from Your News:
A clip from a recent podcast interview has sparked controversy over claims that the Obama administration misappropriated USAID funds to orchestrate foreign protest movements.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Mike Benz, founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast with over 19 million subscribers, where he alleged that during Barack Obama’s presidency, U.S. taxpayer money allocated to foreign aid through USAID was instead used to train and fund protest groups abroad. A clip of the interview, which aired weeks ago but is now circulating widely on social media, has reignited debate over the role of U.S. foreign aid in international political movements. The full episode is available here.
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Barack Obama was using USAID to pretend to send money to a country for “aid” and instead laundering it to the Cayman Islands
He would then use that money to fund and train “Rent-a-Riots” for protests to overthrow governments
Sound familiar?
Mike Benz on Joe Rogan: “A scandal… pic.twitter.com/EL2LLhDMNz
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) March 22, 2025
Benz stated on the podcast, “This was a scandal during the Obama USAID era. We were running a number of rogue USAID operations in Cuba at the time. I’m simply showing the American people where your tax dollars are going and how these things are structured in order to systematically fool you and to fool Congress and to fool the White House.” According to Benz, the Obama administration directed approximately $1.2 billion through USAID to finance activist groups under the guise of supporting civil society abroad.
As Benz described, “We sponsored these activist groups and these civil society organizations to learn how to use Facebook, learn how to use Twitter, learn how to use hashtags, learn how to coordinate street protests so that everyone knows where to go, what street to show up on, what kind of slogans to use in order to create the pro-democracy predicate for it.” Benz further claimed the administration’s goal was to provide tools for civil unrest that could result in regime change.
In one notable example, Benz pointed to the creation of a Twitter-like platform called “Zunzuneo,” named after the Cuban slang word for hummingbird. “They took the exact same thing as Twitter, same user interface, same like and retweet button. But the whole trick about it was you have to make it look like it’s coming from the Cubans if you’re going to do this operation,” Benz explained. He said Zunzuneo was launched in 2010, coinciding with the Arab Spring, and that it initially disseminated non-political content such as sports, music, and weather updates to gain a subscriber base. Once a critical mass of users was reached, Benz alleged, political messages and dissent were introduced through the use of automated social media bots to incite protests.
Benz claimed that the funding for Zunzuneo and related operations was funneled through Cayman Islands bank accounts, falsely earmarked as aid to Pakistan. “You’re using Cayman Islands bank accounts. You’re earmarking it for Pakistani aid. But the money was never sent to Pakistan, it was sent to the Cayman Islands to fund this whole operation,” he said, noting that contractors involved in the effort were directly financed by USAID. The gathered data, according to Benz, was then used for “micro targeting efforts towards anti and pro-government users.”
