In an explosive sit-down interview with The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft back in March, European researcher Bernadette Conrads delivered a chilling exposé on the sprawling influence of USAID and its deep state-funded allies operating across the European continent.
Conrads, who currently serves as Head of Communications for MEP Petr Bystron of Germany’s populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), has spent the last five years tracing a tangled web of taxpayer-funded NGOs, censorship initiatives, and foreign election interference stretching from Washington, D.C. to Brussels.
While USAID may present itself as a harmless humanitarian initiative, Conrads warns it’s anything but.
“Foreign aid? No. It’s not about aid—it’s about control,” said Conrads. “It’s about censorship, regime change, and election interference.”
Her findings confirm what conservatives in America have long suspected: USAID and its sister organizations, like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), according to Conrads, are merely fronts for the CIA and other unelected power centers in the U.S. government.
These groups allegedly launder influence through NGO cover operations, rig foreign elections, silence dissenting media, and export the very same “deep state” corruption President Donald Trump has vowed to dismantle.
Conrads: “I think I’ve been interested in this topic for about five years—not specifically in USAID. I’m not an expert on USAID, but on these kinds of structures. There are many money pots like USAID. There’s also the National Endowment for Democracy. There are plenty of these organizations—organizations that work with the CIA and are deep state entities active around the world.
They create regime changes, control our media, and use so-called NGOs as covers for their operations. They call them NGOs—Non-Governmental Organizations—although they are funded by U.S. taxpayers. That’s a very crazy thing.
I’ve followed these structures over the past few years many times because I was constantly confronted with them. I faced media censorship—not directly by our governments, who also attempt such control—but very strongly by organizations like these, which are funded by USAID.”
Back in January, President Trump froze all foreign aid spending on Day 4 of his second term. Less than two weeks later, Elon Musk—appointed by Trump to lead the newly empowered DOGE group—completely shut down USAID. Musk called it “an organization beyond repair.”
In response, a rogue leftist judge in D.C. ordered Trump to reinstate $2 billion in aid payments—an absurd ruling that has ignited a new constitutional crisis over who really runs the country: the elected president or a network of unelected bureaucrats and activist judges.
“This isn’t about charity,” Hoft said during the interview. “This is about global control. About silencing voices like Gateway Pundit—using American dollars and foreign fronts to do it.”
Conrads and I both shared personal examples of USAID-linked organizations like NewsGuard, OCCRP, and the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which have taken direct aim at independent conservative media on both sides of the Atlantic—including The Gateway Pundit itself.
Jim Hoft:
Absolutely. We’re seeing that. In fact, Gateway Pundit was a victim of this. USAID gave money to this organization in the United Kingdom—it was the Center for Countering Digital Hate. And this group then went to Google and said, “You need to shut down the ads on Gateway Pundit.”So this is a British censorship group that worked to get our ads in the United States taken off of our site—and they were using U.S. taxpayer dollars from USAID to do that. They were successful, and we found out about it not because we read about it, but because the founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate went in front of the Parliament there and bragged that he had removed ads from Gateway Pundit.
He mentions us by name in front of the British Parliament. And that doesn’t happen every day—when you hear a U.S. website getting attacked by someone in the UK. After some research and as more information came to light, we found out that it’s USAID that was funding his organization.
(Note: The Center for Countering Digital Hate partnered with USAID-funded Restless Development to censor and blacklist Covid ‘disinformation’ before the 2022 midterm elections including content from The Gateway Pundit.)
They were doing this—I think—across Europe. They were shutting down voices. I don’t know if they still are or not, but it’s shocking that that’s where that money was going.
Bernadette Conrads:
Absolutely, it’s true. That’s the thing. You see, we are all confronted with USAID—or were confronted with it—in the last few years. And I always tried to find out: where do these attacks come from?I did a deep dive, and the names that showed up in the end—where my research stopped—it was always like the National Endowment for Democracy or USAID. It always ends there. You go through organization after organization, and in the end, there is USAID or the NED.
And it’s the taxpayers’ money going into all these operations.
We had a similar experience. I founded Der Status, a German-speaking Austrian alternative news project. I founded it with two colleagues from another newspaper.
We had these attacks also. It was like fact-checks exploded—these fact-checkers coming up during COVID. There were all, I think, these organizations from the U.S. who told us what was right and what was wrong. It’s just censorship.
They call it fact-checking, but it’s censorship. The information we gave—later, scientists proved it was right, what we said. But fact-checkers said, “No, that’s not true. There’s no proof. It’s not right.”
They’re always using these Orwellian strategies to call…
Bernadette Conrads:
Censorship becomes fact-checking. Dictatorship becomes democracy. Slavery becomes freedom. And so on. That’s what they always do.It’s the same with USAID. Yeah, “foreign aid.” No. It’s not about aid—it’s about control. It’s about control and oppression.
It’s also about regime-changing strategies. It’s about election fraud, also. But I think we’re going to talk about this topic later.
Jim Hoft:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s amazing.We had the same problem in the United States, where they were fact-checking us—and we had people from overseas fact-checking our articles. People from China were fact-checking Gateway Pundit, and it was the same thing.
It’s probably the same issues that you were pointing out—that the virus was made in a lab. We had photos from inside the Wuhan lab before anyone.
And we had some great sources from inside China who were sending us things. And they would fact-check us and say, “No, that’s incorrect.”
Two or three years later, we find out: actually, that was 100% true. Fauci even admits it, and we have the emails now.
But this is what they do to shut us down. And it’s tragic that they were doing the same thing in Europe—and with U.S. dollars.
Was it just Facebook that was doing this to you? In the U.S., the social media giants got involved, and then they were censoring—conservative, mostly—independent media.
But is that where you were? Were you censored by them, or was it other groups?
In perhaps one of the most outrageous revelations, Conrads explained how Bluecoat, a U.S.-linked censorship tool used in authoritarian regimes like Iran, is now being employed inside the European Parliament itself to block conservative websites like Der Status, a German-Austrian alternative news outlet Conrads co-founded.
Bernadette Conrads:
No, absolutely not. There we come to the OCCRP Network. It’s called Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project—blah, blah, blah.It’s like, very nice guys, and they have their partnerships—and they control most of the huge media organizations in Europe. And it’s funded by USAID, as WikiLeaks showed. WikiLeaks showed that this was funded by USAID.
This OCCRP network had their own fact-checkers, and they transported it to this legacy media—telling them which websites were trustful and which were not.
It doesn’t end there. It’s not just about trust with your readers or viewers (if you do video).
It’s also about being published on social media platforms. But also—we had the situation at the European Parliament. We were in a situation where we were censored by a technical organization called Blue Coat.
Blue Coat is a U.S. program. The European Union uses it, obviously, and it banned our website in European institutions.
Some politicians and their staff called me and told me—back then, when I was not at the European Union—that our website was banned. I investigated this case, and I was like, “Okay, how did that work out?” I knew why.
A few months before we were blocked there, we got a question via email from a company called NewsGuard.
NewsGuard is also one of those NGOs that is government-funded. It’s a U.S. company, and it’s also funded by the European Union—as MEP Virginie Joron showed before. She’s a French MEP, and she’s also interested in these cases.
They were successful. They organized that we were blocked—because they said we would spread disinformation.
I let people check afterward. I asked them to check—experimentally—if you could watch porn at the European Parliament. And yes, you could watch hardcore porn.
But you could not read Der Status there. Because that’s “too dangerous” for staff to do any research—because they said, yeah, it was disinformation we spread about COVID.
Jim Hoft:
That company, obviously, has hit a lot of media outlets in the United States—NewsGuard.But it only targets one side of the aisle. It only targets… If you’re conservative or independent media, they’ll challenge everything you do.
It doesn’t matter what the mainstream says—they, in the United States, have produced lie after lie for about eight years. It just keeps stacking up—all their lies.
And yet, they never get a flag from NewsGuard. It’s just the smaller, independent media—and that’s their target.
And we found, too, that it was the United States Defense Department that was funding NewsGuard—that was giving some money to NewsGuard.
So, yeah—it’s just a horrible organization that was created just to censor, silence, and blacklist independent media.
Conrads also discussed the unholy alliance between U.S. intelligence, taxpayer-funded NGOs, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which are deeply entangled in shaping “acceptable” narratives around the world.
“Soros is not like the rich philanthropist who does it just for fun—what he does. He works for the government, in my opinion, for the deep state government of the U.S. That’s why he does that. He’s just a regime-changing operationist, and he uses this National Endowment for Democracy money to organize these regime changes.
And what was interesting: he also organized the travel of refugees during the refugee crisis in 2015. It was his organizations that were in Africa, hiring people to go to Europe and helping them with plans. He also educates people in African prisons through his organizations.
And yes, he’s a very important factor in political science as well, as he has his own universities and his own “science”—because nearly every democracy index you find in political science is somehow funded by a Soros organization.
So, with his organizations—aligned with the interests of the U.S. deep state—he defines what is a democracy and what is not.”
She also revealed that former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden is now a top advisor at NewsGuard, and famously bragged, “We kill people based on metadata.” This Orwellian mindset, Conrads says, underpins the global censorship-industrial complex.
Just weeks before the 2024 European elections, the USAID-funded OCCRP network orchestrated a coordinated media smear campaign against Bystron and other AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) candidates using fabricated ties to “Russian influence.” Mainstream outlets across the EU parroted the false narrative in lockstep—only to drop it after the ballots were cast.
“It was a show. A political hit job to sway the elections—and it worked,” Conrads said.
Despite the attacks, the AfD performed well, but Conrads insists the outcome was tainted by foreign interference—this time, not from Moscow, but Washington.
In response, MEP Petr Bystron has tabled a resolution calling for a full EU investigation into USAID, NED, and the Soros network’s influence across Europe. His proposal seeks to expose:
- All European media outlets and NGOs receiving U.S. government-linked funding
- Instances of electoral manipulation and regime change operations
- Censorship infrastructure built by U.S. “fact-checkers” and spyware firms
- The exportation of American “color revolution” tactics into Europe
“It’s time to ban these fake NGOs from operating in our democracies,” Conrads declared.
Conrads closed the interview with a powerful warning—and a rallying cry.
“Trump has his experiences with this deep state, and he really wants to fight it now. I think he suffered from this deep state in his first period also. I think that’s why he’s very focused to understand what’s going on, what are the reasons for the situation to become as we had it. Now, What’s going on is a revolution, in my opinion. It’s a revolution in the US of common sense and of truth and freedom and honesty. And that’s so amazing. I hope that we are going to get this situation in Europe also. But here, it’s very dangerous now because our leaders, they freak out as they lose all these control from the US. They’re like chicken without hats or something. They don’t know what to do and they freak out and they try to pervert all the instructions they got before from organizations like the National for democracy and so on. I think that’s a very dangerous situation.”
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