Mike Benz Explains USAID’s “Internews”

Stunning information from Mike Benz, being interviewed by Joe Rogan. It was a long detailed interview that is extremely important for everyone to read.  This is shocking, but we all knew that there was coordination in all of the "news outlets that have been marching in lockstep for the past five years to stamp out dissent, including stamping out true information that the government found to be inconvenient. I transcribed the portion of the interview provided in the following Tweet by KanekoaTheGreat. See below.

Mike Benz

On Internews, I've been talking about it for a long time, but now the stage is set to really show the extent of this. What we do is we create these pretty little predicates, these pretty little lie words, weasel words, to hide from the American people, and especially from foreign governments what we're really doing in the area. So we have a catchphrase at State and in state craft. It's called "independent media." You can think of that as the State Department's word for a good guy. Okay, doesn't mean independent. They are funded by us. They are not independent from the government. They literally submit their work and approval plans for their work plans, for what their cover, for review and approval to the US State Department. They are dog walked the whole way. But we call them independent because they are said to be independent from foreign governments who influence.

So basically, they're independent from the Chinese government, or they're independent from the Russian government. So there's just like with the word USAID itself that we talked about last time, it's your mind playing tricks on you. You're seeing "aid," but it's Agency for International Development. They do the same thing with independent media, which is that, internally to them, it means it's a good guy for us, because it's independent from our enemies, but when Americans see that, they think, well, "independent" that means it's a free actor who's not being sponsored by any government. But under the banner of USAID's independent media and media sustainability branches, we fund half a billion dollars a year to this network of, again, over 4000 media outlets. It reaches 778 million people, 9000 journalists "trained." Remember last time we went over the training? The Atlantic Council with seven CIA directors and annual funding from USAID as well as the State Department and pentagon, how they were holding up "I call BS" placards and putting Trump tweets on screen to flag for disinformation? If you remember, we went over that. Well, this is what training journalists looks like. Not only do they have the direct spawn of media octopus under their direct sub-grantee group, but they then go out and train the journalists who work at all the other ones who aren't directly sponsored. So they reach everywhere. And you'll see here, for example, it makes reference to to Jean Bourgault, who is making a half million dollars a year there. . . This has been going viral on X. I've been talking about USAID's role in the censorship industry forever. And if you look up, if you just look up "Internews," and you just plug in the name, you know, if you just copy paste that, you know, "Jean Bourgault" phrase, you'll see this in the video section, because it's everywhere now. She made speeches for a long time.

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Continue ReadingMike Benz Explains USAID’s “Internews”

Walter Kirn: “Censorship is Just for the Prisoners who’ve Escaped the Info Dome.”

Walter Kirn: "In a way, censorship is just for the prisoners who've escaped the info dome. You know, censorship is just shooting the escapees but keeping people inside the dome and playing that 24 hour news act like music as maybe the main imperative. That is the part that I think will truly blow our minds." Walter has perfectly expressed something that distresses me every hour of the waking day. There are vast numbers of people in the US who ingest only the high-calorie low nutrition version of information. I've referred to this type of "news" hundreds of times as "corporate news" or "legacy news," to distinguish it from the work of journalists who rely primarily upon the contributions of individuals who value the quality of the work. The legacy news includes five major players who I have often featured in my posts about the legacy media walking in lockstep to withhold information or to propagandize us. Once upon a time these outlets practiced something more akin to journalism, but we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears (I have posted hundreds of examples) that these outlets are no even trying to tell us what is going on around us, no longer offering conflicting perspectives, no longer putting their stories into historical perspectives and no longer pointing out the hypocrisy of public figures who make claims that conflict with their prior statements each day. Rather, in coordination with the U.S. government (and its many agencies, such as DHS, DOD, CIA as well as CIA's cutout USAID) our major news outlets work hard to convince consumers of pre-determined narratives--they write these plot first, then they go out to construct the facts. They do it like lawyers representing their clients in court--their is no attempt to be even-handed.  In short, they engage in Censorship and Propaganda: The modern day versions of Scylla and Charybdis.

People who continue trust legacy news outlets have been convinced by these big corporate-monied narrative-purveyors that alternate opinions and dissident voices are radioactive. As they did throughout COVID, they argue that dissidents are far more nefarious than people, way worse than people you merely find disagreeable. Dissidents must be avoided at all costs because the dangers they pose with their facts and opinions are existentially dangerous. This way of promulgating news is a great danger. For example, by pounding a simplistic narrative about Ukraine-Russia, as many as one million people have died and the US Treasury funds have been diverted from helping Americans to going into a big black hole.  As a result of stifling COVID dissidents, they got almost everything wrong (I found this on X recently:

Dozens of people with whom I once experienced mutual warm feelings have cooled. If we bump into  each other, they look at me with suspicion. Some of them have accused me of being a Republican, even though my views are largely consistent with what I've always believed, including this: for the 40 years during which I voted almost entirely for Democrats. That said, I have spent my entire life declaring my independence from tribes, political, religious and otherwise. I'm proud of that and I have a lot of criticism for Republicans too, for instance the elimination of the CFPB. My acquaintances on the new Left tend to show intense unwillingness to consider alternative facts and opinions. They are locked down and in fetal position. This is not happenstance--this behavior is the result of one the tectonic plates underlying their media ecosystem. In earlier times, their information diet might have been more varied, but they are now victims of Stockholm Syndrome:

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Continue ReadingWalter Kirn: “Censorship is Just for the Prisoners who’ve Escaped the Info Dome.”

Mike Benz Offers a Sampling of USAID “Jobs”

As the USAID house of cards continues to collapse, Mike Benz responds to Alexander Vindman's whining:

On a light note, here are more (real) examples of USAID malfeasance:

More recent revelations:

These

- $1.5 million for DEI in Serbia

- $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland

- $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia

- $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru

This: "$15 million to George Soros's open foundation Over Obama's last four in office alone."

"Advertiser outreach" to censor news outlets.

Funding to thousands of journalists to shape the news.

Many people are assembling lists of USAID fraud. I can't vouch for all of this, but this is one of the many recent lists assembled by users on X:

Continue ReadingMike Benz Offers a Sampling of USAID “Jobs”

Today’s Report by Mike Benz: What Has Been Going on at USAID?

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I created the following transcript of Mike Benz' discussion with David Harris, Jr.:

David Harris 0:00

The Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, Mike, Benz, Mike, thank you for joining me this evening, brother. We're hearing some pretty disturbing accusations about some of where our tax dollars have gone via USAID. Give us the give us the facts.

Mike Benz 0:17

Well, that's because USAID is one of the most disturbing organizations in the entire federal government. It may rank number one. In fact, USAID is under the cloak of being a humanitarian aid organization designed to advance US foreign policy is assigned the dirtiest tasks that the State Department can't get caught doing, and that used to be done directly by the CIA, but USAID is able to act as essentially a covert operations division in the way that the CIA used to, except it's not even bound by the requirement of a presidential finding to authorize a covert operation that the CIA does, which is why what you've seen for the past Two decades is that most of the International scandals involving spy craft have had to deal with US aid rather than CIA. And if you understand the CIA's history with money laundering, you'll begin to get a glimpse at the size of the problem with US aid and why they won't let either congressional oversight or DOGE see their books.

David Harris 1:19

So have they? They literally have struck gold, the gold of corruption, the the massive bank vault that holds all the dirty details and secrets of the left and of the machine maybe left and right anybody complicit in basically selling out the American citizen and their tax dollars for the various actions, ...

Mike Benz 1:51

Well, I mean, just to your point about first, about the Democrat, Republican side, it's, it's both. While USAID employees contribute 97% to Democrats, the more pernicious concern, so far as I'm concerned, is actually the Blob Republicans, the internationalist Republicans who profit off of exploiting the American empire for their own private gain. For example, Bill Kristol, the famous never Trumper, who likens MAGA people to terrorists. He is a part of an organization that receives millions of dollars from USAID, and so to the barricades he goes to defend USAID. You find Liz Cheney was spawned out of USAID. USAID sister group, the National Endowment for Democracy, has a Democrat organization and a Republican organization, and that Republican organization, the International Republican Institute, gets about $100 million a year just for Republican profiteering off of US foreign policy.

And the problem is far deeper than wokeness. And I want people to really understand this. When the National Endowment for Democracy, the constant companion of USAID ... it was, was born out of a USAID memo in 1982 to give birth to the National Endowment for Democracy. But when, when they overthrew the government of Bangladesh four months ago, in September 2024--these are leaked documents that were published in the Gray Zone just just three months ago, the internal baseline assessment that the IRI submitted to the State Department was that the only groups that they could muster to form an opposition group against the sitting government were gay and transgender groups, were two racial minority groups within Bangladesh and youth and student groups who predominantly listen to rap music. So what do they turn around and do? IRI in tandem with USAID, they funded Bangladeshi rap groups. They funded transgender dance festivals, and they funded the local universities in order to push radicalization messages to overthrow the democratically elected government. But that was Republicans. That was the International Republican Institute, not the Democrats.

And my concern is, if this were just a partisan issue, there'd be no problem shutting USAID down, because right now there's going to be a legal fight over whether you can shut USAID down by executive order. This is one of the one of the main contentions right now that Democrats are vowing to fight. But if you couldn't do it through an executive order, you could do it through an act of Congress. The problem is, it's going to be much harder to do it through an act of Congress, because Republicans there, internationalist Republicans, who do foreign policy for personal profit, can form a majority coalition block with Democrats. That is, they can defect over to the Democrats and shoot down an attempt to legislate USAID out of existence. And the problem, again, is because they, either directly or indirectly, or their sponsors or donors, are on the take.

David Harris 4:50

Wow, wow, wow, wow. Yeah, we have hit the mother load here. I really hope that it's something that President Trump can just issue an EO and say it's done. I hope. Also that as they begin to uncover the details of all of these schemes that go back 20 years, as you say, I hope that the individuals involved get exposed, and literally, the America, America gets to see exactly who's been on the take for for doing what. And maybe that'll push, maybe that'll push the ability for President Trump to sign executive order and shut it down. What are your thoughts?

Mike Benz 5:25

Well in terms of what the amount is, totally eye-popping and overwhelming. The analogy that I've been giving for the past two years is that many people think they live in the world they think they live in, but in some respects, it's a carefully constructed Truman Show made up of movie characters around them, produced by USAID. And what I mean by that is USAID has infected the institutional architecture of every aspect of American society and and world society. They have infected the media by USAID sponsored media. They have infected social media by galvanizing advertiser boycotts and pressure to change social media algorithms. They've corrupted the prosecutors by USAID's work with prosecutors, Prosecutor groups and media in media groups to create predicates for prosecutors to take action. They've corrupted the unions. They've corrupted the public health institutions. Virtually every layer from academia to civil society to the private sector to the media to the government, is flowing through with unaccountable USAID bribe money to advance what's said to be US foreign policy interests. But because Donald Trump ran on a foreign policy vision dramatically different from the legacy establishment, they used US aid as the tip of the spear to kill the domestic drivers of foreign policy, aka, take out the guy who's running for president and his movement, and you won't have to worry about anyone challenging our foreign policy vision.

David Harris 6:56

... Has every past president for the last 20 years known how known about this corruption with USAID and just chose not to do anything about it?

Mike Benz 7:11

Well, most of them are on the take. Joe Biden was the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which directly oversees USAID. USAID was funding Burisma. USAID gave money to Burisma and had a formal partnership agreement with Burisma. Barack Obama's mother worked for USAID. The Bush family runs right through it, Bucha. Bucha, you know, Vice President Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, worked for USAID. They're all in on it. And this is the reason that the Trump revolution was so revolutionary is because it defeated both sides of the USAID snake. And now we're going to see just exactly how the snake bites back when it's cornered.

David Harris 7:55

I wonder if all of the law fare and the everything that they threw at President Trump in his first term, the Russiagate, the collusion, all the stuff. I wonder if that was just to try to keep him on his on his heels enough to not look at USAID. But wait,

Mike Benz 8:09

But that was a USAID opp. . . . USAID funded a group called the OCC RP. Everyone can look this up. They paid $20 million to a group of hit piece journalists who turned around and dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani and then use that as the basis to impeach the sitting President Donald Trump in 2019. That was USA

On FB, many people scoff at Mike Benz and Elon Musk. I forgive many of them because they are Writing Under the Influence of a complex system of government propaganda, as you've stated. They are afraid to step out of their silos to challenge themselves with information the runs counter to their comfy familiar narratives. All of us, including the still-un-red-pilled among us, are victims of a years long psychological/intellectual rape perpetrated by our own government.

Continue ReadingToday’s Report by Mike Benz: What Has Been Going on at USAID?

About the Illusion of Information Adequacy

What happens when to a person who fails to expose themselves to only a few "news" sources? What does it do to their world view when they fail to take affirmative steps to engage with a broadbased news ecosystem that includes viewpoints they disagree with? For instance, what happens when they only follow legacy (corporate) news outlets? What happens when they refuse to consider independent journalists? What I've noticed is that they are much more confident in their opinions, not less. What's going on? At X, Owen Gregoian offers an explanation of the "Illusion of of information adequacy." Excerpt:

Why We’re Confident with Only Half the Story | Neuroscience News

Summary: A new study reveals that people often overestimate the amount of information they have when making decisions, a phenomenon researchers call the “illusion of information adequacy.”

Participants who were only given partial information about a situation were just as confident in their decisions as those who had the complete story. They believed they had enough facts and thought others would likely make the same choice. However, when some participants were later presented with the opposing view, many were open to changing their decision, suggesting that having more complete information can bridge misunderstandings.

Key Facts

- People feel confident in decisions, even with only partial information.

- This “illusion of information adequacy” leads to overconfidence in judgments.

- Additional information often leads to more informed, balanced decision-making.

Source: Ohio State University

Of course, the same problems result with the government or the legacy news consortium limit your access to alternate viewpoints. In these circumstances we are fooled by a false consensus. It looks like everyone agrees, but this is only because everyone else has been censored. That leads to such things as allowing others to put a dangerous so-called vaccine into your arm.  When free speech is limited, it leads to things like this:

Continue ReadingAbout the Illusion of Information Adequacy