#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers
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What revelations have recently emerged about USAID?
Mike Benz. Sean. Welcome back. It's good to be back. Man, I feel like we just saw each other. It was a couple months ago, wasn't it? Yeah, but the before and after picture is quite different. I know, man. Wow. I mean, the stuff that's being unveiled and all the corruption that's being exposed, I mean, we kind of chatted about this a little bit downstairs, but... This stuff is rolling out fast. I mean, like, lightning speed here. Did you expect that to happen?
I didn't expect the speed of this. I think once they fixated on USAID, frankly, I think it was USAID's intransigence as the Trump admin and White House were just trying to simply audit things. And it was their reluctance combined with, I think, the scandals leading up to it that led them to zero in on it. And I think that just because of the pure money outlays and how easy that picture is to understand for Americans, it's now challenging the entire foreign policy establishment from the operations of the State Department to the intelligence services to the defense establishment. I think it's validated already. what had been percolating for a long time, which was this weaponization, not just of what the focus was for the past several years of domestic agencies like the Justice Department and FBI against US citizens, but actually our even dirtier
operations abroad are dirtier apparatus, are blob foreign policy apparatus, capacity for covert activity and political dirty tricks weaponized against Americans, which is just a fundamental assault on the premise for even having them in the first place.
Yeah. I mean, it seems like Doge kind of started with USAID. How involved are you with Doge?
Not. Not? You know, I mean, I speak... I think that a lot of the folks there pay attention to the things that I publish. I think so too. There's interaction simply through X and whatnot. They have an incredible job.
One of the things we're confronted by right now in this moment is it's becoming increasingly clear, I think, to the rest of the American population that it's this foreign policy establishment that's been weaponized against domestic citizens. But this was a nationalist movement from 2016 onward. Make America great again. America first, these sorts of things. People joined it because they cared about their own country or their own neighborhood, whether their streets were safe, whether their school curriculum reflected their own values, whether there was waste, fraud, and abuse at the White House or D.C. level. They didn't think about, in large part, international affairs, foreign relations. They may care about a few wars that they hear about in the news, but The MAGA movement did not really have, and is only now beginning, I think, to incubate a sort of foreign policy intelligentsia that both the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party has had for over half a century, and that the Democratic Party has had.
And so that process, I think, is forming right now, and people are trying to trying to form that North Star. And I think many of the things that I've published help go into that thought leadership soup.
Yeah, I mean, what... I was going to ask this at the end, but I don't want to – it just popped in my head, so I don't want to forget it. But, I mean, you've really dove into the USAID stuff. And so once we get through all of the USAID stuff, which is what we're going to interview about today, what are you going to go at next? What are you going to start looking into?
Well, it's all related. This is one of the reasons when I – do my lectures and I show the chart of the foreign policy establishment, State Department for U.S. National Interest, Defense Department for U.S. National Security, CIA as a sort of covert player to covertly help the State Department or covertly help DOD. These things are all connected. So the DOD picture is... A perhaps darker one and much bigger one to tackle in terms of cleaning that up. By the sheer size of it, USAID is about a $44 billion budget. The Pentagon's $900 billion. Depending on how you measure it, the black hole in their budget is somewhere between hundreds of billions to $35 trillion. Wow.
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