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Radio War Nerd EP #499 — Trump's Wrecking Crüe + USAID Skeletons (Patreon)

Published:
2025-02-09 18:07:04
Edited:
2025-02-09 18:22:55
Imported:
2025-02
Tags:

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Content

Recorded: February 7, 2025

We discuss Trump's headline-onslaught as familiar old GOP strategy. Then (at 1:12:00) we look back at USAID's dirty work from torture & assassination programs to post-Cold War privatization and state subversion programs.

Reading:-"The murderous history of USAID, the US Government agency behind Cuba's fake Twitter clone" by Mark Ames, Pando, 2014-The Wrecking Crew, by Thomas Frank (guest RWN #239)

Total time: 1:55:47Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

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Sound production by Telescope Audio

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Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

Files

Comments

Watermane

I was waiting for this one 👀

John Waaben

The more thing change, the more they stay the same

Jason Edmiston

Love you, Mark, but you need to keep Del Taco's name out of your mouth.

.

I haven’t listened yet because friends are coming over shortly for the Superb Owl. and Im sure mark and john mention this but I hope people know that as horrific as usaid is and how it’s a soft power apparatus of US empire…defunding it this quickly is going to kill people in the immediate and these fucked up people are not going to stop empire shit because they defunded this. The cruelty really is the point. Usaid does do SOME work that saves lives like HIV meds in countries the U.S. keeps poor and destitute…through apparatuses like usaid. It’s all so fucked. We are a death cult country.

Doug Cartel

Yasha Levine had a short write-up on this but in a nutshell yeah, the good stuff USAID did was always in service of a vile empire

Benjamin Glover

it's infuriating that most of the old pando stuff is stuck in archive.org purgatory

Austin Mettler

Mark could you please share a link about the Harris campaign leaks ignoring Gaza mailers?

Horseloverfat

Montanan here. Because of that asbestos poisoning, Libby is one of the only towns in America where the vast majority of the population receives something like public healthcare.

Clean Shirt Piggie

Doesn’t dissolution of Dem party feed into full 1 party dictatorship?

Ander Pierce

Nah Del Taco is absurdly underwhelming, even as far as chain Tex Mex goes 🤣

Webb

The "USAID is a CIA cut-out" stuff always makes me wince. The issue is not USAID - nor even the CIA - as the USA's interventionism and colonialism predate both agencies. Full disclosure, I am "on the take" as they've been saying, as I've spent my career working through US government funded development and humanitarian programs. I would never deny that USAID is used as an asset of the intelligence services and State Department, but the vast majority of the work is focused on health, agriculture, and emergencies (caveat that I think this is distorted recently by some of the Ukraine supplemental bills). But USAID specifically being considered a CIA cut-out specifically rankles , as it ignores the ways in which State, Defense, Treasury, NED, NRI, etc all work as a cohesive unit to carry out USG foreign policy goals. Targeting USAID, but not intelligence or Defense, misses the forest for the trees. It's not enough to say that USAID does "some good" - it's an integral part of the global humanitarian infrastructure. FEWSNET, PEPFAR, emergency food aid, and other disaster response mechanisms are falling apart with the sudden collapse of USAID. The leftist gloating I've seen recently feels entirely misguided, because of course malevolent foreign interventionism will continue - but the humanitarian aspects will easily be killed. Even the multinational agencies are going to see a devastating financial hit from this Trump/Musk attack. USAID is a mess and the OTI/governance aspects need to be dismantled, but the stakes are too real to abandon the agency entirely to the conservative bonfire.

Ana

I remember about 7 years ago getting in big fights with other leftists over their constant belief they could "reform" the Dems. It got so bad that even self-declared "anarchists" refused to engage in actions if they weren't joined by liberal orgs. It was pure madness and I told them at the time they would only doom the left to further irrelevance and the Dems would only move further right before I finally just quit activism/organizing for good (most serious American leftists seem to eventually precisely because of crap like that ime). And now here we are. I'm trying to GTFO of the US since the government has declared people born like me enemies of the state, and somehow I'm positive the American left still thinks they can the Dems. If only Bernie. If only AOC. If only. This country is doomed and deserves what it gets at this point.

CR

When Meta started backing off, we should have known it was over. They collect enough data that they probably knew with absolute certainty Trump would win before probably any other organization on Earth. And the rest of Silicon Valley fell in line because there are enough natsec spooks and demons there to let people know Trump is not fucking around this time. They got the Putin to the Oligarchs speech: back off or I will fucking end you. Because 1) he can - he knows it, his advisors know it, and the nerds know it - and will if provoked, and 2) ending them would eliminate a HUGE Democratic donor base. That is also how he has kept Musk in line. He has advisors now who I’ve been following for years, “dissident” right shitheads like the next head of Public Diplomacy, Darren Beattie. They still may get their Schedule F employees. For now, emptying the offices is a good start. Speaking of Beattie and his associates, someone who has had a freakish amount of precognition about events and policy has been Niccolo Soldo. The sad thing is that he’s a European chauvinist. He wants Europeans to decouple from being vassals to the U.S. because he has no illusions about how powerful the U.S. empire is and how much that has crippled Europe. Funny enough he recently called Arnaud Bertrand a retard for taking Rubio’s comments about multipolarism at face value (Nic was right), but they are both European chauvinists and anti-U.S. imperialists. One just happens to be a racist Croat who repatriated from Canada and the other is a French expat who loves his residential country, China. But Nic paraphrased the line from an African diplomat recently that in Africa, when the Chinese come they get an airport; when westerners come, they get a lecture. USAID is not just a target for being a source of media warfare and lawfare against Trump and his supporters. The DEI stuff is also true. But more than ANYTHING ELSE, the problem that Beattie is going to be working on when the spigot is turned back on is for American soft power to stop being a bunch of hippie-ass gender studies scolds and schoolmarms. No one likes Lisa Simpson. They love Homer and Bart. They want to BE Homer and Bart. Trump’s whole image is built on being an entrepreneurial Shining City on a Hill. And that is what they are going to give the world, especially when China keeps kicking out asses at being awesome and making cool shit and being chill. The world loves America and Americans as an idea. And that’s what I suspect they are going to give the world in terms of soft power. You know why it’s going to happen and why it’s going to work? BECAUSE THE SAME SOFT POWER NARRATIVES FAILED MISERABLY AS POLITICAL MESSAGING FOR THE LAST TWO DECADES. And the people in charge are the ones who saw that strategy fail, mocked it as a failure and futile, and crushed the losers who thought “if we keep calling Trump a corrupt nazi and his supporters idiots, surely THIS TIME, it’ll work. (It never worked).” This is freshman-level lessons from baby’s first reading of the “The Prince”-level stuff. But it’s so obvious the “adults in the room” have been too stupid and narcissistic to see it. But they will be fine. The rest of us are fucked.

CR

Just to be clear, the Democrats are now the classical conservative party, the Republicans are Progressives (when Progressives were more open about being eugenicists and authoritarian technocrats), and the left is dead as Disco.

CR

USAID is a problem for spreading wokeness to these guys, but I can’t emphasize enough how much it comes down to how much they want to be admired and loved without it coming from a bunch of lecturing by fringe minorities that don’t represent the people of these countries. They want the people to want to be us because America Rules. It also doesn’t hurt to smack around their former colonial overlords because it costs us nothing to do so.

a clash of purple

I don't know what any of these people think they're doing. I mean, besides the Nazis and white nationalists in Trump's orbit, anyway. Americans all imagine they're post-ideological anyway. My Bernie-loving anti-Trump friends think of themselves as politically engaged, but they have only the vaguest idea of what 'liberalism' or 'conservatism' are, or most of what the U.S. government actually does (especially overseas) that doesn't directly impact their lives. I know John and Mark have expressed dislike for Forrest Gump, but I believe that film does a pretty good job of capturing the typical American's perception of history. It's a series of disconnected vignettes, famous people appearing and then sometimes getting assassinated, your friends dying or losing their limbs in a war for no reason against an enemy you've never heard of, and then you're sitting on a park bench. All events are random and discrete, with no connections to anything else. Nothing can be understood because there's nothing to understand. You yourself are a naive simpleton compelled to do things by faceless authorities and inner urges you can't comprehend (and aren't interested in examining).

a clash of purple

Well, technically you can have a one party dictatorship while still having a few other parties around. There are a few political parties allowed in PRC besides the CCP, for example. They aren't there to challenge the CCP's rulership, just to provide some other benefit for the government. The United States political system is too complicated to call it "just" a democracy, or an oligarchy, or a dictatorship. Power is still quite decentralized and distributed between different agencies, branches, state vs. federal, etc.. It's impressive how much the Republicans have gotten done despite being a small minority of the overall population, but I donno how far they can go without gaining more mass appeal (and the jury's still out on whether mass politics is even possible anymore). The New Deal coalition was a lot bigger, a lot stronger, and a lot more aggressive than the Trumpies, and even they never achieved anything like their full agenda.

Pranjal Dwivedi

Yes most of these disasters instigated and created by American trade policies and imperialism writ large, USAID is the velvet cloth on the iron hand, either way it deserves what it’s getting, not to mention USAID’s instrumental role in stripping away food sovereignty and replacing it with American centric food crops

Harvey Marsalko

Regarding "Indian hate" and the recent H1B controversy: my personal experience and that of those I know is that the tech labor market has significantly tightened since early 2023. Given this and seeing online that the people who are most vocal against Indians/H1B visas are tech bros, this latest bout of ethnic conflict seems to emanate from simple econ conditions which prob won't alleviate anytime soon. AI will go for those sorts of jobs first, so expect that outbursts to continue (and maybe cause some internal conflict in the Trump admin)

CR

"t got so bad that even self-declared "anarchists" refused to engage in actions if they weren't joined by liberal orgs." Classic wreckers.

CR

He couldn't prove a guy who punched his fiancé on video and dragged her out of an elevator on video punched his fiance. He couldn't find a terror suspect who wasn't set up by his FBI. He couldn't catch a cold.

a clash of purple

I don't believe that there are any "American leftists." Maybe there used to be, and, I donno, I'm sure there are some guys at like the street gang level who bash the fash and squat in communes or something (and God bless them), but I don't think there's any left political project in the United States worth speaking of at the state level and above. I don't think there's any game in town remaining besides Trump anymore, period. The Democrats aren't even controlled opposition at this point, they're just an embarrassment. It's honestly embarrassing at this point to hear well-intentioned people try to argue for the Democratic Party, even as the supposed lesser of two evils. There's a lot of latent energy (much more than whatever Trump has on his side) to do some real good, just waiting for the right movement to pick up, but if such a movement materializes I certainly won't see it coming. Like all those early Christians who knew Christ personally and thought they'd live to see the Second Coming, I'm just sitting around waiting for a sign (metaphorically speaking). Not sure what else to do, since I'm not willing to immolate myself in protest against the empire or shoot a CEO.

a clash of purple

I don't think gloating is the right response, but what is there to say? Is USAID worth defending? I donno. I tend to think that if Schumer and Pelosi are sticking up for it, then it should probably be destroyed. Maybe that's wrong, but there's apparently nothing anyone can do to stop Trump anyway. Those wonderful checks and balances supposedly built into our beloved institutions and our sacred Constitution don't seem to matter at all in the face of people who aren't high on their own self-righteous farts, despite what my high school teachers insisted. The opposition party, such as it is, appears to be mobilizing in defense of USAID. So they've got a better chance than, say, all other government employees, whose only hope is the AFL/CIO and other unions going to court (where the judge is, most likely, a Trump appointee from his first term). And I don't know if anyone with power is advocating for LGBTQ people, or black Americans, or migrants.

a clash of purple

"We" are not a death cult country. We are subjects of a depraved capitalist ruling class, just like most people in the world. Don't blame the rest of us for their atrocities.

fw

The democrat shredder filing of anti genocide mailers reminds of the british politicians who decided to scapegoat lgbt people (by legally defining trans people as rapists, they've openly legalised hunting teen girls; there's already been so many stabbings another brianna ghey is only a matter of time) despite it being an entirely astroturfed concern amongst the populace - for some reason, britleft still hasn't caught on, but they explicitly admitted to the same black hole. They started the shredder policy as part of the wrecker coup to oust Corbyn, too - the party bureaucrats sat on, hid or shredded any complaints about antisemitism for years, then blamed Corbyn for the break down in process, brandished the backlog and selectively propagandised with it as well as used it for blackmail material. None of it was ever actually dealt with properly, of course, even the stuff they brandished publicly as a way to increase their philosemitic cred. The overlap between people being pro trans and anti genocide is something they're aware and scared of, though - just like last century, a lot of different reactionary currents' flotsam coalesces into hatred of the ol pink canary in coal mine. See also sarah jane baker's imprisonment for a pride speech about "punching a terf", palestine action's non violent sabotage and environmental groups' road blocking sentencing, versus the sentences for those who tried to burn refugees alive en masse this summer and also lack of consequences for assault, attempted murder of said environmentalists. The labour administration's response to anti genocide speech and actions have been so contemptuous for the same reason as the democrats, too - they have to deny what should land them in a place far more serious than the hague if acknowledged.

a clash of purple

I think the relationship between Trump and the American oligarchs and Putin and the Russian "oligarchs" isn't comparable. As Ames has said, real power in Russia resides in the state, and always has. The oligarchs got rich at the whim of the state, and the state can destroy them just as easily. That's why it was so important for America to have Yeltsin in power as a totally servile puppet. In the U.S., power resides by and large in the hands of the capitalists. Not completely, and there have been times when the state, for various reasons, pushed back against them, but that's generally the situation. Trump is beholden to Musk and the other wealthy donors who back him (not that he has any ideology of his own to pursue anyway). They're not afraid of him. Putin could unilaterally strip his oligarchs of everything and/or assassinate them. Trump could, at most, slightly annoy guys like Musk and Zuckerberg with a few regulatory hassles. They support him because they're disgusting reactionary fucks and because they can use him to make a lot of money for themselves (and attack competitors like TikTok). (I don't understand what you're trying to say with all the soft power narrative stuff, sorry. Maybe people like Homer and Bart, but Homer and Bart could never write the Simpsons; if the writers are similar to anyone, it's Lisa. That's always been a big problem for the right. Anyone who's fun and/or creative is infinitely more likely to be a woke lib than a based Nazi.)

a clash of purple

I know it's not cool to be religious, but I honestly do hope there is a special hell waiting for the Labour party.

Webb

I don't think we need to hold "USAID" as an institution in any high regard whatsoever. There are just specific projects that need to continue. If WFP, GAVI, or whoever can take them over, that's fine; I don't think Trump is interested in funding UN agencies either though. They're mobilizing for USAID very slowly - like look what Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod are saying about this: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/04/democrats-foreign-aid-trap-trump-00202447 The Dems are severely apathetic about this, like most things

Hans Anders

People don’t want to BE Americans. Not anymore. Trump is pulling the worn Lisa mask, only to show the US was mr. Burns all along

John Waaben

Apparently Musk is supposed to go after graft in the Pentagon now…. We’ll see how that shakes up

Hilary is Pant-suited Syphilis

When elites in imperial hegemons start undermining, cannibalizing and using the institutions designed to prop up and maintain their rule for exclusive benefits for a select few of their class is when decline really starts to accelerate.

Ernesto

Nixon was the last liberal president

CR

The neoliberals collapsed Russia in the 1990s to prepare them for the perfected run they’ve been inflicting on the U.S. since 2008. The red directors were just the precursors to PE vultures.

CR

But the Democrats will make sure more of them are token minorities. Actually, I’m not even sure who some of these ghouls are supposed to be tokens for, anymore.

CR

Like Bill Hicks’ joke about the first meeting a president gets with the same people.

CR

Please stop with the histrionics. It’s also easy to know what they think because they never shut the fuck up. The problem is people don’t fucking listen/read.

CR

With most American oligarchs, I would agree. Silicon Valley oligarchs are a special case. The entire industry exists because of the natsec Blob. Its existence depends on doing what the U.S. government wants. It has made them and it can easily unmake them.

CR

So long as we pretend this is a representative democracy, yes, we are to blame.

.

We are all complicit whether you want to admit it or not. The vast, vast majority of Americans do not care. You could show them this episode and they’d find excuses or still say “good!”. There are sections of America who do care. But it’s a very tiny bloc.

Jeremy

“Stalinist” policies to bring back market growth is one of the crazier things I’ve ever heard. Love the show, though!

Muirneach

What an episode...as always a proper discussion....what would you consider the definitive book account so far on what was done to Russia after the collapse of the Советский Союз

MG

Didn't Trump use USAID to try and arm dissidents in Venezuela?

electradescending

The tree trunk that Bibi presented was a Cedar tree, the national symbol of Lebanon, which makes it all the more ghoulish and gloating for these monsters

Nic Riley

The Del Taco hatred was completely uncalled for!

John Waaben

I thought it was an olive tree from Palestine? Or an olive tree from Lebanon? Doesn’t change the fact it’s a demonic work of sculpture

Elmer Studd

This is one of those things that is 100% true but feels absolutely surreal to acknowledge to myself, let alone say out loud.

Ernesto

Ha, you are describing my apprehension as I typed the comment

Spencer Smyth

Great episode. I feel like Sarah Kendzior would be a great guest, a lot of the names you mentioned overlap with her area of interest, and she has a lot to say about the whole russiagate situation

Niko

Any book recs on USAid?

Adam Loeb

This del taco blasphemy almost had me canceling my subscription but I guess it’s good to get content from outside of my bubble. With respect, 500 episodes in and not one of them reaches anywhere near the perfection of Del Taco’s bean and cheese burrito with green sauce.

Aditya V

Kennedy basically did a power grab when he took away counterinsurgency and special forces from the Army and kept it under his direct control... The military hierarchy was upset as was CIA that was placed under the same task force and pretty much ordered around by RFK. Guess these folks didn't take it kindly.

Blorst of times

In Escondido, Ca (the awful town I am from) there were two Del Tacos. The area around both always smelled like a sewer. One abutted a feral cat colony and was a source of much morbid speculation. Killer ep. Listened twice.

Jack Ross

Great ep, thanks guys

Morgan

a slight correction: russiagate is not forgotten, and in my experience a huge section or majority of young dem aligned people take it as indisputable fact

GC

@Big river -- There are people above, behind, around (and sometimes in) that infrastructure who see that as its purpose, sure, and I wish them short days and bad afterlives. Doesn't change the fact that suddenly shutting huge chunks of that infrastructure down is going to cause a lot of direct immediate death (cold turkey on antiretrovirals, etc.) and potentiate a bunch more unless and until similar infrastructure, or (I wish without hope) something much better, is reconstructed. I'm pretty sure that the anti-imperial critique of USAID, which, please note, I generally agree with, isn't going to be much comfort to the families of the people who die as a direct result of a pro-apartheid billionaire kicking the plug out of the wall. I take this to be Webb's point.

GC

Disco at least retains some pop-culture influence in the US.

GC

Great episode! I'm always predisposed to think that not much has changed in US politics, but I think that this administration's relationship to the courts (complete capture at the upper end, apparent willingness to simply ignore all other levels) may be a little different. These trends were all there earlier, obviously, but IMO Trump II is attempting to culminate a theory of unitary executive power that even Bush II and Obama weren't ambitious enough to go after (not that they wouldn't have liked to!) Anyway, we'll find out horribly soon. Now listening to that Thomas Frank episode from 2022 [EDIT: sorry, 2020] and I'll be damned if it isn't still very fresh. He'd be a fantastic repeat guest. I've been looking for interviews with him post-inauguration and haven't found any yet.

IRIDYSCENZIA

You’re doing great! Keep it up! 👏

Matthew Thrunnowicki

Nevermind USAID’s whole Office of Transitions Initiative regime change dogshit

Noah

the whole Roe codification thing is a red herring. if there had been a federal abortion statute when Dobbs came down the one and only difference it would have made was adding a couple pages to the decision--such a statute woulda been doomed under current Constitional jurisprudence if it could not be justified as protecting a Constitional right

JoR

A fitting 500th episode would be on the current events in DRC/Rwanda. Or a historical episode. I understand you both want a guest for the region and that's hard to get. But I think one/both topics deserve even a non-guest episode.

Borvis

Long forgotten, one of Bush II’s first policies, forgotten after 9-11, was to raise the arsenic levels in drinking water. When you tell people, it’s so bizarre/monstrous they don’t believe you.

William

Don’t care if he’s 43 he deserves to be shot out of a cannon into the sun

William

That’s what we have right now anyways, what’s the difference? The illusion of choice?

William

No? You’re acting like they have a plan, when they’re just opportunistically going for the drum stick with the most meat on it, once the one they’re eating runs out. They’re not thinking past the next drum stick

William

DOGE (pronounced the trueanon way, “doggy” ofc) is different from the Grace commission in one important way- none of the CEOs had read-WRITE permissions for the systems in the Bureau of Fiscal Services, the systems that process ALL government payments, including all spending allocations (even black budget spending) and treasury bond payments. The latter, if interrupted, would crash world financial markets. Just taking the data out of there is incredibly dangerous, if leaked/stolen, as it could compromise undercover agents (personally dgaf) but also millions of people’s ssn and financial data

a clash of purple

Histrionics? I know what Trumpies and Democrats *say* they think, but the Democrats are certainly lying most of the time (including to themselves?) and the Trumpies... I donno. They don't seem to have brains in the way that human beings do.

a clash of purple

Fair point about the techbro CEOs. Maybe Trump has the whip hand with some of them, but I really don't know about him and Elon. If they ever have a real break-up, I guess we'll see which of them can do more damage to the other.

a clash of purple

I guess it's worth pointing out that dissolving the Democratic party would actually open the door for the formation of a real opposition party, potentially.

a clash of purple

I was born in Hawaii, so personally I've always liked the idea of tossing people you don't like into live volcanos.

a clash of purple

People rationalize it or say they don't care because they think there's nothing they can do to change it. This is a deliberate strategy on the part of the ruling class to "shock and awe" the public into checking out of politics (as discussed in this very RWN episode). We can say with some confidence now that a big reason Kamala lost is because of voter backlash over the Democrats' handling of the genocide in Palestine; and that's in the face of overwhelming, top-to-bottom, unified pro-Israeli propaganda in all major English-language media outlets around the world. And still, people were clearly more horrified by Biden and Harris than they were by the prospect of a second Trump term. I mean, Obama betrayed his constituents, but the reason he beat Hillary in the primaries and won two terms as president is because people genuinely believed he was going to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and implement universal healthcare. They thought he was going to stop the torture programs, close Gitmo, etc., etc.. That was his mandate from the voters. Maybe people were gullible to believe him, but you can't say they were acting like a death cult.

Jed Hovey

I'll fess up and say I was one of those who was initially very hopeful about Obama. I was young, fresh out of college, and the Bush years had been so awful. I wanted to believe so badly that if we just put the Democrats in charge things could be good again. In a way it worked out, I built up an immunity to the Trump Derangement Syndrome which has afflicted so many liberals. Although, to be perfectly honest I'd take a deeply cynical, dishonest, neoliberal status quo masquerading as the party of "hope and change" over the current administration without reservation. It's important to remember however bad things are, they can always get worse. The powers that be will never, ever willingly let a genuinely social democratic political movement gain traction in the US. We are left with the good cop, bad cop of the ruling class.

J P 3

With respect to Russiagate, the part of the story that was always the least plausible is the role that Russia had in "electing" Trump in 2016. It isn't plausible that a few million dollars of spending and some poorly designed Facebook memes were going to shift an election outcome against a billion dollar political campaign. The Democratic Party elite pumped it up because it helped them to evade responsibility for the 2016 failure. However, the aspect of the narrative that is more plausible is that Russia did attempt to cultivate a relationship and lines of communication with the Trump campaign both during the primary and afterward. This was highly unusual. e.g. Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort was convicted of multiple felonies in connection with Russiagate. It seems entirely likely as well that Russia is cheering on the dismantlement of USAID and has probably communicated the same to people in the Trump orbit, if not to Trump himself. What is happening now seems like a perfectly miserable coda to the U.S.'s "victory" over the Soviet Union with USAID providing a major assist to the rise of a global oligarchy (as this episode does such a great job of documenting). Ironically, USAID in indirect ways and unintended ways probably did more to elect Trump than Russia did in 2016, and its expedient "successes" in the past are now major contributing factors to its own dismantlement. It would not surprise me if the same might be said in 30 years of the global oligarchy and its own conduct right now, although perhaps this is being too optimistic.

Eric Neilson

I think USAID is just being absorbed into the State Department. It's not going to be shut down entirely, likely just the humanitarian wing of it.

a clash of purple

Thirded. I haven't been able to find anything like that after a cursory search. There's plenty of articles about the various ways that Harris spat in the eyes of people concerned about the Palestinians, but not this specific anecdote. It's academic at this point, of course. Even if that particular story isn't true, the overall picture is very clear. The Dems won't talk about it, but Trump reached out to the pro-Palestine movement. He visited Dearborn, spoke about the plight of the Palestinian people, invited imams and activist leaders to speak at his events, promised to bring peace to the Middle East, etc.. It's all as disingenuous as anything he does, but it's more than the Democrats bothered to do. Even as they call Mexicans rapists and murderers, Arabs terrorists, trans people groomers, etc., Trump and the Republicans frankly treat the Democratic base with more respect than the Democrats do. I think that's why the Democrats' messaging about Trump being a threat to minorities has fallen completely flat. Sure, he openly hates minorities, but not as much as the Democrats do.

Peter Z

Need a timeline of CIA/NED/USAID fuckery. Maybe teed-up with the Blowback boys, looking for patterns and predictions.

Vivek Dandekar

Anybody catch the name of the reporter Mark mentioned at about 1:28:40 in? It’s something like ‘Al Lengith’ but I can’t for the life of me tell & I’m trying to track down that book he mentions

Eric Snow

Over the line! Mark seriously did you have to do Del Taco dirty like that? Say what you will about the tenents of Del Taco compared to Taco Bell but at least Del Taco has an ethos...

Crosley Querin

"Sorry we've gone a little longer than expected, we were meant to discuss USAID but we spent a bit of time providing the context." Sorry, am I listening to Radio War Nerd?

TheEroticBarber

Mark you use "people on the left" too much. Communists and Socialists aren't complaining about USAID going bye bye

Mark Ames

some are, I'll leave it at that because I like some of those some

Mark Ames

I'm getting a lot of hate over my principled stand against Del Taco, I should probably address this

TheEroticBarber

Fedarchists are a different breed I'll give you that 😂

Mark Ames

Really? didn't she do work for them?

Kiel Cone

Giving Andrew Jackson way too much credit. He would have seen anti-trust legislation and regulations as tyranny. Jackson let smaller unregulated banks wreck the economy. Libertarian dipshit messiah.

Mark Ames

Not sure how I missed this, but one of my favorite comments in 500 ep's.

jkjkjkj

Great episode. Two quick notes on the Hmong: 1. Hmong populations were generally pretty sympathetic to communists in Vietnam. Anti communist Hmong were generally a feature of Laos specifically (though roughly 20% were pro communist, generally falling along clan lines, and were often persecuted intensely by the secret army for being pro communist and not sufficiently deferential to Vang Pao). 2. Hmong reliance on USAID rice was largely due to American bombing changing the basic terrain of highland Laos, and thus anihilating their traditional forms of sustenance (and leaving them reliant on food they themselves could not grow and did not have significant experience with)

Mark Ames

thanks for this, very grim