Can America Handle The TRUTH - Trump USAID Cuts With Eric Weinstein (YouTube Content)

Can America Handle The TRUTH? Trump USAID Cuts With Eric Weinstein
Information
Host(s)	Piers Morgan
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	00:49:09
Release Date	11 January 2025
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Can America Handle The TRUTH? Trump USAID Cuts With Eric Weinstein was a discussion with Eric Weinstein hosted by Piers Morgan on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show.

Description

Now that President Donald Trump is back in America’s driving seat, his plan to slash spending, particularly to foreign countries, is moving ahead practically unencumbered. The United States Agency for International Development aka USAID now sits squarely in the crosshairs of MAGA, with questions like; “Where is our money going?”, “How does this help America?” and “Why weren’t we told about this?” being shouted rather than whispered. Conversely, there are those who wholly support USAID and say the influence it affords the US is invaluable.

Piers Morgan dives deeply into this issue, joined by Harvard mathematician and physicist, Dr. Eric Weinstein, former USAID head and national security adviser to Donald Trump, Ambassador John Bolton, commentator and Babylon Bee contributor, Ashley St Clair, and Sunday Times columnist, Matthew Syed.

00:00 - Introduction

03:35 - Eric Weinstein returns to Uncensored

09:55 - USAID’s funding of media organisations

12:50 - “We live in a fabricated world”

17:32 - The information war and “soft fascism”

26:53 - Former USAID head John Bolton returns to Uncensored

34:48 - Ashley St Clair and Matthew Syed debate with Weinstein

36:15 - Can America handle the truth?

Transcript

00:00:00

Eric Weinstein: USAID.

00:00:00

John Bolton: Is clearly in the job of.

00:00:03

Speaker 3: Trying to bring about.

00:00:04

Speaker 3: Regime change. It has secret bank accounts, shell.

00:00:07

Speaker 3: Companies, U.S. aid gets 50 billion a year in U.S. taxpayer money.

00:00:12

Eric Weinstein: We are undergoing a process of what I've called Jessup ization the transformation of a previously open, free society by actors within its governing class to one in which the electorate cannot be trusted with even a basic outline of what is happening. That's what's going on. We don't actually know our own country.

00:00:30

Ashley St. Clair: These are some of the insane priorities that that organization has been spending money on. 1.5 million 80,000 for, 47,000 for a transgender opera in Columbia. As an American taxpayer, I don't want my dollars going towards this crap.

00:00:44

John Bolton: And I'm going to show you my farewell present from aid. You can see it's a hand grenade. This is a style of government.

00:00:50

Ashley St. Clair: The problem is people like John Bolton. He holds up his award from USAID and talks about how reform was needed decades ago, and did absolutely nothing.

00:00:59

Eric Weinstein: We're actually paying to provide low cost pagers and walkie talkies to Hezbollah, as well as giving them tech support. Are we out of our minds?

00:01:07

Ashley St. Clair: No one's going to understand this.

00:01:08

Eric Weinstein: A second, Ashley, let me finish the point. Oh, here we go.

00:01:12

Piers Morgan: Is it not incumbent on governments occasionally to not tell their people the truth? Could America handle the truth?

00:01:23

Piers Morgan: President Trump's dismantling of the US agency for International Development is either a bloated triumph or a dangerous disgrace, depending on where you get your news. USAID supporters say it's a vital tool of American soft power, which supports life saving health programs in the world's poorest countries. Critics say it's tantamount to a shadow government pushing policies divorced from a Trump agenda, wasting millions of dollars, billions, perhaps, in the process.

00:01:47

Piers Morgan: President Trump was unrepentant about the policy when quizzed by journalists this weekend on his way to the Super Bowl.

00:01:53

Donald Trump: The ones that have been, the few that have been legitimate in terms of getting legitimate money will probably put it through the State Department and be handled by Marco Rubio, highly respected man, Secretary of state. There's no reason for US aid. When you look at the politicians that have been in there sucking the blood out of it. When you look at all of the fake deals, I mean, look, all you have to do is get a list of all of the things you can see by the heading.

00:02:21

Donald Trump: It's fake. It's fraudulent. It's probably kickbacks.

00:02:26

Piers Morgan: There has never been a blizzard of criticism about the policy. Former national security adviser John Bolton is among those arguing it will undermine vital U.S. alliances in an ever more dangerous world. Hear more from them later. The heart of a mathematician a podcast superstar. Weinstein, however, sees things very differently. He says the destruction of USAID shows everything pivotal since World War Two was, in part, unreal.

00:02:47

Piers Morgan: Well, here to unpack this. What he means by that is Eric, why is the. Eric great to have you back on uncensored. I just read you a few things that have emerged, that were being financed by USAID. $100,000 for bicycle safety equipment for Hispanic immigrants, $47,000 for transgender opera in Colombia, $1.5 million to advance DTI and Serbian work places, $20 million for Iraqi Sesame Street.

00:03:15

Piers Morgan: Hundreds of millions to fund growing poppies in Afghanistan. Now, these are the sort of headline grabbing elements of this which people generally responded by going, what the hell are we doing? Spending American taxpayer money on such apparently ludicrous things? But you think there's a more serious thing at play here? Tell me about it.

00:03:39

Eric Weinstein: Well, I think the problem is, is that Americans in general have not been brought in to a circle of trust with our foreign facing apparatus the Defense Department, State Department and the intelligence services. And so they don't know about the concept of hybrid warfare. And they're looking in part at this bizarre laundry list that is comprised of, actual aid.

00:04:10

Eric Weinstein: Attempts to destabilize other regimes, including democratically elected ones, pure, payoffs so that we can keep certain people happy as well as paying, you know, just graft to our to our own people who are part of the system. So what you're looking at is an incredibly heterogeneous laundry list of bizarre items that you can't sort easily and you can't figure out, you know, where is somebody trying to reduce malaria and where is somebody paying for it?

00:04:44

Eric Weinstein: Transgendered rock opera to be performed in, in, Tehran. You know, it all looks very, very bizarre because you don't understand that what we are in is a continuation of hybrid warfare into an actual hybrid civil war. You're in the middle of a civil war. That would be understood if you'd understood the concept of hybrid war to begin with.

00:05:08

Eric Weinstein: The question is, do you understand who the two sides are?

00:05:11

Piers Morgan: You said an interesting thing. You said it's equivalent to the you can't handle the truth seen in The Few Good Men, the Jack Nicholson Tom cruise movie. Is this a case of America just can't handle the truth?

00:05:24

Eric Weinstein: Well, I think you don't, people don't understand what that film was. We remember it as Tom cruise playing Lieutenant Kaffee as the good guy, and Jack Nicholson playing, Nathan Jessup, Colonel Nathan Jessup as the bad guy. And that's not at all what Aaron Sorkin actually did. The reason it's a great film is that those are two halves, representing two halves of America, the deep state represented by Nathan Jessup and the, effectively, lackluster turned heroic, Lieutenant Kaffee, played by Tom cruise.

00:05:58

Eric Weinstein: And what's happening in that scene is that you have the culmination of two very important and very different points. Colonel Jessup is actually making an incredibly important point at someplace that you don't like to talk about. In part is you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. That is the correct part. He also realizes, that he has to defend something which can't be explained to ordinary Americans, which is the concept of the code red that was ordered, that there are certain ways in which our country actually functions that cannot be discussed, that are not on the books, and that these are actually an incredibly dominant part of our national

00:06:37

Eric Weinstein: identity being way of life. And, the mechanism by which our peace and prosperity has previously been provided. What happens in that scene that we all remember is that Sorkin very carefully destabilizes things in favor of Lieutenant Kaffee at the end, because Jessup is sort of driven mad by power, and he stops actually being able to manage the lies on which he sits top.

00:07:03

Eric Weinstein: And I think that in part, what I've said is, is that we are undergoing a process of what I've called Jessup ization. If you don't mind, I'll just read what I gave is the definition of. Yeah. I said Jessup ization is, the transformation of a previously open society. I will use my old man glasses. The transformation of a previously open, free society by actors within its governing class to one in which the electorate cannot be trusted with even a basic outline of what is happening and why, via the abuse, of need to know, happening and why via the abuse of need to know or sources and methods privileges.

00:07:45

Eric Weinstein: Now that's what's going on. We don't actually know our own country. And so right now you're reading a laundry list of, bizarre items with no context in which to put them right, partially because what you're seeing is, graft and partially because it's destabilizing other nations.

00:08:06

Piers Morgan: You have a friend, Mike Bentz, who's been at the forefront of this story, and says, if anything, it goes, he goes further than you saying USAID is a rabbit hole. I want to play the clip from him.

00:08:18

Speaker 3: I've been been saying for so long. I mean, the really is a sort of aid Truman Show, that much of the world lives. And how many people found out for the first time this week that 90% of median Ukraine is funded by U.S. aid? Many people are just now finding out, you know, the extent of U.S. media organizations that are that are funded by, by U.S. aid, and they're finding out the reach of it and everything from the unions to social media censorship to, pandemic and gain of function research, to, you know, strange ties even to things like terrorism and the drug trade and, you know, there's that sort of

00:09:01

Speaker 3: these institutions that everyone thought were private and independent being corrupted by, you know, U.S Aids, 44 billion odd dollar a year budget.

00:09:12

Piers Morgan: I mean, fascinating to hear that. A Dave Rubin said the US aid story's way bigger than most people realize. It's not that they funded Politico and New York Times, etc., but that the articles in those publications were used as sources all over CNN, NBC news, etc. to further push their agenda. This is how they laundered the lies. The narrative, as he puts it.

00:09:34

Piers Morgan: And that certainly will be the belief of skeptical people here one day. It'll be hang on. So taxpayer money was being directly pumped, billions of millions of it to media organizations here and in other countries. Amazon being used by those major organizations to put out whatever narrative suited them. So effectively, the taxpayer is funding whatever narrative that media entity wants them or wants to put out.

00:10:05

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, it's way worse than anything either of those, let's say. I don't really know how to talk about it. It's interesting. I didn't know you were going to play that clip. When Israel was commenting, in the wake of its pager and walkie talkie attacks about what the intelligence community actually is, they gave an interview, to CBS making the following statement we make like Truman Show, everything is controlled by us behind the scene.

00:10:34

Eric Weinstein: In their experience, everything is normal. Everything was 100% kosher, including businessmen, marketing engineers, showroom everything, shell companies over shell companies to affect the supply chain to our favor, we create a pretend world. We are a global production company. We write the screenplay where the directors were, the producers were the main actors, and the world is our stage. This is how the I see the intelligence community, worldwide, sees itself as this thing that sits atop normal civil society.

00:11:07

Eric Weinstein: And in so doing, it presents us a world that is simply untrue. And it's untrue at many levels. It's untrue scientifically. You talk about taxpayer money. That's really how Elon is going to track, what this network is and how it functions. If you go after the money and then you're going to end up going after you.

00:11:30

Eric Weinstein: Once you do that, you're going to go after the data. So what he's really going to do is he's going to get access to the data, and he's going to figure out as you cut things off, what stops functioning. No one quite knows that. I know how The New York Times is wired to Harvard University is is wired to the Brookings Institution.

00:11:48

Eric Weinstein: And as such, it's very strange when you see a spontaneous consensus, because consensus effectively never forms, in human experience. Think about any Thanksgiving dinner you've had, as an American or any family gathering. You've had, like a Christmas dinner worldwide. People don't in general come to consensus. They have very interesting, different points of view. That's what makes humanity interesting.

00:12:13

Eric Weinstein: These large consensus, positions are effectively all orchestrated, and that is essentially how government has functioned. So what these people are talking about is imagine waking up to find out that in particular, the last 55 years, I would say, certainly post, 63. But things got really intense, around 1970, where effectively we live in a fabricated world in which we agree that we won't ask too many questions.

00:12:46

Eric Weinstein: And that's what all the concern is about. Are you a conspiracy theorist? It's like, surely you're not going to go poking around in the back of House of the United States of America? Are you.

00:12:56

Piers Morgan: The case? The defense was presented by the former US ambassador to the UN and USAID administrator, Samantha Powers. She appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and said, this.

00:13:09

Speaker 6: So this is an investment in our stability, in our security, in our alliances. And that is what U.S. aid has done since Kennedy created it. Helped eradicate smallpox on the verge of eradicating polio again and again. U.S. aid is on the front lines of some of the hardest challenges that our country faces, and that some of the most vulnerable people in the world face.

00:13:31

Piers Morgan: Now, presumably, Eric, amid all this, absurdity, there is also a lot of very good work that was being done by this program. But on that part, I would I would say that I watched a fascinating thing with a Sky news presenter here called Yalda Hakim, who had set up, a thing in Afghanistan. She's half Afghani to help young Afghani girls get education.

00:13:55

Piers Morgan: And then she said that when she went to American, official government bodies for help, they offered her immediately, here's 100 million. And she only wanted 2 or 3 million. And she said it was staggering to actually suddenly have this arm of the federal government and all its guys just throwing money at this because it sounded like a good idea.

00:14:16

Piers Morgan: And she just said, look, in in their case, they said, no, we only need whatever. It was 2 to 3 million. But she wondered how many other people took 100 million when it was completely unnecessary. In other words, there's clearly a lot of waste going on, even for very well-intentioned programs. But there must also be a lot of good stuff being done as well.

00:14:35

Piers Morgan: So that is the danger here that in I mean, I think you've compared what Ellen's doing as analogous to the moneylenders in the temple by Jesus. But the danger is in trying to get rid of the moneylenders, the whole temple. I America crashes down in the process. You know, there's a lot to unpack. I know with what I've just said, but just simple terms is that good stuff is part of his program.

00:15:01

Piers Morgan: And are you worried on a bigger scale that Ellen could bring the whole package of cars crashing down?

00:15:09

Eric Weinstein: Sure. Let me just say it like this. Historically, USAID, which is how I've always heard it pronounced, did a lot of good because you could always do well by doing good in a time in which, the Soviets couldn't compete with us in terms of all the wonderful things we could do for another country. So you've always been tempted to lead with doing well by doing good, but then at some point you do well by doing bad to some people.

00:15:39

Eric Weinstein: And then that changes things. So USAID has always been this bizarre instrument of both good and evil. The whole spectrum goes through it. So when Samantha Power, who I know, said that she's being somewhat disingenuous and I would actually wonder what happened to Stephen Colbert and how he suddenly became a part, as all the late night comedians in the US seem to be, of one mind, and they speak with one political voice.

00:16:05

Eric Weinstein: I think that in part, you don't even know when The Truman Show, is appearing.

00:16:10

Piers Morgan: I totally agree.

00:16:11

Eric Weinstein: I mean, Samantha Powers.

00:16:12

Piers Morgan: Yeah, I was talking to on that point. I was talking to Jay Leno about this, and he he was pretty apolitical. He used to take the Mickey out of all of them. But he also said that Johnny Carson, it was the biggest star of them all, had a complete sort of monopoly when he was on the airways.

00:16:28

Piers Morgan: No one ever knew what his politics were. And yet now we're in a position where I think every single late night host, with the exception of Greg Gutfeld, now, who was launched on Fox and is number one in the ratings. Probably not a coincidence that every one of the others sounds exactly the same when it comes to how they cover politics.

00:16:47

Piers Morgan: They're all left wing Democrats.

00:16:51

Eric Weinstein: Was, again, it's not really left wing. The the issue is the institutional consensus. The problem in some sense is that the Civil War, the hybrid Civil War comes out of something called the whole of society approach. Now, a lot of Americans and people abroad aren't tracking the idea that this concept, which appears to have originated at an Asia Pacific, think security think tank named after Daniel in a way, around 2010, is basically soft fascism.

00:17:22

Eric Weinstein: And the idea being that a hybrid war, a war that is distributed between the kinetic and the internet, data, hearts and minds, entertainment, etc., has to be fought in a different fashion in which you get all of the participating institutions of society to row together and to speak with one voice and sing from one hymnal. All of the non-canon forming individuals who don't even know that there is something called a whole of society approach, or where it was innovated, or what hybrid warfare isn't are potentially viewed as the enemies because they think they have free speech and they think they have a right to dissent.

00:17:59

Eric Weinstein: So the whole of society, which is hysterically funny as a title, is not remotely the whole of society. Then what happens is that from their point of view, there was this group that you can call the backward rest of society and the backward rest of society. The deplorables are the people who spoke out and say, I don't understand why we're in Ukraine.

00:18:17

Eric Weinstein: I don't understand what the issue is with the vaccines. Why are we claiming that this had to have come from a wet market and the whole of society then started taking this infrastructure that they'd built up to destabilize regimes abroad and started just targeting individuals. And you could say, well, okay, that's all at the level of data or words.

00:18:39

Eric Weinstein: But now Trump has faced at least two assassination attempts. And my guess is that that number is not two. And in particular, I would say that Elon, had a son who I think he believes was targeted by this transgender, movement, attempting to induce people to reproductively mutilate themselves and terminate their line in the situation. I would say that both Elon and Trump feel that they have been joined in a physical hybrid war, and they are now returning fire.

00:19:14

Eric Weinstein: So the question is, what is it that Elon is trying to preserve when you had an actual civil war in the U.S, were both sides trying to preserve the infrastructure of the country that they hoped to rule over the end? This is what I don't know. I don't know it. Mike Benz and I are actually quite close together on this.

00:19:32

Eric Weinstein: We've both been praying for the day that we could actually clean house, with this, terribly frightening architecture that grew up in the CIA, State Department, Nexus. But Mike has compared this to performing open heart surgery, and you're trying to protect the page, the patient, from both, you know, let's say a, I don't know, spread of cancer, while they're on the operating table, but also, a surgeon that appears to be very cavalier about risk mitigation.

00:20:05

Eric Weinstein: I cannot believe that in some sense, Elon and Trump are not surrounding themselves with more strong voices. Given how much is on the line. We're not taking over Twitter here. Twitter never had a thermonuclear deterrent.

00:20:19

Piers Morgan: Right? I mean, you said an interesting thing, about a possible link between the Trump Golf Club assassination attempt, by a guy called Ryan Ruth who said Ryan, Wesley, Ruth and USAID are both strongly tied to discreet American interest assets, sources and methods in Ukraine. Who was paying Ruth in Ukraine, Afghanistan, etc.? Is there no connection whatsoever?

00:20:43

Piers Morgan: I mean, to which I would say a very legitimate question, simply because we know so little actually about either of these people that wanted to kill Trump because, you know, a party, I would say is what you just said, that the very liberal, skewed mainstream media moved on incredibly quickly. I mean, there have been two assassination attempts on a Democrat, running for president, one of which hits him.

00:21:07

Piers Morgan: And then within weeks, there's another attempt that is very, very close to to being successful four minutes away from killing Trump. And we we know so little about the killers, or the attempted killers. It would be a staggering state of affairs and the media would have carried on or not, but they just dropped it. I mean, the first one in particular, Ruth, obviously we know a little bit more about and those connections to Ukraine are, intriguing.

00:21:31

Piers Morgan: But the young kid that shot Trump in the air, literally nothing seems to exist about this kid. And we've all just accepted it. And we.

00:21:41

Eric Weinstein: You know, people I know in the intelligence community talk about the use of patsies to, commit crimes. They talk about pre planting cover stories in mainstream publications. As soon as I heard that, I immediately went to the New York Times search engine to find that, I think in 2023, there was an article about weirdos in Ukraine who would never be allowed, near the front lines of an American war in which, Ruth is featured, which is consistent both with him being a complete lunatic and also pre planting a cover story in the allied media.

00:22:17

Eric Weinstein: You have to recall that when World War Two was going on, the New York Times, had a paid journalist, from the government to write the atomic weapons pieces. So the reporter was actually paid by the government to do its bidding. J Edgar Hoover, used Joyce Haber at the Los Angeles Times to destroy Jean Seberg.

00:22:41

Eric Weinstein: There is a long tradition of using media confederated to the U.S deep state to accomplish things with no trace. And in part, you have to remember that the idea of the CIA is intelligence is what they say. But if it was called the CoA, the covert operations agency, you'd know that the word covert means deniable. Deniable means gaslighting.

00:23:04

Eric Weinstein: It is the only organization that is chartered to gaslight should its activities become discovered. And that is why there's so much pressure never to even ask a question. What was a lunatic like Ryan Routh doing in Ukraine? Who was paying him? Why was he trying to get fighters from Afghanistan to the frontlines in Ukraine? This is a very strange sort of hobby for a former construction worker.

00:23:29

Piers Morgan: Where is the line in terms of transparency? There must be some things which even you would think should remain secret. But as far as US government information, you know, when I remember what happened with it was Snowden, Wikileaks, Julian Assange and so on. When you put all these guys together and you see the attack on them was that they were revealing stuff that was not in America's national interest.

00:23:55

Piers Morgan: Others defended them, saying, well, no, we need to be as transparent as possible. But clearly there's a line between those two positions. You know, you don't want to put the details of every single, you know, CIA operative around the world because they'll get killed, for example. So there is clearly a line, but we're in.

00:24:12

Eric Weinstein: Great.

00:24:13

Piers Morgan: Well, so what where is that line in terms of what Trump and Elon Musk are doing now? There's something incredibly energetic and refreshing about what they're doing and lifting the lid off all this stuff, and they're going to do it, apparently, department by department and even down to the JFK files and what the government knows about UFOs and so on and so on.

00:24:31

Piers Morgan: But but there's got to be a line around them. And you can't just Edward Snowden, Wikileaks, where everything goes out, everything.

00:24:41

Eric Weinstein: They will find out when they've screwed up really badly. At some point they're going to do something like end up, releasing a lot of sources and methods, using this showmanship that they do better than anyone else on Earth. And, you know, the concern that I have is that those of us who have been fighting this battle for, like I don't know, in my case, 35 to 40 years, against this thing, are nowhere to be found.

00:25:07

Eric Weinstein: We're looking at a bunch of people who have crossed over relatively recently to being okay with this whole structure. I mean, I hate to say it this way, but if you look at, like, Mark Zuckerberg, and, you know, the board of Facebook, they were participating in this thing until they switched teams. Yeah. So in part, those of us who've been looking at this for a long time know the dangers of disclosure.

00:25:32

Eric Weinstein: And we've always worried like we need to get at the cancer, but we can't risk, pretending that, oh, you know, sunlight is the best disinfectant. First of all, any any, any more on who always says sunlight is the best disinfectant doesn't understand that something like Brucella gets worse than sunlight. They're infections that actually get much worse than sunlight.

00:25:52

Eric Weinstein: And so, you know, the problem is, is that you've got this very simplistic, point of view. And if you don't subscribe to the simplistic point of view, either of the first group which said that this is all normal, there is no conspiracy, or the second, which is let's let's just destroy the whole thing and take the whole thing out.

00:26:10

Eric Weinstein: It's sort of the tree limb on which upon which we sit. Neither of those is the right course, and I'm exhilarated by getting rid of the rot. I think that they're going to do a great job, and I'm never going to stop rooting for them to succeed. But my God, do they even understand what they're looking at?

00:26:27

Piers Morgan: I don't know, fascinating. Eric, stay with me. We're going to debate all this with, Matthew Syed and, Ashley Sinclair in a moment. Let's spend a couple of minutes talking to one of the biggest critics of us, AI. These demise, they include the pope, whose envoy called the measures reckless and, human on humanitarian grounds. Others, like the former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, say weakens US foreign policy.

00:26:50

Piers Morgan: And Ambassador Bolton now. Ambassador, great to have you back on uncensored. Nice to see you. Why are you so opposed to this?

00:26:58

John Bolton: Because I think properly directed, USAID and a bilateral foreign assistance program, can enhance American national security. It's, throughout history began with reading Caesar's commentaries about how he used the economic means and the conquest of Gaul. There is a lot to criticize about. I do, there's no doubt about it. But the approach that the, administration is taking reminds me of that, Army briefing officer in Vietnam who said, we had to destroy that village, in order to save it.

00:27:33

John Bolton: And I might say, I've got some personal experience here. I was, in charge of policy and budget at USAID during the Reagan administration when we undertook a major effort to fix it. And I'm going to show you my farewell present from side. You can see it's a hand grenade, and it says on it John R Bolton, Truist, Reagan, aid, 1983.

00:27:57

John Bolton: This is a style of government. And, and that's the way we approach this item.

00:28:03

Piers Morgan: John, if you don't mind me saying I'm giving you a grenade as a leaving president, people could say that was that was sending another message altogether.

00:28:11

John Bolton: Well, it was a style of government. We felt that I needed to be shaken up. And I'm sure it needs to be shaken up today, but when you destroy it, you're eliminating an important instrument that we need. If you want to cut the budget, and redirect it, that's fine. What I would do would be to eliminate all American contributions to the world Bank and the multilateral development banks.

00:28:34

John Bolton: And much of the contributions we make to the UN system. I think the US benefits by the direct bilateral provision of foreign aid, much, much more than to these multilateral institutions. We get no credit for what they do, despite our paying 25% roughly of their budget. We get the credit or we get the blame when we do it directly through our own bilateral program.

00:28:57

Piers Morgan: The problem is, though, that when you have a list of things that which have been, given money from this program, $47,000 for transgender opera in Colombia, a $1.5 million to advance DTI and Serbian workplaces, $20 million for Iraq, Sesame Street, and so on. When Americans hear that, they understandably go nuts, particularly when cost of living is, at such a ruinous and ravaging level at the moment in America when people can't even afford to buy eggs.

00:29:28

Piers Morgan: And I think the problem is the optics of this are awful in that there's clearly been no let's.

00:29:33

John Bolton: Talk about reality. No, let's not talk about optics. I would I would agree completely. I'd go nuts over every single thing you mention. But if providing $1.5 billion to Egypt, for example, helped enforce the Camp David peace accord of 1979, was that not something that benefited the United States? There's no doubt particularly, in in the recent Biden and Obama administrations, we've seen a division within the American body politic over what the bilateral aid program is for.

00:30:08

John Bolton: Conservative Republicans generally believe it's to advance American foreign policy interests. Liberal Democrats think it's to be a welfare agency to the world. That's the wrong approach. But having the instrument is critical and, it derives over a long period of time. Some people now talk about turning aid over to the State Department. That's certainly an option. But anybody who thinks turning it over to state will solve all the problems need us to think again.

00:30:35

Piers Morgan: Donald Trump said about it is absolutely obscene, dangerous, bad. Very costly. I mean, virtually every investment made is a con job is nothing of value to anybody unless there's a kickback scheme going on, which is possible. I mean, you, you know, can you say emphatically that's not happening? Or is a lot of this stuff dressed up in a way that actually hides the reality, which is just America wanting to scratch the back of a country for a particular reason.

00:31:03

John Bolton: Well, I think, scratching the back of a country that benefits the United States makes some sense. I think that those kinds of comments by Trump show he doesn't understand what he's doing. You know, with Trump, it's all One Direction. The idea of a complex situation doesn't occur to him. I don't have any doubt, as I didn't in the time I was a kid in 1981 to 83, major reforms were necessary, and I'm sure they're necessary now.

00:31:29

John Bolton: But once the reforms are made, or at least underway, you need a vehicle to provide this kind of assistance to regimes that we need on our side around the world. This was a lesson one would have thought people learned during the Marshall Plan. We weren't providing economic assistance to Europe because we were nice people. Although we are, we were providing it to get their economies back on the feet, to buy products from the United States.

00:31:54

John Bolton: You know, when Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, wanted to sell the Marshall Plan, he went to the Delta Council in Mississippi to speak to a bunch of redneck southern farmers who grew cotton. Why would he defend foreign aid to them so that they would get cotton they could send to Europe to make a lot of money off of which they did.

00:32:14

Piers Morgan: I mean, when you were working there, how much of the money in reality was just being used as a tool to destabilize foreign governments?

00:32:24

John Bolton: Unfortunately, almost none of it. I would have been happy to use some of it to destabilize some of the governments that were faced around the world. That was handled more by the clandestine side of the CIA. What we were trying to do is help governments, that that we felt we had an interest in. Now, I don't think we had perfected that, by any stretch of the imagination.

00:32:44

John Bolton: And there are reasonable people who can disagree about the country levels. You'll notice in this entire three weeks of debate, nobody's talked about, is the allocation to country high enough, or is it too high? They just talk about, you know, the D-I programs, which are small amounts of money. The real the real budget allocation question is, are we spending enough, in support of the governments that we need support from?

00:33:09

Piers Morgan: Should it just not be just completely transparent? In other words, give it all to the State Department and say, right, here's a list of all the investments we're going to be making into all these countries. And here's the real reason why. And we're no longer going to be financing any of these absurd things like Iraqi Sesame Street. Well, just going to say we're going to give Iraq 20 million and here's why and be judged accordingly.

00:33:34

Piers Morgan: But at least it's transparent.

00:33:37

John Bolton: Yeah. Look, if it were looking at a I'd, I'd tell the Hill every single thing we did. In fact, I spent a lot of my time, as did much of the rest of the staff in Washington, telling Congress all these things, the amount of reports we had to do, the amount of internal, reports that were just incredible.

00:33:55

John Bolton: I mean, the amount of paperwork was overwhelming. It made the whole place less efficient. But I think, I think the administrator of a ID has to be prepared to defend the expenditure of every single dollar.

00:34:07

Piers Morgan: Ambassador Bolton, always good to have you on on sensitive. Thank you very much.

00:34:10

John Bolton: Glad to be with you.

00:34:11

Piers Morgan: So who is right when it comes to us? Aid those who think we're right to dismantle it or those who want to see it. Soft power influence protected. Do you want me to? Debatable. Based on the times columnist Matthew Syed author and political commentator Ashley Sinclair and Eric Weinstein is still with us. Matthew, you've been listening to all of this, first to Eric, then to John Bolton. You wrote about this at the weekend. Did nothing change your mind?

00:34:34

Matthew Syed: Well, I don't doubt there's a great deal of corruption, bureaucratic empire building, woke ideology infiltrating the judgments that were made, particularly during a Democrat administration. But I don't doubt that they do good things, too. And I think it is a sensible thing to have a forensic accounting for a department.

00:34:52

Matthew Syed: That does seem to have been somewhat out of control, but I hope people who critique the department also recognize the malaria programs saving lives. And there are synergistic benefits for the American taxpayer, too, in the way that John Bolton described. But I would also add that this is a trivial issue in one way. The annual budget of this department, USAID, what is it, 50 billion, something like that.

00:35:20

Matthew Syed: The level of the federal debt is 35, 36 trillion. And if this is an extra central risk to the United States, and Donald Trump has talked about balance in the budget, I see no, prospect of that happening with the tax cuts. Most of the independent think tanks think you will add trillions to the deficit. The interest on this debt is something like a trillion a year.

00:35:45

Matthew Syed: And unless there's a reduction in entitlements, unless there's a willingness to crack down on corrupt tax avoidance, the infiltration of Congress by lobbyists, monopoly power in the corporate sector, I don't think that this existential risk is going to be alleviated by this battle over a pretty small department, even though I think in and of itself, it's worth doing.

00:36:08

Piers Morgan: I mean, see, that's interesting because like your last words, even in itself it's worth doing because actually they're going to start somewhere. This is where they chose to start. Trump said yesterday. Next is the Education department. Elon's going to get stuck into that. Then every other department, the Pentagon everywhere. And actually, I feel that most Americans are completely on board with this.

00:36:29

Piers Morgan: They're like, there's clearly all sorts of crap lurking under the bonnet here, and they're going to get it out and they're going to use these young geeks, who are brilliant computer whiz kids to root out where the overspend come. Now, there are inherent dangers which Eric I thought outlined, very skillfully, but Ashely St. Clair, I mean, I just if I was an American, I'd be like, yeah, get stuck into this is clearly the tip of the iceberg.

00:36:58

Ashley St. Clair: The American people are all for the cracked ancient scroll card going in and dismantling all of this under Doge. And the problem is people like John Bolton, who go on here, and I'm starting to realize why Trump revoked his security clearances and called him a very dumb person, because he sits here and he holds up his award from USAID and talks about how reform was needed decades ago and did absolutely nothing.

00:37:21

Ashley St. Clair: Instead, we're sending Big Bird over to Baghdad for $20 million. We have $10 million being sent for meals that are inadvertently funding and supporting Al-Qaeda backed groups in Syria. This is absurd. And the American people are tired of this. This has been terrorism, bureaucratic terrorism against the American people. And a lot of people are upset because guess what?

00:37:41

Ashley St. Clair: They're going to leave the federal government and they're going to have to actually acquire marketable skills and work for a living, because this has just been, as Mike Cernovich said, white collar welfare. And these people are making obscene amounts of money. They're in the top 5% of earners running these NGOs that are being funneled through USAID and making $400,000 a year to disperse DDR in Serbia.

00:38:04

Ashley St. Clair: It's insane.

00:38:06

Piers Morgan: Eric. It was another thing that John Bolton said. Right. I mean, did you did you find yourself nodding to anything? He's a.

00:38:15

Eric Weinstein: You know, you're in a situation in which he's talking about a bit of ancient history from the Reagan administration. There's been a huge change in what USAID does recently. It's always been problematic. It's become much more so. And I think one of the things people have to realize is that, in part, they view this as funding the war internally on dissenting Americans.

00:38:39

Eric Weinstein: I don't think it's any accident that Ellen has started here. I don't think that this thing about the whiz kids, you know, we're starting to create this theater around what Ellen is doing. Ellen is very clever in making this about a monetary outrage when the deeper question about it is, why is a portion of the U.S government targeting nonparticipating Americans who don't even know that they are against this whole of society approach because nobody ever signed them up, nobody told them it was going on.

00:39:10

Eric Weinstein: And there is a suspicion that basically our federal apparatus has moved into destroying American lives for dissenting Americans. And I think that that's really the issue you can talk about with, wizards and the line item issues and the fairness about how people got rich. And that's not really the key thing. The real thing is, is that this is, a hybrid civil war.

00:39:34

Piers Morgan: Let's see. I mean, I keep thinking to myself how much I'd love Elon Musk to get stuck into, say, the NHS here in the UK, a health system that has become consumed with bureaucracy and massive wasting of money and so on. And you just think someone with his brain and drive and vigor getting under the bonnet of the NHS could only help.

00:39:56

Piers Morgan: But so, I mean, do you not think that there's a sort of force for good essentially here, albeit a slightly flawed one?

00:40:03

Matthew Syed: Yeah, I was the thing I was most excited about by Trump winning the last election is what they would do it Doge, because the British state and many other Western states are massively, radically inefficient. We can't build things.

00:40:17

Matthew Syed: Massive overspend the NHS you've described most of the government departments haven't had a proper audit for years. So this is highly disruptive and I think people find it completely infuriating. The thing that you said about these departments, working with the media to mock their own home was, yeah, it's a complete rip off of the taxpayer. Give me one.

00:40:35

Matthew Syed: Tiny might seem like a trivial example, but I would be a sports person. As you know, many years ago, very fine table tennis player, former Olympian. And there is a department, a quango, so quite autonomous department of the state called Sport England that had to try and increase the amount of sports participation in the UK, had a huge budget and failed miserably.

00:40:57

Matthew Syed: So the bureaucrats changed the criteria on which they were judged, but they put it in the small pin of the reports that they pump out there. But I look through the sport as a journalist. I thought, I'm gonna look through this. And I pointed it out in my column in The times. And what do you think? What do you think happened?

00:41:12

Matthew Syed: They came back and started quibbling, and I thought, I can't engage with the press officer here, the press officer paid for by the state to try and defend the waste of the state and when I won that argument, they brought on a contract on a very high fee to defraud us even more. Now that in microcosm is what happens with the the Empire building.

00:41:33

Matthew Syed: You know, many sociologists have talked about this, and you look at the number of regulations that keep increasing year by year, but there's no department to start, as it were. Shaving away. And Musk has talked about was that Gulliver with all these regulations, you know, what does he call it. You know, like like nooses around the neck of the American economy?

00:41:51

Matthew Syed: That is a coherent argument. But I do worry about Musk himself. Some of the tweets he's put out about the UK, which I know well, a completely fantasy. And I worry that he's not applying the empirical rigor that we see in his business to some of his political interaction. His flirtation with the far right in Germany worries me deeply.

00:42:11

Piers Morgan: Yeah. I mean, Ashley St. Clair it is a curious one, Elon Musk, because I kind of agree, like a lot of his tweets, can be very ill informed, intemperate or plain wrong. You know, he's called for the British prime minister to be imprisoned for female ministers, be imprisoned in the sun for no good. Good reason. That's based on the evidence, which I in both mass and I, we share a view that we think that's completely over the top and just inaccurate.

00:42:35

Piers Morgan: However, when it comes to building amazing companies in America, or now getting his teeth stuck in to the biggest company of all the federal government and really crunching those numbers, I can't think of anyone better equipped to do it. So, you know, like, I think everything Elon does is right. But I do think he's an unbelievable breath of fresh air to destabilizing and dismantling very, very, very restrictive, bloated, overspending government institutions.

00:43:11

Ashley St. Clair: I would agree, and I think people like Matthew, I'm so tired of the same old arguments. It's very reminiscent of Trump in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 about the mean tweets. Everyone likes to obsess over Elon's post on X, but it's just a tired argument and what he's doing. He was the first person to go in and say where is all of this money going?

00:43:31

Ashley St. Clair: Are we even able to audit this? Why have we not been able to pass an audit? Literally, ever. And he is the person to go in and do the job. And he's done a phenomenal job at this throughout his companies. And many people will say, well, the federal government's not a company. It is wasting as if it is a bloated company and he's going to do a fantastic job at getting rid of these federal bureaucrats who are doing nothing.

00:43:53

Ashley St. Clair: They're getting paid for no show jobs. And he was the first person to actually ask, where is this going? Why can't we just go in there and audit all of the data? Why don't we have one area where we can see exactly where all of the money is being spent? So I think this is going to be a net positive for the American people.

00:44:10

Ashley St. Clair: And I think anyone saying otherwise and trying to redirect to as far right tweets in the UK is really just upset that he's doing the job and doing it well when nobody else could.

00:44:20

Piers Morgan: Yeah. Eric, this issue of transparency, I touched on this earlier, but just to hone in, for example, the JFK files or what we know about UFOs taking the few good men analogy in America, you can't handle the truth. If it turned out that hidden in the JFK files was evidence that the CIA killed JFK, if it turned out that there are indeed a bunch of aliens being held, and some of them could destroy the entire planet in 10s, etc. in other words, if the worst nightmare scenarios were tucked away in these files and Donald Trump and Elon go, hey, you go bang!

00:45:00

Piers Morgan: And that it all goes and it causes utter mayhem, and perhaps even civil uprisings and so on. You know, could America handle the truth is, is it not incumbent on governments occasionally to not tell their people the truth?

00:45:19

Eric Weinstein: The level of non truth telling is the issue. The easiest win for both Elon and Trump is to show that the other side that is the traditional side. Both Republicans and Democrats cannot be trusted. Then you will rebuild trust in those who finally flung open the vaults and said, we are the ones to tell you that is the easiest move and you know, to disagree.

00:45:41

Eric Weinstein: Slightly. I think with Ashley, you have a situation in which the easy part is doing the disclosures. The hard part is understanding what they mean. Imagine you were in Israel and in the wake of October 7th, you did a line item, audit of the security group, and you said, I can't believe that we're actually paying, to provide low cost, pagers and walkie talkies to Hezbollah as well as giving them tech support.

00:46:09

Eric Weinstein: Are we out of our minds? You know, the problem is, when you're looking at all of this, you don't know what you're looking at there. Now, the standard way of doing this is doing a.

00:46:21

Ashley St. Clair: Full on on.

00:46:22

Eric Weinstein: This is that you wait, wait just a second. Ashley, let me finish the point, please. Just a second. Let me finish.

00:46:28

Ashley St. Clair: The.

00:46:28

Eric Weinstein: Second and let me finish.

00:46:30

Ashley St. Clair: That's going to understand just.

00:46:31

Eric Weinstein: A second Ashley, let me finish. Let me finish the point. There's a point at which sometimes a CEO goes into a new company and stands over the server rack with a can of root beer and says, oh, this is the server we need to protect. And they pour the root beer into the server and then everybody gets the message, no, no, no, we're not kidding around.

00:46:50

Eric Weinstein: This is deadly serious and there is nothing sacred. Now, I believe that in large measure, that is the way that Elon is going to get everybody's attention. I understand the logic of it. I have, tremendous admiration for many of the things he's doing, but you're watching something that is itself not transparent. This is not clearly what's going on.

00:47:11

Eric Weinstein: And a lot of the focus on money is actually a focus on getting a hold of the data.

00:47:15

Piers Morgan: Yeah, yeah. Matthew, finally.

00:47:17

Matthew Syed: Well, a bigger point. And I really want to what finally will we come to actually after messy I want to be fair. What does it make a point to Ashley? You seemed upset that like, criticized something that Musk had said. I think a lot of what Musk has done in the States working for Trump is good.

00:47:32

Matthew Syed: What he did in the private sector was good, but I'm willing to criticize him if I think I disagree with something he has said. Ditto Donald Trump. I worry a great deal about what you might call unadulterated sycophancy, but people like Trump so much that let's agree with anything that he says. I hope that a rational person is capable of disagreeing with Trump when he does something that is wrong, like, for example, denying the results of the presidential election.

00:47:58

Matthew Syed: And I hope you would be prepared to criticize Donald Trump and Elon Musk because you felt that it was. I know what you're going to say. That's a lot of people are just falling. Falling. That is not what a rational society does. If I may actually final word to you, are you a sycophant? Oh, I.

00:48:14

Ashley St. Clair: Don't, I—No, not at all. I have criticized both Trump and Elon Musk where it's due. I think a lot of this, Eric, maybe they should call you. I wonder why they haven't yet to talk about this, but I really think that they're doing a fantastic job. I don't think anyone's pouring root beer over the server racks here, and I think they're going to do a fantastic job at aggregating this data so that people can see exactly where the money's been going.

00:48:37

Ashley St. Clair: I don't think that we need to be led into the circle of trust, as Eric said, for the deep state. In fact, they've been deliberately hiding this from us. So that they can enrich themselves. And the American people are tired of it.

00:48:47

Piers Morgan: Okay. And obviously, we don't know whether Eric's been asked to be involved. I strongly suspect he probably has. But I wouldn't expect him to confirm either way. So we'll leave it there. He's on a cliffhanger for the public watching. Thank you all very much. I appreciate it.

00:49:03

Eric Weinstein: Thank you, Piers.