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last hour I mentioned us AID or USAID. It stands
for the agency well us United States Agency for International
Development us AID. And there's a great gnashing of the teeth,
clutching of the pearls, fainting onto the fainting couches as
one does over efforts to rain in and dismantle this behemoth.
UH that has been accused of funding the Wuhan Lab research, UH,
the misinformation complex, color revolutions in other countries. UH, and
a couple of terrorist charities just thrown in for good measure.
So uh, I mean, aside from that, it does some
very valuable work. People are going to starve if you
don't give them money us AI. D oh. And also
this just came down that Donald Trump wrote signed an
executive order to defund UNRUAH. The UN sorry, UN Human
Rights Council, UH pulled us out of that, and yeah, yeah,
and to stop U n r w A funding. U
n r w A or UNRAH is the the shell,
the front company, if you will, in Gaza. This is
where hostages, upon their release from the Islamic jih Hottists Hamas,
they've reported being kept hidden, held prisoner in UNRAH homes, facilities, schools. Right,
they are part of the problem. And so Trump has
signed an executive order to stop funding that horrible, evil organization.
So I'm fine with that too. Yes, this is what
we meant when we said we don't want to fund it.
That's what we meant. Trump is fulfilling the promises. I
think I mentioned this the other day. Maybe not, but
so I'll say it again. I was watching an interview
that Bill O'Reilly gave to Piers Morgan on Piers Morgan
Show Uncensored, and O'Reilly said that he met with Trump.
I think it was a little bit before the inauguration.
O'Reilly went down to mar A Lago and he had,
you know, ate lunch with Trump or whatever. And Trump
asked Bill O'Reilly what Bill thought Trump needed to do
to be the greatest president ever, because that's what that's
important to Donald Trump. He wants to go down in
history as one of the greatest presidents ever, if not
the greatest president ever, right, And O'Reilly gave him one
piece of advice. He said, fulfill your campaign promises. That's it.
It sounds very easy to do. You made all these promises.
Now just do the things you said you would do,
and you'll go down as one of the greatest, if
not the greatest president. And it kind of seems like
Trump may have taken that piece of advice. I'm sure
he had already, you know, thought about it, and he
was already planning to do it himself and build it
and tell him anything he didn't already know and whatever, whatever, whatever.
But I found that to be kind of interesting because
I saw this interview I don't know, a couple weeks ago.
It was like right after the inauguration, and then you
see this start unfolding, and it's like, yeah, like they
have hit the ground running. They have discombobulated the Democrats
and the media. But I repeat myself, and they don't
know how to respond. There's so much stuff going on.
I have a hard time, you know, putting together the
show every day because the stuff I put together then
becomes sort of old news like an hour later. That's
no way to prep for a show, Pete. So there's
just constantly stuff coming out, constant, it's just this barrage,
and so it's hard to keep up. It's hard to
keep pace and things that would otherwise generate, you know,
a lot of attention and focus for a week or two,
maybe months, there's not enough time. There's not enough you know,
there's enough broadcast time. And that's not just me, it's everybody.
And for me, like I made this pledge or commitment
or like I said back in so this was after
Trump won, So this would have been like twenty seventeen,
and I said, I'm not going to make every show
about Donald Trump and about what he said or what
he tweeted. You remember those days where he would, you know,
he'd fire off a bunch of tweets and everybody'd be like,
oh my god, I give believe he said that. And
then we would spend like a day or two and
everybody would be parsing his tweet and all of this,
and I said, I'm not going. I'm not going to
do that. There are other things that require attention. So like,
I'm not that, I'm not going not that I'm going
to ignore, you know, anything that has to do with
Donald Trump, but I'm not going to let him set
my agenda for my show every day. I have found
that to be almost impossible to do now because there's
just so much stuff going on. And I'm not saying
that's as a bad thing. I'm just pointing it out
that this is a very different thing. And I and
the irony of ironies here is that I don't think
that we would be witnessing this had we not gone
through the last four years, actually the last eight, had Trump,
had Trump served back to back terms. I don't think
we see this, I really don't. I think this is
only because of his you know, time in exile on Elba.
That's a Napoleon reference, not dynamite, but the like he
he was out and it gave him and all of
his people plenty of time to go through and say
this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna this is
how we're gonna stack it. Here's our plan of attack
and all of that. Here are the legal arguments, get
the people involved in all that. But also they were
aided obviously by the uh overreaches of the Democrats and
the policies they enacted in the way they protected Joe
Biden and his failing cognitive abilities. And so it all
came to pass this way because of what happened. And
I don't know if we would be seeing the same
kind of activity right now if we had not gone
through the last four years.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So this brings us to USAID. Do you think Donald
Trump would have been looking to completely obliterate USAID had
it not been weaponized against him over the last eight years.
Probably not right. Staffers of the US Agency for International Development,
or USAID, were instructed to stay out of the agency's
Washington headquarters today, according to a notice distributed to them,
after billionaire Elon Musk announced President Donald Trump had agreed
with him to shut the agency down. And again I
point out, for people who are claiming that Trump doesn't
have the authority to do it, I would submit he
does because it was created by an executive order by
John F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy.
Speaker 2: And so I would think, now, unless there's some brand
new interpretation here where it's like a president can And
we saw this with Obama, by the way, and a
ruling against I think it was an immigration related case
where I remember Obama did something and then Trump tried
to undo it and they were like, no, you can't
do that, Like, well, wait a minute, if Obama did
it with an executive order, it can be undone with
an executive order. And then there's like no, not really
because reasons. So unless we end up with some kind
of you know, Kakamami judicial ruling like that, I don't
see how. I don't see how Trump is, you know,
outside the bounds of his authority here. Us AID staffer
said they also tracked more than six hundred employees who
reported being locked out of the agency's computer systems overnight.
Those still in the system received emails saying that quote
at the direction of agency leadership, the headquarters building will
be closed to agency personnel today, Monday, the third. The
developments came after Musk, who's leading an extraordinary civilian review
of the federal government with the Republican President's agreement, said
early in the morning today that he had spoken with
Trump about the six decade us AID and Development agency
end quote. He agreed we should shut it down, and
so shut it down.
Speaker 1: They are.
Speaker 2: Over the weekend, the Trump administration put two top security
chiefs at USAID on leave after they refused to turn
over classified material in restricted areas to Musk's government inspection teams.
A current and former US official told the Associated Press
on Sunday, this is an article at the AP. I
suspect Trump is doing or he's allowing Musk to do
what Musk did at Twitter, which is when Muscot in there,
he basically fired eighty percent of the workforce. And everybody said,
this is not going to work. Oh my gosh, you're
going to ruin Twitter. Everything's going to crumble. We need
all these people. And then it turned out they didn't.
They didn't. They had just way too many people on
staff and they didn't need all of the people, and
they were creating inferior products. And so that seems to
me what they are doing at USAID. But what do
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is an article out of the Associated Press about USAID
US What is it saying for the Agency for International Development?
Created by John F. Kennedy in order to, you know,
send a bunch of food and aid to countries that
were struggling, that were in need. And the idea was,
you know, this would help with sort of soft diplomacy.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: People would see all the bags of food piled up
at the docks and see USAID all over it, and
they would be like, hey, those Americans they're all right,
you know. They they kept me from starving. And in principle,
I kind of like that idea makes sense. I think
for you know, bang for the buck, it's pretty cheap.
Like if you can make people friendly towards you, or
at least not hostile, right, then you know, you send
this message that we are helpers, we want to help people,
we are trying to do good and you need some
food and we can give you some food. Here's some food,
right charity. I'm okay with that. The problem is when
you set the agency up to give out food and
the next thing, I know, you're using the money as
a pass through for NGOs to organize migrant caravans. Like,
that's a problem. That's a problem, right. You're using USAID
funding to send money to Bill Crystal, you know, like hmm,
never Trump or guy like ah, or you're sending money
to fund drag queens story hours in Sudan. I'm not
sure we have kept our eye on the goal here people.
You know, so Democratic lawmakers are protesting the moves to
shut down USAID, saying Trump lacks the constitutional authority to
shut it down without congressional approval, which again I'm not
so sure that's the case. Why would that be the case.
If it was created by a stroke of the pen
by JFK, then why can't it be uncreated in the
exact same manner. Well, pee, once Congress puts money towards it,
then it just lives forever. Really, I see, this is
the problem when you have rules and then you break
the rules to do things like this, not what Trump did,
but what Kennedy did. Right, When you break rules to
create these government programs and services and you don't run
it through legislation, it creates a lot of ambiguity. Now
about who's in control of it, like because I saw
some reports like we're going to try to move this
thing under the US State Department. Like no, no, no, stop,
don't put it under. Just get rid of it. Just
get rid of it. If Congress wants to do some
sort of an aid program, then let them do a grant,
let them send the money, let them vote on it,
and appropriate the money. That way, we don't need to
be doing this for USAID again like this, it is
a classic example of of what happens with government programs
and services all the time. They expand, they expand, right,
and they break the boundaries of the thing, of the
original guardrails that they were initially set up to focus
their attention on certain issues. And then they get bigger
and bigger, and they get more and more money, and
then they just start expanding beyond what the initial parameters were.
And so it's like a controlled burn. And I know
Democrats don't like doing those, but that's what it's like.
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this story on the USAID cuts and the locking out
of the employees, they reported that Elon Musk's and Trump's
comments came with Secretary of State Marco Rubio out of
the country in Central America on his first trip abroad
in office. Rubio has not spoken publicly about any plans
to shut down USAID. Now he has because apparently Marco
Rubio is now the new acting director of us AID,
and here's what he just said to the press.
Speaker 1: What's going to be as other questions or three.
Speaker 3: Well, look, I mean, my frustration with USA goes back
to my time in Congress.
Speaker 1: It's a completely unresponsive agency.
Speaker 3: It's supposed to respond to policy directives of the State Department,
and it refuses to do so. So the functions of
the USAID, there are a lot of functions of USAID
that are going to continue, that are going to be
part of American foreign policy. But it has to be
aligned with American foreign policy. I said very clearly when
we were during my confirmation hearing that every dollar we
spend in every program we fund that will be aligned
with the national interest of the United States, and USAID
has a history of sort of ignoring that and deciding
that there's somehow a global charity separate from the national interest.
Speaker 1: These are taxpayer.
Speaker 3: Dollars, and so I'm very troubled by these reports that
they've been unwilling to cooperate with people who are asking
simple questions about what does this program do, who gets
the money, who are our contractors, who's fun funded? And
that sort of level of insubordination makes it impossible to
conduct a sort of mature and serious review that I
think foreign at large should have. We're spending taxpayer money here.
These are not donor dollars. These are taxpayer dollars, and
we owe the American people sure the assurances that every
dollar we are spending abroad is being spent on something
that furthers our national interests, and so far a lot
of the people that work at USAID have just simply
refused to cooperate.
Speaker 1: Are you currently in charge of USAIDA.
Speaker 3: I'm the acting director of USAID. I've delegated that authority
to someone, but I stay in touch with him. And again,
our goal was to go in and align our foreign
aid to the national interest. But if you go to
mission after mission and embassy after embassy around the world,
you will often find that in many cases USADID is
involved in programs that run counter to what we're trying
to do in our national strategy with that country or
with that region that cannot continue.
Speaker 1: USAID is not.
Speaker 3: An independent, non governmental ent. It is an entity that
spends taxpayer dollars and it needs to spend it, as
the statute says, in alignment with the policy directives that
they get from the Secretary of State, the National Security Council,
and the President.
Speaker 1: And it's been twenty or thirty years where.
Speaker 3: People have tried to reform it and it refuses to reform,
it refuses to cooperate. When we were in Congress, we
couldn't even get answers to basic questions about programs that
will not continue.
Speaker 1: That's not going to continue, you know, an public career.
Speaker 3: That I've articulated to you my challenges with it, and
they go back to my time in Congress. Okay, we
would ask them questions, what is this program fund? Who
gets the money? We won't tell you. We don't need
to tell you. We're a political. Well, American foreign policy
isn't a political. American foreign policy is to further the
interest of the United States.
Speaker 1: If someone wants.
Speaker 3: To spend eight political dollars, they should spend private dollars.
Go start a charity, and you can fund anyone you want.
But if you're going to spend taxpayer money, then you
need to spend it in further and further into the
national interests of the United States. That's exactly what I
said in my confirmation hearing. This is not my frustration.
This frustration has existed now for almost a quarter century,
and to administer multiple administrations that have gone through this challenge.
Speaker 1: It's going to stop, and it's gonna hand. Can you
tell us a little bit?
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 1: So there you go.
Speaker 2: That was Rubio just arrived back from Panama, and he's
exactly right. He is exactly right. You don't get to
take taxpayer funds like that and then not tell us
what it's being used for. Okay, yes, yes, unless you're
the military, that's right. But like if you get an
administration in there and like, okay, this is going to
be our posture now towards you know, country A and
US AID personnel are like, no, we don't think that's
the best policy, So we're just going to keep funding
these other entities that the CIA is to I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding. The CIA would never use us AID
to foment any kind of disc in another country. So anyway,
the USAID person I was like, we don't want to
do that, we don't think that's the right thing. You'll
be gone in four years whatever whatever. And he like,
if Rubio, if what he's saying is true that as
members of Congress, like they've asked for what are you
funding on, like what is this money for? And they refuse,
They've just they're that is in subordination, right, and like
depending on what you're funding, like you're working at counter
purpose to the stated administration's goals. So you're in the
fo part of the FAFO dynamic there USAID, they thought.
And by the way, Democrats are now outside the headquarters
of USAID and they're out there doing a press conference.
All the people are going to die, you know. The
Trump administration and Rubio have imposed an unprecedented freeze on
foreign assistants that has shut down much of USAID's aid
programs worldwide, compelling thousands of layoffs by aid organizations and
ordered furloughs and leaves that have gutted the agency's leadership
and staff in Washington. See, this is the thing. They
act like they are a standalone unit of government and
they're not, or as he said, they're acting like they're
the world's charity, like they're a global charity, but they're not. Oh,
have you heard about the Census director? He quit, just
up and quit. Robert Santos resigned as the director of
the US Census Bureau. I wonder why you did that.
I think I might know. All right, if you're listening
to this show, you know I try to keep up
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and it combines news from around the world in one place,
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it also supports ground news as they make the media
landscape more transparent. Got an email from Bob. It's a
peat mail. He says, correct, shut it all down very carefully,
bring back essential functions with sunset provisions for a usaid
for the shuttering of various government funded programs and such. Yeah,
that that is. That's one way to go about this.
I mentioned before the break the US census. And for
people who have been following this story for a while,
this will not come as any kind of a surprise
to you because it has been it has been known.
It has been reported on in conservative media, not in
sort of mainstream media, not that I have seen as well.
But there was a good breakdown by a guy named
Seth Keshell or Keshel. He is an MBA is a
former Army captain of military intelligence. He's a veteran and
from the Afghanistan War, and he does analytics and forecasting
on elections and such, and so he writes a sub stack.
I thought I had the thought I had the name
of it here, but I guess it's s Keshell, k
E s H E L. S Keshel or Keishell. And
his name is Captain Seth Keshel. And he reported how
the director of the US Census Bureau, Robert Santos, abruptly resigned.
And if you know the problems that the census had
in twenty twenty oh because of covid P, yeah, then
this might if you know about that what happened then
in twenty twenty, this might actually not come as such
a huge surprise. He says, yours truly meaning him. Captain
Keshel briefed the staff of Congressman Comber Matt Comer, the
head of was a House government oversight committee. He briefed
Comer in December during a hearing on the twenty twenty
US Census. And it's considerable corruption. Using research compiled by
some of the best in the business, I pegged Santos
as one of the key lynchpins in concealing the census
rigging scam from the public. Right, so what is the right?
First off, why is the Sensus so important? Right, it's
not just to get account of people and ask them
invasive questions and stuff like that. The purpose of the
counting of the people, it's in the Constitution. The purpose
is to apportion our members of Congress the House seats, right,
and yes, like, once you do that, there's all you know,
there's there's a per capita population funding formulas and stuff
at the federal level and all of that. But you
need the count of how many people are in America
in order to then essentially distribute, to allocate all of
the House seats. Because that is a formula where you
take the total population of the country and you divide
by the four hundred and thirty five members of the House,
and you get a number. And that number is somewhere
in the eight hundred thousand range. It's somewhere around eight
hundred thousand. So that is the number, or that's the
population I should say, of every house district. Now, if
you're in a state and you don't even have eight
hundred thousand people, then you get one House seat. Okay,
you're guaranteed a minimum of one House seat even if
you don't have eight hundred thousand people. But a state
that's got you know, one point six million people, they
would get two House seats, right, because each one is
eight hundred thousand people. So if you are counting population,
and that number is then used to essentially kind of
sort of determine who controls the House of Representatives, if
you're in control of the counting, you can juice the
stats there depending on who you count, and areas where
you may have overcounted justice smidge and areas that you
may undercount in just a smidge. And the effect there
is when you do it across the whole country, you
can have a differential of fifteen or sixteen House seats.
And that's precisely what happened in twenty twenty, where the
mistakes all tended in one direction, which was to help
blue states keep their seats rather than lose because they
were losing population. So they helped to keep blue states
with an extra congressional seat that they otherwise would have lost.
And red states are prevented from gaming a House seat,
and those also by the way that the number of
seats right those determine the electoral College votes. And so
a state that has like North Carolina, has been growing,
keep adding an additional congressional seat. We're now up to fourteen.
I think when I first moved here. We were at
ten I think, so we've picked up like four seats
over the course of like thirty years or so, and
so we keep adding more and more seats, and so
when we vote for a Republican president, they get more
and more Electoral College votes. So more people moving to
red states means an easier path for a Republican presidential candidate.
And then there is another aspect to this, which is
the counting of illegal immigrants. Right when you have people
that are in a state that are getting counted but
they cannot vote. The Democrat position on this is that, well,
we need to know what the vote or what the
population count is even if they can't vote, because there
are services that are funded at the federal level based
on population. And so you'll recall try to stop the
counting of illegal aliens from being included in the census,
which to me makes sense. You take the population of
the people that are citizens in the state and the
people who are not citizens. They should be counted in
a census from the country from which they came because
they are citizens of that country. Right, That's where you
would and that's how you would know what the number
of illegal aliens in America would be like, okay, here's
the difference. But they don't get counted back home, they
get counted here. And so if you have a whole
bunch of people that are getting counted but don't get
to vote, and their head count, their presence simply aids
the majority party, in this case, the Democrats, then you're
creating essentially a permanent ruling class in that state because
you just have people that are there. They can never
vote and they can't vote out the Democrats, but they
get counted, so the Democrats keep more seats and they
keep a hammer lock on the state. So this is
the corruption of the census. And in the House, had
these states gotten their proper counts, according to the analysis
here in the House, it would have delivered Trump a
two thirty six to one ninety nine majority. Just based
on the apportionment adjustments. He says, Trump would have won
three hundred and twenty electoral votes, Harris would have picked
up two hundred and eighteen, a swing of sixteen electoral
votes towards Trump. And that was in line with the
with the predictive model that this guy ran before the
election even occurred. And the Carolinas are by the way,
they are in the mix on this The Carolinas are
in the mix. We'll probably get another seat in twenty thirty,
but we probably should have gotten one this time around.
All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. I could not do the show
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