In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, host Russell Brand sits down with journalist Mike Benz to discuss why he thinks Mike Benz should have been given a job in the Biden administration. They talk about how powerful interests converge around power, and the role of journalists in helping to uncover them.
00:03:30.000Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:03:33.000My guest today makes me want to become a producer.
00:03:36.000Like, I want to step into the shadows and make the show bring your receipts with Mike Benz.
00:03:42.000You might have seen Mike Benz on Joe Rogan.
00:03:44.000You might have seen him on Tucker Carlson.
00:03:45.000You could have seen him in a variety of places.
00:03:47.000We've been talking to him for a couple of years, and it's Mike Benz who makes me believe in independent media.
00:03:53.000He makes me believe that platforms like Rumble and X can and already have changed the world.
00:03:58.000That doesn't mean they're perfect and that they're not subject to their own biases and their own challenges, but they're certainly not the same challenges and biases that impact organizations like Google, Alphabet, YouTube and Meta, Facebook.
00:04:10.000They're essentially part of the media machine.
00:04:13.000Mike Benz helps you to understand how those relationships operate and work and what the significance are of so many news stories and how they point to the convergence of various interests around power.
00:04:26.000In fact, the phrase that I came up with that I'm pretty pleased with in this conversation was Mike Benz helps you to put together a mosaic and with that mosaic you can see the silhouette of power because the blob, the term that he generally uses, is a sort of an amorphous plastic mass that Today we talk about Russia Today,
00:04:52.000where it's banned and why it's banned, big tech power, and a story that Mike's just broken about Reuters receiving $300 million of Biden administration money in one way or another, in ways that are quite diffuse.
00:05:03.000It's not like a sort of flat up sort of bribery thing, but even his explanation of that gives you an indication, excuse me, how long have I had this cough, by the way, of how power works.
00:05:13.000If you're watching us on YouTube, we'll be with you for the first 15 minutes, then we'll be exclusively streaming on Rumble, where we can speak freely.
00:05:21.000Now, if you don't have Rumble Premium yet, get Rumble Premium right now, because then you get an ad-free experience, and you also get access to additional content, not only from me, actually, but from Bongino and from Crowder and Greenwald and a whole host of brilliant Rumble content creators.
00:05:37.000If you're watching us on Locals, we continue to put everything we're making from Rumble Premium also on Locals, so there's no need for you to buy both.
00:05:47.000Probably just pick the one that's most reasonably priced, I suppose, and there's a link in the description describing that to you and for you right now.
00:05:56.000Be with us on this beautiful journey into a better and brighter education with Mike Benz, one of the people I believe who is so good, he should have been given a job in the administration.
00:06:06.000He's really up there with your Bhattacharias and your Marty Makary's.
00:06:10.000And the people that have emerged, but he's more, I suppose, in the deep state corruption space.
00:06:15.000He even tells one story about a board that's created to bring down disparage and dispute, corrupt journalistic reporting, and everyone on the board has got secondary and conflicted interests.
00:06:32.000And if you can supplement this kind of information with Christian insights, I believe you are arming yourself Putting on that helmet of salvation.
00:06:41.000Holding that sword of truth and that shield of righteousness.
00:06:44.000No, it's breastplate of righteousness.
00:06:45.000If you have a theological undergirding to accompany this deep education provided by the likes of Mike Benz, you are going to be fully equipped to face a dangerous world.
00:07:06.000Hey, okay then, let's get into this brilliant conversation where I even cover drones.
00:07:11.000I cover the sort of new administration and we cover in incredible depth the ongoing relationships between legacy media, state interests and corporate state interests that amalgamate together to be the blob.
00:07:22.000It's a brilliant Mike Benz conversation.
00:07:33.000You've been up all night because of the Reuters story, which I now know is that in various ways, the Biden administration donated 300 million to Reuters.
00:07:42.000Then Reuters won journalistic accolades for their reporting on particular on Elon Musk.
00:07:50.000And I suppose what you're suggesting is, is it may ask this question, is this the way that people in our space would assume that Bill Gates making all of those donations to various media organizations, including the BBC, is to one way or another, directly or indirectly, generate favorable reporting. is to one way or another, directly or indirectly, generate Thank you.
00:08:10.000Well, we don't know that to be the case in this particular case, but there's a very bad look here and a very bad moral hazard, which is that these are government contracts.
00:08:24.000It's one of the two main newswire agencies that provide on-the-ground reporting or stories that the wider media universe sources its stories from.
00:08:39.000So state, local, and national news around the world will source their stories from Reuters, and Reuters has been around forever.
00:08:50.000It's got a very strange relationship with the U.S. State Department and CIA, having been busted several times as working together to filter false news stories to advance U.S. interests on that front.
00:09:10.000A Biden administration who systematically targeted all of Elon Musk's businesses.
00:09:16.000So there were 11 different federal government agencies that targeted them.
00:09:21.000There's the Justice Department, the Department of Transportation, the SEC, the FTC, the FCC, and on and on.
00:09:32.000Many people saw this as a political hit job on Elon Musk because he was backing Donald Trump for president and because he had vocally criticized the Biden administration.
00:09:44.000He was not invited to electric car conferences at the White House, despite having the industry leader.
00:09:51.000There were conflicts between him and the UAW, the United Auto Workers Union, which is a major Biden backer.
00:09:58.000And so Biden actually, if folks recall, about a year ago or two years ago, spoke from the podium at the White House calling for government agencies to look into Elon Musk.
00:10:11.000So 11 different government agencies filed actions to take those businesses down, and Reuters, which is a major media conglomerate, We did a systematic investigation of all of Elon Musk's companies at the same time these government agencies were investigating those companies and doing investigative journalism hit pieces on Elon Musk.
00:10:38.000And you can obviously see how that helps those government agencies.
00:10:41.000It helps them find evidence to bring up in court.
00:10:44.000It helps them win the battle of public opinion so that these are publicly favorable actions to bring against Elon Musk because it's reported by Reuters.
00:10:53.000Now, we don't know that to be the case that there is any sort of pay to play here.
00:10:58.000What I'm suggesting is that The news coverage of Reuters, as well as many other media companies, when they have other lines of business getting government contracts, it's obviously in their interest to do favors for those government agencies in order to secure those contracts.
00:11:16.000And there are many examples of that happening with those hard smoking guns.
00:11:21.000The reason I dug this up and put this out is because I think it warrants the investigation to see whether something like that may have happened here.
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00:12:56.000As is so often the case, the connections are curiously diffuse to the point where you can't irrefutably say the relationship between the Biden administration and Reuters means when it comes to certain subjects, you 100% cannot trust Reuters on these matters you 100% cannot trust Reuters on these matters because it's likely that through various biases and necessary financial relationships, their reporting is coloured to favour the agenda of the powerful or amplify the agenda of the powerful.
00:13:22.000their reporting In fact, forgive me dragging this immediately back to myself, but it makes me think about on the day after two British media organisations working together over a series of years, published allegations attributed to anonymised published allegations attributed to anonymised sources.
00:13:49.000The head of the regulatory and governmental body in charge of social media wrote to X and Rumble and YouTube and said demonetise Russell Brand.
00:14:02.000And you can't prove a direct relationship between the media groups, CRISP, Logically AI, these peculiar sort of NGO organisations that take government contracts and appear to work on behalf of the government on a variety of subjects.
00:14:18.000It's very difficult to find all of the pieces in the smoking guns.
00:14:22.000But what you can see is there's just a convergence of interests and a preferred direction of travel.
00:14:28.000We were reporting in our live show, Mike, yesterday that...
00:14:33.000On your story about the various Burisma board members and it just eventually a kind of mosaic appears in which the silhouette of globalist power you refer to and many others, I know you don't take credit for that term, the blob becomes identifiable.
00:14:54.000And like the same with the Bill Gates making donations to the WHO or the BBC or George Soros' various business interests that may or not be beneficial when there's a coup or a war in Ukraine.
00:15:08.000It's not like you can't just go, aha, but you can go, hmm.
00:15:12.000It's more of a hmm than an aha, isn't it?
00:15:21.000And so, you know, for example, it's a very common thing for prosecutors to cite news stories as evidence to the judges, because prosecutors are, they have an investigative arm, but it's a very limited capacity.
00:15:40.000Just again, for the fullness of facts here, most of these $300 million in government contracts from the Biden administration to Reuters were not to Reuters, the news media LLC or their specific news side.
00:15:56.000Reuters, like many media conglomerates, has a variety of services and solutions that they provide beyond just the news because Their role in the news has given them proprietary access to various things.
00:16:09.000It allows them to do network intelligence or data management services or investigative services that can assist law enforcement.
00:16:17.000So, for example, while they do receive government contracts from places like the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which I should note is sort of a hotbed for State Department and CIA coordination with outside media, Reuters does have Millions of dollars in grants for that.
00:16:36.000The lion's share of them are for places like something called Thomson Reuters Special Services, which is for network intelligence and data management in order to help the defense, the intelligence, and law enforcement agencies sift through news and be able to have a hub and a portal To be able to use all of Reuters' proprietary data and resources.
00:17:06.000And so the investigative news media arm is a much smaller slice of that.
00:17:11.000But the analogy that I draw here is this is exactly what we saw with Facebook.
00:17:16.000So Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Weaponization Subcommittee, subpoenaed Facebook in March of this year For something called the Facebook files, where we got the internal emails between Mark Zuckerberg and Nick Clegg, who is the, you know, former UK Labor Party fellow who became the head of public policy at Facebook.
00:17:39.000Public policy is where censorship policies are You know, coordinated and set at Facebook.
00:17:47.000And Nick Clegg tells Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook needs to think creatively about ways to be receptive to the Biden administration's demands for censoring COVID claims, COVID origins, COVID vaccine claims, because Mark Zuckerberg said, do we really have to do this?
00:18:05.000And Nick Clegg tells him we need to think creatively about ways to be receptive to their demands for censorship.
00:18:11.000Because we have bigger fish to fry on multiple policy fronts.
00:18:16.000And at the time, Facebook was highly reliant on the Biden State Department to defend Facebook against the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, as well as on the Biden administration to fend off threats to Facebook on their data monopolies, on their advertising revenues, on the regulatory stakes.
00:18:41.000So we know that at the very, very highest levels of Facebook, they made an adjustment to their core algorithm for distribution of news because of side products That impacted or side issues that impacted Facebook's business model much more than simply,
00:19:02.000you know, censoring claims about COVID. And the question is whether there's a similar conflict of interest or similar conversations that happened at Reuters in the sense that Reuters They didn't just do these stories on Elon Musk and all of the businesses that were simultaneously being targeted by Reuters' government customers, their clients.
00:19:24.000They won the Pulitzer Prize this year for their work exposing Elon Musk's misconduct at these different businesses, allegedly, right?
00:19:34.000This is what they report in their news series.
00:19:38.000And so, you know, this was high impact in investigative reporting that tilts the mind in ways, direct or indirect, of the judges, of the juries, of public opinion.
00:19:51.000And this is coming on the heels, I should note, of just two weeks ago, an absolutely astounding scandal that broke around USAID's funding of an organization called the OCCRP.
00:20:06.000I don't know if you or the audience are familiar with this, but can I hop into this?
00:20:15.000So it's a long acronym, OCCRP, but what it stands for is the Corruption Reporting Project.
00:20:23.000Basically, this is a consortium of 200 investigative journalists with 50 different media organizations and 70 different media partners.
00:20:38.000They have done some of the most high-impact investigative news scandal reporting over the past several years.
00:20:46.000They published the Panama Papers as well as many others.
00:20:50.000They've gotten proprietary access to hacked documents somehow to do these stories.
00:20:56.000Now, it came out two weeks ago that they receive 50% of their funding on the sly from USAID and the State Department, and that the State Department has a veto right over the senior and that the State Department has a veto right over the senior staff of the Corruption
00:21:18.000Now, this corruption reporting project was started in 2008 by the State Department in Bosnia as a pool of U.S. taxpayer funds to write hit pieces about political opponents In the newly sovereign Balkan countries that the US was working to fold into the Western political orbit.
00:21:44.000And so you had these oligarchs, you had these power factions that needed to be discredited.
00:21:48.000And so the US government paid investigative journalists.
00:21:52.000Now this is something that I just broke Last night on stream, but I haven't actually published it.
00:21:58.000That was to a private audience, but I'd like to mention it here.
00:22:01.000There's a deeper level to this scandal, which I think connects to this Reuters, Elon Musk, Biden administration scandal, which is that if you go to USA.gov and you look at their pages, their grant pages for the corruption reporting project they were funding, one of those pages shows $20 million given To these investigative reporters in Central and Eastern Europe.
00:22:29.000And it talks about the highlights of the achievements of the program.
00:22:34.000And the highlights include that the result of this reporting generated $4.5 billion in seized assets and fines 538 policy changes to local governments and local civil society actions.
00:22:56.00021 sackings or firings of government officials, including a president and a prime minister, And 456 arrests or indictments of targets of the investigative reporting.
00:23:18.000And they are bragging about the return on investment for funding outside journalists to write hit pieces.
00:23:26.000$20 million netted them $4.5 billion in seized assets.
00:23:32.000$20 million netted them 21 government officials being fired, including a full-on regime change, firing a president and a prime minister.
00:23:43.000And $20 million purchased 456 political enemies of the State Department being arrested or indicted by local prosecutors.
00:23:53.000So this is the US government paying on the sly Independent journalists, this is the largest consortium in the world of independent journalists all working, of investigative journalists all working together, in order deliberately to write hit pieces that will help the State Department by getting their political opponents arrested and bankrupted.
00:24:18.000We can't keep streaming this on YouTube because YouTube are part of the blob.
00:24:24.000YouTube, Google, Meta, Facebook, these are part of the conglomeration of organisations that create a 360 sphere of augmented reality.
00:24:48.000Does this connect to the Trusted News Initiative?
00:24:50.000And while you were saying this, Mike, I was thinking, had the Democrats won this election, we'd be in some serious, serious trouble.
00:24:59.000The fact that they didn't, given the speculative likelihood that these type of contracts that you're describing and these types of relationship are not unique, and therefore that influence, whether it's in the Facebook example and the Reuters example, whether it's in the Facebook example and the Reuters example, because even though these examples are particular and pertain to specific time frames, it's likely that they are just visible nodes of a network of relationships that amount to an almost 360 it's likely that they
00:25:35.000It's astonishing that independent media has been able to overcome that, even if you were to take just the one issue of the recent US election and, And I shudder to think of what would happen if there hadn't been the intervention of the Maga Maha election.
00:26:16.000Two, if you are surprised that the election went the way that it did, given the indications that there is control over information in so many of these sanctioned news spaces.
00:26:30.000Yeah, the Trusted News Initiative, I mean, even from its name, it's about creating this delineation between...
00:26:37.000News that's real news you can trust and news that is fake news that should not be regarded as part of the news industry or part of news distribution.
00:26:49.000Because if something is formally designated as not really being news, then you're not censoring the news when you censor that outlet.
00:26:59.000And this has been the MO of institutions like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, is to create rating systems of how much you can trust these various news agencies so that AI algorithms can filter them out on social media feeds, so that advertiser Programmatic ad dollars have a filter to automatically block advertisements from going to low trust news sites.
00:27:29.000And then you look at what's actually happening with These news rating agencies like NewsGuard and Global Disinformation Index, and turns out they all have government contracts or work with the government.
00:27:41.000NewsGuard got a $750,000 Pentagon contract.
00:27:46.000Global Disinformation Index is tied into the The State Department Global Engagement Center.
00:27:53.000NewsGuard was also a part of this White House Information Integrity Working Group that was partnered with 26 different Biden administration, federal government agencies.
00:28:04.000And on the board of NewsGuard, determining who the news is, was Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the CIA, the former head of the NSA, and the former four-star general.
00:28:17.000Tom Ridge, the former head of DHS. Rick Stengel, the former head of the censorship arm of the State Department, the Global Engagement Center, and Anders Vogt Rasmussen, the head of NATO. So you had the head of NATO, the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, a four-star general, the head of DHS, and the head of the State Department Censorship Center, determining the credibility of outside news agencies.
00:28:39.000I mean, we used to call this Operation Mockingbird.
00:28:42.000Now we call it, you know, trusted news.
00:28:46.000No wonder that they have to insert trusted news initiative, information integrity, and news guard into their names to mask at the outset the plainly nefarious and manipulative intent of these organizations.
00:29:04.000Mike, a minute ago you were going to share your screen, so I'm guessing you want to do that, because the next thing I wanted to talk about is, like, I've got a few follow-up questions, but if you were going to share your screen, I'd love to see that.
00:29:17.000Oh, I don't think I hit the button on that, but if there's something you'd like me to bring up, I can bring it up.
00:29:23.000Well, all right, I'll just move on with my next question, right?
00:29:26.000Because when he was saying that, I was thinking about the, you know, utilizing news reporting subsequently for judicial matters.
00:29:34.000It reminded me of the New York Times, a pair of New York Times stories.
00:29:39.000One, there was a convenient moment, and I think we discussed it before, where they revealed the CIA bases in Ukraine.
00:29:45.000So it was sort of plainly a sanctioned moment and indicated a relationship between the CIA and the New York Times.
00:29:50.000And then separately, but similarly, when Jack Teixeira was arrested, the New York Times were kind of present at his arrest.
00:29:58.000And I sort of wonder what that indicates in terms of relationship between sort of law enforcement and Judiciary and old school media.
00:30:34.000But the fact is we know that this happened in the Hunter Biden laptop censorship scandal because the FBI was the entity in possession of the Hunter Biden laptop and the FBI was monitoring The journalists at the New York Post as they were developing and on the eve of publishing that story.
00:30:55.000And then the Aspen Institute exercise is conducted just two weeks before the story breaks with people from the FBI present.
00:31:06.000And suddenly news organizations, social media company, trust and safety sensor squads, Think Tank, bigwigs, and the intelligence state,
00:31:22.000the FBI, the domestic intelligence arm of the U.S. government, are all sitting together in a tabletop exercise, playing out the best way that they can all work together to censor an upcoming story about Hunter Biden and leaked documents from electronics that he had possession over.
00:31:45.000And even pertaining to a scandal of a gas company that Hunter Biden was involved in.
00:31:54.000So, you know, you don't really need to squint too hard to say, unless you're dealing with a sort of Nostradamus of epic proportions, frankly, if they had that capability, they would outperform the Nancy Pelosi stock tracker.
00:32:12.000But somehow they knew the exact story that only the FBI had access to.
00:32:20.000You can't the FBI can't just leak documents on, you know, on its investigations to report.
00:32:27.000I mean, this is the sort of thing that we put people in jail for when Edward Snowden does it or when it's alleged that someone like Julian Assange does it.
00:32:36.000But when our own FBI does it and it advances the Justice Department's goal, well, the Justice Department is not going to arrest their own FBI for helping them out.
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00:34:15.000The recent murder of General Igor Kirillov in Russia appears to suggest, again, ulterior relationships between NATO countries and their deep state operatives and Ukraine.
00:34:33.000Similarly, it's being reported by legacy media as a kind of Ukrainian victory, an embarrassment for Putin.
00:34:41.000But even when I watch Russia Today's reporting, Mike, I was thinking of you because they talk about George Soros.
00:34:51.000And it's difficult not to think that the reason that Russia Today has been banned from trusted news initiative organizations like Google, YouTube, they're one of the members of that group, that it's not in order to protect you from disinformation, but it's in order to prevent you from gaining access to information that might make you but it's in order to prevent you from gaining access to information that might make you lose trust in the media organizations that are Government.
00:35:17.000Generally speaking, it seems really that there's a strong bifurcation, dichotomy and separation between government interests and the interests of the people that they're purported to represent.
00:35:31.000That's the problem that's being exposed and revealed again and again and again.
00:35:36.000What are your thoughts on that assassination?
00:35:41.000Well, I don't know too much the particulars of the assassination to be able to really weigh in with, you know, an opinion I'm confident in.
00:35:49.000But on the Russia Today point, it's really an extraordinary story, the story of the U.S. government's relationship with Russia today, because it's The argument we're making against Russia today is the argument that we labeled the Soviet Union an autocracy for doing during the Cold War,
00:36:11.000saying that there was an iron curtain that had descended over Central and Eastern Europe because media from other countries in the West was not allowed.
00:36:22.000And now we are drawing a silicone curtain here in the West to prevent Outside media from penetrating our information space.
00:36:32.000What we said for the entirety of the 20th century, and we said this with a little elbow grease in it on human rights violation grounds, essentially we were alleging that these were humanitarian crimes and countries should be sanctioned unless they allow in state media from foreign countries, i.e.
00:36:54.000I have been very fascinated by the Russia Today I'm going to call it a scandal, frankly.
00:37:00.000I think that the diplomatic blowback to the U.S. on what they're doing right now about Russia today has not even begun to be felt because the story is still in process.
00:37:09.000And I think by the time it's over, it will be in the history books.
00:37:14.000I remember very vividly reading the CIA assessment of Russian interference on social media after the 2016 election.
00:37:22.000In January 2017, just two weeks before Trump took office, the CIA published an intelligence assessment that would come to be the basis of the entire intelligence community that Trump's 2016 election was not really legitimate because Russia had interfered on social media.
00:37:41.000And before they moved to the bots and trolls argument, there was this like 16, 17 page CIA memo that was published that started this whole thing.
00:37:54.000You know, big screaming headline, Russian interference, a lot of sort of table setting about how it's in Russia's interest to manipulate U.S. social media, but nothing actually in the body of the memo that showed that Russia had interfered.
00:38:12.000There was no suggestion of bots or trolls or anything like that at the beginning.
00:38:17.000All they had was like a two-page appendix affixed at the very end of it, which showed the increase in reach of Russia Today and Sputnik on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, as opposed to their historical relevance and reach,
00:38:36.000and as opposed to places like BBC and NPR. And they argued at first that That RT and Sputnik being able to have social media accounts that were gaining in popularity was effectively Russian state interference in U.S. elections because they were gaining a following.
00:38:59.000People were retweeting them, including members of the public and members of the political class.
00:39:04.000And so Russian state media was tilting the election.
00:39:10.000That's not some covert intelligence operation, or else you have to label the BBC. If you are doing influence operations on behalf of the British Crown, you need to register under Farah here in the US. In fact, Nina Jankovic The disinformation governance boards are that sort of fell out in disgrace.
00:39:37.000She's now at the Center for Information Resilience, which is a British censorship influence shop that seeks to alter U.S. policies on social media governance.
00:39:51.000And because that's what it seeks to do, and the UK is a foreign country, She needed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
00:40:00.000So if you're going to argue that Russia is doing an influence operation, well then, so is the CBC in Canada.
00:40:07.000So is the BBC in the UK. So is every state broadcaster.
00:40:12.000But the fact is, they don't care about those because they parrot what the CIA says.
00:40:17.000They parrot what the State Department says.
00:40:21.000I mean, it's really a case of Being a sore loser in the information war and trying to change the rules of the game in order to box your opponent out from being able to show up to the match, you know, I sort of think of it,
00:40:37.000there was a famous example in the 1990s when I was growing up of Tonya Harding kneecapping, you know, her political, I'm sorry, her figure skating adversary ahead of the Olympics by hiring a Basically a hitman to take out her kneecaps because she didn't want to lose to...
00:40:57.000Was it Nancy Kerrigan or whoever the main figure was?
00:41:01.000But here you have a figure skating match between U.S. media and Russian media.
00:41:08.000And they're competing for hearts and minds in an open information system.
00:41:12.000You're not even talking about troll farms and covert influence.
00:41:17.000This is just the, they have a Twitter account just like everybody else.
00:41:22.000And He who gets retweeted the most wins the influence war, so to speak.
00:41:30.000And this we call the rules of the road for the liberal rules-based international order for the entirety of the Cold War in the first 15 years of the 21st century.
00:41:42.000In fact, you would get sanctioned if you didn't allow that.
00:41:45.000The Biden administration sanctioned Iran for having its government censor news institutions in Iran.
00:41:53.000The Trump administration censored North Korea, I'm sorry, sanctioned North Korea for censoring journalists.
00:42:02.000But we are now, I mean, in theory, what we're doing to RT should get the United States Kicked off of the United States dollar if we were held up to the standard that we hold on other countries.
00:42:16.000But this is very obviously a case of if you can't beat them, hire someone to beat them up.
00:42:25.000And that way you don't need to compete on game day.
00:42:30.000Scott Ritter had his home raided by the FBI, as well as several other journalists, when the State Department and the FBI teamed up to argue that anyone who has overt links to Russia today needs to be investigated for potential when the State Department and the FBI teamed up to argue that anyone who has And that justifies an FBI seizure of their cell phones and home electronics.
00:43:00.000Yeah, particularly if the links are overt, that in a way, through its own candour and explicitness, means that it's something, as you say, that's the participation in the open information world.
00:43:20.000And it feels to me, Mike, that what we're witnessing is...
00:43:25.000As these media spaces evolve, it's being gradually and in fact too slowly appreciated and learned by institutions that were accustomed to using centralised media resources, that those centralised media resources, more rapidly than imagined, are becoming Redundant and eviscerated.
00:43:51.000And therefore, in order to compete, as you say, they have to use the Tanya Harding kneecap method rather than the open competition in public.
00:44:02.000And in fact, now that you've made that claim, you can almost see it continually.
00:44:07.000In the pandemic, instead of a public information campaign along the lines of Hey, we've got this medication that we're developing.
00:44:23.000It's probably beneficial if you've got comorbidities and you're particularly vulnerable to respiratory conditions.
00:44:31.000There's no data on how effective it is with children and we might need to be careful about unforeseen side effects.
00:44:40.000Instead of that, they shamed people that didn't take it.
00:44:43.000And that's, I suppose, why there are so many people that consider that there is much more to that story than meets the eye and is able to magnetise and attract all sorts of other ideas.
00:44:54.000And it is then difficult to discern what stories that are connected to that are true because what happened publicly and in plain sight was so dark...
00:45:05.000That you can't rule out really anything.
00:45:09.000Now I can see that you're looking for some facts just by watching your eye movement.
00:45:31.000An additional point on the Russia today and what you had said about how You know, they were publishing things that you just don't hear on Western media or that it almost seems as if you're not allowed to hear on Western media.
00:45:50.000And so there's an obvious Western interest in preventing Westerners from being able to hear true factual information.
00:45:59.000Because if you can simply box out anyone who's not in the club from publishing it, then you don't have to worry about anyone On the inside of your country knowing it.
00:46:10.000And so I wanted to give an example here.
00:46:21.000So what I've pulled up here is the USAID disinformation primer, a 92-page Censorship blueprint document that was published by the Biden administration's USAID in February 2021, just one month into Biden's term in office.
00:46:40.000Now, understand that USAID funds billions of dollars of support to media institutions to create a, as you said before, a 360 surround sound of media in countries all over the world.
00:46:57.000To parrot the State Department's preferred narratives circulating in that region to support a particular political candidate.
00:47:05.000We mentioned earlier the scandal of the OCCRP, the Corruption Reporting Project, that was paid by USAID to write hit pieces to get USAID's and the State Department's enemies arrested in those countries.
00:47:20.000And you'll see here, in the USAID, this is the formal US government program, and the funder of billions of dollars to outside media organizations.
00:47:30.000You'll see here, in red underlined and yellow highlight, USAID, the sponsor of the media organizations, instructs the media organizations to, quote, agree policies on strategic silence.
00:47:48.000So, To all collude and work together to agree together as different and competing media organizations that they will agree on strategic silence to not publish information and to collectively boycott and blacklist certain scandals or certain news narratives And this is coming as top-down
00:48:18.000instruction from their government sponsors.
00:48:21.000form a firewall about news stories so that nothing can penetrate the information space, form this, you know, this silicon curtain.
00:48:35.000And so you can see if the media organizations all do what the government says and agree on strategic silence.
00:48:42.000And then a place like Russia Today, which is not sponsored by USAID or is not reliant on the U.S. government for access or favors or contracts like Reuters is, that they might publish a scandal about Joe that they might publish a scandal about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden.
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00:50:10.000You have consensus among the sanctioned news organisations to have an agreed upon silence, which is another word for censorship, or not censorship, like it's controlled information.
00:50:23.000And then censorship is the other component.
00:50:26.000If anyone is reporting on it, censor them.
00:50:28.000Because of new media models, someone like you or me, particularly if we work in conjunction with the legitimacy of your reporting and then additional reach that can be provided by people that...
00:50:41.000Might otherwise, in an old celebrity sphere, have been just posting about sneakers, but now can be posting about sneaky activity of government agencies.
00:50:51.000Suddenly, you've got a new set of relationships and a new challenge.
00:50:56.000And to deal with that, you've got to get into Tonya Harding territory.
00:50:59.000You've got to start hobbling your opponents.
00:51:01.000You've got to start saying, this one's a racist, this one's a rapist, this one's that.
00:51:46.000And also that what would be an instinct of the naturally sceptical would now be legitimised through authentic reporting.
00:51:56.000So someone like me who sees that Nord Stream pipeline and thinks, why would Russia blow up their own economic pipeline that's beneficial to them?
00:52:04.000But, you know, that can just be 360'd out using the template that you just showed us.
00:52:10.000Now you can just have, oh, well, look, you know, Seymour Hoffman's reporting this.
00:52:15.000And then you can talk to Jocko Willink and he goes, yeah, that'd be no problem for a Navy SEAL.
00:52:20.000All of a sudden, like, it's absolutely completely unmanageable so quickly that, yeah, now you need to be able to do things like, like you get this mad stories, like in Australia, they want to censor X, but outside of Australia.
00:52:37.000It's creating so many bizarre dynamics, isn't it?
00:52:42.000It is, and there are these power block consortiums that are working together on it, but on that point of This new constellation, the freedom that you have on X, the freedom that you have on Rumble, the total erosion of trust in legacy media has allowed the breakthrough of stories that are very much against,
00:53:08.000that they would like to form a policy of strategic silence to block out, but unfortunately, there's not enough of them now to control that.
00:53:21.000It made me think actually of another receipt that I think may be useful to the audience if I could share on screen, which, do you see this here?
00:53:38.000So this is from that same USAID February 2021 disinformation, countering disinformation blueprint for, you know, how to, and it's not countering it by counter speech, it's countering it by censorship.
00:53:53.000It's an incredible document because one of the things that it says in here is that we need to censor unfiltered alternative news because unfiltered alternative news frequently produces narratives that impact USAID programming.
00:54:11.000Meaning USAID programming is funding news media in the country to support a political candidate, to support a law being passed in that country's parliament.
00:54:23.000To support the approval of a military base, you name it.
00:54:27.000And the effectiveness of that USAID programming is being undermined because real people organically talking on social media are disagreeing with USAID-funded media institutions.
00:54:39.000And they go through some of the reasons why.
00:54:43.000Let's see if I'm trying to zoom here so it's a little bit unwieldy.
00:54:47.000But Here again is from the US government.
00:54:51.000It says, while information on alternative systems, such as conspiracy theories, may seem farceal or preposterous to an outsider, to users, these spaces enable them to collaborate and validate their own claims And interpretations of the world that differ from mainstream sources.
00:55:10.000Now, mind you, they're saying this in the context of why we need a formal disinformation program, a whole-of-society program funded by USAID, partnered with private sector companies, NGOs, universities, and media organizations in order to stop this from happening.
00:55:28.000And they're saying the problem is, is unfiltered news allows people To collaborate and validate their own claims and interpretations of the world that differ from mainstream sources.
00:55:42.000With this, individuals contribute to their own research, to the larger discussion, collectively reviewing and validating each other to create a populist expertise that justifies, shapes, and supports their alternative beliefs.
00:55:58.000So what USAID is putting squarely in the target For them to digitally assassinate is the very construct that we just talked about, that there is an ecosystem that allows us to do our own research, to collaborate, to contribute to a larger discussion, to collectively review each other's work, and to validate each other's work, and to create a subject matter expertise.
00:56:29.000That we can then use to justify, shape, and support broader supporting political beliefs.
00:56:35.000That is the very soul of what USAID, which I should note, is one of the most notorious CIA funding conduits and which has been busted As a CIA front dozens of times in its history, and that is supposed to be a humanitarian agency to support international economic development.
00:57:02.000This is what they are saying, that the very existence of what you just laid out is what needs to be nuked from the internet because it's undermining the State Department's control.
00:57:18.000You can see how organically your next thought when attempting to undertake such a project is what would legitimise that level of censure.
00:57:28.000And you have to start pointing to child pornography, information that leads to violence.
00:57:36.000So it's clear that they've done that algebra in advance and then they have to find ways of making connections online.
00:57:47.000I remember when I learned, first of all, and it's just an obvious thing, really, that my audience were ahead of me, is when I think about, it was pre-pandemic, I think, Mike, there was a story about a Facebook whistleblower and how this Facebook whistleblower had come out against Facebook and was saying, you know, Facebook, I work at Facebook and I'm seeing how dangerous it is, you know, and I was like, yeah, finally, someone's standing up to Facebook.
00:58:11.000Then I saw the comments to the content we made.
00:58:13.000Everyone's going, this person is being used to legitimize censorship.
00:58:19.000And sure enough, as the story unfolded, the legitimacy of that whistleblower became more and more questionable.
00:58:27.000And indeed, the audience, in the way you said, populist expertise.
00:58:31.000You know, it's interesting because you can see that that What you were citing there is written to condemn it.
00:58:37.000They're creating, they're validating, but validating means make valid, and verifying, and that means make true, and expertise, that means a deep understanding, and populist means en masse, but they're trying to use all these things pejoratively to prevent their opponent, which is everyone and everything, overwhelming their centralised corrupt sovereignty.
00:59:03.000Because doctrinally, the State Department, which USAID serves, USAID capacity builds the institutions that help the State Department's foreign policy goal.
00:59:13.000And they've doctrinally labeled populism an attack on democracy.
00:59:19.000Well, USAID is a democracy promotion organization.
00:59:22.000So if something is an attack on democracy, they promote democracy by neutralizing that attack.
00:59:29.000So it's when they Put populist expertise as an italicized internal jargon term.
00:59:38.000They are saying this is a bad guy, subject matter expert.
00:59:44.000They are not allowed to become subject matter experts in their own way of thinking, because that allows them to build out an ecosystem of political thought that may take them in a direction we don't want our country to go in, or we don't want a foreign country to go in.
01:00:00.000And so it's a war on the ability to even have expertise in a field that, if you had expertise in it, you would know what they were up to, or you would know what's wrong with their policies.
01:00:14.000Everything Bobby Kennedy published in the Wuhan cover-up, or the real Anthony Fauci, is populist expertise in the public health corruption space.
01:00:27.000Everything that I publish about the censorship industry, these are all true receipts.
01:00:34.000They come from these organizations themselves, but it is a populist expertise.
01:00:40.000And so you can justify killing the expertise and knowledge by saying that it's being used by populists and we have a doctrinal mission to take out populism, to stamp out populism.
01:00:54.000And so They're trying to get to the very soul of the distribution of information in order to create that blockade.
01:01:04.000It's intuition plus investigation plus receipts is their worst nightmare because it exposes something as kind of almost beyond satire as...
01:01:20.000They've created a board to oppose corruption, and the members of that board all belong to organisations that are corrupting the information and ensuring that only corrupt investigations are able to take place.
01:02:10.000Kind of like class hatred in my country.
01:02:13.000All sorts of forms of bigotry and expression of that.
01:02:15.000But in this instance, it's being used to oppose the available aggregation of information led by thought leaders, aggregated through online technology, which becomes a sort of an insurmountable obstacle for them.
01:02:31.000They have to somehow create a new discourse that undermines that.
01:03:38.000You see, the way that it goes to work is ingenious in a way.
01:03:42.000And what's so crazy, I mean, you know, I've had so many hippies about me and some of them are way out there.
01:03:48.000Some of them are just sort of like slight mistakes.
01:03:51.000And, you know, there have been moments where, you know, as hardened as I am, they'll publish something that I know did not happen or I know I did not say or something or some event I know I was not at.
01:04:11.000And it is this 1984 type thing where because it is this imprimatur of authoritativeness that I think Americans, Brits, people all over the world have sort of Lazily trusted because it was collectively trusted.
01:04:34.000Thank God Because of shows like yours and information access on X and Rumble, I think one of the most important changes, in the same way that in the 1990s when people used to click on banner ads for scams and pop-ups, and then just over the course of just seeing it so many times and being fooled so many times, you just ignore it.
01:05:01.000And then they come up with a new scam, and then you adapt to that.
01:05:04.000I think there has been this collective evolution of public inoculation against Against lazily trusting mainstream media and also institutions at large that are connected to this larger blob apparatus, including in the biomedical, public health, and biosecurity spaces.
01:05:26.000You mentioned doctors and that phenomenon of saying, you can't opine on this, you're not a doctor.
01:05:32.000But then I think what millions, tens of millions of people have woken up to is, well, the doctors are under threat of losing their medical licenses.
01:05:43.000For not recommending the thing that we're questioning.
01:05:46.000So they are forced to agree on policies of strategic silence, as our own US government agencies insist media companies do.
01:05:56.000So there's what used to be a compelling argument about you don't have the credential, you didn't go to school for this, and then you Once there's enough collective consciousness that the only way to graduate from that school is to agree on strategic silence to not talk about those topics,
01:06:21.000then you realize really the only way, unless you are a brave whistleblower from the inside, is to be an outsider.
01:06:28.000And thank God we now have a much freer internet to be able to, you know, have the outsiders begin to exert enough of a voice that they can influence the course of events on the inside.
01:06:39.000And people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, you know, being the head of NIH now, and Bobby Kennedy at HHS and potentially Kash Patel at FBI, you see these, you know, outside flamethrowers now becoming Not just on the inside, but potentially running those government agencies.
01:06:57.000So this is a real true test of whether reform is really possible.
01:07:03.000And when I started seeing people that I've had on podcasts heading up the NIH, the FDA, and Kash Patel, as you say, the FBI, not that I've had him on, but Bobby at the HHS, I was like, is this actually...
01:07:17.000If they can make this not good, then man, they're powerful.
01:07:21.000Because, you know, and by they, I mean the media, and then you start seeing some weird assassination stuff going on.
01:07:27.000And I, yeah, I really wonder how that's going to...
01:07:33.000Because my understanding of power is that it's mutable, plastic, and able to accommodate that.
01:07:40.000And it was you that taught me the phrase, when they say democracy, they don't mean the electoral process of representing the will of the people.
01:07:47.000They mean a set of institutions that will be guarded and protected and that they ultimately control, whether that's Ukrainian democracy or American or British or whatever.
01:07:56.000And now I... I'm fascinated as to what could happen with people that are just outspoken and radicals.
01:08:04.000Like Bobby Kennedy with what he wrote in the Fauci book, being the head of the HHA. I just can't see how something like that can happen this quickly.
01:08:14.000It's sort of staggering, isn't it, Mike?
01:08:17.000It is, but it's very, very exciting, in particular because of the strength of the outside coalition.
01:08:23.000Because a lot of people felt the same way when Trump was elected president in 2016. This outsider who was calling for these totally Seismic reforms to the U.S. government being made the head of the U.S. government.
01:08:42.000Someone calling for a completely different relationship with the U.S. military's operations in Iraq and Syria being made the commander in chief.
01:08:52.000And we saw how that was stymied through FBI special prosecutors, through impeachment trials, through betrayals of the traditional base of support in Congress.
01:09:04.000And so we're going to see this play out at every agency.
01:09:07.000We're going to see the careers at the FBI and HHS and NIH. We're going to see attempts to do ethics probes, potential criminal investigations.
01:09:19.000We're going to see attempts to bribe or extort the support base that these heads of agencies have, both inside the agencies and on the outside of it.
01:09:34.000In the US, there is a Republican incoming president, a Republican-controlled Senate, a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and a Republican Supreme Court majority.
01:09:47.000And yet, Kash Patel may not get appointed.
01:09:54.000And the reason is, is because there were enough swing people in the middle of the Republican Party on the blob international side who are more financially and politically aligned with Democrats on certain issues.
01:10:10.000That they can tank the actions of the executive branch.
01:10:14.000For example, there's six to nine Republican senators who have sided with the Democrats on the Matt Gaetz issue.
01:10:25.000They may side with the Democrats on the Pete Hegseth issue at DOD. They may decide if Pete Hegseth goes rogue Or John Ratcliffe at CIA goes rogue or Tulsi goes rogue.
01:10:38.000The Senate could initiate impeachment inquiries on the basis of scandalous investigative reporting that may or may not be sponsored.
01:10:52.000So there's going to need to be an unbelievable watchdog eye within the White House Office of Management and Budget, within Doge, and from folks on the outside in order to constantly monitor the dirty tricks that are going to be popping up left, right, and center.
01:11:23.000To my knowledge, I can recall in this weird, never-ending, eternal, fractal spiral of realities that we're living within, with colliding networks of apparent reality.
01:11:35.000Mate, I wanted to ask you, you're like, by the way, the one person who I'd like to see Mike Benz in there somewhere.
01:11:42.000You would think, to the point we made earlier, like the mosaic that can be formed that creates a silhouette of this ghostly blob, you would think that if there's one person that they would want to discredit and take down, and when you...
01:12:00.000Talk about these centralised, these centralised Republicans, you might say, or these international Republicans that might align with the Democrats against Hegs-Eff or Moeley.
01:12:11.000The one you'd think they'd really want to take out would be Bobby Kennedy, given the size and scale of his potential portfolio there at HHS. And given what you're saying, what you're saying is that a likely component would be the journalistic power...
01:12:26.000Of those agencies and organisations and the sort of relationships that exist there, the relationships with big tech.
01:12:31.000And in a way, what's been created through this sort of diffuse systemic corruption and all these sets of relationships that sort of appear and disappear symbiotically in sort of new forms, like this sort of protean plasma of corruption, which, yeah, blob is that in one syllable, isn't it?
01:12:50.000In the end, the only way that was ever going to be opposed was someone like Trump, because the left can't do a version of that.
01:14:12.000Any of your friends that work in areas that make their money steal from that, they've got their faces in the trough, you can forget them, guys.
01:14:32.000They sort of have to, and then, so that they're not confronted with what they're doing, they have to sort of go, yeah, because actually, thinking about it, yeah, I believe it.
01:15:11.000But no, it really is an incredible time to be alive, and we have a true test now.
01:15:16.000If you totally stack the deck and get good people in there, you have support from the outside, you have the popular will, is even that enough to take it on and make a dent in it?
01:15:52.000I've seen a lot of things I don't agree with.
01:15:54.000I don't know exactly what I do agree with.
01:15:56.000Generally speaking, anytime I see drone or UFO or UAP activity, I immediately think it is a military base.
01:16:09.000In this case, I've seen evidence that there are There's a naval base or air force bases in the region, close to where a lot of this has been going off in New Jersey.
01:16:19.000And generally speaking, when there are these types of sightings, it's usually an early stage sighting.
01:16:27.000Military R&D, research and development project for a new way that the drones can move, a new technique, a new acceleration system or anti-radar system.
01:16:41.000And so the It's classified because it's early stage military research.
01:16:47.000We don't want foreign countries to know that we have this military technique that may be coming online.
01:16:55.000And so we need to classify it and shield That drone activity from being known to foreign countries, which means we need to block our own domestic populace from knowing about it, because if we know about it and we talk about it, then every Russian who reads U.S. news, every Chinese official who reads U.S. news or reads a U.S. news report on it knows it.
01:17:20.000And so the military has to censor You know, everything they do in the aerospace field that's early stage technology from Americans in order to stop the people that it might be used against from knowing about it.
01:17:35.000And so, you know, I frequently refer to this 2014 documentary called Mirage Men, which goes over just tons of examples of The U.S. Air Force bases and NSA counterintelligence officers going around and telling people,
01:17:53.000civilians, U.S. civilians, that the drone or plane activity happening on local Air Force, who live near Air Force bases, That they were actually aliens, including examples where the NSA broke into people's homes and tampered with their computer just to make them believe that what they saw were aliens in order to stop news stories about the nature of the parts that were found.
01:18:18.000And so, seeing how hush-hush government officials have been the sort of ominous statements by Trump on this about the government.
01:18:27.000You know, I've received these briefings from the FBI and CIA on this.
01:18:34.000I think that that's generally the case because I think psyoping people to believe that something is coming from an Iranian mothership or space aliens is generally a bad idea to lie to the public.
01:20:28.000So Massey, when you see this, get back to me about this.
01:20:31.000Okay, then we see that trailer and we're back.
01:20:33.000I read in this book called The Sacred of Fame by Murcia Eliard and in this he explains how mankind's original condition was one of recognizing the sacred, making offerings sacred, the act of Eden, the act of making love, the act of birth and death.
01:20:54.000I think the most exciting time I've ever been alive.
01:21:11.000And it's the same thing with your relationship with God.
01:21:13.000Brandon just said he's falling more and more in love with his wife every day, and I feel the same way that I'm falling more and more in love with Laura.
01:21:34.000- Ah, I've got it in the morning, Ralph. - Some people go, "West Bair's marsh, "sages he normally makes anyway." In your name, you, Lord Jesus Christ, firstborn and mother of the dead, if it's your will, Lord, give Edward the strength to stop drinking and change his life and may be born again.
01:22:00.000Interesting that this whole thing is kind of unfolded the way it did.
01:22:03.000I'm going to take it as a sign from God to stop drinking.