The Charlie Kirk Show - February 20, 2024


The CIA's Mass Censorship Behemoth


Episode Stats


Length

46 minutes

Words per minute

157.2973

Word count

7,372

Sentence count

460

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, Charlie talks about the censorship industrial complex and the role they play in stifling free speech and the freedom of speech on the internet. He explains how the censorship Industrial Complex came to be and why it is so important to them to stifle free speech.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, a full episode with Mike Benz, who has recently gone super viral on the censorship industrial complex.
00:00:07.000 You'll love this conversation.
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00:01:24.000 Mike, welcome back.
00:01:25.000 Mike, that was just kind of like a sterling performance.
00:01:28.000 You're kind of doing the media circuit now.
00:01:30.000 You're all over the place.
00:01:31.000 And we have you for the full hour.
00:01:33.000 And I think what was so powerful about this, and I'm going to try, I'm going to ask you to do, I know what you've been doing quite a lot, which is try to retell it the best you can.
00:01:40.000 What was so powerful, though, is you went through a history of how free speech and the censorship industrial complex came to be with the internet and how the internet and advancement of social media actually outpaced the censorship industrial complex.
00:01:57.000 And that in a moment in time, the internet was too free, was too liberated, and the bad guys had to play catch up.
00:02:04.000 And that was 2016, obviously, with the election of Donald Trump.
00:02:09.000 You say it a lot better than I do.
00:02:11.000 Mike Benz, congrats on the virality.
00:02:13.000 Walk us through it.
00:02:14.000 Yeah.
00:02:14.000 So, you know, the way that I sort of started the Tucker interview was with the story of free speech as an instrument of statecraft, because I do think it's, you know, the surprise when you see the presence of government agencies and intelligence services and the national security state and the full panoply of NGOs and state-sponsored media organs all pressing on the censorship direction.
00:02:43.000 I think it's instructive to start with the history of their role in free speech on the internet in the first place.
00:02:50.000 So, you know, I can rehash that whole history, but I do think it's useful first to understand that we started this free speech industry on the internet as a means to be able to control the American empire and manage the American empire, which I don't want to just retrain everything that I said on the Tucker thing.
00:03:18.000 So I think the thing that I think is most important to stress is you have the American Empire as it started in 1898, right?
00:03:29.000 You had the Spanish-American War.
00:03:31.000 We took the Philippines.
00:03:34.000 We took Cuba effectively.
00:03:36.000 We had a, we had a Monroe Doctrine from the 1823 up, as soon as America essentially was founded within just a couple of decades, where we sought to essentially acquire territorial and political control over Latin America and South America.
00:03:53.000 And we were a global empire, An empire whose agriculture and whose oil and gas relied primarily on foreign countries.
00:04:03.000 And the issue is, is in the big, bad, mean world of geopolitics, resource nationalism is real.
00:04:09.000 And you need a full-throated, powerful, brass-knuckled national security state and foreign policy establishment in order to coerce other governments to giving your country what you want from their resources.
00:04:25.000 So, if we have oil and gas interests, or agriculture interests, or supply line interests, or rare earth mineral interests in another country, and that country has an opposition group rising to power that is campaigning on its own nationalism or its own socialism.
00:04:46.000 That is, it's either depriving U.S. stakeholders or NATO stakeholders of those resources because of their, you know, because they're nationalists, or because they are socialist communists.
00:04:58.000 They want to have their own national champions hold those interests instead of ours.
00:05:03.000 We have a Department of Dirty Tricks that we roll out to deal with that government, to regime change it, to back a different group to rise to power who will do what we say, or to be able to apply different destabilization techniques in order to acquire the leverage to get what we want.
00:05:24.000 And we entrusted those Department of Dirty Tricks powers to our national security state, to our Pentagon, to our CIA, to our State Department.
00:05:32.000 And those agencies are all supposed to be completely foreign-facing.
00:05:36.000 They're not supposed to be able to do squat on U.S. soil or against U.S. citizens.
00:05:41.000 And this was a doctrine that was all laid out in 1948 when George Kennan, the CIA's godfather, penned the inauguration of organized political warfare.
00:05:51.000 You can find that in the CIA reading room or the Wilson Center or anywhere else that's hosted online.
00:05:56.000 But it was a paper written right after we had rigged the Italian election in 1948, where the godfather of the CIA, just 12 days after, says, hey, we just rigged the Italian election.
00:06:06.000 We were stuffing ballot boxes and we played a lot of dirty tricks.
00:06:10.000 We were working with the mob.
00:06:11.000 We did all this nasty stuff.
00:06:13.000 But hey, we need to do this if we want to win the American century. 0.91
00:06:17.000 We need to inaugurate a policy of organized political warfare and conduct that on every plot of earth in the world, or else the Bolsheviks will lose to the Bolsheviks. 0.54
00:06:27.000 And so that was the argument in 1948 to establish this national security state soft power projection mechanism that would then go on to be put on steroids when the internet was privatized. 0.68
00:06:42.000 And I can keep going through this.
00:06:44.000 I know I'm sort of coming at it from a slightly different angle.
00:06:47.000 Yeah, well, the part I want to isolate here, and without having to make you rehash the whole thing, which is kind of like asking Jordan to rehash game six, because it was just such a great performance with you and Tucker.
00:07:01.000 I don't want to ask you to redo that, but just talk about 2016 and how everything changed, about how when Donald Trump was elected, there was some semblance of a free and open internet.
00:07:12.000 And there was then the scrambling to institutionalize mass censorship.
00:07:17.000 And then we'll go through some of the specifics.
00:07:19.000 Yeah.
00:07:20.000 So, you know, it did, I think the point that I tried to stress on the Tucker segment is that it did start a little bit before 2016.
00:07:29.000 And 2016 was kind of the breaking point.
00:07:31.000 You know, I mean, it really started in 2014 Crimea.
00:07:34.000 It started with the 2014 Ukraine coup.
00:07:37.000 and the fact that we had poured $5 billion worth of State Department U.S. aid and national endowment for democracy funding into that coup only to have half the country fall out of our grasp when Eastern Ukraine broke off and Crimea had in their own referendum an independent vote to join the Russian Federation instead of NATO.
00:07:58.000 And it was that moment that the hybrid warfare doctrine was rolled out by NATO and the Pentagon, which the doctrine of hybrid warfare is the idea that modern warfare is no longer about tanks.
00:08:11.000 It's about tweets.
00:08:12.000 And the biggest threat to NATO and the democratic institutions that it protects is people reading the wrong media sources, developing the wrong politics, and voting NATO stakeholders out of power of their own accord.
00:08:31.000 And so this gave rise to the so-called from tanks to tweets doctrine at NATO.
00:08:36.000 And there was this then national security state focus, not just on positive saturation of propaganda, which had been the way that information operations and soft power projection in the information space had been done primarily for 70, 80 years.
00:08:58.000 There were incidents of the CIA, you know, asking the Washington Post to kill a story about the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Kennedy administration.
00:09:07.000 Those types of censorship of stories absolutely did occur, but they were one-off and they couldn't happen at scale.
00:09:13.000 You couldn't reach into the dinner table of tens of millions of homes and just turn off someone's vocal cords, which is basically the equivalent of censoring tens of millions of tweets, YouTube videos, and Facebook.
00:09:25.000 That power never existed.
00:09:27.000 And it began to be created after 2014, the counter-coup in Ukraine, because of a perception that the U.S. was losing its information advantage in Central and Eastern Europe.
00:09:38.000 At the time, Germany was in the process of doubling down on its energy relations with Russia.
00:09:45.000 Now, Germany is the industrial base of Europe.
00:09:49.000 It's the economic powerhouse of the EU.
00:09:53.000 And we had been pursuing about 15 years of a coercive, essentially sanctions policy against EU member states who were dependent on U.S. security assistance and monetary aid.
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00:11:01.000 Mike, please continue.
00:11:03.000 Yeah, so the thing I want to impress is this 2016 censorship industry coming home to the US did not just spawn out of nowhere, right?
00:11:13.000 You had three years essentially between the 2014 counter coup and the election of Donald Trump, where you had the entirety of NATO.
00:11:22.000 You had the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, you had the UK Ministry of Defense, the UK Foreign Office, the whole MI6 squad, Brussels.
00:11:32.000 all of them beginning to invest in the architecture of internet censorship.
00:11:36.000 This is primarily done through two modalities.
00:11:39.000 The first was the creation of AI censorship capacities to be able to monitor speech online in a proactive way rather than in a reactive whack-a-mole way.
00:11:50.000 And this is there's a technique called natural language processing.
00:11:53.000 It uses machine learning to create these topographical maps of influence online, which started to be funded in 2014, 2015, and then would come to be used to create the system we live under currently of automated censorship.
00:12:10.000 Over 99% of all speech violations are done through this exact technique, which was created by our own military.
00:12:18.000 And before 2016, the only automated censorship that was done on the internet was when AI was able to detect things like spam or child pornography.
00:12:30.000 But they've now developed these new complex AI training models that allow you to essentially dissect any narrative or community or political movement and then censor at scale.
00:12:42.000 So that began its development in 2014.
00:12:44.000 And the other part was the institutional infrastructure, the connective tissue between the Pentagon, State Department, sort of CIA faction and the tech media platforms themselves.
00:12:56.000 And this was done through the creation of things like NATO Centers of Excellence.
00:13:00.000 And then when it, you know, it's that basically extended from Germany through Ukraine and Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.
00:13:09.000 When Brexit happened in June 2016, it was said to be sort of, you know, this hybrid warfare doctrine is now affecting Western Europe.
00:13:19.000 And then, you know, five months later, when Trump won, it was the final straw.
00:13:24.000 And from that point forward, you had this immediately right out the gate, right in tandem with RussiaGate, you had this same censorship architecture that was rolled out in Central and Eastern Europe, again, for the reasons of RussiaGate-related reasons, right?
00:13:41.000 They said it was basically Russian influence influencing hearts and minds from Germany through Ukraine.
00:13:50.000 That was the reason that NATO was beginning to lose elections and was losing control over the population in terms of who people were voting for and what their national identity was.
00:13:59.000 And so they took that exact same predicate of RussiaGate to usher this all home.
00:14:05.000 And from 2016 through 2018, actually through summer of 2019, the initial censorship architecture in the U.S. that was all spearheaded by Pentagon, CIA, State Department folks, as well as their organized goon squad of NGOs and university centers who were all on their payroll, did this censorship domestically through a foreign predicate, right?
00:14:32.000 Through saying, well, our national security. 0.74
00:14:35.000 But it wasn't until Mueller collapsed on the stand in June 2019 and Russagate died that they were really at this crossroads of saying, damn, we don't have this predicate anymore to say it's all Russian bots and trolls.
00:14:50.000 So, Mike, I remember during four years ago, the spring of 2020, it feels like it just hasn't ended.
00:14:56.000 It was like 15 days or so to the spread, slow the spread till today.
00:14:59.000 It's just been nonstop chaos.
00:15:02.000 I remember I tweeted out something that was favorable about hydroxychloroquine.
00:15:08.000 And I was very popular on Twitter then.
00:15:13.000 This was still like kind of when before January 6th.
00:15:16.000 And I'll never forget, I lost access to my Twitter account.
00:15:20.000 It was the first time that ever happened.
00:15:22.000 And they said, because you're spreading disinformation when it came to public health.
00:15:27.000 And what I said was not incorrect.
00:15:29.000 I cited a study that hydroxychloroquine could be potentially helpful in malarial and anti-viral.
00:15:36.000 And Twitter came down with me.
00:15:37.000 And the next thing you know, the New York Times came after me and wrote an article saying that I'm spreading medical disinformation.
00:15:43.000 So I want you to riff on that, but I really want you to emphasize COVID and how they used censorship as a tool to shut up different opinions when it came to medicine.
00:15:56.000 Yeah, well, you were caught up in the Pentagon's crosshairs.
00:16:00.000 The censorship operation of COVID started with Pentagon-funded censorship gargoyles.
00:16:07.000 I'll give you some of the craziest examples here.
00:16:12.000 Without weighing too deeply into the strange administration of the whole COVID warp speed with the Pentagon and the pretty strange role of the CIA in all of this, which I believe is still currently under investigation by the Jim Jordan committee.
00:16:29.000 But the first pass censorship institutions who made it their mission and who received their paychecks professionally to censor anyone who talked about COVID narratives in a way that was heterodox were all Pentagon-funded institutions.
00:16:51.000 They were groups like Graphica.
00:16:52.000 So Graphica is a group that has gotten over $7 million of Pentagon grant funding, grants and contracts from the DOD.
00:17:01.000 They got their start as part of what was known as, what's still known as the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative, which is the psychological operations research center for the Pentagon.
00:17:12.000 When the Pentagon wants to run PSYOPs, they turn to their institutional sort of research folks who basically pitch and put together the social science data for doing it this way or that way.
00:17:28.000 And this very group, Graphica, which came right out of the Minerva Initiative at the Pentagon for doing psyops and had previously gotten funding for things like mapping the paramilitary group's social media activity and conflict zones that the CIA was involved in in January 2020.
00:17:48.000 COVID-19 was not even called COVID-19 yet.
00:17:53.000 The first pneumonia-like symptoms were detected in Wuhan on December 12th.
00:17:58.000 So this is one month later.
00:18:01.000 Graphica begins a full court press in tandem with the NATO Center of Excellence, the very institution I just described that was responsible for hybrid warfare set up after the Crimea annexation in 2014 to be the internet censorship arm of NATO.
00:18:19.000 So the Pentagon PSYOPS cell and the NATO censorship arm came up in January 2020 within just less a month before after the pneumonia-like symptoms and before it was even called COVID-19, it was just called the coronavirus at that point.
00:18:38.000 They began a systematic global mapping of every political group, every demographic in every NATO country, the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, the whole shebang, They published several dozen page initial preliminary report and then continued to get funding from the Pentagon.
00:19:04.000 They would actually come to be one of the four corners of the election integrity partnership for Malon Dallas and then one of the four corners of the Virality Project for formally censoring COVID dissident speech as part of this syndicate with Stanford and University of Washington and the Atlantic Council.
00:19:25.000 But your talk about hydroxychloroquine was, you had the long arm of the Pentagon who was responsible for that first past censorship.
00:19:37.000 I just want people to understand that our military then was suppressing an American citizen.
00:19:45.000 I mean, is that not digital martial law?
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00:21:04.000 Yeah, so every single one of the major institutions that comprised the Virality Project were deeply involved in either the DOD or the CIA, which is one beast, right?
00:21:19.000 I mean, the CIA is basically, it's basically, you know, it's, it's, it's military intelligence.
00:21:24.000 It's this military intelligence apparatus, which is kind of the Department of Dirty Tricks farm of the State Department.
00:21:30.000 We, you know, as I described in the sort of first segment we did, you can think of the foreign policy establishment that we are up against as, you know, as essentially, you know, populist stators trying to reform corrupt institutions.
00:21:45.000 You know, the thing we're up against is this three-legged stool of the foreign policy establishment, which is the State Department, the Defense Department, and the IC, the intelligence community.
00:21:55.000 Those are where the Department of Dirty Tricks are located.
00:21:58.000 That is what's supposed to, the stuff we can't do to U.S. citizens, the election rigging, the media rigging, the PSYOPs, all of that is that it's important to think of those as one entity.
00:22:13.000 Those jobs are interchangeable.
00:22:14.000 If you work for the State Department, your next job could just as easily be at the DOD or the CIA as it could be at state.
00:22:21.000 Same thing with DOD.
00:22:22.000 It's completely interchangeable.
00:22:23.000 So when I say CIA and DOD with respect to COVID censorship, you should just be thinking that it's the same blob, that three-legged trifecta of state DOD and IC.
00:22:35.000 And so all four groups that were part of the Virality Project, which were the subject of the Missouri v. Biden Supreme Court case, which oral arguments start next month, the America First Legal Case, suing them on civil attort grounds.
00:22:52.000 They were the subject of multiple congressional investigations from the Jim Jordan Committee and the Dan Bishop Committee in the House.
00:22:57.000 And they were also the major stars of the Twitter files from Matt Taibby and Michael Schellenberger.
00:23:03.000 This group called the Virality Project was comprised of four institutions, Graphica, which we just talked about, the PSYOPS arm of the Pentagon, the literal psyops arm.
00:23:13.000 The Atlanta Council, who we've talked about, I think, previously on several episodes of this show, the Atlanta Council had seven CIA directors on its board.
00:23:22.000 A lot of people don't know that seven CIA directors are still alive, let alone all concentrate on the board of a group that was the top heavyweight for censoring COVID-19.
00:23:31.000 They also get annual funding every year from all four corners of the U.S. military, the Navy, the Army, the Marines, and the Air Force.
00:23:38.000 And they get funding from the annual funding from the State Department, and they get annual funding from CIA cutouts like the National Downing for Democracy.
00:23:44.000 So they were one of the other entities who were the four entities involved in the Virality Project.
00:23:50.000 By the way, Virality Project is a play on words.
00:23:53.000 It's referring to the virality of the COVID virus and the virality of misinformation about COVID online.
00:24:00.000 And they had these vast sprawling rings of essentially tens of millions of dissonant posts in four different categories, including opposition to masks, mandates, reputational posts impugning Tony Fauci or Peter Dashek or other VIPs.
00:24:21.000 And then they had a catch-all for conspiracy theories, such as the belief that hydroxychloroquine is safe and effective.
00:24:29.000 But all of these were CIA or DOD intermediated.
00:24:33.000 The technical director for Stanford Air Observatory, who was the third group there, was Renee DeResta, who started her career in the CIA.
00:24:41.000 Her boss was Alex Thamos, who was the chief security officer at Facebook, who worked directly with the Office of Director of National Intelligence, the group on top of the CIA and the intelligence community at Facebook for censoring Russian propaganda.
00:24:54.000 And his boss at Stanford was Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Obama, who was kicked out of Russia for authoring full reports on how to run a successful color revolution there.
00:25:09.000 And then the fourth entity, the University of Washington, with Kate Starburg, three generations of military brass, basically had worked with DARPA and the military for doing crisis informatics around social media's role in international crises and then gets repurposed to censor COVID-19.
00:25:29.000 So all four of the major groups responsible for censoring COVID-19 came straight out of DOD or CIA or State Department, foreign-facing Department of Dirty tricks squads.
00:25:45.000 All of them, every single one.
00:25:47.000 It's incredible.
00:25:48.000 Mike, Foundation for Freedom Online, what is your website?
00:25:51.000 Foundationforfreedomonline.com.
00:25:53.000 And you can find me at MikeBenCyber on X.
00:25:56.000 I post everyday sort of bazooka style.
00:25:59.000 So that's the most accessible way.
00:26:02.000 So, Mike, I want to go through this, the timeline.
00:26:03.000 So in 2014, Crimea caused NATO to realize tweets, not tanks, was now the power to turn world events.
00:26:09.000 In 2016, we had Brexit and Trump, which led the foreign policy establishment and the domestic intel agencies to realize that nationalist and populist movements would have to be countered like they used to fight Russia and Eastern Europe.
00:26:22.000 2020, we had COVID and Trump v. Biden.
00:26:25.000 I wrote this down when I listened to your interview with Tucker.
00:26:28.000 The two most censored events in history are the 2020 election and COVID.
00:26:32.000 Can you elaborate?
00:26:33.000 Is that correct?
00:26:34.000 So the year of 2020 was the most censored year in the history of humanity.
00:26:38.000 Would you stand by that?
00:26:39.000 Hands down.
00:26:40.000 Hands down, Barnan.
00:26:43.000 There's nothing that's even come close, even overseas.
00:26:47.000 I mean, even China's great firewall and their technical censorship operations are far slower and less, they don't have the level of rapid response units and the institutional infrastructure that was laid out for those two events.
00:27:04.000 I mean, it's totally sprawling.
00:27:07.000 We have 60 university centers who have gotten funding for censorship of those events, federal government funding just by the National Science Foundation alone, not including DOD grants, not including State Department grants, not including the FBI and Justice Department grants, which the Biden administration has begun to do.
00:27:25.000 60 universities here in the U.S. have professional censorship centers getting funding for those for both of those events, basically election disinformation and public health misinformation.
00:27:40.000 Now, they also have expanded this into a wide range of other topics, climate censorship, immigration censorship, abortion censorship.
00:27:48.000 I mean, when they were so successful at doing this after COVID and the 2020 election, but before the political pushback that began in 2022, when a whole cascade of free speech counteroffensive began to become effective, powered by things like Elon Musk's acquisition, the craziness of the Disinformation Governance Board,
00:28:11.000 the turning over of the House to Republicans to allow subpoena power and hearings, the Twitter files, the lawsuits.
00:28:19.000 I mean, there was a whole cascade of things that happened later in time, right?
00:28:27.000 But after between 2020 and 2022, and during that halcyon period for the censorship industry, to them, they thought the sky was the limit, that this was now accepted by the American public and it was unchallengeable.
00:28:45.000 In fact, the Harvard Misinformation Review even wrote an internal report for their proprietary censorship policy magazine called the Harvard Misinformation Review, saying that the field of censorship, the disinformation studies or disinformation, misdis and malinformation studies is what they call it the science of censorship, was now, quote, too big to fail.
00:29:10.000 And it was in that sort of perception that there would never be any pushback by the American people, there would never be any pushback by Congress or by the press or by the social media platforms that they planned to expand that infrastructure that they rolled out for the 2020 election and COVID to quote every sensitive policy issue.
00:29:29.000 And that's a direct quote that I've got a dozen of these people saying on tape, almost like they're reading it from the same white paper.
00:29:35.000 But the idea was, is anytime there's a sensitive policy discussion, I mean, effectively that gets in the way of a Pentagon priority, we now have this incredible, perfect, godlike tool when you combine the AI censorship capacities with a professional team to map the narratives in real time and work with the rapid response units to have the essentially CIA liaison office at Facebook, Twitter,
00:30:00.000 and YouTube to just put these machine readable scripts into their AI for what narratives to censor and what communities it will micro target and to be able to fine-tune those up and down knob turns by having this architecture in place.
00:30:17.000 They thought that this was going to be unchallenged and applicable to everything.
00:30:22.000 And they did begin to do this in late 2021, early 2022, but it sort of got short-circuited by how politicized it all became once the revelations began to go mainstream.
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00:31:19.000 Mike, has anything been done to fix or defang this censorship industrial complex?
00:31:26.000 And I want you to also mention the NGOs, the Aspen Institute, and the outside 501c3s that act as janissaries for the censorship machineries and leviathan's wishes.
00:31:38.000 Yeah, well, I mean, so I just laid out many of the things that have already been done.
00:31:43.000 I mean, you can read on my foundation's website at foundationforfreedomonline.com, we've got all the reports about how they're on their own panels.
00:31:51.000 They have been in a sort of panic until the ratification late last year of the EU Digital Services Act, which is the new NATO censorship law, which they see as the Hail Mary to save themselves from the stalling of their momentum.
00:32:05.000 That's maybe a sidebar issue you can return to if we have time.
00:32:08.000 But as I mentioned, we should take some heed that 2023 was the first year of victory against censorship that we ever had.
00:32:20.000 From the rise of the censorship industry from 2016 through 2022, it was one loss after another.
00:32:26.000 It looked completely unchallengeable, insurmountable, too big a Goliath to take on.
00:32:32.000 And then we had a serendipitous sequence of events between Elon Musk acquiring Twitter and all it takes is one little crack in the Titanic to sink the thing.
00:32:44.000 If one free platform allows free speech, then suddenly the water comes rushing into the vessel.
00:32:52.000 So you had Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter.
00:32:55.000 And just not to find a point on it, Twitter is the place for political thought leadership, and there's not even a close second in that respect, even though it has the lowest amount of monthly active users as measured against Facebook.
00:33:10.000 Instagram's got 2 billion.
00:33:12.000 Facebook, YouTube is far larger by traffic.
00:33:17.000 It's the second largest, most trafficked website after Google.
00:33:20.000 And it is sort of a social media.
00:33:22.000 But there is a huge asymmetry with respect to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube versus Twitter when it comes to political narratives and the virality of political narratives, because 99% of people who watch YouTube are not YouTube creators.
00:33:34.000 They don't actually, you can't retweet a YouTube video on platform.
00:33:38.000 You need to go to Twitter to do that.
00:33:40.000 And same thing with Facebook and Instagram.
00:33:42.000 These are not primarily political organs.
00:33:44.000 So, you know, and it's Twitter is also the easiest to be able to map when it was an open, when it was an open garden as opposed to a walled garden before Elon Musk changed that policy in the summer of 2023.
00:33:59.000 It's much easier for these CIA-funded, Pentagon-funded censorship squads to be able to just get right into how a narrative was spreading and micro-target who exactly to censor and how to do that in that pre-period.
00:34:12.000 So you had the Elon Musk sort of victories there.
00:34:15.000 You had the legal victories with two great judgments at the trial court and the appellate court level with the Missouri v. Biden case, which is directly suing every agency in the federal government for an injunction to prevent them from coordinating or pressuring platforms to censor.
00:34:29.000 That is now before the Supreme Court, riding on two major victories at the lower court level.
00:34:34.000 You have the rise of institutions like America First Legal under Stephen Miller, who have filed multiple censorship lawsuits that have been extremely effective at being able to get documents and discovery and be able to amplify in the public understanding of the case being articulated.
00:34:53.000 You have Ken Pacton, the state attorney general of Texas, now shepherding this new lawsuit against the State Department.
00:35:00.000 You have the revelations and constant pressure from Jim Jordan's weaponization subcommittee.
00:35:05.000 And don't underestimate the power of that, even though these, I mean, what we're up against is so big that you can't think about things in terms of we're going to have this one little, you know, one weird trick to slay the CIA and the Pentagon, which has $800 billion in funding in this.
00:35:29.000 That is, you're living in a dream world in that case.
00:35:32.000 And you need to just, I know it's painful to stare directly into the sun and see the size of the beast you're up against, but you need to in order to, you need to go through your five stages of grief and get to the acceptance stage so that you can understand what victory actually looks like.
00:35:48.000 Victory does not look like, you know, stopping these people altogether.
00:35:52.000 We are way too far from that.
00:35:54.000 You need to begin the process.
00:35:56.000 You need momentum.
00:35:57.000 You need coalition building.
00:35:58.000 You need resilient networks.
00:35:59.000 You need funding.
00:36:00.000 You need all these, you need a public awareness.
00:36:03.000 You need a whole of society freedom alliance to take on the whole of society censorship alliance.
00:36:09.000 And that did not exist before 2023.
00:36:12.000 And it is beginning to.
00:36:15.000 And, you know, now the empire is striking back with this new NATO censorship law, which is existential and perhaps beyond the scope of this.
00:36:23.000 But there has been people should appreciate that the censorship industry is chastened right now after a string of losses they were not expecting.
00:36:34.000 I want to just touch on this briefly.
00:36:36.000 You talked about mail-in ballots in the Tucker interview.
00:36:38.000 Did they know that they were effectively rigging the election against Trump, therefore?
00:36:42.000 Yeah.
00:36:42.000 So they, can you elaborate on that?
00:36:45.000 I almost thought it'd just be funnier to leave that as a deadpan.
00:36:48.000 But yes, I mean, they literally defined on tape, and my foundation has all their confession videos clipped in a 10,000-word report we published in November 2022, where they literally at the outset defined Donald Trump himself.
00:37:02.000 These are the people who have gotten millions of dollars in grant funding from the National Science Foundation for Censorship Order and who were formally deputized.
00:37:11.000 They were created by the Department of Homeland Security.
00:37:15.000 That is, it was, they had pitch meetings to create themselves as this entity, EIP, directly with the Department of Homeland Security, because of a topic we've covered, how DHS came to acquire these powers, to use their proprietary domestic disinformation switchboard in order to achieve this mass censorship.
00:37:37.000 But they defined Donald Trump himself as, quote, the death star of disinformation.
00:37:44.000 They were refereeing, they were refereeing free speech about the election while defining one of the two candidates as being the exact death star that they were trying to blow up.
00:37:56.000 I mean, it's cartoonish.
00:37:57.000 There's not a single person in their 120-person squad who was, you know, who was ideologically heterodox.
00:38:03.000 It was a political hate job and they pulled it off.
00:38:05.000 So, Mike, let me see if we can get some forward-facing thing.
00:38:11.000 They're going to try the censorship campaign again in 24.
00:38:14.000 How would they shut down Twitter or Elon Musk?
00:38:16.000 Is it possible ahead of November?
00:38:19.000 Yes.
00:38:20.000 Well, it's very nasty what they're turning to now.
00:38:20.000 Yeah.
00:38:22.000 You know, it's very similar as a parallel to what's happening with the Trump election or the Trump candidacy in 2024.
00:38:31.000 Right now, Donald Trump is up in all seven battleground states, polling shows he's actually winning with young people and Hispanics, which are two demos.
00:38:39.000 He's never been above the real clear politics polling average ever.
00:38:43.000 And it's right at that moment when, in a fair fight, it would look like he might be victorious, where you have the escalation of things like four separate indictments, breaking two and a half centuries of precedent around not indicting presidents, breaking that, you know, to charge them for 700 years of prison,
00:39:06.000 and then having New York state itself extend a statute of limitations on a totally insane fake rape charge that then results in $100 million in cumulative damages.
00:39:19.000 Then you have this ruling by the state of by a New York judge that Trump has to just disgorge $400 million when even on the facts of the case, there was no one actually damaged because all loans were repaid.
00:39:33.000 This escalation of the stakes beyond the traditional terms of engagement for hard-nosed politics is playing out now in the censorship industry space in the sense that it used to be the case that you could make the argument that the straightforward path to victory was a persuasion game,
00:39:54.000 and it was about getting the social media companies to stop censoring, and it was about getting governments maybe to stop putting their boot keel on the press of the private sector to coerce that censorship.
00:40:06.000 That is now changing because of the nastiness of the Biden State Department.
00:40:10.000 And it's really, really nasty what's happening right now, which is there is this joint effort by the U.S. State Department, the UK Foreign Office, and NATO to create a legal ban on dissident speech.
00:40:25.000 And this was something that began, I may have described this in the Tucker segment, but I think I went through what I call the Dirty Diplomats Roadshow, which was this international roadshow that was done by State Department exiles of the Obama administration after they were all expecting promotions to the National Security Council when Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, won the presidency.
00:40:49.000 But they were all unceremoniously fired when Donald Trump shockingly won that day.
00:40:54.000 And they took their special set of skills, which is getting European regulators to pass laws in Europe.
00:41:03.000 That's what their job is.
00:41:05.000 That was what my former job was too when I was at state.
00:41:08.000 But this was the same group whose job was getting NATO member states, getting European Union states to pass sanctions on Russia.
00:41:19.000 What I'm talking about here is something that I call the transatlantic flank attack.
00:41:23.000 And is really the most existential threat to the internet right now at the strategic level, which is you had something, transatlantic flank attack 1.0 is what I was describing, which is how the censorship architecture really came back to the U.S. What we talked in the beginning about how the Pentagon and the CIA and the State Department were initially doing this in Germany and Ukraine and in the Baltics.
00:41:49.000 And then it came to the UK after Brexit, then it came to the US.
00:41:54.000 And how that actually came to the U.S. Was on the back of a series of EU regulations that were essentially coerced and spearheaded by U.S.
00:42:06.000 State Department folks who blamed the rise of alternative media for Donald Trump's election in 2016 and saw a commonality with their Pro-EU political class in Europe from a comparable threat in Europe That the MAGA movement posed to US.
00:42:28.000 You had the Brexit movement in the UK.
00:42:29.000 You had Marine Le Pen's movement in France.
00:42:31.000 So they made the arguments about Frexit or anti-NATO sentiment in France, Malteo Savini in Italy, the Grexit in Germany and Svegsit in Spain and Grexit in Greece.
00:42:42.000 And so all of, basically, the U.S. State Department exiles who are now back in power with the Biden administration. took this special set of skills around getting European regulators to pass new laws, just as they did after Crimea in 2014.
00:42:57.000 They all passed, you know, bite themselves in the leg sanctions on themselves to cut themselves off from cheap Russian energy to sanction Russia over the Crimea annexation in 2014.
00:43:10.000 They ran it back in 2017 to do the same roadshow, but instead of for sanctions for censorship.
00:43:16.000 And they went about in the UK and spearheaded what is now called the online harms bill.
00:43:24.000 They went to Germany and they spearheaded something which was called Nets DG.
00:43:28.000 And that was really what forced so much of US censorship starting in late 2017, because it forced U.S. tech companies to adopt AI censorship as a proactive matter in order to comply with German law and effectively to comply with EU law because Germany is the economic base of Europe.
00:43:47.000 And because they were forced to hire all those new content moderators anyway, and to install all this technology, it wasn't a huge cost for them to then simply apply the same speech standards back here in the U.S.
00:44:01.000 And at the time, there was a lot of press about, oh, the U.S. is on a collision course with Europe about the First Amendment versus these new norms and standards in Europe after the 2016 election.
00:44:12.000 But the side of that, the American people aren't really privy to is the role of our own US state.
00:44:17.000 And Europe didn't make that decision by itself.
00:44:20.000 There are many, many member states of the EU who occupy high positions in parliament or the executive suite there that can't go to the bathroom in their own homes at 5 a.m. without getting approval from a State Department diplomat somewhere.
00:44:35.000 I mean, many of these countries are still basically subject to the Marshall Plan reconstruction, if you will, because they're so reliant on the U.S. for favors that they will, they're not exactly making up their own minds.
00:44:48.000 And it was our own blob apparatus that was pressuring them to do that in 2017.
00:44:54.000 And they are back at it now with a new trick called the EU Digital Services Act, which you should not think of as an EU thing.
00:45:01.000 You should think of it as a NATO thing because it is the NATO military arm, which is putting its thumb on that press.
00:45:07.000 And that extends the hate speech violations of the European censorship laws into a new category called disinformation, which now does not even, you know, they were mass censoring right-wing populist groups because of their opposition to immigrant, mass immigration in Europe.
00:45:26.000 You know, after the Qaddafi assassination, there was this migrant influx that created this right-wing populist surgeon.
00:45:33.000 But you could still, you couldn't argue that, you know, simply supporting a political party was an act of hate speech.
00:45:39.000 You had to go through proxies.
00:45:41.000 With this disinformation law, it is now, you know, that there are legal hate speech laws in the EU.
00:45:49.000 It sort of does make sense if you don't have a First Amendment and you have a legal ban on hate speech to have some compliance requirement for social media companies operating there not to break the law.
00:45:59.000 But that didn't extend to this disablination.
00:46:02.000 Now it does.
00:46:04.000 And the implications of that are that Twitter is now going to be forced by NATO unless the State Department protects them.
00:46:12.000 And this is the killer shot because the State Department, the only way to stop that is if U.S. diplomacy puts its elbow in the mix and says, you know what?
00:46:22.000 You pass this law, you're cut off from USAID.
00:46:25.000 Well, that's not cut off from the USB.
00:46:26.000 That's not going to happen with Joe Biden.
00:46:27.000 They would love to crush it.
00:46:28.000 It is the opposite because it's the Biden administration that wanted them to do this, that pressured them to do this.
00:46:33.000 Mike, excellent work.
00:46:34.000 Thank you so much.
00:46:35.000 Check out Mike Benz on social media and support Foundation for Freedom Online.
00:46:39.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:46:40.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:46:43.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.
00:46:47.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com