Latest / Man in America Podcast / Exposing the Pesticide Playbook that Poisons Your Family & Makes the Elites Filthy Rich | AH EP02

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Exposing the Pesticide Playbook that Poisons Your Family & Makes the Elites Filthy Rich | AH EP02 · Man in America Podcast

• 0:13
  Speaker 1: He who controls the food controls the people. That quote's widely credited to Henry Kissinger. Now whether or not those were his exact words, what he wrote in a classified 1974 government document tells you everything you need to know about whether he believed it. And I want you to keep that in mind for the next thirty minutes because what I'm about to show you isn't a series of accidents. It's not negligence.
• 0:40
  It's not a system that failed. It's a system that worked exactly as it was designed to work. Four chemicals, four scandals, one playbook over eighty years. The names change. The corporations change.
• 0:55
  The decades change. But the outcome never does. When you read a 1974 classified US government document where Kissinger's national security team recommends using food as a tool of population control, and then you watch the EPA dismiss four separate international cancer classifications across four decades, you stop calling it negligence and you start to see it for what it really is. The people who were supposed to protect American families made a different choice, and they made sure that you were the last one to find out. This is the second episode of my America Hijacked series.
• 1:41
  It's an investigative history. We're digging through the archives, pulling the original documents, presenting the receipts, specific decisions, specific people, specific money. We go back to the exact moments when things change, find out who made the call and why, and then we follow the money until the bigger plan comes into focus. Alright. Let's get into it.
• 2:07
  Before we get into the chemicals, I wanna show you four documents with four dates. Because without these four pieces of paper, none of what follows is even possible. Here's the first document, 1943, the Rockefeller Mexican Agricultural Program. This is where it starts, not with a pesticide, but with a philosophy. The Rockefeller Foundation working with the Mexican government begins redesigning global agriculture from the ground up.
• 2:36
  The goal officially is to increase crop yields. What it actually does though is replace the self sufficient family farm, the farm that feeds itself with one that's gotta buy seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides from a handful of corporations every single season. So you don't own your food supplies anymore. You rent them season by season from them. No one can call that an accident of history.
• 3:02
  That was the design. Now here's the second document. 1958, the grass loophole. Congress passes the food additives amendment, and buried inside it is one of the most consequential sentences in the history of American food safety. Chemical companies can now self certify their own ingredients as safe.
• 3:24
  Go back and watch my first episode for a full breakdown on that one. The burden of proof was reversed. Chemicals were allowed until they're proven harmful, not proven safe before entry. Now that's the legal door that's been left open for the rest of this just come on through. Everything you're about to hear walks straight through that door, and here's the third document.
• 3:46
  1974, n s s m 200, the Kissinger report. This is the National Security Study Memorandum 200 completed 12/10/1974, classified and then declassified in 1989 and then publicly available in 1990, adopted as policy guidance by president Ford via NSDM three fourteen in 1975. This isn't a theory. It's a significant document. And what does it say?
• 4:14
  Well, listen to this. It recommends using food as a tool of geopolitical control. It argues that population growth in developing nations is a threat to US national security and economic interests, and that controlling the food supply is one of the mechanisms for managing that threat. Remember, this isn't a conspiracy theory. This is a declassified government document.
• 4:36
  It's in black and white. You can read it yourself. And the final document of the four, twenty '15, agenda 2030. A 193 nations adopt a framework calling for the transformation of global food systems under coordinated international governance. The framework is backed and actively funded by some of the most powerful private institutions on earth.
• 4:57
  The Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charitable foundation run by Bill Gates himself, has contributed billions to global food and agriculture programs tied directly to this agenda. The Rockefeller Foundation, century old dynasty that funded the original shift to chemical dependent farming back in 1943, is back at the table. The World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the world's wealthiest CEOs, heads of states, and global power brokers in Davos, Switzerland, has made food system transformation one of its flagship initiatives. And the corporations writing the checks include Nestle, the world's largest food and beverage company, Cargill, the largest privately held corporation in The United States and one of the biggest controllers of the global grain supply, and Unilever, which manufactures the food, cleaning, and personal care products found in the homes of 3,400,000,000 people worldwide. These are not charities or governments.
• 5:53
  They're entities that grow it, process it, package it, and sell it to you. And they all sat down together to design what they're calling the future of food. So four documents from 1943 to February of policy, money, and laws all pulling in the same direction. Less control in your hands, more control in theirs. Now let me show you how it plays out on the ground because now we get into the playbook.
• 6:22
  Playbook. But before I tell you a single chemical story, I wanna name the pattern because once you see it, you can't unsee it. I call it the pesticide playbook. There's five steps used four times across eighty years, and it goes like this. Step one, an independent scientist, someone with no financial ties to the company making the chemical, finds evidence that the chemical causes harm to human health, to animals, or to the environment.
• 6:51
  Step two, the chemical industry, the corporations that manufacture and profits from that chemical, funds its own counter studies designed to cast doubt on the independent findings. And then they go after the scientists. Not their data, the person, the reputation, their career, their funding, their mental stability. They make sure that by the time the public hears the name of that scientist, the first thing that they think is, can we really trust this person? Step three, the regulatory agency gets involved.
• 7:21
  In America, that's the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Their one job is to protect you from dangerous chemicals in your food and water. So what do they do? Well, they look at the independent science. They look at the industry science, and they choose the industry science, not because it's more accurate, but because the chemical companies have lobbyists in Washington.
• 7:42
  They make donations to political campaigns, massive donations, and their former executives often end up working inside the agencies that are supposed to regulate them. That's called the revolving door, and it means the fox is guarding the hen house. Step four, Europe looks at the same independent science and reaches a different conclusion. They banned the chemical. They pulled off the market.
• 8:05
  Farmers in Europe can no longer buy or spray it. Their citizens are no longer eating it, while Americans are still consuming it every single day. Step five, America dismisses Europe's findings. Americans keep consuming it for years, sometimes decades, and then eventually, the lawsuits start. Thousands of sick people, many of them dying, who can prove that this chemical was in their body and if their body then developed cancer or another serious disease.
• 8:33
  The company gets dragged into court. After years and years of fighting, they agree to pay out billions of dollars to the victims to make the cases go away. But here's the part that should make your blood boil. They admit no wrongdoing. Legally, on the record, they never did anything wrong.
• 8:49
  The money changes hands, the victims are silenced, and the chemical often stays on the market. That's the playbook. And here's the number I want you to be aware of. According to the data from the USDA in the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, The US uses approximately 20 to 24% of the world's pesticides while representing 4% of the world's population. 4% of the people using up to a quarter of the poison.
• 9:19
  This next part is what I want you to think about through every story you're about to hear because this is not just about killing people. So I sat down with Kim Bright, who spent the last fifty years in natural health, and I asked her what she thought the real target was.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, you know, there's there's mounting evidence that pesticides are being used as part of a deliberate population control program, which makes sense, I'm sure to you. I mean, it's for increasing our risk of cancer and other chronic diseases. But it's not just that, Seth, they're actually attacking, which I don't think people really understand, they're attacking cognitive abilities in a way that could be nothing less than intentional targeting. What I'm talking about here is problems with memory, higher rates of dementia, Parkinson's disease, effects on our mood like anxiety and depression, raising our risk for other chronic diseases like heart disease, asthma, and cancer.
• 10:11
  I mean, for those that simply see Agenda 2,030 as a scheme for depopulation, I think that you'd be missing how just how intricate and detailed some of these attacks actually are. I don't think the goal is simply depopulation. They they wanna depopulate and disarm those who have the presence of mind and know how to fight like like you and I. You know? Every everything I I know about this agenda has played it it it's indicating that they wanna target older individuals first.
• 10:45
  And this could be for a variety of reasons, but I believe it's because the younger generations have already been conditioned to comply so that that tendency to resist or question or even be aware that something's very wrong, it eludes most of them. And they want a new generation made up of TikTok robots seeking instant gratification. They wanna populate these fifteen minute city talking about with people who are incapable of recognizing injustice, essentially those that are too naive to think for themselves.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: Now let me show you the first time the playbook ran. In 1939, Swiss chemist Paul Mueller discovers that synthetic pesticide called DDT is extraordinarily effective at killing insects. It works by attacking their nervous system. But here's the problem, it does not stay in the insect, it moves up the food chain. It accumulates in the fat tissues of animals and humans.
• 11:45
  It soaks in the soil, runs into the water, and eventually, it ends up inside the human body. The Swiss patent follows in 1940. By 1942, it's patented in The United States. In 1948, Paul Mueller wins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for that discovery. So the US government calls DDT a miracle.
• 12:07
  The USDA calls it safe.
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: Because we're fighting a total war, our forces must be marshaled against every enemy, unseen as well as seen, in every place, all of the time. Millions of insects constitute an important part of our foes, in their way as militant as the axis. Their menace multiplies as they multiply. Because in some areas more men were being incapacitated from action by insect borne diseases than by battle casualties, a search for a more powerful insecticide than had previously been known was imperative. The answer to the quest for a poison to eradicate the insects which threaten the morale, health, and military efficiency of our troops was found in DDT.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: 1945 to nineteen sixties, DDT is getting sprayed on homes, schools, farms, and children. Not metaphorically, literally on children in schools at public events. Aerials sprang over neighborhoods. The government's telling the public there's nothing to worry about. 1962, a marine biologist named Rachel Carson publishes a book called Silent Spring.
• 13:23
  She documents the devastation that DDE is causing on bird populations, ecosystems, and the broader food chain. She's really careful, she's methodical, and she's meticulous. So the chemical industry responds by spending what would be millions of dollars in today's money to absolutely destroy her. They call her hysterical. They call her a communist.
• 13:41
  They call her unscientific. Internal memos from the chemical companies documented this coordinated smear campaign. They're part of the public record. She's a woman who told the truth, and the people who were profiting from the lie came after her with everything they had. 1972, ten years after Silent Spring, ten years, DDT is finally banned in The United States.
• 14:04
  But here's what the ban didn't fix. Present day, DDT metabolites, the chemical breakdown products of DDT, are still found in the blood of Americans born decades after the ban. It passes from mother to child in the womb. The chemical outlasted the law that was supposed to stop it. Step one through five, this is the first time.
• 14:25
  That's the pesticide playbook. 1965, Dow Chemical introduces chlorpyrifus to the American market. Now I won't tell you exactly what chlorpyrifus is. It belongs to a class of chemistry called organophosphates. That same class of chemistry produced the nerve agents developed during World War two, sarin, tabun, and the compounds that make soldiers collapse within seconds of exposure.
• 14:54
  The pesticide on your vegetables and the nerve agent in a chemical weapon come from the same branch of the same chemistry tree. So Dow gets approved for use on food. Yes, food. 1996, Congress passes the Food Quality Protection Act. It instructs the EPA to reassess the safety of chlorpyrifus.
• 15:14
  A twenty year review begins. Twenty years. Your children grew up and had children of their own in the time that it took the EPA to look at this. 2012. EPA scientists working alongside researchers at Columbia University find direct links between chlorpyrifus exposure and reduced IQ in children.
• 15:34
  It's not in rats. It's not in some lab simulation. It's in children, real kids, lower IQs from a chemical that was already on your food. 2016, EPA scientists formally conclude there's no safe level of chlorpyrifus for children. None.
• 15:51
  Zero. They write it up. They recommend the ban. They did their jobs, and then they waited. On 03/09/2017, Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator appointed by president Trump, sits down privately with Andrew Liveris, the CEO of Dow Chemical, the company that makes chlorpyriferous.
• 16:10
  The meeting lasts about thirty minutes. 20 later on March 29, Pruitt announces that the EPA will not ban clearopiriferous. His own agency's scientists had told him that there was no safe level of exposure for children. He looked at that finding, walked into the meeting, and came out on the other side having made a different choice. And Dow Chemical had donated a million dollars to president Trump's inauguration fund just weeks before.
• 16:38
  2021, a federal appeals court, not congress, not the EPA, a court orders the EPA to ban chlorpyrifus within sixty days. Because the agency had refused to act on its own scientist findings for so long, a judge had to step in and do it for them. Fifty six years from the day chlorpyrifus was introduced to the American farms in 1965 to the day that a court finally forced it off the market. Fifty six years. But the story isn't over.
• 17:11
  In 2023, a different federal court reversed that ban, and it's still in use today. The same pesticide playbook the second time. 1958, a Swiss chemical company called Sibagigi introduces a herbicide called astrazine. A herbicide is a chemical that's sprayed on crops specifically to kill weeds. Now most Americans have never heard of sebogigi, but their products have been on American farms for decades.
• 17:43
  Sebogigi would later merge with with another chemical giant and rebrand itself as Syngenta, which is the name that you're gonna hear in the courtroom documents. But the company that created Atrazine and the company that fought to keep on the market are the same company, just with a newer, cleaner name. It becomes the second most widely used herbicide in The United States behind only glyphosate. It's used mostly on corn, but it runs off into rivers, streams, and groundwater. It ends up in the tap water of tens of millions of Americans.
• 18:13
  In the early two thousands, a scientist at UC Berkeley named Doctor. Tyrone Hayes conducts independent research on atrazine. What he finds is this, atrazine chemically castrates male frogs at concentrations found in American tap water, not in a laboratory with extreme doses, at levels already present in the water people are drinking. Syngenta's response isn't to conduct safety studies. Their response documented in internal emails obtained through litigation, emails that are now on public record, is to coordinate a campaign to discredit Hayes personally, to monitor his movements, and attempt to buy his silence.
• 18:55
  They tried to pay him to stop talking, and he didn't stop. Instead, he kept talking. He kept publishing. He kept showing up at conferences. He kept giving interviews.
• 19:03
  He kept standing in front of audiences and saying the same thing that he had always said, the data is the data. A scientist from South Carolina, the first in his family to go to college, up against one of the most powerful chemical corporations on Earth, and he wouldn't sit back down. Syngenta spent years and millions of dollars trying to make him go away. He's still talking today. 2004, the European Union bans atrazine.
• 19:30
  2006, the EPA reviews atrazine. It declines to ban it, citing industry funded studies over Hay's independent findings. The NRDC, the National Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental law organization, files a lawsuit that forces the EPA to publicly acknowledge that atrazine is contaminating drinking water supplies across the Midwest. It's drinking water, the tap water that's coming out of the faucet in people's homes. November 2025, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the IARC, classifies atrazine as a Group 2A probable human carcinogen.
• 20:11
  Group 2A means the evidence in humans is strong enough to raise serious concern, but not yet definitive enough to call it a confirmed cause of cancer. It's one step below the highest classification. The finding is published in the Lancet Oncology, one of those respected medical journals in the world, the kind of journal where a finding does not get published unless the science behind it has been reviewed and scrutinized by other experts. It's not some fringe study. This is the global scientific establishment putting atrazine on the list of things that probably cause cancer in people.
• 20:46
  The EPA's response is to dismiss the IARC classification. Atrazine is still legal in The United States. It's still being sprayed. It's the pesticide playbook. It's the third time.
• 21:01
  So you already know how the story goes. 1974, Monsanto introduces Roundup. Monsanto is a chemical company founded in nineteen o one. Over the decades, it's made pesticides, industrial chemicals, and Agent Orange. By the nineteen seventies, it's turned its attention to agriculture.
• 21:21
  So Roundup is its new weed killer, and the active ingredient is glyphosate. So glyphosate works by blocking a process inside plants they need to survive. It does not target one type of weed. It kills almost any plant that it touches. You spray on a field and everything green dies, except starting in the nineteen nineties, for the crops that Monsanto has engineered in its own laboratory, spray on a field and everything green dies, except for the crops that Monsanto has engineered in its own laboratory to survive it in the nineties.
• 21:55
  Crops that come with a patent, crops that farmers must buy from Monsanto every single year. 1996, Roundup ready GMO crops arrive. GMO stands for genetically modified organism. These are crops that have been engineered in a laboratory to survive being sprayed with Roundup. Every other plant in the field dies.
• 22:18
  The GMO crop doesn't. So farmers who plant them have to buy Monsanto's seeds fresh from the company every single season. They are legally prohibited by contract from saving their own seeds. Let that sink in for a moment. Because for all of human history going back thousands of years, farmers saved seeds.
• 22:39
  You harvest your crop, you set aside your best seeds, you plant them again next spring. That's how farming works. That's how it's always worked. Monsanto looked at that and said, not anymore. In 1998, a canola farmer named Percy Schmeiser in Canada found Roundup Ready plants growing on his land.
• 22:57
  He says they bloomed from a neighbor's field. Monsanto sued him anyway. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. You never guess it. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto.
• 23:10
  Percy Schmeizer had farmed that land for fifty years. He was in his late sixties. Monsanto had been in seed business for two. 2015, the IARC classifies glyphosate as a group two a probable human carcinogen, linking it to non Hodgkin lymphoma. Several regulatory agencies, including the EPA and the World Health Organization's own JMPR, the joint meeting on pesticide residues, the expert panel the World Health Organization uses to evaluate whether pesticide levels of food are safe, have disagreed with the IARC finding.
• 23:45
  Here's why that makes what happens next more damning. 2017, the EPA signs with Monsanto, declares glyphosate not likely carcinogenic to humans. Then the Monsanto papers come out. Internal documents released in litigation show that Monsanto ghost wrote scientific studies and paid academics to put their names on them, that they coordinated directly with EPA officials to block independent reviews, that they knew. They knew what their product might be doing, and they buried it.
• 24:17
  And then the lawsuits came, 2020 through to present. Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, has paid over $10,000,000,000 in glyphosate cancer settlements. A proposed additional settlement of $7,250,000,000 was announced in February 2026, but the company admits no wrongdoing. 2022, glyphosates detected in the urine of more than eighty percent of Americans tested, including children. Exposures increased five hundred percent since Roundup ready crops were introduced in '96.
• 24:53
  And then while the lawsuits were still being settled, something else happened. An executive order was signed at the White House, the title, promoting the national defense by ensuring an adequate supply of glyphosate based herbicides. They tied glyphosate to national security, not to protect you, to protect the companies that make it. At the same time, a Republican house farm bill was moving through congress that would make it illegal for local governments to warn their own residents about the dangers of pesticides. Think about that.
• 25:27
  Not just refusing to ban it, but making it illegal to warn people about it. The same pesticide playbook. The fourth time. No consequences, no end, but now immunity. The old system didn't collapse.
• 25:45
  It got upgraded. 2021. Bill Gates is confirmed as the largest private farmland owner in The United States. Approximately 270,000 acres across 17 to 19 states depending on the year of the accounting. So let's talk about what Gates is actually doing because this is where it gets really interesting.
• 26:05
  His key investments include Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Appeal Sciences. Appeal is a fruit coating that has been approved for use on USDA organic produce. It can't be washed off. Let that sink in. It's a coating on your organic apple that you can't remove, approved by the same system that's supposed to protect you.
• 26:26
  And then there's AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, co funded by the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Their stated goal, to end hunger in Africa. Right. Feed the poor. Very noble.
• 26:41
  Except the Oakland Institute, which has studied this for years, documented that the AGRA has actually increased food insecurity in several African nations. Not decreased it, but increased it by pushing chemical dependent patent and seed systems onto subsidence farmers who were already feeding themselves just fine. So Gates and the AGRA dispute those findings. Of course, they do. And there's this.
• 27:07
  Gates is the second largest funder of the World Health Organization on the planet Earth, behind only the United States government. So the same man that's investing in your food supply also has enormous influence over global health policy. His public message is that he wants to replace chemical agriculture with lab grown food and patented seed systems, a cleaner future, a safer future. His critics say something very different though. They say this is not an alternative to the broken system, It's more a complete version of it.
• 27:41
  It's the same dependency model, same centralized control, just newer patents, and a much friendlier face. Now I wanna bring you back to where we started. The four documents, the Rockefeller Playbook from 1943, the Grass Loophole from '58, the Kissinger Report from 1974, Agena 2030 from 2015. Everything you just watched, DDT, chlorpyriferous, atrazine, glyphosate, and now Gates buying the land. It all fits inside those four documents.
• 28:15
  It's not a series of regulatory failures. This isn't incompetence or negligence. This is a system that's working exactly as it was designed. So the next time you walk into a grocery store and you can't afford real food, but that processed stuff is really cheap, you now know how we got there. That price gap wasn't an accident.
• 28:34
  The next time you hear that a chemical has been in our food supply for thirty years and the EPA is just now getting around to reviewing it, you now know why. That delay was built in. The next time a new lab grown product shows up on your shelf with a health claim on the label and a patent behind it, you now know whose hands it came from and what model it was built on. The next time a scientist gets ignored, discredited, or silenced for publishing data that inconveniences a billion dollar company, you now know that's not a bug in the system. That is the system.
• 29:06
  Everything you just watched happened in the past, but it's not over. It's still happening right now in your kitchen, in your kid's lunchbox, in the water coming out of your tap. The question was never how this happened. We know how it happened. We just walked through it together.
• 29:20
  Four times, the same five steps over eighty years. The question is, now that you know, what are you gonna do about it? You know the playbook now. The next phase is already underway. And knowing the facts and the history of this is the first step of resistance.
• 29:35
  The next step is using that knowledge and those facts to make better decisions for you and your family in your daily life. So here's what you can do. Choose real food. The closer it is to the ground it came from, the better. The closer to you that it was grown or produced, that matters too.
• 29:50
  Support your local farmers, independent farmers. The family farm that feeds itself isn't nostalgia. It's a threat to the system we just talked about. That's exactly why it was replaced. Another important thing you do is just read your labels, not just what's in the food, but look who made it, who owns the brand, see where the money goes, follow your dollar, and vote with every purchase that you make.
• 30:12
  Refuse appeal. If you see it on your produce, just put it back, and build community. Because the answer to a system that is designed to make you dependent is a community designed to make you free. And that's why I'm building the ARC community. That's what it's all about.
• 30:27
  That's what the whole project has been focused on. So if you wanna get on the waiting list for that, there's a link in the description below. And look, I've got two little girls, two and five, and I'm still hopeful. Even after everything I just walked you through, I'm still hopeful, but not because I think this isn't serious. I think it's extremely serious, but because I believe that we've got the ability to opt out.
• 30:45
  Not perfectly, not all at once, but step by step, choice by choice. And my hope ultimately isn't in any regulatory agency or political figure. My hope is in God, the creator, and that's what carries me. And I think that that's what this moment is calling us towards, a deeper dependence on the one who made us and a deeper independence from the systems that were built to control us. So that's today's episode, connecting the dots from the past to show you how America was hijacked.
• 31:15
  If it helped you, make sure you hit that like button, whichever platform you're watching on. Leave a comment. Share the episode with a friend. And I'll see you next week for more America Hijacked.