Stay Free - Russel Brand - How the State Department Shapes Global Narratives

00:00:00.000 Thank you.

00:03:15.000 In this video, you're going to see the future.

00:03:22.000 We're getting the breaking news.

00:03:23.000 We've got a line stop there.

00:03:28.000 Hello there, you awakening wonders.

00:03:30.000 Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:03:33.000 My guest today makes me want to become a producer.

00:03:36.000 Like, I want to step into the shadows and make the show bring your receipts with Mike Benz.

00:03:42.000 You might have seen Mike Benz on Joe Rogan.

00:03:44.000 You might have seen him on Tucker Carlson.

00:03:45.000 You could have seen him in a variety of places.

00:03:47.000 We've been talking to him for a couple of years, and it's Mike Benz who makes me believe in independent media.

00:03:53.000 He makes me believe that platforms like Rumble and X can and already have changed the world.

00:03:58.000 That 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.

00:04:10.000 They're essentially part of the media machine.

00:04:13.000 Mike 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.

00:04:26.000 In 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,

00:04:52.000 where 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.

00:05:03.000 It'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.

00:05:13.000 If 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.

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00:05:55.000 Join us in the chat.

00:05:56.000 Be 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.

00:06:06.000 He's really up there with your Bhattacharias and your Marty Makary's.

00:06:10.000 And the people that have emerged, but he's more, I suppose, in the deep state corruption space.

00:06:15.000 He 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.

00:06:28.000 I mean, it's an amazing conversation.

00:06:30.000 It's an amazing interview.

00:06:32.000 And if you can supplement this kind of information with Christian insights, I believe you are arming yourself Putting on that helmet of salvation.

00:06:41.000 Holding that sword of truth and that shield of righteousness.

00:06:44.000 No, it's breastplate of righteousness.

00:06:45.000 If 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.

00:06:55.000 That's why I do Break Bread.

00:06:56.000 My most recent conversation was with Brandon Lake and it's an excellent conversation and I suggest you watch that.

00:07:01.000 You can watch that either on Rumble Premium right now or on Locals right now.

00:07:04.000 It's up To you.

00:07:06.000 Hey, okay then, let's get into this brilliant conversation where I even cover drones.

00:07:11.000 I 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.

00:07:22.000 It's a brilliant Mike Benz conversation.

00:07:24.000 You're going to love it.

00:07:25.000 Here's Mike Benz.

00:07:26.000 Mike Benz, it's an extraordinary privilege to be joined by you on Stay Free today.

00:07:31.000 Thank you.

00:07:32.000 Thanks for having me.

00:07:33.000 You'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.

00:07:42.000 Then Reuters won journalistic accolades for their reporting on particular on Elon Musk.

00:07:50.000 And 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.

00:08:10.000 Well, 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.

00:08:22.000 Reuters is a large organization.

00:08:24.000 It'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.

00:08:39.000 So state, local, and national news around the world will source their stories from Reuters, and Reuters has been around forever.

00:08:50.000 It'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.

00:09:06.000 But in this case, you have...

00:09:10.000 A Biden administration who systematically targeted all of Elon Musk's businesses.

00:09:16.000 So there were 11 different federal government agencies that targeted them.

00:09:21.000 There's the Justice Department, the Department of Transportation, the SEC, the FTC, the FCC, and on and on.

00:09:32.000 Many 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.

00:09:42.000 They were at odds.

00:09:44.000 He was not invited to electric car conferences at the White House, despite having the industry leader.

00:09:51.000 There were conflicts between him and the UAW, the United Auto Workers Union, which is a major Biden backer.

00:09:58.000 And 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.

00:10:11.000 So 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.

00:10:38.000 And you can obviously see how that helps those government agencies.

00:10:41.000 It helps them find evidence to bring up in court.

00:10:44.000 It 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.

00:10:53.000 Now, we don't know that to be the case that there is any sort of pay to play here.

00:10:58.000 What 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.

00:11:16.000 And there are many examples of that happening with those hard smoking guns.

00:11:21.000 The 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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00:12:56.000 As 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.

00:13:22.000 their 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.

00:13:49.000 The head of the regulatory and governmental body in charge of social media wrote to X and Rumble and YouTube and said demonetise Russell Brand.

00:14:02.000 And 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.

00:14:18.000 It's very difficult to find all of the pieces in the smoking guns.

00:14:22.000 But what you can see is there's just a convergence of interests and a preferred direction of travel.

00:14:28.000 We were reporting in our live show, Mike, yesterday that...

00:14:33.000 On 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.

00:14:54.000 And 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.

00:15:08.000 It's not like you can't just go, aha, but you can go, hmm.

00:15:12.000 It's more of a hmm than an aha, isn't it? 0.97

00:15:16.000 But it's a hell of a hmm.

00:15:19.000 Right.

00:15:20.000 No, exactly that.

00:15:21.000 And 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.

00:15:37.000 They're not a full-blown news agency.

00:15:40.000 Just 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.

00:15:56.000 Reuters, 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.

00:16:09.000 It allows them to do network intelligence or data management services or investigative services that can assist law enforcement.

00:16:17.000 So, 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.

00:16:36.000 The 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.

00:17:06.000 And so the investigative news media arm is a much smaller slice of that.

00:17:11.000 But the analogy that I draw here is this is exactly what we saw with Facebook.

00:17:16.000 So 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.

00:17:39.000 Public policy is where censorship policies are You know, coordinated and set at Facebook.

00:17:47.000 And 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?

00:18:05.000 And Nick Clegg tells him we need to think creatively about ways to be receptive to their demands for censorship.

00:18:11.000 Because we have bigger fish to fry on multiple policy fronts.

00:18:16.000 And 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.

00:18:39.000 And so...

00:18:41.000 So 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,

00:19:02.000 you 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.

00:19:24.000 They won the Pulitzer Prize this year for their work exposing Elon Musk's misconduct at these different businesses, allegedly, right?

00:19:34.000 This is what they report in their news series.

00:19:38.000 And 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.

00:19:51.000 And 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.

00:20:06.000 I don't know if you or the audience are familiar with this, but can I hop into this?

00:20:13.000 I think it's connected.

00:20:13.000 Yeah.

00:20:14.000 Okay.

00:20:15.000 So it's a long acronym, OCCRP, but what it stands for is the Corruption Reporting Project.

00:20:23.000 Basically, this is a consortium of 200 investigative journalists with 50 different media organizations and 70 different media partners.

00:20:38.000 They have done some of the most high-impact investigative news scandal reporting over the past several years.

00:20:46.000 They published the Panama Papers as well as many others.

00:20:50.000 They've gotten proprietary access to hacked documents somehow to do these stories.

00:20:56.000 Now, 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

00:21:18.000 Now, 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.

00:21:44.000 And so you had these oligarchs, you had these power factions that needed to be discredited.

00:21:48.000 And so the US government paid investigative journalists.

00:21:52.000 Now this is something that I just broke Last night on stream, but I haven't actually published it.

00:21:58.000 That was to a private audience, but I'd like to mention it here.

00:22:01.000 There'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.

00:22:29.000 And it talks about the highlights of the achievements of the program.

00:22:34.000 And 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.

00:22:56.000 21 sackings or firings of government officials, including a president and a prime minister, And 456 arrests or indictments of targets of the investigative reporting.

00:23:15.000 Okay?

00:23:15.000 Now this is on USAID.gov.

00:23:18.000 And 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.

00:23:43.000 And $20 million purchased 456 political enemies of the State Department being arrested or indicted by local prosecutors.

00:23:53.000 So 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.

00:24:18.000 We can't keep streaming this on YouTube because YouTube are part of the blob.

00:24:24.000 YouTube, Google, Meta, Facebook, these are part of the conglomeration of organisations that create a 360 sphere of augmented reality.

00:24:32.000 We all live in augmented reality.

00:24:34.000 It's like Pokemon Go in here.

00:24:36.000 So click that link in the description.

00:24:38.000 Join us over on Rumble right now for the rest of this fantastic conversation with the ever brilliant and effervescent Mike Benz.

00:24:47.000 It's terrifying.

00:24:48.000 Does this connect to the Trusted News Initiative?

00:24:50.000 And while you were saying this, Mike, I was thinking, had the Democrats won this election, we'd be in some serious, serious trouble.

00:24:59.000 The 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

00:25:35.000 It'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.

00:25:59.000 I don't know.

00:26:16.000 Two, 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.

00:26:30.000 Yeah, the Trusted News Initiative, I mean, even from its name, it's about creating this delineation between...

00:26:37.000 News 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.

00:26:49.000 Because if something is formally designated as not really being news, then you're not censoring the news when you censor that outlet.

00:26:59.000 And 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.

00:27:29.000 And 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.

00:27:41.000 NewsGuard got a $750,000 Pentagon contract.

00:27:46.000 Global Disinformation Index is tied into the The State Department Global Engagement Center.

00:27:53.000 NewsGuard was also a part of this White House Information Integrity Working Group that was partnered with 26 different Biden administration, federal government agencies.

00:28:04.000 And 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.

00:28:17.000 Tom 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.

00:28:39.000 I mean, we used to call this Operation Mockingbird.

00:28:42.000 Now we call it, you know, trusted news.

00:28:46.000 No 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.

00:29:04.000 Mike, 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.

00:29:17.000 Oh, 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.

00:29:23.000 Well, all right, I'll just move on with my next question, right?

00:29:26.000 Because when he was saying that, I was thinking about the, you know, utilizing news reporting subsequently for judicial matters.

00:29:34.000 It reminded me of the New York Times, a pair of New York Times stories.

00:29:39.000 One, there was a convenient moment, and I think we discussed it before, where they revealed the CIA bases in Ukraine.

00:29:45.000 So it was sort of plainly a sanctioned moment and indicated a relationship between the CIA and the New York Times.

00:29:50.000 And then separately, but similarly, when Jack Teixeira was arrested, the New York Times were kind of present at his arrest.

00:29:58.000 And I sort of wonder what that indicates in terms of relationship between sort of law enforcement and Judiciary and old school media.

00:30:08.000 Right.

00:30:09.000 I believe we saw the same thing when Rudy Giuliani had his home raided by the FBI. I believe it was his case.

00:30:16.000 It may have been another one.

00:30:18.000 Apologies if there's drilling going on here.

00:30:21.000 But when the FBI raided his home at 6 a.m., there was a CNN camera set present.

00:30:28.000 So who got the tip-off?

00:30:30.000 Who at the FBI told CNN to be there?

00:30:34.000 But 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.

00:30:55.000 And then the Aspen Institute exercise is conducted just two weeks before the story breaks with people from the FBI present.

00:31:06.000 And suddenly news organizations, social media company, trust and safety sensor squads, Think Tank, bigwigs, and the intelligence state,

00:31:22.000 the 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.

00:31:45.000 And even pertaining to a scandal of a gas company that Hunter Biden was involved in.

00:31:54.000 So, 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.

00:32:12.000 But somehow they knew the exact story that only the FBI had access to.

00:32:19.000 They are not allowed.

00:32:20.000 You can't the FBI can't just leak documents on, you know, on its investigations to report.

00:32:27.000 I 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.

00:32:36.000 But 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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00:34:15.000 The recent murder of General Igor Kirillov in Russia appears to suggest, again, ulterior relationships between NATO countries and their deep state operatives and Ukraine.

00:34:33.000 Similarly, it's being reported by legacy media as a kind of Ukrainian victory, an embarrassment for Putin.

00:34:41.000 But even when I watch Russia Today's reporting, Mike, I was thinking of you because they talk about George Soros.

00:34:50.000 They talk about Burisma.

00:34:51.000 And 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.

00:35:17.000 Generally 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.

00:35:27.000 Perhaps that's the bottom line.

00:35:28.000 They're not our government.

00:35:30.000 They're someone else's government.

00:35:31.000 That's the problem that's being exposed and revealed again and again and again.

00:35:36.000 What are your thoughts on that assassination?

00:35:41.000 Well, 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.

00:35:49.000 But 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,

00:36:11.000 saying 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.

00:36:22.000 And now we are drawing a silicone curtain here in the West to prevent Outside media from penetrating our information space.

00:36:32.000 What 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.

00:36:52.000 the United States.

00:36:54.000 I have been very fascinated by the Russia Today I'm going to call it a scandal, frankly.

00:37:00.000 I 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.

00:37:09.000 And I think by the time it's over, it will be in the history books.

00:37:14.000 I remember very vividly reading the CIA assessment of Russian interference on social media after the 2016 election.

00:37:22.000 In 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.

00:37:41.000 And 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.

00:37:54.000 You 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.

00:38:12.000 There was no suggestion of bots or trolls or anything like that at the beginning.

00:38:17.000 All 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,

00:38:36.000 and 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.

00:38:59.000 People were retweeting them, including members of the public and members of the political class.

00:39:04.000 And so Russian state media was tilting the election.

00:39:08.000 Now, but that's all public facing.

00:39:10.000 That'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.

00:39:35.000 What is she doing now? 0.98

00:39:37.000 She'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.

00:39:51.000 And 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.

00:40:00.000 So if you're going to argue that Russia is doing an influence operation, well then, so is the CBC in Canada.

00:40:07.000 So is the BBC in the UK. So is every state broadcaster.

00:40:12.000 But the fact is, they don't care about those because they parrot what the CIA says.

00:40:17.000 They parrot what the State Department says.

00:40:18.000 They have a transatlantic alliance.

00:40:21.000 I 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,

00:40:37.000 there 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... 1.00

00:40:57.000 Was it Nancy Kerrigan or whoever the main figure was?

00:41:01.000 But here you have a figure skating match between U.S. media and Russian media.

00:41:08.000 And they're competing for hearts and minds in an open information system.

00:41:12.000 You're not even talking about troll farms and covert influence.

00:41:17.000 This is just the, they have a Twitter account just like everybody else.

00:41:22.000 And He who gets retweeted the most wins the influence war, so to speak.

00:41:30.000 And 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.

00:41:42.000 In fact, you would get sanctioned if you didn't allow that.

00:41:45.000 The Biden administration sanctioned Iran for having its government censor news institutions in Iran.

00:41:53.000 The Trump administration censored North Korea, I'm sorry, sanctioned North Korea for censoring journalists.

00:42:00.000 We do this everywhere.

00:42:02.000 But 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.

00:42:16.000 But this is very obviously a case of if you can't beat them, hire someone to beat them up.

00:42:25.000 And that way you don't need to compete on game day.

00:42:28.000 And they have really weaponized this.

00:42:30.000 Scott 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.

00:42:56.000 And that's terrifying.

00:42:59.000 something.

00:43:00.000 Yeah, 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.

00:43:18.000 We're all doing this, we participate.

00:43:20.000 And it feels to me, Mike, that what we're witnessing is...

00:43:25.000 As 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.

00:43:51.000 And therefore, in order to compete, as you say, they have to use the Tanya Harding kneecap method rather than the open competition in public.

00:44:02.000 And in fact, now that you've made that claim, you can almost see it continually.

00:44:07.000 In the pandemic, instead of a public information campaign along the lines of Hey, we've got this medication that we're developing.

00:44:20.000 You can take it if you want to.

00:44:23.000 It's probably beneficial if you've got comorbidities and you're particularly vulnerable to respiratory conditions.

00:44:31.000 There's no data on how effective it is with children and we might need to be careful about unforeseen side effects.

00:44:40.000 Instead of that, they shamed people that didn't take it.

00:44:43.000 And 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.

00:44:54.000 And 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...

00:45:05.000 That you can't rule out really anything.

00:45:09.000 Now I can see that you're looking for some facts just by watching your eye movement.

00:45:13.000 So hit us up, Mike.

00:45:17.000 Yeah, and apologies if there's some drilling, if you hear in my building.

00:45:20.000 It's actually, it's not reaching us.

00:45:22.000 We're not hearing that audio.

00:45:23.000 We're not hearing that.

00:45:24.000 Okay.

00:45:25.000 Well, so if...

00:45:26.000 I think your producer mentioned that I could share something on screen.

00:45:29.000 I wanted to make...

00:45:31.000 An 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.

00:45:50.000 And so there's an obvious Western interest in preventing Westerners from being able to hear true factual information.

00:45:59.000 Because 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.

00:46:10.000 And so I wanted to give an example here.

00:46:12.000 Let me just pull this open.

00:46:14.000 I just did a...

00:46:15.000 Do you see this share screen right here?

00:46:20.000 Okay.

00:46:21.000 So 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.

00:46:40.000 Now, 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.

00:46:57.000 To parrot the State Department's preferred narratives circulating in that region to support a particular political candidate.

00:47:05.000 We 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.

00:47:20.000 And 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.

00:47:30.000 You'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.

00:47:48.000 So, 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

00:48:18.000 instruction from their government sponsors.

00:48:21.000 form a firewall about news stories so that nothing can penetrate the information space, form this, you know, this silicon curtain.

00:48:35.000 And so you can see if the media organizations all do what the government says and agree on strategic silence.

00:48:42.000 And 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.

00:49:04.000 George Soros, you name it.

00:49:08.000 And so they need to be boxed out of the entire information environment.

00:49:12.000 That way, these policies on strategic silence actually work.

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00:50:08.000 Yes, I see.

00:50:10.000 You 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.

00:50:22.000 It's unbelievable.

00:50:23.000 And then censorship is the other component.

00:50:26.000 If anyone is reporting on it, censor them.

00:50:28.000 Because 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...

00:50:41.000 Might otherwise, in an old celebrity sphere, have been just posting about sneakers, but now can be posting about sneaky activity of government agencies.

00:50:51.000 Suddenly, you've got a new set of relationships and a new challenge.

00:50:56.000 And to deal with that, you've got to get into Tonya Harding territory.

00:50:59.000 You've got to start hobbling your opponents. 0.99

00:51:01.000 You've got to start saying, this one's a racist, this one's a rapist, this one's that. 1.00

00:51:06.000 That whole country is a war criminal. 0.96

00:51:08.000 But the problem is, is because there are so many interconnected nodes now, you can have, well, hold on, how did that war start?

00:51:17.000 And when did it really start?

00:51:19.000 And why does Hunter Biden's pardon go back to 2014?

00:51:21.000 And why is the new Moderna and Pfizer protections that Biden's just offered go to 2029?

00:51:28.000 Is that to line up with the 2014 maiden coup in Ukraine and the end of Trump's term, the final term, in 29?

00:51:35.000 It's like we can...

00:51:37.000 What I realised around, I think when I was hit by it was the Nord Stream pipeline, is that they couldn't do it fast enough.

00:51:44.000 That's what I felt.

00:51:46.000 And also that what would be an instinct of the naturally sceptical would now be legitimised through authentic reporting.

00:51:56.000 So 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?

00:52:04.000 But, you know, that can just be 360'd out using the template that you just showed us.

00:52:10.000 Now you can just have, oh, well, look, you know, Seymour Hoffman's reporting this.

00:52:15.000 And then you can talk to Jocko Willink and he goes, yeah, that'd be no problem for a Navy SEAL.

00:52:20.000 All 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.

00:52:37.000 It's creating so many bizarre dynamics, isn't it?

00:52:42.000 It 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,

00:53:08.000 that 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.

00:53:21.000 It 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?

00:53:35.000 Yeah, that's up.

00:53:37.000 Yeah, take us through it, Mike.

00:53:38.000 So 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.

00:53:53.000 It'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.

00:54:11.000 Meaning 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.

00:54:23.000 To support the approval of a military base, you name it.

00:54:27.000 And the effectiveness of that USAID programming is being undermined because real people organically talking on social media are disagreeing with USAID-funded media institutions.

00:54:39.000 And they go through some of the reasons why.

00:54:43.000 Let's see if I'm trying to zoom here so it's a little bit unwieldy.

00:54:47.000 Okay.

00:54:47.000 But Here again is from the US government.

00:54:51.000 It 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.

00:55:10.000 Now, 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.

00:55:28.000 And 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.

00:55:42.000 With 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.

00:55:58.000 So 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.

00:56:29.000 That we can then use to justify, shape, and support broader supporting political beliefs.

00:56:35.000 That 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.

00:57:02.000 This 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.

00:57:18.000 You can see how organically your next thought when attempting to undertake such a project is what would legitimise that level of censure.

00:57:28.000 And you have to start pointing to child pornography, information that leads to violence.

00:57:36.000 So it's clear that they've done that algebra in advance and then they have to find ways of making connections online.

00:57:46.000 Of that nature.

00:57:47.000 I 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.

00:58:11.000 Then I saw the comments to the content we made.

00:58:13.000 Everyone's going, this person is being used to legitimize censorship.

00:58:17.000 This is a government plot.

00:58:19.000 And sure enough, as the story unfolded, the legitimacy of that whistleblower became more and more questionable.

00:58:27.000 And indeed, the audience, in the way you said, populist expertise.

00:58:31.000 You know, it's interesting because you can see that that What you were citing there is written to condemn it.

00:58:37.000 They'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.

00:59:01.000 That's exactly it.

00:59:03.000 Because doctrinally, the State Department, which USAID serves, USAID capacity builds the institutions that help the State Department's foreign policy goal.

00:59:13.000 And they've doctrinally labeled populism an attack on democracy.

00:59:19.000 Well, USAID is a democracy promotion organization.

00:59:22.000 So if something is an attack on democracy, they promote democracy by neutralizing that attack.

00:59:29.000 So it's when they Put populist expertise as an italicized internal jargon term.

00:59:38.000 They are saying this is a bad guy, subject matter expert.

00:59:44.000 They 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.

01:00:00.000 And 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.

01:00:13.000 It's populist.

01:00:14.000 Everything Bobby Kennedy published in the Wuhan cover-up, or the real Anthony Fauci, is populist expertise in the public health corruption space.

01:00:27.000 Everything that I publish about the censorship industry, these are all true receipts.

01:00:32.000 They are all validated.

01:00:34.000 They come from these organizations themselves, but it is a populist expertise.

01:00:40.000 And 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.

01:00:54.000 And so They're trying to get to the very soul of the distribution of information in order to create that blockade.

01:01:04.000 It's intuition plus investigation plus receipts is their worst nightmare because it exposes something as kind of almost beyond satire as...

01:01:20.000 They'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.

01:01:38.000 It's beyond satire.

01:01:40.000 It's beyond Kubrick.

01:01:42.000 It's beyond Kafka.

01:01:43.000 It's beyond Huxley.

01:01:45.000 It's beyond Orwell.

01:01:47.000 It's like, Oh, no, well, if that was a chapter in 1984, you would question it.

01:01:52.000 And then more popularly and colloquially, we see it, Mike, in, like, when, during the pandemic, people were like, oh, are you a doctor?

01:02:00.000 You're not an expert.

01:02:02.000 Oh, you know, like, that became popular discourse.

01:02:05.000 And that was the kind of, we'd seen that snobbery before.

01:02:09.000 With the kind of...

01:02:10.000 Kind of like class hatred in my country.

01:02:13.000 All sorts of forms of bigotry and expression of that.

01:02:15.000 But 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.

01:02:31.000 They have to somehow create a new discourse that undermines that.

01:02:35.000 And the new discourse is...

01:02:37.000 Well, you can't just have populist expertise.

01:02:39.000 You can't have that.

01:02:40.000 Oh, do your own research.

01:02:42.000 And then you see people go out a plethora of hired mouths parroting those points.

01:02:49.000 That's when it gets normalized across talk shows and late night shows.

01:02:53.000 And you see it again and again.

01:02:54.000 And even I myself have heard, like, when I see it...

01:02:58.000 I start to go, oh yeah, maybe that's not true.

01:03:01.000 Oh, didn't I hear that that person was accused of this though?

01:03:04.000 And didn't I read that again and again and again?

01:03:06.000 And I remember that actually, mate, from old school media.

01:03:10.000 Like when it was newspapers, like print media, newspaper, analogue media was the dominant form of media, right?

01:03:17.000 I was already in them.

01:03:19.000 And I'd like read a story about me and go, that's not true.

01:03:23.000 That's not what happened.

01:03:24.000 I didn't do that.

01:03:25.000 Then I'd turn the page and it'd be about someone else. 0.99

01:03:27.000 And I'd go, whoa, what an arsehole. 0.98

01:03:30.000 I'm like, hold on a minute. 0.98

01:03:32.000 You know it's not true because it's happened to you.

01:03:34.000 But it's so powerful and seductive.

01:03:38.000 You see, the way that it goes to work is ingenious in a way.

01:03:42.000 And what's so crazy, I mean, you know, I've had so many hippies about me and some of them are way out there.

01:03:48.000 Some of them are just sort of like slight mistakes.

01:03:51.000 And, 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.

01:04:03.000 And I'll see it.

01:04:04.000 I'll see it in the newspaper.

01:04:05.000 I'll see it in the New York Times and I'll say, oh, that didn't happen.

01:04:08.000 But it's right here in writing.

01:04:09.000 Did I do that?

01:04:11.000 And 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.

01:04:34.000 Thank 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.

01:05:01.000 And then they come up with a new scam, and then you adapt to that.

01:05:04.000 I 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.

01:05:26.000 You mentioned doctors and that phenomenon of saying, you can't opine on this, you're not a doctor.

01:05:32.000 But 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.

01:05:43.000 For not recommending the thing that we're questioning.

01:05:46.000 So they are forced to agree on policies of strategic silence, as our own US government agencies insist media companies do.

01:05:56.000 So 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,

01:06:21.000 then you realize really the only way, unless you are a brave whistleblower from the inside, is to be an outsider.

01:06:28.000 And 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.

01:06:39.000 And 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.

01:06:57.000 So this is a real true test of whether reform is really possible.

01:07:01.000 Yeah, it really is.

01:07:02.000 It's exciting.

01:07:03.000 And 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...

01:07:17.000 If they can make this not good, then man, they're powerful.

01:07:21.000 Because, you know, and by they, I mean the media, and then you start seeing some weird assassination stuff going on.

01:07:27.000 And I, yeah, I really wonder how that's going to...

01:07:32.000 Play out.

01:07:33.000 Because my understanding of power is that it's mutable, plastic, and able to accommodate that.

01:07:40.000 And 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.

01:07:47.000 They 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.

01:07:56.000 And now I... I'm fascinated as to what could happen with people that are just outspoken and radicals.

01:08:04.000 Like 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.

01:08:14.000 It's sort of staggering, isn't it, Mike?

01:08:17.000 It is, but it's very, very exciting, in particular because of the strength of the outside coalition.

01:08:23.000 Because 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.

01:08:42.000 Someone calling for a completely different relationship with the U.S. military's operations in Iraq and Syria being made the commander in chief.

01:08:52.000 And we saw how that was stymied through FBI special prosecutors, through impeachment trials, through betrayals of the traditional base of support in Congress.

01:09:04.000 And so we're going to see this play out at every agency.

01:09:07.000 We'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.

01:09:19.000 We'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.

01:09:31.000 Like, we're seeing this right now.

01:09:32.000 You know, we have a...

01:09:34.000 In the US, there is a Republican incoming president, a Republican-controlled Senate, a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and a Republican Supreme Court majority.

01:09:47.000 And yet, Kash Patel may not get appointed.

01:09:51.000 Bobby Kennedy may not get appointed.

01:09:52.000 Matt Gaetz already had to drop out.

01:09:54.000 And 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.

01:10:10.000 That they can tank the actions of the executive branch.

01:10:14.000 For example, there's six to nine Republican senators who have sided with the Democrats on the Matt Gaetz issue.

01:10:25.000 They 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.

01:10:38.000 The Senate could initiate impeachment inquiries on the basis of scandalous investigative reporting that may or may not be sponsored.

01:10:49.000 By aspects of the U.S. government.

01:10:52.000 So 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.

01:11:11.000 But it is...

01:11:13.000 I think the most exciting time I've ever been alive.

01:11:16.000 Yeah, you're the one...

01:11:18.000 It sounds like you believe in reincarnation, just there as an aside.

01:11:22.000 To my knowledge.

01:11:23.000 To 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.

01:11:23.000 To my knowledge.

01:11:35.000 Mate, 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.

01:11:42.000 You 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...

01:12:00.000 Talk about these centralised, these centralised Republicans, you might say, or these international Republicans that might align with the Democrats against Hegs-Eff or Moeley.

01:12:11.000 The 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...

01:12:26.000 Of those agencies and organisations and the sort of relationships that exist there, the relationships with big tech.

01:12:31.000 And 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?

01:12:50.000 In 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.

01:13:03.000 Let me give you the examples.

01:13:05.000 It tries Bernie Sanders, a kind of anti-big finance, out-of-the-occupy-moment type of political figure.

01:13:13.000 He's sucked back in.

01:13:14.000 Bobby Kennedy emerges as a sort of a potential dream candidate for the Democrat party.

01:13:20.000 Tulsi.

01:13:22.000 Like, it just won't have it.

01:13:24.000 That side won't have it.

01:13:25.000 And the Republicans, they'll try their best to belch out a Nikki Haley or a Jeb Bush.

01:13:32.000 You know, but, like, the only sort of crack...

01:13:36.000 It's going to be some sort of tycoon, populist, all-American, individualist.

01:13:41.000 By process of elimination, it's like Donald Trump.

01:13:46.000 That's it. 1.00

01:13:47.000 It's like the one man who has the cojones, the durability. 0.96

01:13:53.000 Who else has endured even a fragment of what he has when it comes to reputational attack, judicial stuff? 0.97

01:13:58.000 I have.

01:13:59.000 Like one part in the millionth.

01:14:03.000 And it destroys you.

01:14:05.000 It tears into your family life.

01:14:08.000 It's like a nightmare.

01:14:09.000 It's expensive.

01:14:10.000 It's exhausting.

01:14:12.000 Any 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.

01:14:21.000 They're gone.

01:14:22.000 Because now, in order to support you, they've got to go...

01:14:26.000 Oh, hmm, well, was it going to be my mortgage or that dude?

01:14:31.000 Ta-da! 1.00

01:14:32.000 They 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.

01:14:40.000 You know, even people that know you.

01:14:42.000 Like, so that guy is just like...

01:14:46.000 It just sort of stands, faces it, just faces it.

01:14:50.000 It's like unbelievable.

01:14:53.000 It's unbelievable.

01:14:54.000 It's mythical.

01:14:55.000 I don't...

01:14:56.000 Yeah, it's mythical.

01:14:58.000 It's, you know, I don't know if there's some Austin Powers mojo thing that he...

01:15:03.000 You have it or he should sell it.

01:15:06.000 You know, I don't know if that's that new Trump fragrance thing with the...

01:15:09.000 Jill Biden.

01:15:11.000 But no, it really is an incredible time to be alive, and we have a true test now.

01:15:16.000 If 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?

01:15:32.000 The betting markets are now open.

01:15:35.000 Trump Musk could be the perfect fragrance to capture this essence.

01:15:44.000 Before we go, what's going on with the drones, Mike?

01:15:50.000 I don't know.

01:15:52.000 I've seen a lot of things I don't agree with.

01:15:54.000 I don't know exactly what I do agree with.

01:15:56.000 Generally speaking, anytime I see drone or UFO or UAP activity, I immediately think it is a military base.

01:16:09.000 In 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.

01:16:19.000 And generally speaking, when there are these types of sightings, it's usually an early stage sighting.

01:16:27.000 Military 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.

01:16:41.000 And so the It's classified because it's early stage military research.

01:16:47.000 We don't want foreign countries to know that we have this military technique that may be coming online.

01:16:55.000 And 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.

01:17:20.000 And 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.

01:17:35.000 And 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,

01:17:53.000 civilians, 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.

01:18:18.000 And so, seeing how hush-hush government officials have been the sort of ominous statements by Trump on this about the government.

01:18:27.000 You know, I've received these briefings from the FBI and CIA on this.

01:18:31.000 The government knows what they are.

01:18:32.000 They should just tell the public.

01:18:34.000 I 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.

01:18:47.000 They lose trust.

01:18:49.000 That seems to have been the course of history for at least the last five years.

01:18:53.000 Mike Benz, thanks for coming on, man.

01:18:55.000 Thanks for bringing the receipts.

01:18:57.000 Thank you for bringing the laughs and thank you for explaining such complicated things so beautifully.

01:19:03.000 I was watching you on the show yesterday's show.

01:19:07.000 It was clipped up.

01:19:09.000 I think you were talking to the long-haired Canadian lawyer guy.

01:19:14.000 He's on Rumble as well.

01:19:16.000 Yeah, Beaver Fry, yeah.

01:19:17.000 Viva Fry, yeah, I love Viva Fry, actually.

01:19:19.000 And I just was like, when I was commenting, I was like, how's Mike Benz remembering this even?

01:19:24.000 How are you even remembering it?

01:19:27.000 Well, thank you, Mike Benz, for an illuminating and brilliant conversation.

01:19:32.000 This is our last show until next year.

01:19:36.000 We will be streaming 10-15 minute special articles up on Rumble every single day.

01:19:44.000 But...

01:19:45.000 We will be back with live stream shows in January.

01:19:49.000 Please stay connected with us till then.

01:19:51.000 Get your Rumble Premium subscription ready because next year we are going to be bringing you a whole new show with a whole new flavour.

01:19:59.000 Indeed, have a look at this trailer that shows you the new depth and breadth of content we'll be bringing you next year.

01:20:08.000 You're going to love it.

01:20:09.000 Then insert a trailer that's got bits of break bread in it.

01:20:11.000 I guess...

01:20:13.000 We'll discuss who cuts this in the production meeting.

01:20:16.000 Bits of Break Bread, bits of Mar-a-Lago, bits of the shooting range, bits of the out-and-about meeting people, okay?

01:20:23.000 That's a trailer.

01:20:24.000 And then put 2025 on it.

01:20:26.000 Let's do that.

01:20:28.000 So Massey, when you see this, get back to me about this.

01:20:31.000 Okay, then we see that trailer and we're back.

01:20:33.000 I 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.

01:20:54.000 I think the most exciting time I've ever been alive.

01:20:58.000 To my knowledge.

01:20:58.000 To my knowledge, I can recall in this weird, never-ending, eternal, fractal spiral of reality.

01:21:05.000 And so, but this is a relationship, it's a journey.

01:21:07.000 I'm still getting to know my wife every single day. 0.99

01:21:10.000 Falling more and more in love.

01:21:11.000 And it's the same thing with your relationship with God.

01:21:13.000 Brandon 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.

01:21:21.000 You're a brilliant wife. 0.51

01:21:23.000 Lovely to meet you, Brandon.

01:21:24.000 I don't know if you can really change yourself, can't you?

01:21:26.000 But you can't change us.

01:21:27.000 Holy Spirit.

01:21:28.000 Holy Spirit.

01:21:29.000 We're gonna jump in the ocean.

01:21:31.000 Grace, it's cold.

01:21:32.000 Ready?

01:21:33.000 Why are you not getting in?

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.

01:22:00.000 Interesting that this whole thing is kind of unfolded the way it did.

01:22:03.000 I'm going to take it as a sign from God to stop drinking.

01:22:06.000 Well, that was a surprise.

01:22:07.000 What a beautiful service, what a beautiful dress.

01:22:09.000 You look so amazing.

01:22:10.000 Congratulations, Annalie.

01:22:11.000 Thank you for coming.

01:22:12.000 Congratulations, Henry.

01:22:13.000 For the love of God, arrest real games.

01:22:15.000 Just like the sort of thing I would say.

01:22:17.000 For the love of God.

01:22:18.000 It's actually a good title.

01:22:19.000 Make a note of that.

01:22:20.000 I believe there's an all-you-can-eat cookie competition.

01:22:22.000 Good.

01:22:29.000 - Good.

01:22:30.000 Nice work.

01:22:40.000 Mar-a-Lago! 1.00

01:22:42.000 I've been here before then.

01:22:44.000 It's nice here, isn't it?

01:22:45.000 Russell Brand is here.

01:22:46.000 I knew because there were Secret Service here.

01:22:48.000 I'm very grateful to be in a double act with Mel Gibson all of a sudden.

01:22:52.000 Come here, you soppy sausage.

01:22:55.000 Stick to delivering the presents.

01:22:57.000 Okay, Russell.

01:22:58.000 Picking up poop on the street to protect the people and their feet.

01:23:06.000 We're all broken deep inside.

01:23:10.000 Pick up the poop and abandon your pride. 0.78

01:23:14.000 Thank you very much for supporting us all the way through 2024. What an amazing and incredible year it's been.

01:23:21.000 How challenging, how ridiculous, how beautiful.

01:23:23.000 But there's been some incredible highlights.

01:23:25.000 There's been some wonderful moments.

01:23:26.000 We will see you next year.

01:23:29.000 Not for more of the same, but for more of the different.

01:23:32.000 Until then, happy Christmas, happy new year, and we'll see you in 2025 for more of the different.

01:23:39.000 Until then, if you can, stay free.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - December 19, 2024

How the State Department Shapes Global Narratives

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