it was going to go. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't his idea. And I don't know how much he even liked the idea. He may have just decided he had to go along because he was in Trump's house so to speak and he needs Trump on board and they've got a good working relationship. So he's not going to throw that away. And he just sort of let it happen while looking really uncomfortable. Again I can't read his mind but he didn't have the look of someone who was embracing the idea.

So we might end up with the best possible situation. But I want to be clear about this. It's not a bluff. It's not a bluff. Trump would do it if they don't come up with a better idea. I'll bet they'll come up with a better idea which they never would have before. So we'll see.

All right. So the things we're learning about USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, which is another one of these alleged CIA cutouts that the US uses to control other countries and run coups and do capacity building in other countries, which is getting kind of a foothold in other countries in some entities within those countries so that we can have some future control. Now as you know the only reason we know about this is that Mike Benz has been explaining it for a while. But then DOGE got in there and started looking at USAID and all the things it's doing and decided oh no it's a ball of worms, as Elon Musk says. And although it might be doing some things we like, we're going to have to close down the whole thing. And then if there's a good argument for adding anything back they're open to listening to it. But the only way to fix it is you just got to get rid of the ball of worms and then see if you can find a little bit of apple later.

So here are the things we know. And Mike Benz says when a job is too dirty for the CIA they give it to USAID. So here's what you need to know. The Mike Benz take on USAID is it's not a mixture of bad things like overthrowing countries with a mixture of good things like helping countries battle the AIDS crisis in their own country. What it is is in every case a CIA takeover of a country. Sometimes they help them with the AIDS but that's really just the easiest way to get our assets into their country. So it's really about maybe collecting some information through the AIDS process, maybe using it to get some spies in there so they can work their thing once they're behind the other side of the border.

So the Benz take, which I accept, is that there's no such thing as USAID just doing charity. All the charity is a cover for something that the US wants. So in some sense USAID is doing the bidding of the United States. Except who in the United States? It kind of matters whose bidding they're doing, right? So if it's not Trump's bidding, should they be doing anything? So at the moment USAID looks like just a weapon that we use against other countries.

And what we've learned about how they do it is the fun part. So I'm going to tell you what to look for if you thought that USAID and the CIA were trying to take control of your country. So here are the telltale signs. So if you're in another country and you see this happening you should say whoa, whoa, red flag, this looks like a takeover of our country. Ready? Number one, usually the takeover has to do with getting rid of a populist because a populist is not a puppet. And if we're going to try to control some smaller country we want to get a puppet in there. So the existence of a populist is usually a trigger for the other things. And if the result is a puppet then probably there was this undercover effort.

Now there's a name for this kind of takeover and there's some more details I'll give you. They're often referred to as color revolutions. The reason it's a color revolution is that there's some history of some of these fake revolutions that the CIA and USAID gin up that they have some kind of color as their banner. So I guess Georgia had an orange movement and Ukraine when it was doing its thing there they had a rose movement, right? And I think somebody else had some other color. So often there's a color associated with the movement but that's not a requirement but often there.

You would look for outside money flowing into the country. So you'd look for that or USAID specifically. So if you saw that USAID was sending money into anything in your country that would be a sign that there's a planned takeover. So you're looking for a populist who triggers it looking to be replaced by a puppet. The puppet being run by USAID and CIA. Some outside money from USAID. And capacity building. So the capacity building would be getting your own puppets into the media, getting your own people into the important institutions either by bribery or blackmail or usually bribery. And so you look for that.

But here's the big one. You look for an artificially generated social instability. So the way you get a good revolution going is you've got to get the social instability really high so then it all makes sense. Oh it's obvious why this country got rid of their leader because look at all the social instability. So you've got to create some social instability. If there isn't any you might, for example, the number one way to do that is to get a country racially divided. So if there's any minority groups that are being abused, they're already primed so you just got to organize them, give them money, make sure they got a leader, make sure they know how to organize. And then suddenly you've got people in the streets. Suddenly it's a battle. Suddenly the news, which you've also done capacity building so you've got some control of at least some of the media, so then the media starts saying hey look at the population they're so unhappy because of all the division. They're taking to the streets.

And then that's the next thing. If you see movements literally on the streets and they haven't existed before they might be fake movements. So it would be typical for the color revolution to co-opt a big union. If they could get control of the leaders of the union then the union would be part of the marching in the streets. So you look for any big organization that maybe already exists but they're not organized and you get them organized and get them on the streets and that would be part of a color revolution.

Two of the things that USAID does for other countries which you could say huh is that part of the social instability? What is it? They push DEI on other countries. Do you think they're pushing DEI on other countries because that's good for America? Is it because it's just charity or is it social instability? Well DEI causes tremendous social instability so there's that. What about climate change? Apparently climate change is something that gets introduced in a country you want to take over because there's always some green people who say yeah hell yeah climate change. Our government's not doing enough. We're going to take to the streets. So you can get some climate change people marching. You can get some race related groups marching. Then you've got your social instability.

But none of it works unless you've got control of the media or enough control to tell your story. Oh everything's bad here. We're going to have to get rid of this populist leader. This populist can't do anything right. We better put in this well respected boring puppet. All right so look for the capacity building, look for billionaires funding things, look for the racism and the fake groups and all that and the media propaganda. And you look for the USAID behind it.

And then there's one tell that's like the good one. If it also looks like Russia is a threat that's almost a guarantee that the United States is behind it because we love to blame Russia for stuff especially if it's Ukraine or Georgia or just about anybody else. We're going to say you know we could save you from Russia or this new leader could be the person who protects you from Russia. Yeah so look for that.

So that takes us to 2016. You remember 2016 when this populist American became president. His name was Trump. You've heard of him. And the powers that be in this country, even the people who control USAID, probably were not happy about it. Turns out that USAID is 98% Democrats. So you can imagine how everybody felt when this non-Democrat populist became president.

And do you remember what happened soon after he became president? Some changes in the country. Did anybody notice those changes? I'll give you some examples. There were the pink hats. Yeah there were a lot of people wearing pink. Pink's a color. But there was also Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Seems like they were wearing a lot of black outfits. There was the black motif of Black Lives Matter but then Antifa always dressed in black. It was almost like black was the color. Almost like they were color coordinated.

Do you remember the Charlottesville marchers? You know those neo-Nazis marching? Have you known isn't it weird that we had never seen anything like that in modern America and then it happened once and then we never saw it again? And it became the biggest story in America and it was based on a hoax. The hoax that Trump was on the side of the Nazis. Now I said it at the time but I didn't have any context to back it up. I said there's something about this Charlottesville event that looks completely non-organic. How did all these people afford to be there? How did they get the tiki torches? How did the most disorganized group of people in the United States, the neo-Nazi racists, how did they suddenly mount this camera perfect media event but only once? They could only pull it off once. Isn't that interesting? Huh.

So that would look like exactly the kind of thing that the USAID and the United States and the CIA would do to another country. Just what they do. And then of course there was something weird about Black Lives Matter and Antifa that popped up around the same time that it seemed to come out of nowhere, seemed to be funded by Soros and who knows where else. And they disappeared as soon as Joe Biden became president. So that would kind of suggest that Charlottesville was never real because it never reconstituted in any way. It would suggest that Black Lives Matter was never real except that it had some kind of exterior backing that made it active for a while. And it would suggest that Antifa was never real.

So who would be backing things that aren't real that would create racial division at the same time DEI was going wild? And the biggest one of the biggest complaints about this populist president was not good on climate change. Huh. DEI and climate change, two things that we know are used as weapons against other countries to create social divide. Both of them happening at the same time our populist president got in. That's kind of a big coincidence isn't it?

And then of course the J6 insurrection. We don't know what role the government had in fomenting that but it doesn't look like something that happened organically to me. To me it looks like a bunch of people who thought the election was rigged but for some reason a bunch of bad people got in there too. What do you think was the organizing principle that got all the bad people in there too? It was surprisingly organized. And yet after January 6 nothing like that has ever happened again. So never happened before, hasn't happened again. It's almost like that's not a naturally organized group of people. It's as if there's some exterior force organizing Black Lives Matter, organizing a Charlottesville march, organizing Antifa and organizing perhaps the violent part of January 6.

And then we've got the anti-Israel protesters. So I'm not sure if that's related because that one actually could be organic. But anyway you don't have to worry about some color revolution in the United States because that would assume that the CIA was turning its weapons against a domestic enemy. Except we know that they are allowed to do that now and we know that they did that for censorship by using funding of foreign entities that would then try to suppress our social networks and create censorship in our country by building capacity in other places. Huh.

When USAID pushed DEI in the United States, somebody saying in the comments I've been seeing that but that wouldn't surprise me. But you know the way to know if there was some kind of color revolution in this country would be, I mean and obviously this didn't happen but imagine if the person who replaced the populist candidate, imagine if that person was a puppet. Oh wait, Joe Biden was a puppet. He was the only candidate we've ever seen in which neither side believes he was actually in charge. Never seen that before. But at least he has this vice president who, oh wait, we learned that the vice president was so incapable that she couldn't possibly have been in charge of anything. And if she became president would have been a puppet because she was weak and incapable.

So I'm not going to say that there was a color revolution in the United States driven by the same people with the same tools that did it in other countries. And by the way not just once in a while but dozens of other countries. Dozens. And it always looks the same. But there were fake organizations. There were fake media. Do you know why the Charlottesville thing worked? It's because the hoax that came out of it, the fine people hoax. Do you know why the mainstream media who all knew it was a hoax, do you know why they didn't report it as a hoax? They reported it as fact and they kept reporting it as fact long after it got debunked. Do you know why? Well it's not because they didn't know it was fake. It looks exactly like USAID and the CIA and all their evil trolls ran an overthrow of this country.

Under that context, given that context, do you believe the elections were not rigged in 2020? You know I went from open to the question in 2020. I was like well you know there's I'm not seeing any proof but I'm open to the possibility of anything happening. At the moment I think the odds that 2020 was rigged are 100% because once you see the entire mechanism from the fake media to the fake street movements to the fake division about race, fake division about climate, it's so textbook that if they didn't rig the actual election why did they do the rest of the stuff? All the rest of the stuff was to get a result and they're not playing. That's the thing you need to know. Whoever would be behind this sort of stuff, they're not playing. So yes of course they would rig the election if that was the only way to win and it might have been.

So I would say that if they didn't rig the election they were ready to rig the election. Maybe they didn't have to. I mean it's possible that Biden the puppet, the brain dead puppet, got the most votes that any Democrat has ever gotten and then the very next election it goes back down to the baseline. Maybe, maybe. But how likely is that? I would say the odds of the 2020 election being stolen I'd give it a 100%. I don't think there's any doubt at this point. But I'll give you the only out. I'll give myself is that it's not proven. But how many times has the United States rigged an election in another country and they couldn't prove it? Does that never happen?

And I'd like somebody to explain to me why is it we have voting machines when you don't need them? They're more expensive. They're harder to maintain. They're not as fast or at least there's no advantage in anything. So why would you have them? I can only think of one reason. In the early days I can imagine the vendors just sold them with their oh this will be faster, oh much better, much more accurate than the paper. But now that we know that none of that's true why do we still have them? Why do you have a voting machine? There's only one reason. Once you've actually had them long enough to know that they're not faster, more accurate, more reliable, they're nothing, why do you still have them? There's only one reason.

And if nobody will even come on TV and say oh Scott you're wrong here there are some good reasons, I'd be open to that by the way. If there are some good reasons I'll change my mind tomorrow. But you don't know any reasons. I'm a voter and this is one of the biggest issues in the country. Was the election fair? And not a single person as ever that I've seen, maybe you've seen it but I haven't seen it, going on TV or on the news to defend why machines are safer, faster, cheaper, better than paper. Haven't seen it. And that's a dog not barking pretty loudly.

So that's where we are now. The good news about this USAID debacle is that the leaders who are prairie dogging on this, you know the other one is the ones who are sticking their heads up and saying no no no you cannot cut this, no no, they're all the ones who are part of the grift. They're the ones who are either directly or indirectly funded by USAID even though they're politicians in this country. You know that there are lots of indirect ways to fund things. But all the definitely corrupt people have decided to go public now. They don't know that it's so obvious that this is the corrupt crowd. I sometimes call them the designated liars.

But look at the names of the people who just went public trying hard to keep that USAID: Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Jamie Raskin, AOC. And as Mike Benz pointed out AOC is only a politician because there was a USAID process to find her in college and jump start her career. So AOC has always been a creation of the machine and she's out there defending that USAID. Swalwell, Adam Schiff, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta. Need I say more? Well also let's see Jasmine, I think Jasmine Crockett was there and Presley and Ilhan Omar. The last three on the list they may just be jumping in because they like to jump in. I'm not sure they're all USAID beneficiaries. They might be. Ilhan Omar might be, I don't know. But that's the thing to look for anyway. They've all revealed themselves as part of the dirty money plot.

Now if you saw Schumer the second day in a row he went out in public and embarrassed all of the Democrats. Remember he held up the can of beer and the avocado and he mansplained to people what an avocado is. An avocado makes your guacamole. You will not have a beer as inexpensively as before on Super Bowl. And it was just so weak and so poorly done. And then the next day he's out there trying to save USAID and he's giving his inspirational speech. And I'd like to give you my impression of Senator Schumer inspiring the crowd. Preparing myself, get the glasses. And we are going to win everybody. We're going to win. Okay you say it after me. We're going to win. No this is where you say it at the same time I say it. Everybody say it loud. We're going to win. And that and then we're not going to rest. No you say that too. We're not going to rest. Don't say the first part say the second part only. Now we're get arrest. We never get rest.

And it was literally just hilarious. But I thought to myself maybe Democrats love this. You know maybe my bias filter is so sensitive that anything the other team does I don't like. Right? But then I turn on Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart is begging Democrats to stop. Jon Stewart is begging Democrats to stop sending Schumer out. And after mocking Schumer as badly as I did, Stewart just leans into the microphone. He goes he's not good at this. He's not good at this. Yeah he's not good at this.

Anyway so all the bad people are going to try to stop DOGE. The federal workers are suing DOGE for connecting some server to something. Wired is reporting. Who knows where that'll be. I guess 20,000 federal workers have taken Trump's buyout offer. If they take the buyout they get paid through September with benefits. 20,000 said yep. So I read that in Just the News. And that's going to save, if they save 100 billion a year so that's nice. Saved 100 billion a year.

Apparently the entire CIA has this offer as well and I'd expect some of them to take it. In other news Ukrainian president Zelensky according to the Gateway Pundit he thinks that the United States should supply him with nuclear weapons. You know the puppet that the United States installed. I don't know, anything could happen but I don't think we want to give him nuclear weapons. I don't think that's going to happen. Not under Trump anyway. Yeah he's a crazy man, maniac. I can't imagine how that would make anything better.

Apparently according to DOGE and there's an article in Breitbart that the Biden administration made improper payments totaling 236 billion just in 23 alone, 2023. Now that was mostly overpayments. And you know even though it's a lot of money, 236 billion, it's just a portion of the 1.8 trillion annual deficit. But think about that. So 236 billion is the amount we've identified as fraudulent or overpayment. Let me say that again. That's just the amount we identified. That is by no means the limit of what the fraud was. It's only what we've identified. Oh my God. You know we found out through the DOGE effort that the Treasury was signing off on everything that came to them. That they didn't look at anything. Say wait a minute you're paying a terrorist. It just wasn't their job. They just processed the payments.

So we had this huge unaudited immense pile of money that wasn't being managed in any practical way. And maybe it will be now. But I'd like to go on record as saying I don't understand how DOGE could possibly save enough money to balance the budget. All the numbers I hear don't make any sense to me. So USAID for example is like 7% of the budget. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think 100% of what DOGE has been working on is maybe 1% of the budget. So if they save 30% of 1% of the budget that's not even getting anywhere near the amount of the deficit. But when they talk about it they act like it does. What am I missing? Why don't any of the numbers make sense to me? None of it makes sense.

And when I say it doesn't make sense I mean it's like a butterfly to an elephant. I don't understand it. What I see is a butterfly sized number of cuts even though the numbers are enormous. In terms of percentages it's like a little butterfly. What needs to be cut would be the elephant. The claims are they found enough butterflies to equal like half an elephant already. I don't think so. So I don't know what's going on exactly but I don't know why I can't understand the difference between the butterfly and an elephant. I mean I'm not even in the same zip code with seeing that we're cutting enough to make a difference. But maybe. I'd love to be wrong. I mean that would be ideal. So we'll see what happens with that in terms of the deficit. But certainly I like everything that DOGE is doing. I like them moving fast. I like them breaking stuff. I like them turning off things that we desperately need just to find out how desperately we do need them. Every part of that is looking good to me. I like the aggressiveness that they're using. I like that they're bending some rules, no bad ones, but they're bending rules in the service of doing something useful. You can do that all day long as far as I'm concerned. So we'll see.

Apparently according to Zero Hedge seven Americans have been charged with this gigantic COVID related tax credit scheme where they filed for over 600 million of fraudulent payments. Now they didn't get all 600 million but they got 45 million. Seven people filing fake tax returns and asking for the COVID money. 45 million. They could have gotten 600 million. Again those are the ones that got caught. How many didn't get caught? The numbers of fraud during the pandemic and just in general are just mind boggling. So yes the entire government is broken and I don't think DOGE can break it harder. It's completely broken. It's throwing our money out the door for things we don't even know about. So if you break that you're breaking something that was already broken, right? You can't break something that's already completely broken. And that's what our funding and spending were. Completely broken. So you can't break it harder than it was already broken.

All right. So the Wall Street Journal in their editorial opinion is describing Trump's negotiating victories with Canada and Mexico as quote minor concessions and treating it basically as an embarrassing failure because he got nothing of substance but he backed off at least for 30 days on the tariffs. Does that really look right to you? Why are they calling a major concession a minor one? Is it because they think they won't actually do anything? So I think the complaint is until Mexico and Canada do something that is big and what they promised he got nothing because they haven't done anything yet. To which I say that's why he postponed the tariffs for 30 days. Because our good friends and partners and neighbors said yes we plan to do these things. And so Trump said those are things I want. So if you're going to do those things I'll wait 30 days for the tariffs. Then in 30 days if you've done those things we're all good. Maybe. He always says maybe. He doesn't say for sure.

But isn't this the way it's supposed to work? And so if the Wall Street Journal is right and the only thing Canada and Mexico did was make some promises that they have no intention of keeping, I saw an article just before I came on that suggested that Canada had no intention of sending extra people to the border. Maybe that's true. And then you know what you do? You crash their economies. You destroy their economies. Because if they really promised us something that's that important to us, if they promised it and it was, that's when you're not friends anymore. That's the end of being friends. That's when Trump's going to crash your economy and you probably recover but it's going to take you a while and we're never going to stop tariffing you because we can't trust you now. If we can't trust you when you make a deal your economy is going to the toilet. And I think Trump needs to do that. But because we're dealing with allies and neighbors and partners you can't say no when they say yes. In other words if you ask for something and they say yes you can't tariff them then. They said yes. They offered something you wanted. But if they lied, which is what the Wall Street Journal is suggesting, or they allowed Trump to think it was more than it was which would be kind of a lie, it's going to be really expensive and they're going to wish it didn't happen.

So my guess is they're going to step up because when it gets close to that 30 days it's going to be pain. And I don't think Trump's going to, I think if they say it again oh wait give us another 30 days I don't think they're going to get another 30 days. I think the next 30 days both Mexico and Canada get to decide if they still have an economy. And I think Trump will just take both of them down if they lie to him.

According to one source over four years the administration unintentionally misspent close to a trillion dollars. This is according to Rachel Greszler in the National Review. Well I suppose there'll be lots of different opinions on how much was misspent but that's a big number.

Trump says he left instructions that if he gets assassinated by an Iranian asset that Iran will be obliterated. Now we don't know if obliterated means the whole country or just the leadership. I would imagine it would be the leadership. But that was exactly the right way to play it. Now who knows if Trump has really left instructions to obliterate them. I don't think he'd have to tell us. I think we'd go hard at Iran's leadership and destroy them if they took out Trump. So it's probably not maybe technically true that somebody's going to obey the president who's no longer with us. So would it make any difference if he left instructions? All that matters would be if JD Vance wanted to do that but I don't think you'd have to twist his arm. So I like that Trump puts it out there and he makes it clear as he did with North Korea. If you cross this line you never, you don't get to come back. So I like that positioning.

Weirdly Elizabeth Warren is agreeing with Trump that banks are debanking too many people without cause. How about that? That's a weird one. Now apparently Warren is getting lots of complaints from people being debanked and probably in those cases those are left leaning people getting debanked. Now there are lots of reasons to be debanked and usually it's because the account did something suspicious by bank standards. Doesn't mean that they broke any laws but there was something about the way they were operating that a bank says we can't touch that. You're a little too close to weird crypto, a little too close to scams. You're operating as if you're doing something illegal but we can't tell. So apparently there are a whole bunch of gray areas where you can get debanked pretty fast. And Elizabeth Warren is actually asking Trump for support and is supporting the idea that the banks need to explain and have maybe a better process for deciding who gets debanked. So hey, a little bit of minor agreement there.

This story already got reversed from the time that I wrote it in my notes. For a moment there the post office was halting all packages from China and that was related I guess to the fact that China sends gazillions of small packages to get past the tariffs and duties that would apply on larger dollar items. But apparently that's been resumed already because it was too dramatic a change and too much involved would hurt American companies too much. But I recommended that back in probably 2018. I said if fentanyl is coming into the country from China we should stop all shipments from China which seemed like a ridiculous idea but it happened for maybe a few hours. I don't know if that's going to happen again.

All right so here's the nerdiest thing I'm going to tell you about AI. This is actually a big deal but if you're not following the field it won't look like a big deal at all. Did you know that AI can't read spreadsheets? It can read them. You could feed it to them and it'll tell you some things that are in there but it can't reliably tell you what's on the spreadsheet or make an estimate based on it or extend it or anything. It just is sort of dumb and blind when it looks at any table of data. I don't know why. I think it's something that's built into the character of AI so it's hard to change. But there's a company according to Fortune, a German startup, that figured out how to make AI capable of re