Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

Trump’s shuttering of USAID has exposed how foreign aid has long been weaponised for sinister political ends.

In the eyes of their critics, President Donald Trump and his DOGE appointee Elon Musk are heartless tyrants, recklessly cutting foreign aid as they prioritise wealthy Americans over the world’s poorest people.

This narrative may be popular in the legacy press, but it overlooks some sinister truths about key US federal agencies as news of their fraud, waste, and abuse come to light.

At the centre of this controversy is one agency in particular: USAID.

USAID is an acronym that plays tricks on the reader’s mind. Originally pronounced U-S-A-I-D, more recently the last three letters have been voiced together, in a nod to the agency’s purported purpose: distributing US foreign aid, disaster relief and humanitarian assistance around the world.

In reality, the acronym stands for United States Agency for International Development — and according to the agency itself, the purpose of these global giveaways goes far beyond just charity and goodwill. USAID and its US$50 billion annual budget exist primarily to advance US foreign policy objectives abroad, projecting American power on the world stage.

Mike Benz: USAID is not about aid. It’s about coordinating clandestine operations through foreign left-wing NGOs. With a $50 billion budget, it even surpasses the budgets of the CIA and State Department combined. pic.twitter.com/qeAEK4tObL

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) February 2, 2025

Insiders refer to this as “soft power” diplomacy.

Over recent years, one such insider, Mike Benz, has been on a crusade to educate the public about the soft power function of USAID and connected agencies.

A former State Department official turned foreign policy commentator, Benz likens the revolution currently sweeping Washington DC to performing open-heart surgery on the American empire.

Benz argues that Trump’s battle with USAID has very little to do with slashing foreign aid. Instead, it’s about exposing how “humanitarian efforts” have long doubled as tools of political influence and regime change.

Most sinister of all, Benz explains, is how these tools for regime change were eventually imported back into America and weaponised against conservatives in general and Donald Trump in particular.

Indeed, the media’s outrage over Trump’s USAID cuts isn’t really about lost funding for the underprivileged — it’s a mask-off moment for Trump’s Deep State enemies, who now fear their entire operation has been dragged into the spotlight.

I even started the first Tucker interview with this exact history. Here’s the opening 10 mins, covering how free speech was a State Dept instrument of statecraft turned to censorship

“The best way to start the story of Internet censorship is with the story of Internet freedom.” https://t.co/72aybftW4j pic.twitter.com/b39KUPJIYM

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) October 9, 2024

The Booming Industry of Soft Power

To pick apart this complex web of ideas and events, we need to start at the beginning. What follows is a canned history of US soft power according to Mike Benz.

In the aftermath of World War II, the world’s nations signed the UN Charter in an effort to secure global peace. Among its many stipulations was that nations were now explicitly forbidden from invading and seizing territory by force. But diplomacy was still essential. How could nations like the US secure import-export markets, preserve national security and maintain high standards of living? They would now need to rely on the subtle art of soft power.

Enter the Marshall Plan — an American initiative enacted in 1948 to aid Western Europe in its post-war recovery. Thanks to the Marshall Plan, European nations saw their infrastructure repaired, their food shortages alleviated, their industries modernised and their currencies stabilised. In return, America gained a booming market for its goods, solidified the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and secured political influence against Soviet expansion.

Benz argues that a crucial tool in the latter effort was media influence, with agencies like the CIA, the State Department and eventually USAID playing pivotal roles. Programs like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, funded by the CIA, were not just news broadcasters but cultural ambassadors promoting Western liberal values as an alternative to Soviet ideology. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, another CIA-backed initiative, sponsored publications, conferences, and art exhibitions to further Western democratic ideals.

Through these initiatives, the CIA came to value the strategic influence of soft power, and recognised its effectiveness in shaping global perceptions and politics without military might. Indeed, steering elections by controlling the media ecosystem was not only less bloody but also infinitely cheaper than conducting military operations — a great return on investment for US taxpayers, it could be argued. Thus, the success of these Cold War campaigns entrenched soft power as a cornerstone of US foreign policy.

However, by the 1970s, the CIA found itself embroiled in scandal, after the Church Committee exposed a series of covert illegal activities. One of these was Project MKUltra, which involved mind control experiments on unwitting subjects. Another, Operation CHAOS, aimed at spying on anti-war and civil rights activists within the U.S. The CIA was also exposed for its role in various coups and propaganda campaigns around the world, leading to calls for greater oversight and transparency of the agency.

The CIA Goes Underground

Benz argues that the US foreign policy brass responded to this heightened scrutiny by quietly relocating the CIA’s more controversial activities — like funding media and backing coups — to USAID, where the oversight was less stringent. Thus, under the guise of foreign aid, USAID took on roles in media manipulation and political destabilisation, continuing CIA tactics like “rent-a-riot” to influence foreign politics without public backlash. According to Benz, this included training foreign police in controversial methods and supporting opposition movements to sway elections, all while maintaining the image of a humanitarian organisation.

By the mid-2010s, the United States had successfully used media, diplomatic pressure, and covert funding through NGOs like USAID to spark regime change — also known as “colour revolution” — across vast tracts of Eurasia. This included Serbia’s Bulldozer Revolution (2000), Georgia’s Rose Revolution (2003), Ukraine’s Orange (2004) and Euromaidan (2014) Revolutions, and Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution (2005), as well as Iran’s Green Movement and political unrest in Belarus, Venezuela and Myanmar.

As technology developed, the internet became the new battleground for soft power. Social media and encrypted communication platforms, many developed with military funding from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), played critical roles in uprisings like the Arab Spring, where Twitter and Facebook enabled mass mobilisation against authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.

Initially, US foreign policy leaders were excited at the internet’s potential for sparking political uprisings. However, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, they began viewing the internet with suspicion, wary of the freedom it afforded everyday people to craft narratives outside of official channels.

To that end, in 2016, the State Department created the Global Engagement Center to counter “disinformation”, marking the start of more aggressive information control. Platforms like the “Hamilton 68” dashboard, run by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, sought to identify Russian proxies on social media — often without clear evidence. Soon, the language of “misinformation”, “disinformation” and malinformation” would be embedded in the popular mindset and find its way into legislatures across the Western world.

Mike Benz exposes USAID for 11 straight minutes. pic.twitter.com/ja95d0qp0c

— Tucker Carlson Network (@TCNetwork) February 5, 2025

Colour Revolutions on American Soil

This strategy of engineering political upheaval overseas without direct military intervention — often referred to as “colour revolutions,” was now a fixed feature of US foreign policy.

But what happens when these tactics are applied on home soil?

According to Benz, the United States soon found the answer to that question.

Having perfected the art of regime change abroad, US powerbrokers adapted these tactics to suppress dissent and control narratives within their own borders. Beginning in 2016, he argues, machinery once used to reshape foreign governments was soon turned on the American public as Trump’s election and Brexit disrupted the globalist agenda.

These efforts escalated during the 2020 election. The suppression of stories like the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, Benz says, exposed a sinister alliance between government agencies and big tech. Federal agencies also sought to censor dissenting views on COVID-19, from lockdowns to masks to vaccines. The “Disinformation Dozen” narrative, pushed by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, was another example of these efforts, aimed at shutting down vaccine skeptics.

I even started the first Tucker interview with this exact history. Here’s the opening 10 mins, covering how free speech was a State Dept instrument of statecraft turned to censorship

“The best way to start the story of Internet censorship is with the story of Internet freedom.” https://t.co/72aybftW4j pic.twitter.com/b39KUPJIYM

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) October 9, 2024

Benz highlights the response to the January 6 Capitol riot as another instance of how government agencies and media outlets worked to control the public narrative. He suggests that perceptions of the event were tightly managed to fit a particular political agenda.

Benz argues that, by turning its machinery on Americans, the foreign policy elite are re-engineering democracy itself. No longer is it a system where public votes determine outcomes. Now it is institutions that form a consensus and impose that consensus on the populace. Unelected bureaucrats and faceless intelligence personnel decide their agenda and impose it on the public through covert hearts-and-minds campaigns.

In Benz’ analysis, what began as a push for soft power abroad has become a form of “military rule” at home — one enforced not by tanks and bullets, but by keystrokes in data centres that covertly condition American minds.

The Real Meaning of USAID Fraud

Many Americans have been shocked at the waste, fraud and abuse that uncovered at USAID as Elon Musk and his DOGE team have audited the books. With the country US$36 trillion in debt and families struggling to put food on the table, it is unthinkable that a “foreign aid” agency is squandering taxpayers’ hard-earned money, including, at last check:

• $32,000 for an LGBT comic book in Peru
• $47,000 on a transgender opera in Colombia
• $70,000 for a DEI-themed musical in Ireland
• $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces
• $2 million for sex change surgeries in Guatemala
• $6.3 million to study men having sex with men in South Africa
• $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language”
• $20 million to produce a new “Sesame Street” show in Iraq
• $22 million for tourism promotion in Tunisia and Egypt
• $100 million sent to terror-linked organisations
• $520 million to pay ESG consultants in Africa

It doesn’t take a genius to see this isn’t about foreign aid — it’s about propaganda warfare and foreign political interference. Thankfully, this era of reckless spending is coming to an end as wasteful budgets are slashed and, more importantly, US foreign policy undergoes a comprehensive overhaul.

The only people complaining about USAID’s budget cuts are Democrats in Washington and rich Westerners conditioned by the propaganda press to believe that Donald Trump and Elon Musk hate the poor.

If this battle were really about cutting foreign aid, the leaders of third world nations would be in uproar. Instead, they are mostly silent. Like a growing number of Americans, they understand what’s really at stake: the highjacking of charity to shape global narratives, control political movements, and steer election outcomes.

“There is no USAID project on God’s green earth that is honest.”

Former State Dept. official @mikebenzcyber exposes how the U.S. uses USAID to topple foreign governments and covertly influence other countries: pic.twitter.com/AaAd80G5j3

— System Update (@SystemUpdate_) February 4, 2025

An old, decrepit system that weaponised foreign aid for political control is on its deathbed. While a shrinking minority demand a funeral dirge, the rest of us look to the future.

If Benz’s interpretation holds true, the reining in of these agencies could be the first step towards reclaiming liberty from the shadows of soft power and sinister manipulation.

In DOGE, the perceptive don’t see the death of foreign aid, but its rescue from the grip of duplicity — and even better, a new dawn for America.

___

Image courtesy of Unsplash.