The CIA’s Playbook for Revolution—And How It’s Being Used on You

Is it true that there's documentation on like literal documentation on how to launch a street uprising? >> Oh my god, there's Where do you want me to start? There's an entire field. It it's not just like a document. I mean it's this is democratization studies. You know, international relations 101 now. College kids learn how to do this. This is This is how you I mean think about someone like Michael McFaul who was the US ambassador to Russia. He He spent 30 years at Stanford working on the the body of work, the playbook on how to do it, the the sequencing of events, all the different levers within a society you need to control in order to have it successfully play out. There's These models are constantly updated for emerging technologies like social media uh for you know, emerging laws and you know, counter attempts by government to resist the counter revolution like NGO transparency laws and the like. It's a It's a huge huge huge field and it started off in the 1950s uh right in tandem with the construction of the intelligence apparatus in our country. I mean really it all goes back to They you know, they all call themselves scholars and academics in order to try to you know, I always say you can't spell academia without CIA. But the fact is is Gene Sharp was >> Well, to this day I mean Gene Sharp started this work in the 1950s um at a time when the US foreign policy establishment was you know, in in the absolute armpit of the of the Cold War and trying to figure out how do we now that the nature of war has moved into the political realm rather than the kinetic military realm, how do we develop a body of of theory to reliably be able to go country by country and develop this political influence apparatus in order if we lose an election, what do we do in that event? How do we still have a kind of civil society resistance? How can that take power even if we don't win an election? And so this this body of work that is now every major university and I'm not joking when I say that. Whether it's Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth, Berkeley, Arizona State University, Florida University, there's it is a it is a 101 for getting into this field that you learn about civil resistance and it is a big part of what the State Department, what USAID, what the US Agency for Global Media does. But Gene Sharp, I mean this this started as a I have I hesitate to even legitimize it with with even the front term of academia because you have to understand that this is a military and and if if you want to extend it, a military statecraft and intelligence world completely. Gene Sharp got $50 from the Department of War to do the to do the research for this at the Harvard Center for International Affairs. Now, you know, for folks who are following along, I'll just let you play out the acronym for Center for International Affairs in your head. This is like right in your face. I mean this is this is the Harvard CIA. This which was created by Henry Kissinger, which who was the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, recruited Gene Sharp. They got $50 from the Department of War and not just from the Department of War, but from the Psychological Operations Center of it, in order to build the body of work for how groups that were supported by the US State Department could could leverage influence of a minority of the population to do bottom-up rather than top-down revolutions. Because prior prior to World War II, the way you did coups was primarily through the military. What you would do is the the State Department, this is before we had a CIA, but the British would do this, the the the UK Foreign Office would work with you know, military generals or the US War Department would work with military generals, police, security forces, and because the the guys with guns had a monopoly on violence, all the the way to do coups was always top-down. You would You would work with a the generals, the police, and then you would simply have a military takeover of the country, and then you would have an interim head of state, and then you would try to kind of roll out democracy in a managed way in these vassal state countries. But as it became apparent that you could actually not just have top-down revolutions, but you could have bottom-up revolutions, it turns out there's something that's effectively the same as a as a military if you get it big enough, and that's a paramilitary. As as the US military paradigm moved into what they called small wars, rather than big World War II style things, the CIA, the State Department, USAID, they were all working with hillside guerrilla groups in Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam, or you know, Chile or Colombia. And and and what they found is actually, you know, if you get a big enough crowd, it's basically like a military. If the mob is so big that the police can't take it on, or if the police end up shooting someone in the crowd, the mob will just kill the police. They're they're bigger. They they're they outnumber them. Uh in many respects, in many cases, they're armed, or they've got kind of small arms, or they've got bulldozers, or Molotov cocktails, or uh or and a certain quotient of the police or military on their side as well, then you can do a bottom-up so-called people-powered revolution. And the magic behind that was essentially winning enough hearts and minds through the media to accuse the democratically elected leader of being illegitimate or corrupt, uh mixed with cash. Essentially, these these groups being funded to do it through USAID or the State Department, or flow-through entities like the National Endowment for Democracy or the US Institute of Peace. But it's it's an enormous body of work. It's it's democratization studies. It's civil resistance. Um it goes by any number of names, but um yeah, it's you can get a comfortable job at a US university, any US university, or even law school teaching that field to young aspiring coup plotters. >> Now, have we ever run the coup playbook against ourselves? >> Absolutely. There was a group specifically dedicated to do it by a professor in the field who was also number three at the Pentagon. It's called the Transition Integrity Project in 2020. Transition is one of these uh watchwords. Transition means we're going to overthrow your government. Transition, we call it democratic transition. Uh that is uh when when we don't like the government that's in power, and so we are going to transition it to a new government. And in 2020, a group was set up called the Transition Integrity Project. It was run by Rosa Brooks who was a very, very high-ranking Pentagon official for the Obama administration. Just a not to put too fine a a point on it, but she wrote a book in 2016 called How everything became war and the military became everything. >> Woah. >> And uh basically on her experiences on how the military uh can take over the civil society space and all the different examples of how, you know, the military would fund operas in Eastern Europe to influence hearts and minds. And this is, you know, everything, whether it's media, operas, art murals, you know, graffiti, dance festivals, uh and and you see this now. I mean, there's a big scuffle at South by Southwest, I think in 20 23 or 2020 Yeah, I think it was 2023 South by The Pentagon became one of the biggest funders of music festivals like South by Southwest. Uh you know, you you you know, you have places like the >> like what bands or I don't understand. >> Well, essentially Now, this has been going on for a very, very long time. Music is and not to not to de- to detour too hard in this, but the arts and cultural space is a big part of hearts and minds and and culture control. And politics is downstream of culture. This is how you see >> Yes, but are they literally like becoming A&R executives? Like I don't How does this cuz one thing I want to understand is, okay, this has been used against us then as recently as 2020. This is very recent. So, what do they actually do? Like how much of this is AstroTurf? I I hear so many conspiracy theories and most of it sound like total BS to me. But what was the actual playbook run on us? >> Well, I can Okay, so we we sort of two open threads right now. One of them is this 2020 transition integrity project and I want to get deeper into that. To to immediately answer kind of like how the playbook works in something like the music industry, I can give you some great specific examples and I can talk about the general structure of it. I'll I'll give you some specific ones. So, um every year we as taxpayers give about $350 million to a group called the National Endowment for Democracy. Uh that that funding is from us as taxpayers to the Treasury, to the to the State Department, to NED, the National Endowment for Democracy. Uh the National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 by the Reagan administration as a response to the Democrats in the late 1970s severing many of the powers of the Central Intelligence Agency. When uh the Church Committee and Pike Committee Committee hearings of '75 and '76 uh ended up revealing the CIA was manipulating domestic politics in order to stop the left-wing anti-Vietnam war movement. Uh Democrats reacted very heavily against the CIA. They hated the CIA in the late '70s, early '80s. Jimmy Carter rode to power on the back of that scandal. Uh one of the first things he did is he put CIA Director Stansfield Turner in charge of the CIA and immediately fired 30% of the entire operations division of the CIA in a single day. It was called the Halloween Massacre. Uh then in 1979, the US lost control over Iran with the Iranian Revolution. The national security state blamed that on having a weak CIA who could have stopped that coup from happening in Iran. Uh Ronald Reagan wins the presidency, wants to give the CIA their old powers back, but has a problem, which is that the Democrats controlled Congress at the time. They controlled the House of Representatives. And so, through the executive branch, he establishes the National Endowment for Democracy. In the words of its founder, Carl Gershman, uh who he told, I believe it was the Washington Post in 1986, "Democrat groups around the world used to get in trouble when they were seen as being subsidized by the CIA. We have not had the power to do that in a long time. That is why the endowment was created." So, literally, you have a direct quote from the founder of the group that they were set up to fund the groups that it would be too embarrassing to the group or too scandalizing to a group if the money came from the CIA. The idea for the National Endowment for Democracy came from the CIA. It came from William Casey and one of his right-hand man guys, Raymond Green, who had worked in the propaganda and disinformation bureau of the CIA for 30 years, who went on to directly draft the legislation establishing the National Endowment for Democracy. The CIA gets a copy of every single grant the National Endowment for Democracy makes. We don't get any transparency over that. So, even though it's an NGO that's supposed to be working overtly on philanthropic work, it's a complete intelligence operation. The the Biden State Department actually signed this stealth agreement with NED that every single one of their grants is under total blanket sensitivity. So, it's it's it's it's it's even more secret than the CIA in the sense that even Tulsi Gabbard can't just demand access to it because technically it's not classified, so it can't just be immediately unclassified. It's got this sensitivity blanket that if any of the oversight organs know, then everyone involved in these programs could die. Because it would put them at such risk knowing they're being sponsored by this group that's effectively more secret than the CIA itself. In fact, that the Washington Post in the 1990s when when CIA director Bob Gates was was up for confirmation, the Washington Post wrote an article saying, "We don't even need to confirm a CIA director this year because we have the National Endowment for Democracy and it's it's it's everything the CIA wants to be and more." Well, they have they have four cores at at NED, the way it's structured operationally. They have a Republican branch called the IRI. Basically, everyone who wants to run for president has to go through the IRI. Um John McCain ran IRI for 25 years. Mitt Romney has been on the board of IRI for 15 years. Uh Marco Rubio won the 2024 Man of the Year for for IRI. Uh Trump was the only Republican in the past 25 years who was not on the board or running IRI. This just just goes to show how closely the CIA has effectively vetted presidents. Uh there's a Democrat branch called the NDI. Hunter Biden was on the uh chairman's the the the chairman's advisory board of NDI. Make of that what you will. Um but the chairman of of NDI was Madeleine Albright, who was the Secretary of State. So again, you have this State Department CIA nexus. But the other two cores are the uh Center for International Private Enterprise for the CIA and Chamber of Commerce. And the Solidarity Center for the CIA and unions. They also have a media arm to control media, NED does. It's called the Center for International Media Assistance. This is yet another one of these CIA control over over media vectors. But just to come back to this music thing, um we overthrew the government of Bangladesh in 2024. The Biden administration did. Um there'd been a big beef between the the Democrats and um sh- uh the the Prime Minister of Bangladesh over a number of issues, military uh military base in the region, petroleum. Uh Hillary Clinton at one point when she was Secretary of State threatened to have the IRS go after the Prime Minister's son who was living in the US. Um but the state dep- the Biden State Department was losing hearts and minds in Bangladesh. The they lost the last two elections and the State Department had correspondence with the National Endowment for Democracy about what to do about it. Uh after the loss, I believe it was in 2021 uh 2021 2022, the elections there. Um the State Department worked with one of their NGO CIA cutouts, the National Endowment for Democracy, about what could be done in Bangladesh because despite running all this money into the opposition, they still got crushed in the election. And what was proposed was a destabilization campaign uh to in- instead of trying to win the vote, uh trying to organize a color revolution to get people in the streets and to destabilize the the country in order to essentially break it and induce a crisis. And one of the ways they did that was through funding not just students in universities and all the different cleavages in Bangladesh society who felt disaffected. For example, NED spon- with State Department money sponsored transgender dance festivals, uh really went after like the LGBT population, went after women who felt >> spark division. >> Yes, as a way to do street protest and to uh create international human rights outcry uh as as a way to to break down society and so that they wouldn't just have an ordinary vote, uh it would be chaos. It'd be just destabilized. And this is what happens. If you can't win an election under stable conditions, induce a crisis, things break, and then there's movement, and then sometimes you can just overthrow the government, like was done in Ukraine, and like what was done in Bangladesh. The Prime Minister had to evacuate the country because, once again, the CIA-backed mobs surrounded the parliament building and then just took power. But but within those those documents that were produced by the investigative outlet The Gray Zone, who had a whistleblower at IRI, the NED Republican branch. It was amazing what what what turned up. The The CIA, through IRI, was funding Bangladesh rap and hip-hop groups to sponsor musical and hip-hop anthems targeted at young people, unemployed people, disaffected youth to take to the streets and to sow distrust in the Bangladesh in the in the Bangladesh government. In fact, this was in the baseline assessment report of IRI to the State Department. They bragged about this. You know, they had columns for all the different grants and what they were doing. And they had You can actually go on YouTube and you can If you run a search on my X account for Bangladesh, you'll uh you'll you'll see all the documents that that uh The Gray Zone published and that I've I've highlighted and but the uh the CIA, through IRI, was reporting to the State Department about the different musical anthems that were being produced with State Department money to get people to take to the streets, to get people to to distrust or or believe that their government was corrupt, and they were reporting on this how the lyrics were quote designed uh to get people in the streets and protesting. I believe one of the rappers in this group uh was also a uh visiting professor at a USAID sponsored university, that was one of the launching points for these student protests. But you see the same thing everywhere. This happened in Cuba with something called the San Isidro movement where USAID sponsored one of the main rap and hip-hop groups and and had this anthem about um blood and um blood and wasn't blood and soil. It was like land and land It was something that was very It was a Patria y Vida, I think was the name of it. And then got this, you know, this local rap group played on international radio. And while they were working with the assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere and while they were funded by USAID and but you see this the the The Biden State Department set up an entire bureau called the the State Department Bureau for Music Diplomacy. Last year they brought 22 different hip-hop and hip-hop and rap musicians from 14 different countries to the State Department for training, for activist training. You have revolution music sponsored by the US State Department USAID. I think freedombeat.org I think is is one you can look at where it's literally just civil resistance movement sponsored by the State Department to to sponsor riots and revolutions and This is a checklist item in the same way that music is. And you'll see this in Miami where I am. The the largest performing arts center is the Adrienne Arsht Center. Adrienne Arsht is is one of the largest financial sponsors of the Atlantic Council which has seven CIA directors on its board and gets annual funding every year from the War Department, the State Department, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Then you you get this cultural entombment by the way. This is a big part of when we overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014. One of the first things we did with the new vassal government, when Yatsenyuk was installed, not by a vote, installed by Victoria Nuland, and she bragged about this on a hot mic that was caught when she said, "F the EU, we're going with Yatsenyuk." Um Vladimir Klitschko is going to have to sit this one out. We'll make him mayor of Kiev, and you know, he'll have to be satisfied with that. Uh one of the first things that happened was they moved the Ministry of Education, the control for it, out of Ukraine and into this EU credentialing body. And uh one of the red lines that the State Department, USAID, and NATO set for Zelenskyy is first month in office, the May 2019 red lines memo, was that uh none of the reforms put in place between 2014 and 2019 about education and culture could be reversed. They banned the Russian language, for example, on uh on any Ukrainian TV. They banned uh Russian access, you know, Russian-controlled social media accounts and Telegram accounts. Um they they banned the Russian language or any Russian affinity teachings in Ukrainian uh education. You You also see, for example, Randi Weingarten, the head of the, you know, American Federation of Teachers, making a, you know, half a dozen pilgrimages over to Ukraine to work with the teachers unions in uh to work with the teachers unions in Ukraine and effectively create this, you know, so that the this the kids don't get to have any sort of cultural affinity with the political influence within Ukraine, even though half of the country was was Russian ethnic. We're not allowed to speak the language, we're not allowed to have any, you know, cultural glorification of anything Russian, uh so that their minds were controlled in a way that they would grow up to believe in Ukrainian nationalism and the you know the entire purging of any kind of Russian affinity or any kind of alliance between Russia and Ukraine which had existed you know for for a you know going back to the Crimean War in the 1800s. I mean going back forever but completely purged because the CIA ran a coup in 2014 and they didn't want mean reversion after the Crimea referendum in 2014. But you see this everywhere and it's it's so it's full spectrum. It's the media, it's the teachers. In fact the CIA was busted funding our own teachers unions in in the US. There's something called the Vernon Fund which which the CIA would later confess was a was a CIA front philanthropy that gave a million dollars to the National Education Association. That's the largest teachers union in the country as well as a CIA proprietary called the World Confederation for Organizations of the Teaching Profession. >> When when was this? >> This is the 1960s. 1960 68. >> Okay, so let me put a bow on this and see if I'm tracking this accurately. So dear public, if you can hear my voice right now, what Mike Benz has just told us is that the right way to view all of these things is that warfare is no longer kinetic at least if we can avoid it. The real warfare is soft power. There are people that fully understand the way that we are indoctrinated whether it's music, education, arts, on and on and they are finding ways to get money into those places through NGOs and the like, USAID being the most famous right now of disseminating taxpayer dollars around the globe uh under the guise of being philanthropic, but actually being soft power warfare, that these are effectively agents of Uh you you were very careful to say they're not all agents of the government, but but certainly what we're talking about right now, that some subset of them are agents of government foreign policy. And they are the one thing that we haven't really pulled in really tightly yet. But this idea of uh drafting off the policies, you've got these hedge funds that are like, "Hey, I have economic interests here." And the reason I don't think we've quite pulled that one in yet is you'll say we lost an election or we won an election, but we haven't defined exactly what that means. Like who? The blob? Like who's considering it to be a win or a loss? I'm guessing the blob and Trump are sort of diametrically opposed. So, would it be as simple as if the blob has won, Trump mega ideology has lost and vice versa? Like I get the economic part, but is there like a thing that guides the economic thing or is it just like "Well, Soros happens to be shorting them today and so we want them to lose. Oh, he's actually hoping this one to win, so we want them to win." That that part I'm not entirely sure like how sort of one-for-one this is. Like is this an economic battle where we use useful idiots on the ideological standpoint or is this an ideological standpoint that happens to get a lot easier when uh a someone like Larry Fink, who I think of as using social movements as cover for economic gain, where he's like, "Oh, I'm just going to pull this green blanket on top of my investing strategy and I just know what policies are going to get yes and what policies are going to get no. I don't care if it's green or not. I just know green's an effective way for me to make more money." So, if you can help us tease that out, whether ideology is driving this, whether economics are driving this, that would be I think really helpful. >> Yeah, I would say economics. It's easy There is a weird kind of democracy within the blob in the sense that you do have this big stakeholder soup. And the way foreign policy usually gets made is through a consensus of stakeholders within the kind of high net worth individual family class, the sort of folks who have you effectively control over the hedge fund, private equity, big multinational corporation folks, and they they all have different interests.