00:01:09.320We had Mark from Rasmussen polling in earlier, and he put together a series of words that the way he put it was just so succinct and powerful.
00:01:21.040But he basically referred to the media tsunami after now, you know, Vice President Kamala Harris and president-elect are the leading contender on the Democratic side for now.
00:01:34.780And he just said, you know, after that media massive input, he called it a psyop, for example.
00:01:45.300And I wanted to find out if he saw anything in the polling.
00:01:48.940And it was still too short to tease that out.
00:01:53.220Right. So you've got the political fundamentals built into the polling, but then you've got these, you know, millions and millions of dollars.
00:02:01.020And I think you've got another report out kind of leading in this direction to the carve outs from unexpected sources of media bias that, in a sense, determines election outcomes.
00:02:14.740Not in a sense, it clearly does, right?
00:02:17.260People pay millions of dollars in marketing every day to change people's minds.
00:02:21.580And so why don't you tee us up with your latest report and and then broaden it to to your usual line of research?
00:02:30.880Thank you very much for being with us, Mike Benz.
00:02:34.120Yeah. So after the 2016 election, the national security state, our foreign policy establishment, basically the the row of government gangsters, I guess, is Kash Patel.
00:02:44.740Calls them. Some people call it the deep state. I refer to it as the blob embarked on a quest to kill advertising revenue to alternative news sources.
00:02:55.180They blamed the loss of the 2016 election to Donald Trump and the events of of the Brexit vote in UK on the rise of alternative media, basically outflanking traditional legacy CIA, Pentagon, State Department back channeled media.
00:03:14.740You know, these this this these bumper cars on democracy that that mainstream media had put on on the boundaries of thought and on political movements had fallen away as alternative news sources like.
00:03:27.960The War Room, like Real America's Voice, like places like Breitbart and OAN and these right.
00:03:36.640Basically, you know, organic grassroots, you know, citizen run podcasts or or or journalism outlets were becoming more popular than the legacy outlets themselves.
00:03:48.780I mean, even Alex Jones at the time had more clicks on YouTube than all of CNN and in in 2018.
00:03:54.680And so what they what they decided to do and by they I mean these government forces, the U.S.
00:04:01.100State Department, USAID with help from the Pentagon, with help from the NGO complex, embarked on a quest to kill advertising revenue to alternative news sources.
00:04:11.100They basically came up with a plan that it's easier to shoot the messenger than it is to kill all of the messengers, individual messages.
00:04:19.620So while they set up the censorship complex on the one hand to kill the distribution of news stories, their ultimate goal was to kill the actual existence of alternative news organizations.
00:04:31.000And so there are a couple elements to that. One of them is this class of censorship mercenary firms like NewsGuard, which folks may have heard of NewsGuard, Global Disinformation Index, NewsElla.
00:04:42.380There's a there's a there's a there's a there's a pop up industry of censorship mercenary firms who now assign rating labels to news online in order to treat them the way Moody's or S&P does about about about about like debt instruments, you know, whether or not this is a junk bond or triple A rated.
00:05:04.860They now do this with news organizations in order to create to filter this to advertising companies to kill advertising revenue to any any Web site that's deemed to be a misinformation spreader.
00:05:17.460So, for example, NewsGuard created a blacklist of about 650 Web sites that had questioned covid orthodoxy or talked about the manmade, you know, lab leak covid origins thesis.
00:05:30.740And then using its relationships with big global with with the big four advertisers like publicis, their their four main advertising agencies, they then got to kill billions of dollars in revenue to alternative news sources by again exploiting that relationship between the censorship gargoyles who rate the news and these and the advertising agencies who distribute corporate advertising funds to the Web sites.
00:06:02.740So there's one in particular known as GARM, which is this sort of syndicate out of the world economic forum, which oversees about two point six billion dollars every year in programmatic ad spend.
00:06:13.740And, you know, these these rating agencies are all part of it.
00:06:16.740Now, my foundation, Foundation for Freedom Online, just did a survey of all their federal contracts.
00:06:22.740And frankly, what we found is totally shocking.
00:06:25.740All four of the major ad agencies, again, including publicists.
00:06:30.740And you'll see this on the FFO report on our on our website.
00:06:33.740But all four of them receive billions of dollars, billions with a B every year in federal government contracts.
00:06:41.740One of them gets four billion dollars a year.
00:06:44.740Another one gets one point eight, one point one.
00:06:47.740Now, a lot of this comes from the Pentagon.
00:06:49.740And this is basically the same strategy that they use to spread ESG.
00:06:53.740It is these are the agencies that are now killing the ability to operate an independent Web site by selectively discriminating against anyone who disagrees with the U.S. State Department or who disagrees with the U.S. War Machine or who disagrees with big pharma.
00:07:10.740Now they can't operate a Web site effectively while the entire playing field of media is rigged in favor of the government's preferred outlets.
00:07:19.740And it's the taxpayers who are voting, you know, who are being basically having their money stolen to subsidize this.
00:07:26.740So I think that all of these funds should be cut to to those.
00:07:31.740These federal contracts should be cut to these ad agencies the same way that's starting to be done with ESG with places like Texas divesting from investments in BlackRock to the tune of eight billion dollars a few months ago.
00:07:43.740And until they get rid of their ESG activism, I think the same thing has to be done on the adversaries or boycott side.
00:07:49.740Yeah, well, and this tall all ties back into your original research on the censorship running through DHS, et cetera.
00:07:59.740Now that, you know, in the private sector is one level.
00:08:04.460But when you show the government is complicit, that is illegal.
00:08:18.640We have a little bit of an uncertainty in the state of play here in the sense that there's this big Supreme Court case, which was just punted on effectively.
00:08:26.800We, uh, there was, there was, there's, there's an effective ruling.
00:08:34.800Now we had, we had great rulings at the trial court and appellate court level, but again, it was on a preliminary injunction.
00:08:40.540The Supreme court made a narrow standing based ruling, kicked it back down to the lower courts.
00:08:45.440So we're in a gray zone right now as to whether or not this actually is legal.
00:08:51.100But, uh, I, you know, I think for now, a lot of people don't actually even realize that this is happening, that you have the government subsidizing the, the ad agencies who in turn then discriminate against conservatives, against independent outlets, even anti-war left-wing news outlets.
00:09:09.380Uh, it's basically, you know, comes down to, again, this blob, do you agree with Hillary Clinton, if you, if you will.
00:09:17.300So the, you, so some of these outlets, you know, uh, who are even on the left, this sort of, uh, old school Bernie Sanders aligned ones who may be NATO skeptical, even, you know, even they get dinged by outlets.
00:09:28.720Like, like, like news guard and therefore by the big four, but, but the government should not be playing, picking winners and losers.
00:09:37.620Let's, and let's rewind it back to your opening comments.
00:09:41.180Uh, because the other thing I want to pursue here is you said government DOD department of defense, state department, their carve outs, NGOs, et cetera.
00:09:54.680Uh, and on, on, on prior, uh, shows I've seen you, but like on Tucker, I, I, this isn't the exact same issue, but I think you've shown, uh, that some of the mainstream news networks are carve, carve outs also, and they receive government funding, uh, CNNs, et cetera.
00:10:26.680There's, we have an institution known as internews, which is a, uh, you know, basically the classic definition of, of what the CIA got busted doing in the 1950s to the 1970s with, with Project Mockingbird.
00:10:39.900But, you know, about a third of the national endowment for democracy budget, which is a, one of these classic CIA cutouts goes to funding media organizations.
00:10:48.900So, you know, the, it's, it's very important when you're trying to pull off an operation to create media surround sound.
00:10:55.340So, what you do is you, you do these pop-up newsrooms, actually one of the big censorship operators in this, in this, uh, in this space known as First Draft, one of its founders, Fergus Bell, actually created this, this concept of pop-up newsrooms that you'd essentially be able to create this artificial surround sound of state department funded media organizations.
00:11:17.920So that civilians in a particular region think something must be true because here's 42 different, different news organizations all saying the exact same thing.
00:11:28.140So they can't all be wrong because it's sort of what the civilian thinks, not knowing the operation behind it, but not knowing that all 42 of those organizations are being funded effectively through state department or CIA pass-throughs like USAID or the national endowment for democracy.
00:11:41.300Yeah, well, unfortunately, that's the new pattern.
00:11:48.740I was a lowly freshman and all of a sudden something would start out in the Atlantic and then go to the Washington Post and then my regional newspaper and then kaboom, all over the place.
00:12:19.020Well, who's the – one of the star writers of the Atlantic is Ann Applebaum.
00:12:23.860Ann Applebaum is on the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, this very CIA cutout.
00:12:29.600Don't take my word for it being a CIA cutout.
00:12:32.120Read the New York Times or the Washington Post or the founders of the National Endowment for Democracy.
00:12:35.940The founders of the National Endowment for Democracy, Carl Gershman and Alan Weisberg, they literally have direct quotes saying that they were set up to do what the CIA used to do but got in trouble for doing.
00:12:50.260And they didn't want CIA fingerprints on it anymore.
00:12:53.040So they wanted to create a private – a nominally private NGO to do it.
00:12:58.460That way when people got busted trying to overthrow governments, it would look like it was coming from an NGO instead of from the CIA.
00:13:05.140But there would be this Senate Intelligence Committee approved CIA back channel.
00:13:09.160This was the deal that was struck between the CIA director, William Casey in 1983, and Ronald Reagan's attorney general.
00:13:35.420They call it quasi-private because it's not like USAID where it's a formal public agency.
00:13:39.940But it's – literally was created in a letter from the CIA director to the attorney general saying, hey, we want to do what we used to do but not have the CIA get in trouble when it all goes bottom up.
00:13:51.980But Ann Applebaum is on the board of directors of the CIA cutout, and she was busted in something called the Integrity Initiative, a British intelligence operation in 2015 as part of the UK intercluster.
00:14:03.260So I can go off – but this is just one example of a million.
00:14:08.540And I was – I lost my seat to a former CIA person.
00:14:14.160No one knows what she did because that's a neat side story.
00:14:17.200But there was an article in The Atlantic, and they set up one hand on her holster, the other hand on her thing, the blonde hair flowing in the wind, Tim Kaine sitting in the corner a year and a half before I ran.
00:14:55.600It's back in a minute at the War Room.
00:14:59.680America is facing a real danger, the kind of danger only real Americans are ready for.
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00:16:20.060Just unbelievable research, digging into issues we couldn't have conceived of five or ten years ago.
00:16:29.860So I'm going to stay with Mike for two minutes here just to conclude, and then we're going to go to Gordon Chang, more analysis, deeper dive on China with Gordon, who's just incredible.
00:16:42.560But, Mike, any summary comments you want to leave us with?
00:16:45.980And then please leave us with how people can reach you and support you, and don't be humble because the work you're doing, you're a national treasure.
00:16:55.780Well, we were just talking about the Atlantic and the role of CIA pass-throughs like the National Endowment for Democracy and Applebaum and her role in these things.
00:17:04.300And I think it is useful to keep in mind.
00:17:06.300I mean, if I can leave people maybe with a code word, when you hear the word Atlantic, it's a code for Atlanticist.
00:17:12.800You see, we have something – the rules-based international order, when it was set up in 1948, was this essentially alliance between the United States and Britain and the new formation of NATO and all the international finance structures like the World Bank and IMF that run through that.
00:17:32.480And so we refer to that as the transatlantic alliance.
00:17:35.600And so these structures like NATO or the Atlantic Council, which is NATO's think tank, or the Atlantic, they all run through this foreign policy blob shop.
00:17:45.260So when you see Atlanticist or Atlantic as a word, that's usually going to be a code for the foreign policy establishment, which is diametrically opposed to any form of populism or sovereignty of nationalist nations.
00:18:01.500So that's one thing I would say to be on the lookout for.
00:18:05.720And, of course, all of these are government-funded.
00:18:07.680The Atlantic Council, for example, is not just NATO's think tank.
00:18:11.180It gets annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department, and CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy.
00:18:17.040In fact, all four branches of the US military, the Air Force, the Marines, the Army, and the Navy, all give annual funding to this independent think tank representing NATO.
00:18:25.740And then the Atlantic Council then goes out and coordinates censorship as well as these sort of advertising boycott plans like the ones we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation here.
00:18:35.140But you can follow me on X, at MikeBenzCyber.
00:19:33.180It's our honor to welcome Gordon Chang to the war room.
00:19:37.160Gordon, we've been doing a deep dive on China today with several experts, Bradley Thayer,
00:19:46.740and then Colonel Derek Harvey was on earlier as well.
00:19:51.400A little debate with one of our other guests on the war room, Douglas McGregor, who said we're not at war right now, and China does not want a war.
00:20:06.620And, you know, to give him the benefit of the doubt, I think he means kinetic right now.
00:21:10.420So, really, what we're talking about is a political system in China that has incentives to go to war or at least to annex territories by intimidating opponents.
00:21:22.760Yeah, Gordon, you kept mentioning the word fuel, fueling.
00:21:36.260They're extending their tentacles and building Air Force bases everywhere.
00:21:40.960All that is contingent, it seems to me, on having an economy that's still fairly robust.
00:21:48.940And that seems to me – I've been following things not at your level, but as best I can.
00:21:55.220And it seems there's a significant weakening in the Chinese economy and, therefore, hopefully, in their ability to project power in five or ten years, I hope.
00:22:21.500If that, it could even be contracting.
00:22:23.580And this inhibits their ability to pay for their military, for their internal security apparatus, for Belt and Road, and for a lot of other projects.
00:22:50.960I think that he needs a quick victory somewhere, with or without war, because he wants to prevent other senior Communist Party figures from challenging or even deposing him.
00:23:02.900Now, he realizes that a war would not be popular with the Chinese people.
00:23:07.140But as Bradley Thayer pointed out to you, they don't really care about the Chinese people.
00:23:11.760Xi Jinping cares about his own political position.
00:23:14.200And that means he has domestic incentives to be belligerent and provocative, which means he can take us by surprise.
00:23:38.420So it looks like they were, you know, internal facing.
00:23:42.060Prior, they were very external facing with capital markets.
00:23:47.480Now it seems like they're trying to, you know, produce a consumer type society that's self-sufficient because they see the writing on the wall.
00:23:56.640And then finally, he said, we want to get rid of, you know, China culture because we're, you know, which probably means Buddhism and Confucianism, et cetera.
00:24:06.240He's been sounding stale lately when it comes to that.
00:24:10.340And so all that said, what domestic incentives is he facing?
00:24:16.640Well, when he became China's ruler in 2012, he inherited a consensual political system, which meant that no leader got too much credit or too much blame.
00:24:27.360But by grabbing power from everybody else, he ended up with accountability.
00:24:31.520The other thing that Xi Jinping did was he inherited a political system where if you lost a political struggle and were forced out, you would just basically got a nice house in Beijing.
00:24:50.560And so Xi Jinping knows that the costs of losing a political struggle are very high.
00:24:54.540You put that all together, and it means Xi Jinping realizes that he's being blamed for the economy.
00:25:00.660He's being blamed for the demographic problems.
00:25:03.320He's being blamed for everything else.
00:25:05.580And that means he knows that he's personally at risk, which means he knows he needs a quick win to silence other Communist Party figures from deposing him.
00:25:28.340We've been talking about this for quite some time because, first of all, a war on Taiwan would be very difficult for China and would be very unpopular with the Chinese people.
00:25:39.600With the Philippines, he thinks they're an easy target.
00:25:42.100He doesn't think the United States will defend them despite our 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty.
00:25:47.540He doesn't respect the Biden administration's warning about the Philippines.
00:25:51.380And on June 17th, we saw China seize two Philippine craft, injure eight Filipino sailors, one of them seriously.
00:25:59.380We saw some things which are basically acts of war at Second Thomas Shoal.
00:26:04.360That's where I think the problems will be.
00:27:27.440This is the most consequential and most dangerous time in history.
00:27:31.520You know, it's even more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis because we know then that neither Khrushchev nor Kennedy were willing to use their nukes.
00:27:38.800We don't know that about Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, and Vladimir Putin.
00:27:43.180They are marching on the world, and we have a president who has checked out and not defending our country.
00:27:50.300Yeah, there you have it in succinct form.
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00:28:36.040In fact, some of the guests I've had on The War Room believe that the government will soon expand their powers to track our every move.
00:28:43.420If we say the wrong things on social media, donate to the wrong causes, buy firearms, or even vote MAGA, the government may be able to shut us out of our bank accounts.
00:28:54.440I can't say for sure if this will happen, but it's an interesting and dire warning.
00:28:59.980Fortunately, Jim Rickards, an American patriot and friend of mine, has made it his mission to educate us on what he believes is coming and how to protect yourself from the possibility of programmable money.
00:29:12.300Watch Jim's warning video now, before it's censored like I've been in the past.
00:30:04.820Earlier today, I characterized the essence of Christianity as John the Baptist comes preaching forgiveness of sins.
00:30:16.640I asked David Barton, I said, is that Christianity in its succinct form?
00:30:22.540I also pointed out that Christians sometimes give ourselves a bad image because we do a little bit too much judging and not enough forgiving.
00:30:32.080We turn into Pharisees instead of being humble because of Jesus and the forgiveness of sins in the Christian tradition.
00:30:42.900And so do you think that's a crystallization of the gospel just to get us started off?
00:31:26.940And so when Nebuchadnezzar blows the trumpet, you have to bow to the statue.
00:31:30.320And but the idea that you have a worth, irregardless of any group, you have a worth because you're made in the image of the creator.
00:31:37.940And this creator is not a respecter of persons.
00:31:41.100That basically is the origin of the very concept of individual.
00:31:45.160And so when we say in our declaration that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, it exalts the individuals.
00:31:54.600So in Europe, you had a creator, king, people.
00:31:59.740And so the king was like a lieutenant, was a go-between between you and the creator.
00:32:03.660And in America, we leave out the king.
00:32:05.860And we say that the creator gives the rights to each individual person.
00:32:12.620So John F. Kennedy, in his inaugural address, said that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.
00:32:25.740He said, we believe all men are created equal because we're created in the image of God.
00:32:30.240And then Eisenhower said, in some states, the lands, the state claims to be the author of human rights.
00:32:36.140If the state gives rights, it can and inevitably will take away those rights.
00:32:41.900Our founders had to refer to the creator in order to make our revolutionary experiment make sense.
00:32:47.020We had to claim we had rights directly from the king, from the creator, and the king was infringing on our God-given rights.
00:32:53.500But if there is no creator, then the rights come from the government, right?
00:32:56.960The social contract with the government giveth, the government can taketh away it.
00:33:00.280So politically, you boil down the Bible beliefs to the concept of the individual.
00:33:09.000Yeah, well, and so, you know, modern liberalism, not the advanced Marxism we're currently living under, but the old liberals kind of shared those beliefs.
00:33:18.560And the common refrain would be, well, that's nice you Christians did all that nice work and founded all the Harvards and the universities and the hospitals and everything and gave us human rights language on top of it that framed, you know, the post-World War II liberal order.
00:33:37.660And so I want to push us back to the big, can you have this idea of a creator God that creates us in his own image, and can you retain that without the full force and energy of the gospel behind it?
00:33:55.420That's why I wanted to start off with, where's the animating power that took, you know, a millennium, right?
00:34:01.260The rabbis, the rabbinic tradition, they were debating and using reason way back.
00:34:06.960And then, you know, things start kicking off, you know, Magna Carta and rationality and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, etc.
00:34:15.460But all that was within the context of the Judeo-Christian tradition that started with that gold nugget of faith and forgiveness, etc.
00:34:24.440And so I was trying to, what do you think the motivating original position is that got us that logic?
00:34:34.040And can we keep the logic without that animating force of God and the Holy Spirit or however you want to frame it?
00:35:18.560There's the pre-King Saul and post-King Saul.
00:35:21.500So the most common form of government in world history is kings.
00:35:25.220Nimrod, Pharaoh, Caesar, Kaiser, Sultan, and the kingdoms get bigger because with the latest military advancements, kings can kill more people.
00:35:32.700So instead of king killing Abel with a rock, they can kill with a bronze weapon, an iron weapon, a phalanx spear, symmetry, sword, gunpowder.
00:35:38.740A king is basically a glorified gang leader.
00:35:41.100And your worth is dependent on how well you can serve him.
00:35:44.980And the people say, I thought slavery started in 1619.
00:35:49.400No, wherever you had the first king on top, you had slaves on the bottom.
00:35:52.520So around 1400 BC, 1400 BC, you have millions of Israelites come out of Egypt.
00:45:45.840If you want somebody fighting for you, if you have any tax liabilities, tax problems, government problems with tax, if you need someone to fight in your corner with you, go to TaxNetwork.com.
00:46:19.720We're back with William Federer, who's been doing a tour de force across the Judeo-Christian tradition and the moral insights embedded in that Christian tradition.
00:46:30.940William, give us—today, truth is under attack.
00:46:39.160Our universities, right, Harvard was founded on truth for Christ in church.
00:46:44.420Then we went kind of a secular model with the modern liberals who you could at least debate, right, and share data with.
00:46:51.940And now we're living in a postmodern world, a Marxist world that just openly rejects God.
00:47:01.540People haven't figured out the consequences of that, that if you reject God, according to Marx, you're also rejecting the entire superstructure created by the capitalists.
00:47:11.740You're rejecting any metaphysics, you're rejecting any theoretical terms like love, justice, human rights.
00:47:21.300Marxists, in their core, are materialists.
00:47:23.920They don't believe that the realm of human rights exists because, as you said earlier, they don't believe that we're made in the image of God.
00:47:32.660So can you share your insights on how the biblical setup, the image of God, if we lose track of that, where do we stand in this modern, postmodern world, and how do we fight back in a Christian way?