Transcription
The relationship between the State Department and CIA and the music industry. I sort of started in the 1940s with jazz diplomacy. This was this period where the, you know, World War II had just ended, and we are now in a fight for geopolitical control over all the different neutral countries in the world against the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union has this communist government, and they're making appeals to Africa, among other places, saying that the capitalist society in the West is racist. They're discriminating against black people. There's all this class injustice. So, African countries should sign economic partnerships with the Soviet Union. They should have their governments be more aligned with the Soviet Union because they're more egalitarian.
And so this was a lot of how the J. Edgar Hoover Hoover FBI was sort of calling a lot of folks who were pro-civil rights, they were calling them communists and Soviets because the Soviet Union was amplifying these kinds of, you know, racial discrimination against African-Americans, you know, stuff on their own media channels. And so, in Africa, what the State Department did is it took who were very popular at the time, these black jazz musicians, Louis Armstrong and the like, and would fly them, you know, as essentially music diplomats to Africa, and making the point to African diplomats and African civil society organizations that actually the West, you know, does not discriminate. The Soviets are wrong. And so you had these musical ambassador types of, uh, being flown around by, you know, on taxpayer dime.
And then with the with classical music, around the same time, the CIA starts something called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which is this big arts and literature and music hub. It's basically hundreds of poets, musicians, thought leaders in the arts space, in the culture space, and the music space. Gloria Steinem was a part of that with the feminist movement. Um, but among that were classical musicians. So at the time, Shostakovich and these kind of Russian classical composers were seen to be superior to like Western classical musicians. And so even in the classical music hub, the CIA organizes these conferences through the like musical conferences, musical exchanges, musical concerts, uh, in Rome, in Paris, in Germany, through this CIA-funded cutout, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, in order to show that actually Western classical music is, you know, competes on par and is better than Russian classical music.
And then you had the whole rock and roll movement where you had this export to, uh, essentially behind the Iron Curtain. You had this anti-authoritarian, you know, challenging the government, uh, you know, rock music, uh, space. And a lot of this stuff was sponsored by the US government, sponsoring rock concerts by the Berlin Wall to try to, you know, show that we're against the, you know, the big government of the Soviet Union and against Big Brother.
Then you had this in in the rap space, you mentioned Cuba. Um, so in the in the early 2000s, the CIA, USAID, the State Department really began to turn attention to the rap and hip-hop space, uh, as it, you know, achieved this kind of cultural saturation and did this in a bunch of countries. So, a very famous one is, uh, this group called the Santa Clara Collective in Cuba. In 2009, this CIA cutout called the National Endowment for Democracy. It was conceived of by the CIA director in 1983. Uh, the CIA gets a copy of every single grant that they give. This was disclosed in 1986 in the Washington Post. Its founder says, "We were created because the CIA used to get in trouble in the 1960s and '70s. I'm sorry. Groups seen as subsidized by the CIA were scandalized by that. So, our endowment, NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, was set up so that we could fund the groups that the CIA, they'd be too scandalized to get from the CIA. Meanwhile, the CIA gets a copy of every single one of their grants. So, it's just an empty cutout for it."
So, in 2009, they write this memo. They have this in-house journal called the Journal of Democracy. We pay for it as taxpayers. And in this 2009 memo, they're talking about how their attempts at regime change in Cuba have been unsuccessful, and they should try a more targeted Afro-Cuban strategy because the Afro-Cuban population is actually, was, is higher, I think, than it's like the highest most popular demographic in Cuba, and yet they're underrepresented in the Cuban government, and there are grievances that can be inflamed in Cuba on that basis. When they, and they did this demographic survey, again, this is a CIA cutout doing this, and they say, "Okay, well, the Afro-Cuban population is disproportionately unemployed, um, uh, prone to using drugs, and, uh, and has cultural salience communicated through rap and hip-hop music."
A year later, they begin funding together with USAID. So, it's USAID, which is a giant CIA money funnel, plus the CIA's effectively proprietary cutout, begin funneling money and aid to this rap collective called the Santa Clara movement, uh, who pens this anthem about taking to the streets to rebel against the government. At the same time, USAID sets up a fake Twitter in Cuba. It's called ZunZuno. This was a big scandal where humanitarian funds were earmarked for Pakistan by USAID and then they were diverted through Cayman Islands banks to set up a Twitter knockoff because in 2009, 2010, this is when the Arab Spring was going on, right? So you had these CIA social media revolutions, and so they wanted to bring a Cuban Spring there. So they get, they have these insider documents that end up leaking a couple years later where they say that the goal is to attract people because Cuba at the time had banned Twitter. And so, uh, they wanted to make this look like this was by Cubans for Cubans. So they, so USAID got these two unsuspecting business executives to set up this Twitter knockoff. The plan was, according to the USAID documents, to get them to attract them, uh, by advertising a social media website that would emphasize sports, music, and hurricane updates. And then once they hit 100,000 subscribers, they would switch to, uh, anti-government political messaging.
And so this group, by the way, the Santa Clara movement and their anthem they penned to try to, you know, get people to take to the streets in a color revolution. You can still see odes to this in Art Basel in Miami. As I live in Miami, you still see this. You know, Miami was the biggest CIA hub for the whole Cold War. There was, um, the station JM Wave, the Miami station was the largest CIA hub in the world. And because Miami was so close to, you know, it's a giant port city, and it's the Caribbean and Central America, you get the South America tip.
So anyway, even even today in 2024, the Biden administration overthrew the government of Bangladesh. They did so in part through NED grants, this CIA cutout grants to Bangladeshi hip-hop artists. And even these documents leaked where NED actually wrote back to the State Department that they funded these two rap and hip-hop videos that were designed to get people to take to the streets, to sow distrust in government, to inflame tensions between the youth and unemployed people and the government not serving them. And the Biden administration at the same time opened up this brand new center called the Music, the Global Music Diplomacy Bureau within the State Department. The State Department is what coordinates CIA and USAID. So, I think in 2024, they brought 22 rap and hip-hop artists from 14 different countries for a three-day training session at the State Department. You know, they're training them how to mobilize youth, how to how to get people to the streets.
And this is another big thing with these concerts. They simulate street mobilization. When you get all these people together in the street, you get them in the practice of taking to the street, and they put aside all the differences they might have with each other on grievance grounds. Like, for example, the, um, there was an underground rock scene that the CIA and State Department worked with in Yugoslavia in the 1990s when they were backing something called the Otpor movement, which is kind of the origins of this like iron fist for all these color revolutions. And what they, what the whole purpose is, you're the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You have all these groups who don't necessarily like each other, but when they are infighting, they can't form a unified front to win an election or to rally behind like an opposition candidate who will take the place of the leadership. So having the backdrop for organizing being music everyone likes, rather than, uh, you know, abortion, when half of the half of the people might not, you know, on have religious differences, so they might not want to organize about that, or, you know, tax policy, when half of the people you might want to recruit are business owners or the like, or, you know, energy policy, when half of the people might like cheap fossil fuels, half of the people might like, you know, renewable energy. But the music cuts through all of that. We're all together. We have one thing in common, which is that we hate this government. But now we're all marching together. We're all in the streets together. We're all vibing to the same music. And so, you know, you see this all the time.
And this is also another thing like Bono, for example, who's been kind of my, like, uh, you know, bettor on some of this USAID stuff because, you know, Bono's out here talking about how USAID has the cuts to USAID have killed 300,000 people so far, and it's like, did he say that? He did. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He's citing this Boston University study, which is complete garbage. Even in the study itself, it's like, well, we don't count duplicate deaths. So theoretically, if someone dies from dysentery, AIDS, Ebola, SARS, Zika, and MS, we count that as 12 deaths, and none of these things, nobody's auditing this. Like, you know, basically, a lot of people see me as like a force behind this USAID shutdown.
And, you know, that was a major blow to the capacity of a lot of these intelligence operations, these covert influence operations. As I just mentioned, USAID is running the rap game in many countries, let alone, you know, what it's doing in terms of impacting markets, what it's doing in terms of impacting governments. So, there's a lot of people who are very angry at that, but they can't really think of a good reason to keep it in light of the fact that you don't see a lot of foreign leaders complaining about US aid being shut down. Like when when Trump announced the shutdown of USAID, the president of Mexico came out and said, "Thank God." The president of El Salvador came out and said, "Thank God." The heads of the drug commissions in Peru said, "Thank God, because when Bolivia banned USAID, they finally got cocaine under control. Turned out the US aid cocaine programs were responsible in large part for keeping the cocaine going," which is a common story here because, you know, you saw the same thing in Afghanistan, you saw the same thing, uh, in Syria, you saw the same thing in the Golden Triangle, the Golden Crescent, uh, in Colombia and the like.
But anyway, I think the music stuff is so interesting because, you know, you have like the military, I think in 2023 began this massive sponsorship of South by Southwest in Miami, where I live, the largest music performing arts center. It's called the Adrienne Arsht Center. Adrienne Arsht is one of the top five largest donors to the Atlantic Council, which has seven CIA directors on its board. That's funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, and it builds itself as NATO's think tank. And, you know, the benefactor for that is doing the per, you know, the largest performing arts center in Miami. And a lot of this is because politics is downstream of culture, right? And so, you know, if you can influence the culture and influence the mythology, you effectively set the bounds for what's politically possible.