Eastern European countries, it's jointly to do...
independent media, sustainability funding, and anti-corruption, because we want to root out corruption in Eastern Ukraine, and root out corruption in Eastern Europe, root out corruption in Romania, and anywhere that, basically what they do is, They effectively function to write hit pieces and dig up dirt on the political enemies of the U.S. and U.K.
legacy foreign policy establishment and then provide a predicate for prosecutors to arrest them or seize their assets or to induce policy changes in the country. And in fact, on USA.gov, and everyone can find this in the Wayback Machine, they have a document that says funding for OCCRP in Eastern Europe, $20 million dollars. Function, capacity building, independent media, anti-corruption.
Over $1 billion worth of assets seized. I believe it's several hundred policy changes induced in government or civil society organizations in the region. I believe they have six or seven government officials fired or sacked because of this group's reporting, including a president and a prime minister. So they're claiming criminal regime change.
And then the final one is 456 arrests and indictments. So this is mercenary media for the state. Paid for, deputized... These are effectively hitmen hired to seize the assets of, to get fired from their jobs, and to arrest, criminally take, use the criminal justice system, create a pipeline between their sponsored journalists and the local prosecutors.
in order to arrest the political enemies of the U.S. government in these target countries. And you know this relationship with prosecutors in USAID runs very deep. For example, it was the USAID funding, which was implicated in that Joe Biden speech threat to Viktor Shokin around the removal of Viktor Shokin in Ukraine. That famous Council on Foreign Relations proposal And by golly, he did it.
Son of a B, he did it. This was the famous clip where basically he said, if you don't fire the prosecutor, you're not going to get your billion. Well, USAID. USAID paid $27 million in just two grants alone to the Tide Center here in the U.S.
The Tide Center is not just the fiscal sponsor of the Black Lives Matter Foundation, but they are also the fiscal sponsor of a group called FJP, it's Fair and Just Prosecutions,
which is the group that manages the Soros prosecutors and tells them who to prosecute, who not to prosecute, has them sign pledges like Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, gives them talking points, gives them social media posts. This is all according to the Media Research Center, I should note. Meet on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. These are U.S.
prosecutors where the fiscal sponsor of that group 30% of Americans live under these Soros prosecutors now. And they're working with this group, Fair and Just Prosecutions, and they get their fiscal sponsorship through a mega-grantee of U.S. aid. USAID is, they do this everywhere and they can get away with it because judicial reform and anti-corruption is part of our humanitarian aid work.
We're trying to strengthen their democracy. But this, when you read that accomplishment section, you don't know what crimes these people have committed. You don't know if they're guilty or innocent. USAID doesn't even brag about that in the document. It's the raw number. 456 of our enemies, 456 of our enemies got arrested
because of the incredible return on investment for paying our own mercenary media assets $20 million. And think of the return on investment. We paid them $20 million and we seized a billion dollars. You don't know what the crimes are when you read that document as a US citizen.
That scale of prosecutions, it's hard to imagine that every single person there was guilty of those crimes or that there wasn't some relationship with the prosecutors in the background that politicized those cases in the same way we have in the D.C. court here with the January 6th cases. So this plays out everywhere.
And this is also why USAID-funded SPOCs and NGOs had their own personnel making speeches to the prosecutors in Brazil when they ran the operation against Bolsonaro.
There's this USAID Truman Show, and it touches everything. You think USAID is not having a massive impact on the government of France and the government of Germany and the government of the UK? USAID pays the Atlantic Council. In 2018, in the Atlantic Council's Democratic Defense Against Disinformation white papers,
The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on their board, I should mention, funded by the Pentagon and the State Department as well, and had a formal partnership with Burisma. But they're funded by USAID. In 2018, the front cover of their Democrat Defense Against Disinformation, one of their series in this, which was an internet censorship podcast.
propaganda document and consensus-building document so that the Atlantic Council's muscle as NATO's think tank could go out to all of their different grantees and partner networks about who to censor, how to sell it, how to do it, what connections to establish with the tech companies in these governments. The front cover of this, and everyone can look this up,
was the so-called Macron leaks in France and the distribution web of basically news stories that were damaging to Emmanuel Macron in the middle of his presidential run against Marine Le Pen, who USAID and the U.S. State Department – this is Western Europe. This is – where USAID ain't supposed to be, we're told.
Showing 81–100 of 855 · page 5 of 43
← Previous
Next →