Jack Posobiec is joined by the host of Revolver News and Human Events, Darren Beattie, to discuss a variety of news stories, including the latest on the situation on the border, pro-Palestinian protests, and more.
00:01:02.200And with polls like this, that blows that argument out of the water.
00:01:05.280This is probably going to lead to a lot of Democrats increasing the chatter that Joe
00:01:09.340Biden should step aside and make room for another Democrat.
00:01:13.140And I think the problem that Democrats have is they don't know who that Democrat would be.
00:01:16.900In a remarkable sign of a gradual racial realignment between the two parties, the more diverse the swing state, the farther Mr. Biden was behind.
00:01:26.600And he led only in the whitest of six.
00:01:30.000While Ukrainian President Zelensky is still deeply committed to the fight, some of his advisors are worried.
00:01:36.640One of Zelensky's aides telling time he deludes himself.
00:02:57.220I am Darren Beattie, filling in for the great Jack Posobiec.
00:03:01.140The long-awaited collab between Revolver News and Human Events is here, ladies and gentlemen, on this day of November 6, 2023.
00:03:13.100We have an action-packed and insight-packed show for you today.
00:03:18.140Lots of interesting things to discuss.
00:03:20.720We're discussing the situation on the border.
00:03:22.760We're getting a deep dive into the censorship industrial complex, Biden's dilemma, and much more.
00:03:30.800But first, I'd like to open with some breaking and really fascinating news.
00:03:36.540Story coming out from Louder with Crowder.
00:03:39.640Steve Crowder has seemingly managed to obtain pages from the covered-up manifesto of the transsexual school shooter.
00:03:50.380As you might remember, big story in March, there was a tragic shooting at Covenant School.
00:03:57.540And for the longest time, the police department had covered up the manifesto, which is bizarre.
00:04:03.420Usually this would never happen, unless the information and the contents within the manifesto was politically inconvenient to the regime or to the police department or something else.
00:04:13.560So this is a very big deal and very interesting.
00:04:16.860Based on what we've seen so far from some of the pages that come out, there have been some fascinating and rather telling quotations.
00:04:25.060I'll just share some of them with you to the extent that I can, because some of it's quite graphic and explicit.
00:04:32.380Hale, the name of the transsexual shooter, referred to the day as a death day and said,
00:04:39.080Can't believe I'm doing this. I hope my victims aren't ready.
00:18:40.080I'm filling in for Jack Posobiec, who is on assignment, and we're here having a great conversation
00:18:45.400today with redhead libertarian on the catastrophic situation on our nation's border.
00:18:51.500We're absolute hordes coming in, millions and millions of people throughout the entire year.
00:18:58.760Seemingly an unsustainable issue, unsustainable thing to transpire.
00:19:07.420Biden's poll numbers seem to be collapsing.
00:19:10.640Trump's poll numbers are much stronger.
00:19:12.720We've talked about the crisis itself, but now I think we should address the meta issue of how does this border crisis, if at all, play into the 2024 calculus, and how does it affect Biden's prospects going forward?
00:19:28.940Yeah, this migration crisis is not popular.
00:19:35.940And places where Biden had a stronghold, like cities, for instance, a lot of the migrants are being replaced there, and they're not liking it.
00:19:46.600The people in the cities are coming out against it.
00:19:48.680Like Chicago, for instance, they had a meeting, and they said, we can't take anymore, you know, and it was black.
00:19:55.200It was a group of black people, and they were like, we already get the scraps, and they're going to get the scraps of our scraps.
00:20:07.220I think a lot of members of the audience might have seen clips of erstwhile luxury hotels in New York City basically transforming into tent camps in order to accommodate the absolutely massive number of people poured in from the border.
00:20:25.560And this sort of, this is the complication.
00:20:27.360And it's interesting that you say that, is that it only becomes a problem when the clients of the Democrats themselves are directly inconvenienced.
00:20:38.580It's not an issue of, okay, simply the fact that we're destroying the country, destroying the value of citizenship, dropping the value of citizenship into nothing.
00:20:50.480Just absolutely ravaging what little social cohesion remains in the nation by doing this.
00:20:59.700But if you're a resident of New York City, if you're a resident in Chicago, you're not supposed to be inconvenienced by these policies.
00:21:08.760They're supposed to be resettled into the interior of the United States where middle America is.
00:21:16.220They're supposed to be resettled in Maine and such.
00:21:19.040And so I wonder if you have any insight, why is Biden risking his own kind of political favor in future by resettling these migrants into cities?
00:21:30.500Or are there simply so many that they can't dump them all in Maine anymore?
00:21:35.960I'm wondering if it has to do with who's sending them there.
00:21:39.500Maybe it's not the Biden administration.
00:22:15.400And those photos and the footage of, I think, in particular, the Roosevelt Hotel and some other hotels in New York City, absolute pandemonium, looked like a third world tent camp.
00:22:30.880Actually, you know, the biggest insult is to say it looks like San Francisco.
00:22:34.780The Roosevelt Hotel in New York looked like San Francisco.
00:22:37.920And that's a result of this bizarre migrant resettling issue.
00:22:42.980Do you have any insight as to the people profiting from this?
00:22:46.540Are the usual suspects, like the Catholic Charities groups?
00:22:50.280We did a piece at Revolver.News on the Lutheran organizations that receive money in order to resettle various, this is refugees in particular.
00:23:02.000But I imagine there are groups that are similarly responsible for settling these immigrants.
00:23:07.780Do you have any knowledge or insight on that?
00:23:12.860I do know that it's NGOs that are doing it primarily.
00:23:16.680And they do line their own pockets with whatever money they get from the state that helps them do that or from charitable people who help them do that.
00:23:25.060And it's just not a sustainable thing to be happening right now.
00:23:30.240But there's a large transfer of wealth from 2020.
00:23:34.700And we're just seeing that extend in different ways through different crises ever since.
00:23:41.600Indeed. And at the beginning of the segment, I mentioned a possible tie-in between the open border situation generally and some of the flare-ups we've seen in terms of pro-Palestine protests, the United States and Washington, D.C.
00:24:02.220Do you think it's fair to draw a connection between the open borders policy and the general kind of third world decolonialization ideology that seems to be driving a lot of these recent protests pertaining to the Mid-East situation in Gaza?
00:24:26.620Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. They're here and they wave their flags.
00:24:31.920I mean, we're getting everyone from all over the world.
00:24:37.440We're not just getting people from South America.
00:25:14.920You know, and it is interesting and ironic in some ways because you have a lot of people in the United States who are now coming out and expressing consternation, expressing outrage, expressing concern regarding all of these protests that are, you know, not only pro-Palestinian, but in some ways more directly inflected pro-Hamas.
00:25:41.920And it's very frustrating in a way to see people finally express concern about this who had either never expressed any concern about open borders policies.
00:25:56.760And if anything, many cases have kind of looked down with condescension on anyone who would draw attention to the issue of the border.
00:26:06.720And now it's quite clear, or at least I would suggest it is, I'm curious as to your thoughts, that for anybody who is concerned with the pro-Palestine protests, for anybody who is concerned with a decreased support for Israel, as many donors have written to Harvard expressing concern about pro-Palestinian protests,
00:26:29.720is it the case that the two things go hand-in-hand, the more the United States invites the third world, the more you are going to see this transformation in sympathies toward causes like Palestinian cause and other sort of globalized decolonialization movements?
00:26:52.720I have a theory. So there's really no presidents that get two terms without a popular war.
00:26:59.720I mean, the way that it is, Donald Trump didn't start any wars, didn't have a second term, George Bush finished a war, didn't have a second term.
00:27:08.720So the Ukraine war was not popular. That was largely not popular.
00:27:15.720But the Israel war is popular, and whether they didn't start it, but, you know, they're sitting in the Mediterranean right now thinking about, you know, whatever they're going to do there, we don't know yet.
00:27:29.720So there's a popular war now. Also, on top of this, we have migrants who are pro-Hamas coming in through the border.
00:27:39.720That's another crisis. So we're seeing the reaction to this popular war, this pro-Israel popular war, to be like, we need to expel Palestinians.
00:27:49.720And to see them finally looking at Harvard and and the Marxists there and saying, OK, this is not good anymore.
00:27:58.720And so they're looking at a way to fix all the things that are wrong with our country using Israel kind of has the powder keg for getting for getting the pro-Hamas people out of here, for kind of returning it to more of a status quo that people people liked.
00:28:14.720People were happy with and becoming more popular and more powerful in that regard to hopefully get Biden a second term, or at least get some Democrat elected to the second term, because nobody's been thrilled with what the Democrats have done to this country.
00:28:31.720Now, it's a very interesting hypothesis, and it's, you know, it's complicated precisely because of this tension within the Democrat Party of, you know, a lot of the establishment elements that are sort of the
00:28:44.700that are certainly sympathetic to Israel that remain sympathetic to Israel, and the sort of energetic, increasingly energetic base, which takes the other side.
00:28:54.700So if this is part of the agenda of the Biden administration, it might blow back in their face, because it's kind of hard to see how an intensification of this conflict would actually help Biden, given, first of all, his poll numbers with Muslims,
00:29:12.700more so given the inherent tension and split on this issue within the Democrat coalition in particular.
00:29:24.700Yeah, this could blow back and hit him in the face.
00:29:27.700I think so. There's a chance of that happening, as always. I've always thought they were going to replace him with Gavin Newsom, eventually anyway.
00:29:39.700We're going to see, as the election approaches, things happen that are good that everybody wants to see. We'll see a drop in inflation. It'll be artificial, but we'll see it. We'll see interest rates artificial, but we'll see it. We'll see them do something about the border. We'll see it's more pro-Israel. We're here to support our greatest ally.
00:30:05.700And don't forget, most importantly, we're going to see concert ticket prices decline. The Biden White House was very pleased with that. So we've got a lot of things. Thank you so much. Tell the audience again where they can find you, where they can read more about this important topic.
00:30:22.700Absolutely. You can find me on x.com, the redheaded libertarian, T-R-H-L official. You can also go over to him as a subscriber.
00:30:33.700Stop buzzing in my ear about the boring people at your office. I'm trying to listen to the new human events with Jack Posobiec.
00:30:43.460Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. I'm Darren Beattie filling in for the great Jack Posobiec of human events. This is the long anticipated revolver human events collab. We've got some great stuff coming up for you. Now we want to discuss censorship.
00:31:02.640One of the major issues. I used to say the major issue, but now I think the major issue is the regime has gone beyond censorship and now simply throws people in prison or indicts them for doing things that it doesn't like.
00:31:15.840But censorship is still very much an important issue. And the good news is we've actually made great progress in terms of striking back against what some, including my next guest, would call the censorship industrial complex.
00:31:31.760And in fact, there's a very important case, Missouri v. Biden, that's actually going to come up before the Supreme Court that pertains precisely to government organizations putting pressure on big tech companies to censor things.
00:31:48.860And so it has all sorts of really significant First Amendment implications, significant implications in terms of how the censorship regime operates.
00:31:59.600There's nobody in the country, I think it's safe to say, who understands more intricately and profoundly how censorship works in all of its manifestations than my next guest, Mike Benz, who's a former State Department official and currently the head of the Foundation for Freedom Online,
00:32:16.860which is at the cutting edge of all of this. Mike, thanks so much for coming on.
00:32:21.860Thank you, Darren, for all the work you're doing as well.
00:32:24.860So tell us a little bit about Missouri v. Biden in particular and how it relates to the broader sort of censorship space and recent developments in that space.
00:32:37.860Yeah, so it's easy to easiest to understand Missouri v.
00:32:42.860Biden is essentially being a case of government censorship laundering.
00:32:46.860So in the same way that money laundering operates by concealing an illicit source of funds, you have all this private sector censorship that is happening essentially through the government laundering censorship, but concealing its government source.
00:33:01.860So there's government funding of censorship institutions, there's government coordination on censorship policies, there's government creation of private sector censorship cutouts, and there's government outsourcing of censorship dirty work.
00:33:16.860And Missouri v. Biden basically seeks to expose all of these sources of government censorship laundering through cutouts in the universities and in the NGOs and through how government works with private sector companies.
00:33:31.860Now, the plaintiffs, the Missouri State Attorney General and Louisiana State Attorney General's offices, are making the sweeping claim that all of those forms of censorship laundering essentially are First Amendment violations.
00:33:48.860There was a grand slam indictment of the federal government in a July 4th ruling at the trial court level several months ago that it was partially upheld on appeal.
00:34:00.860There was some good stuff and bad stuff about the appeal.
00:34:03.860But now it is before the Supreme Court, and we will really have the moment that will set where the chess pieces are on everything from the legislative front to the state government front with a final say, at least at the early stage of the case, now to determine whether the government can operate through cutouts in order to outsource what they can't do themselves.
00:34:27.860Yeah, that's such an interesting point.
00:34:30.860Yeah, that's such an interesting point.
00:34:31.860And I think there's been an evolution how people have thought about the censorship issue.
00:34:37.860I think originally many people thought, okay, the censorship is primarily driven from within these big tech companies, which is true to an extent.
00:34:48.860But I think part of what's revealed through Missouri v. Biden, revealed through your work exposing these DHS-linked organizations, is that, well, yes, there are many sympathetic people to censorship within the tech companies.
00:35:02.860So a lot of the pressure was actually coming from the government, but it was doing so to some degree, not exclusively, but to some degree and a substantial degree through these kind of cutout organizations where they effectively outsourced their violations against the First Amendment.
00:35:23.860So let's say we get a favorable ruling in Missouri v. Biden, and that is to say that the government itself needs to step away far more than it's been doing.
00:35:36.860How do you see this affecting the development of the censorship industry?
00:35:40.860Because, you know, an analogy we might draw would be affirmative action.
00:35:45.860The regime depends on affirmative action.
00:35:48.860Affirmative action impinges on every single institution in the country, how it functions from a legal perspective, economic perspective.
00:35:57.860And so while we can celebrate a Supreme Court ruling that curtails affirmative action, we can also reasonably anticipate that the regime will find some other way to achieve the ends that it already wants.
00:36:11.860And so since you're on the cutting edge of this, I'd be very curious, what is the next move from the standpoint of our regime's commissars in response to the threat of Missouri v. Biden and the generalized threat of catching them red handed in direct censorship activities?
00:36:30.860Right. Well, that's a great analogy, actually, there, because just as with with the censorship industry, with with DEI, there were also not just sort of the individual policies of universities or corporations, but there was also there grew this vast sort of cottage industry of DEI service providers.
00:36:53.860These were folks like your sort of diversity, equity and inclusion consultants or credentialists who would essentially tell schools or tell public universities or private corporations whether or not they've satisfied various DEI requirements or that service intermediaries for getting state government contracts or federal government contracts.
00:37:14.860So there's this vast blob in the middle in DEI contracting and service providing.
00:37:21.860And so, too, there is now in the censorship industry.
00:37:24.860So from 2018 to 2022, much of government censorship was essentially top down in terms of pressure and funding from government into what they called a whole of society model that that entwined the government with the private sector, civil society organizations and then allies.
00:37:43.860And then allies in the news media and fact checking orgs.
00:37:47.860But a lot of this depended on the government serving a quarterback function where they were coordinating what the NGOs and the universities were doing.
00:37:55.860They were giving them funding. They were coordinating with the fact checkers and giving them funding.
00:37:59.860They are putting direct pressure on the private sector companies.
00:38:02.860They were acting as the quarterback there. The way the censorship industry is currently being restructured in anticipation of a devastating Missouri v.
00:38:11.860Biden ruling is to do a sort of middle out restructuring, whereas instead of having things run out of CISA at the DHS or or or or the State Department's Global Engagement Center, it would be run out of a what they what they're calling a middleware company.
00:38:27.860A censorship service provider who sits in the middle between the user and the platform, but is intermediated by essentially intelligence agency and government and major government figures who inform that middleware censorship companies policies and filtering mechanisms.
00:38:48.860So NewsGuard is an example of this. NewsGuard, of course, has Rick Stengel on its board who ran the Global Engagement Center at the State Department.
00:38:56.860Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was the head of NATO for five years in the Obama administration.
00:39:01.860Tom Ridge, the former head of DHS and General Michael V.
00:39:05.860Hayden, who is a former four star general head of the NSA and head of the CIA.
00:39:10.860So that's who's in control, essentially, of the middleware censorship provider who is now also doing censorship compliance for this new European Digital Services Act.
00:39:20.860They're trying to get congressional regulations to mandate middleware so that it looks like it's coming from the private sector when indeed it's again being intermediated by these intelligence cutouts.
00:39:32.860Very interesting. And we'll get into that more after the break and maybe name names and get into some of the more nefarious and frankly some in some cases ridiculous some cases both actors in this space.
00:39:47.860But indeed, NewsGuard and these other sort of middleware companies seem like a sort of freelance version of HR, you know, the compliance lady for hire, as it were, that for some reason, I mean, it astonishes me that this business model works, but it just shows how companies and organizations, institutions just feel compelled to follow these best censorship practices.
00:40:17.860When in fact, they might not need to do so. Do you have any idea on how, you know, how the business model works?
00:40:24.860We're running out of time for this segment, so we'll get into that later. Talk about NewsGuard. Talk about some of the true scumbags in this space. And there are many.
00:40:33.860Renee, you're one of them, but there are many. We'll talk about the scumbags when we get on and then talk about maybe some of the broader connotations of what's the geopolitics of censorship.
00:40:44.860That's coming up. We've got Mike Benz, much more. I'm Darren Beattie filling in for Jack Posobiec. We'll see you very shortly after the break.
00:40:51.860I'm always listening to Human Events with Jack Posobiec.
00:40:57.860Welcome back. I'm Darren Beattie filling in for Jack Posobiec. We're having a fascinating conversation with the one and only Mike Benz on the censorship industry.
00:41:08.860Before the break, an organization called NewsGuard was briefly mentioned. Now, Revolver.News did a major piece on NewsGuard quite some time ago.
00:41:18.860And for those in the audience who don't understand what this is, I mean, there are a lot of ridiculous things going on in the censorship world.
00:41:25.860But NewsGuard is pretty remarkable even by censorship standards. This is an organization that's basically a company.
00:41:35.860And for a small fee, in fact, it's probably not that small, they will give you the privilege of censoring information for you effectively or using their judgment to tell you whether something is acceptable or not.
00:41:51.860You know, appropriating this kind of weird health analogy of giving things nutrition labels.
00:41:57.860This information is good. It's yummy. This information is apple. If it, oh, something is supporting open borders. This is yummy. If something is naughty, this is no good. That's bad nutrition. That's junk food.
00:42:12.860You're not allowed to eat that little boy. That's effectively what they're saying with these nutrition labels.
00:42:18.860So just the idea of a company that would have the chutzpah to basically say, you pay me and I can tell you what information is suitable for you to consume is pretty remarkable.
00:42:31.860But it gets even crazier when you look at the people whose judgment you would actually be paying for in terms of being able to censor what you see.
00:42:40.860And Mike mentioned some of these. There's Michael Hayden, who is a notorious scumbag.
00:42:45.860This is the guy who led the NSA under its notorious and illegal spying activities exposed by Edward Snowden, which I believe he basically lied about.
00:42:56.860So you're having some of the top liars and crooks in the country, Michael Hayden, Rick Stengel, who is a self-described propagandist for the Biden regime and the Global Engagement Center,
00:43:09.860a who's who of censorious, discredited, and disgraced scumbags.
00:43:15.860And these are the people that you for a small fee can have tell you what information you're allowed to consume and what you're not allowed to consume is quite amazing.
00:43:25.860And so it's hard to imagine how this business model is sustainable.
00:43:29.860Mike, tell us a little bit more about some of the planning you discovered behind the scenes on how they're going to force this ridiculous business model down our throats.
00:43:40.860Right. So there's a few ways they're looking at it.
00:43:43.860So you'd mentioned in the previous segment a figure out of the Stanford Internet Observatory named Renee DiResta, who began her career in the Central Intelligence Agency.
00:43:53.860She did a talk in 2021 with her fellow censorship heavyweight Kate Starbird, who runs the University of Washington, essentially the Bill Gates University Censorship Lab and Francis Fukuyama, the sort of notorious end of history theoretician about how to create a competitive middleware space.
00:44:16.860That is how to how to pump up the revenues of companies like NewsGuard and create a bunch of different NewsGuard type spinoff companies.
00:44:26.860And in their hour and a half talk planning how to build out a commercial industry around this, they all agreed that it wouldn't be able to survive commercially on its own because no market exists for it.
00:44:41.860So they contemplated two different ways to pay for it.
00:44:44.860One of them would be to have a congressional mandate so that rather than having the government compel censorship, which would be a violation of the First Amendment.
00:44:57.540The government could instead compel companies of a certain size like Twitter or Facebook or YouTube to adopt middleware disinformation compliance services like one of a menu of NewsGuard type companies.
00:45:15.420And so it would lock in a commercial market so that even if those companies didn't want their services, they would be forced to under some sort of FTC regulation.
00:45:26.420If they wanted to have their license to operate as a large social media platform, they would need a disinformation compliance service like NewsGuard.
00:45:34.480Another way is if they contemplated would be to have the tech companies pay for it themselves if they could be sufficiently pressured, coerced or crisis induced through essentially crisis PR to have the companies pay out of a corporate social responsibility budget, essentially a kind of donation to these companies.
00:45:56.980So basically, they know the free market wouldn't allow a censorship mercenary company, so they're compelling it.
00:46:03.060And these are, again, intelligence figures who are driving this fake free market.
00:46:07.240So this is effectively an ESG for censorship is what they're anticipating in terms of getting the tech companies to cover it.
00:46:17.780And I think many people listening to this simply don't understand how disturbing, but also how stupid and ridiculous this is.
00:46:25.840This woman, Renee DiResta, yeah, she was CIA, she was all this, but she cut her teeth as part of an organization that made a big deal out of Russian interference, the Russia, Russia, Russia.
00:46:38.160And it turns out the organization that she was affiliated with actually itself created fake Russian bots and then had those bots support a candidate they didn't like, whom they then turned to say that person is a Russian agent candidate.
00:46:55.720And then on top of that said, well, this is evidence of the Russia problem that, of course, justifies future funding for their operations.
00:47:04.760When she was caught red-handed doing that, she got involved with all the things that you've been reporting on, the election integrity partnership.
00:47:13.200I've seen this in universities, them doing lectures on how some revolver news stories that you know something about, the color revolution stories and how they developed.
00:47:25.340They did a whole mock-up on how this works.
00:47:28.480And, of course, now that that's been exposed, the thing about these people, they're mediocrities who can never experience career death.
00:47:36.780It's really incredible to see these mediocrities fail from one fake job to the next.
00:47:42.980And it's part of the frustrating thing is you think you get them in one place and they pop up in another place.
00:47:48.040And now her latest script is forcing institutions effectively to pay for the privilege of having their censorship decisions decided for them by the likes of Michael Hayden, Rick Stangle, and other disgraced scumbags.