The Great America Show - MIKE BENZ： MILITARY CONTROLS AMERICA

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00:01:18.340 Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs. Welcome to The Great America Show. It's great to have

00:01:22.340 you with us. With the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas moving out of the House and into

00:01:27.200 the Senate for trial, so far only three Republican senators calling for Mitch McConnell to hold

00:01:33.620 a trial in the Senate. So it seems likely that Mayorkas may easily survive the House impeachment.

00:01:41.200 That's too bad. Yesterday, we brought you news that multimillionaire investor Kevin O'Leary

00:01:46.380 would no longer be doing business in New York, calling it a loser state. Today,

00:01:52.220 we bring you billionaire real estate investor Grant Cardone. The real estate mogul manages

00:01:57.100 a $4 billion portfolio, says he no longer wants anything to do with a Marxist-run New York state.

00:02:04.000 Cardone and his wife have started a GoFundMe for President Trump, vowing to fight back against

00:02:09.400 these corrupt New York Marxist Dems. So far, the GoFundMe account has raised nearly $800,000

00:02:15.120 in a few days. Who runs America? I mean, really? It's certainly not Joe Biden,

00:02:20.900 and the consent of the governed is obviously no longer required. Our guest today is about to tell

00:02:26.880 us who's really running this country. He's one of the foremost cyber experts and a great American.

00:02:32.720 He's Mike Benz. He's the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. And Mike,

00:02:38.860 thanks for being with us. We appreciate it so much. And your interview with Tucker Carlson to me was

00:02:44.640 historic and a great public service. You talked about censorship and said the two greatest instances

00:02:50.240 of censorship in our history were the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 elections. Am I quoting

00:02:58.880 you correctly? Yeah, that's 100% correct. And your judgment as to why those two events?

00:03:05.860 Well, I should sort of preface that by saying that their plan was to scale out what they did for those

00:03:12.140 two things, those two events for, quote, every sensitive policy issue. And my foundation's website

00:03:18.380 has a whole supercut of clips about the way they want to expand what they did for COVID-19 censorship

00:03:25.140 and 2020 election censorship into virtually every issue of concern of foreign policy establishment,

00:03:31.640 spanning energy, immigration, abortion, you name it. But essentially what was happening during the

00:03:39.760 COVID-19 and the 2020 election mass censorship operations, which again, were the most censored

00:03:46.000 events in human history. And I include China's Great Firewall and other things in that when you look at

00:03:51.320 the sheer scale of it. But what was happening was you basically had a perfect storm of three things

00:03:56.380 that were available then and in ready position that did not exist before and currently do not quite

00:04:04.400 exist anymore. And that was you had a combination of censorship technology, censorship institutional

00:04:10.920 embedding, and political legitimacy to get away with it. And in the sense that there was not any

00:04:17.280 pushback, there was not any, it had not been scandalized, there was no public awareness,

00:04:22.000 even trying to say, hey, this might be happening, got you labeled, you know, something between either

00:04:27.360 a partisan or a conspiracy theorist. And a lot of people didn't want to believe that the, you know,

00:04:34.020 to stare directly into the sun, so to speak, and to understand what they were even up against.

00:04:39.120 And so those three things, the technology, the institutional embedding, and the political

00:04:43.580 legitimacy allowed them to get away with that. And those three things were essentially the AI censorship

00:04:49.740 and narrative detection capabilities in order to detect every emerging narrative, every grouping of

00:04:56.840 communities in order to designate them mystics or malinformation. The sort of technology that did not

00:05:02.160 exist before 2016, when all speech on the internet was flagged manually, so you couldn't do millions or

00:05:08.820 tens of millions of things censored at once. The technology did not exist to be able to track and then scan and

00:05:15.080 ban or apply different levels of content moderation at scale. You know, whether that's, you know, they call it

00:05:21.860 remove, reduce, inform. Remove is when you just ban something all together. Inform is the fact check label and the

00:05:27.420 friction and reduce is this great inter, you know, this great vast tundra of different interventions, as they call them,

00:05:34.740 in order to throttle or de-amplify or apply a so-called virality circuit breaker so that technically it's posted,

00:05:41.380 but it can't get shared or it can't get above a certain number of shares or click-throughs or whatnot.

00:05:48.140 So this was technology that had been in development really since 2014, but then it supercharged after the 2016 election.

00:05:55.660 And you had this brand new predicate with democracy after the Mullergate investigation fell apart in July 2019.

00:06:05.660 We created these tools around censoring Russian disinformation, and you had the Pentagon and the State Department and the CIA

00:06:11.600 and hundreds of NGOs and university centers who all had this institutional embedding with all the major tech companies.

00:06:18.720 And they now had their hands on these play toys for these AI weapons of mass deletion, you know, as I refer to them.

00:06:25.320 And none of them were household names. You didn't have Elon Musk purchasing Twitter.

00:06:31.360 There was no way to even popularize the issue because you couldn't even talk about it.

00:06:35.940 You didn't have the House investigations from the Jim Jordan Committee or the House Homeland Security Committee or the Oversight Committee.

00:06:41.820 You didn't have the subpoenas. You didn't have people being hauled in for transcribed interviews.

00:06:45.300 You didn't have the lawsuit with Missouri v. Biden or the America First legal lawsuit or the or the three different state attorney generals who've done these censorship investigations.

00:06:53.860 The whole panoply. And so they got away with it. And what was amazing is I'll just say as a final note is I watched these people's morals evolve over time on this.

00:07:02.940 Because I've been doing this for eight years and they didn't start out with the kind of brazenness that they that they walked themselves up to, you know,

00:07:11.120 around the covid in 2020 election. And then when they did this foreign to domestic switcheroo and took this Russian censorship predicate

00:07:18.120 that it existed from January 2017 up until summer of 2019.

00:07:23.080 And then four months later, the pandemic starts. And then three months later, the mail in ballot sort of operation started.

00:07:29.360 But they at that moment, they could have just shelved it on and said, OK, well, we're not going to do censorship anymore because there's no more Russian threat for the 2020 election.

00:07:37.840 But instead, they just transitioned it all home with this democracy branding.

00:07:41.240 And they were able to get away with it until quite recently.

00:07:43.500 Until quite recently, the issue here is 2020 and the epidemic government intruding into our private lives as citizens in this country and translation.

00:07:57.960 That means diminishing our constitutional rights wholesale in many instances.

00:08:02.600 We have a government that actually turned against the American people, because this we can talk about in terms of censorship.

00:08:10.680 But the reality is the consent of the governed is absent anywhere in the algorithm that remains.

00:08:18.040 Do you agree? Oh, not just in the algorithm at the network level.

00:08:22.160 I mean, what you're talking about is not, you know, is not an idea from from you or me.

00:08:27.840 It's an idea. It's actually the central thesis of the Biden administration's legal defense of their censorship scheme, which is that the First Amendment needs to be effectively somewhere between shelved altogether or more broadly interpreted in the age of social media, because democracy did not anticipate social media.

00:08:49.800 And this is this is the argument that that they're making in the Missouri v.

00:08:53.460 Biden case, that the traditional interpretation of the First Amendment should no longer apply.

00:08:56.680 Now, and a great example of this is actually one of the origin points of government censorship is a small little nucleus tucked within the State Department called the Global Engagement Center,

00:09:05.680 which was initially set up to give the government the capacity to to censor ISIS, because in 2014 and 2015, during the Obama administration,

00:09:14.500 as part of the lead up to putting boots on the ground in a military sense into Syria,

00:09:18.600 there were all of these, you know, hyperventilated threats, you know, surround sound media about ISIS recruiting Americans on Facebook and Twitter.

00:09:27.440 And it was everywhere. And that gave this sort of political predicate to set up a group within the State Department that would be able to have a liaison office at the highest levels of YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and every major platform and forum on the Internet to be able to tell them,

00:09:43.760 hey, these networks, hey, these networks need to go down. This speech is not allowed. This person sounds like an ISIS or ISIS propaganda.

00:09:50.720 And they mapped the whole language, the exact same thing they would do for critics of mail-in ballots or for COVID-19 heterodox opinions,

00:09:58.460 which is this process when you're creating these censorship algorithms of mapping the specific linguistics of, you know, the slang terms,

00:10:09.540 the prefixes, the suffixes, the slogans, the hashtags, you know, every there's a unique dialect that every belief system articulates.

00:10:19.120 You know, we, you know, we, you know, who tend to be more on sort of the right side or conservative side of the aisle can very quickly identify this when we hear social justice or cultural Marxist type talk.

00:10:31.420 We can sort of identify that immediately just with our own sort of human capacities.

00:10:36.420 You can only imagine the power of AI to be able to do that.

00:10:39.540 And that is that is what, you know, was basically under construction with the assistance from the Global Engagement Center at the State Department.

00:10:47.080 And the guy who founded that that censorship center within the State Department, Rich Sengel, came from being the managing editor of Time magazine previously.

00:10:57.240 And he was the undersecretary of state for public affairs, which is the, you know, which is the liaison office that coordinates basically the CIA,

00:11:04.420 the State Department and mainstream media in order to amplify the State Department's foreign policy priorities.

00:11:10.260 And he had said that his mission was, firstly, he described himself as Obama's propagandist chief.

00:11:18.360 But he had said that his mission as undersecretary of state for public affairs was to, quote, export the First Amendment.

00:11:23.880 But then two years later, when social media cost them the election, he then wrote a Washington Post op-ed in an entire book calling for an end to the First Amendment,

00:11:35.320 because it allows the kind of people to be elected who might undermine democracy.

00:11:40.120 So it went from exporting the First Amendment to ending the First Amendment just because they lost an election.

00:11:44.160 And recently, listening to Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, being asked about FISA reauthorization and reform,

00:11:53.740 suggesting, it's not suggesting, stating clearly that the administration doesn't believe that the First Amendment concerns

00:12:01.920 where it pertains to warrantless wiretaps would be helpful to the national interest.

00:12:08.160 I mean, to hear this nonsense spewing out of this administration, frankly, every American should be chilled with that kind of attitude in the White House.

00:12:17.120 And because of you, we know that that attitude permeates our federal government, in point of fact,

00:12:22.720 that is under the control of the of really the the deep state and the Marxist Dems, as I call them.

00:12:30.800 Mike, we're going to take just a quick break here.

00:12:33.380 We'll come right back after these quick messages.

00:12:36.260 We're talking with Mike Benz and the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:12:42.360 I recommend you go to it immediately.

00:12:44.940 It is worth your time.

00:12:47.740 I can guarantee you it is worth your time.

00:12:50.780 Believe me.

00:12:51.520 We'll be right back.

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00:14:29.140 We're back now.

00:14:30.420 We're talking with Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:14:35.560 And I just recommend that you read everything that Mike and his folks produce and follow it carefully.

00:14:44.360 I'll tell you this, we are, and I want to again thank you and Tucker Carlson for the conversation that you had, I guess it was a week ago.

00:14:55.260 Remarkable, and I urge everyone to look at that as well and everything that Mike has in terms of media on his site.

00:15:03.060 Let's go to the first instance, the pandemic.

00:15:07.880 We saw the government really turn against the people.

00:15:10.840 And for the first time, we in this country that I can recall, certainly, we had mandates.

00:15:16.500 We had rules imposed by public health agencies, by the White House, by the Defense Department.

00:15:24.460 Suddenly, everywhere in government, there was a totalitarian streak.

00:15:29.000 Government, obviously, is all about power over the people.

00:15:33.040 But we've been fortunate enough to live here where we have power over the government.

00:15:37.660 I watched huge chunks of freedom being chewed up by these agencies and departments.

00:15:47.000 And suddenly, I realized this is not the America that we had just a few months, a few years previous.

00:15:56.380 What is the program, if there is one, the specific program, the specific tool that made it possible for government to strip out dissent online?

00:16:11.840 Right.

00:16:12.160 Well, during the COVID pandemic, we were functionally under martial law.

00:16:16.420 And who administers martial law?

00:16:19.480 The Martians, the military.

00:16:20.980 And you have this, you know, at the top of my feed right now on my Twitter account, it's at Mike Ben Seiber.

00:16:27.400 The top post is a video showing the Soviet military response to the Chernobyl.

00:16:33.280 It's from the, it's a scene from the Netflix documentary called Chernobyl.

00:16:37.020 And it basically describes how information was contained, you know, as that outbreak happened in order to stop people from perpetuating misinformation within the Soviet empire about that event.

00:16:49.360 There was a very similar thing that happened here with respect to the outbreak of COVID, which is to say that you had, you had a kind of martial law from the government being applied.

00:16:59.100 And particularly within our national security state, our Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and all the adjacent NGOs and cutouts that they work through in order to create the surround sound and the so-called whole of society censorship apparatus that they have.

00:17:16.060 Now, they call it whole society counter misinformation network.

00:17:19.580 But countering the misinformation does not mean counter speech.

00:17:22.420 It means censoring.

00:17:23.840 It means picking down the posts, you know, remove, produce, and form.

00:17:26.860 You know, you know, you know, the government that we're in trouble with our government when the government starts labeling everything the opposite of what it is.

00:17:35.640 It becomes Orwellian to a degree we've never experienced before in this country.

00:17:39.740 Well, you're kind of getting at sort of the heart of it, which is, I mean, most people have no idea how much work goes into it from their side in order to come up with those framing devices.

00:17:52.820 I mean, for years, I was watching these people come up with all that.

00:17:55.800 You know, we can't quite say it like that.

00:17:57.180 It won't go down well.

00:17:58.160 You know, we need to be able to persuade this group of stakeholders and these committees of Congress.

00:18:02.460 So we need to call it this.

00:18:03.580 Well, this doesn't quite work.

00:18:04.640 Well, how about this?

00:18:05.240 Well, we need to run this through our whole sort of stakeholder apparatus in order to, you know, to get everyone on board that this is the branding.

00:18:11.220 And it's all done to deliberately mislead you so that you have no idea what's happening behind the scenes.

00:18:16.220 And this is why I sometimes joke that the reason that the disinformation governance board was shelved within a week.

00:18:21.820 But the actual Ministry of Truth within the Department of Homeland Security, which had this innocuous, innocuous, you know, mundane name called the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has the name security in it twice.

00:18:37.320 It had nothing to do with security.

00:18:38.180 It was a censorship agency.

00:18:39.840 It was our first ever federal government domestic censorship bureau.

00:18:43.700 And that was what was responsible for censoring the 2020 election.

00:18:46.840 This is how you got hundreds of millions of pro-Trump tweets centered.

00:18:50.860 It was through this specific government agency.

00:18:53.260 But they didn't call it the Disinformation Governance Board.

00:18:56.040 You know, if they called it that, it probably would have been shut down within a week, like the Disinformation Governance Board, when they tried that in April 2022.

00:19:03.740 So the systematic wrong naming, you know, I refer to this as censor speak.

00:19:08.380 In order to parse the sort of cinematic universe of what you're up against here, you need to speak their language.

00:19:13.920 Because everything is coded in order to prevent the sunlight that would instantly be legitimized.

00:19:21.700 And so, you know, these are words like media literacy, you know, which is like a whole censorship branding thing to say that if you read news sources that are misinformation sites, then you are illiterate in media.

00:19:34.100 And you need to get your mind right or you shouldn't be able to access those sites.

00:19:37.800 Most people think media literacy means, you know, helping underprivileged kids in inner cities learn how to become more literate.

00:19:43.760 They have no idea it's a censorship branding term or the term intervention.

00:19:47.320 You know, intervention.

00:19:48.560 Most people think that that means, you know, saving someone from drinking themselves to death.

00:19:52.960 But what they mean is running an intervention on you so that you, your mind is not clouded up by misinformation that you see on social media.

00:20:00.520 And so we will censor the posts that you can see, or we will throttle them in the algorithm, or we'll affix these fact-checking labels with interstitial playthroughs so that you, we are intervening to help to see you from your own, you know, wrong thoughts and opinions that you might form.

00:20:15.080 And I mean, there's a million of these on my website.

00:20:17.120 I have a whole sort of lexicon of censor speak.

00:20:19.460 But, you know, you need to speak that language, and people are only beginning to learn that now.

00:20:23.580 Yeah, and don't hesitate to mention the name of your site, the Foundation for Freedom Online, because it's very important to this audience.

00:20:32.700 What you're talking about is, frankly, it's so important to the American people to understand what has happened to this country.

00:20:40.340 I want to go to the, you mentioned the agency, the, what is it?

00:20:48.800 CISA, yeah, DHS.

00:20:50.220 Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency.

00:20:55.020 I mean, all they needed was another security in there.

00:20:58.720 We had a real title.

00:20:59.980 But they also lied through their teeth in the 2020 election.

00:21:05.280 Famously, Chris Krebs came out and said it was the most secure election in American history.

00:21:09.860 He did that within, I believe, as I recall, six days of the election, which was impossible no matter how advanced the cyber tools that were in use.

00:21:20.060 You couldn't have possibly rendered that judgment because of the variety of votes that were cast and types of votes.

00:21:28.320 And then a year and a half later, and most people didn't pay a bit of attention, they came out with a paper in which they recanted.

00:21:35.140 They didn't apologize, they didn't correct it, but they recanted that statement.

00:21:43.380 And the national media didn't pick it up.

00:21:46.400 It was really quite interesting to watch because it's a perfect example of what you're talking about.

00:21:50.840 This was mind control.

00:21:52.940 This was ducking, bobbing, and weaving in the national media flagrantly and without comment from the national liberal media in this country.

00:22:02.260 And it's outrageous.

00:22:03.800 And people still think that the election of 2020, you know, is either on the left, they say it shouldn't be re-litigated.

00:22:11.020 They don't understand it.

00:22:12.680 And the conservatives on the right say that it doggone well better be because we know it was rigged.

00:22:20.420 And the fact is, we don't understand what happened in this country fully.

00:22:25.740 And I think you've given us a way to get to that answer, your thinking.

00:22:31.320 Yeah, I mean, the rabbit hole on this goes so deep, I think it could be a lot of overwhelming for people to sort of digest in one bite.

00:22:38.060 On my foundation's website, we have an article called The Ultimate Guide to DHS Censorship.

00:22:42.540 And it's a 10,000-word report with 25 different confession videos of insiders confessing to this whole plan as they were doing it and gloating about it afterwards.

00:22:51.760 150 hyperlinks is sort of the definitive story of this DHS censorship of mass mail-in ballots.

00:22:58.120 It's been entered into the floor of Congress and multiple lawsuits.

00:23:01.680 That's probably the best source for people who want further reading after this.

00:23:05.180 But, you know, the short story is when this whole society censorship network was set up, they knew they needed the government to be the quarterback.

00:23:13.660 And, again, the whole society is four quadrants of institutions, government agencies, the private sector institutions such as the platforms and the private sector censorship mercenary firms and the censorship technology developers, civil society institutions, and that's universities, nonprofits, foundations, and activist and researcher groups.

00:23:32.800 And then the fourth one is media and fact-checking organizations.

00:23:36.060 And they knew they needed a government quarterback of the whole society network because government cutouts, like, for example, Stanford University created this censorship organization called the Stanford Internet Observatory.

00:23:50.420 There was no observing about it.

00:23:51.860 This was a Death Star that was blasting millions of posts, you know, off the Internet.

00:23:55.840 But they couldn't call it, you know, they couldn't call it that, so they had to make it sound, seem like an observatory.

00:23:59.800 Is that even a bit again?

00:24:00.560 Yeah, it's called the Stanford Internet Observatory.

00:24:03.500 They've been, you know, they've been the subject of many, many news cycles at this point because of how deep the scandal goes there.

00:24:11.180 You know, they've been subpoenaed by the Jim Jordan Webinization Committee and are all over the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit.

00:24:16.220 You know, they were partnered with three other institutions, which include Graphica, which got $7 million of Pentagon grants and got started as part of something called the Minerva Initiative, which is the Psychological Operations Research Center of the Pentagon.

00:24:31.740 So this was a formal, this is a private firm, which was formerly, you know, parked within a psychological operations unit within the Pentagon, who got $7 million of Pentagon funding, who was designated the formal domestic disinformation flagger for the U.S. election in 2020.

00:24:49.940 You know, their CSO was 25 years in the CIA.

00:24:54.440 They'd been doing basically social media mapping for the Pentagon in conflict zones until the 2016 election.

00:25:00.380 And then the Pentagon, you know, the Pentagon was at war with Donald Trump.

00:25:04.000 I mean, let's just say what it was, the Ukraine policy that he articulated, the Russia policy that he articulated was a reversal of the Obama administration and the Bush administration and the Mitt Romney and the John McCain.

00:25:15.540 The uniparty Pentagon priorities that had basically existed from Truman until Trump were deeply, deeply challenged.

00:25:23.900 And not only that, it happened at a time when these things were very fragile in Ukraine.

00:25:28.340 And there was an in-process operation to try to basically bring these breakaway states back in.

00:25:32.380 And so you had this, you know, what you might argue may have happened with the Kennedy situation where he was at war with his own generals.

00:25:41.080 And so this, but there by far none, the Pentagon is the largest employer in the entire country, bigger than a private employer.

00:25:49.580 They employ something like 2 million people, the Pentagon alone.

00:25:52.340 It gets the most money, federal dollars, of any federal government agency.

00:25:57.000 And they're the most sophisticated in being able to launder things through cutouts because so many of our own private sector institutions and universities and media companies rely on the Pentagon either for direct funding, for R&D funding, for the Pentagon to clear the way for them, to do favors for them so that they can, you know, resist resource nationalism from foreign countries.

00:26:17.480 And for access, you know, when it comes to media institutions.

00:26:21.640 And so, you know, the Atlanta Council is also partnered with Stanford.

00:26:24.740 The Atlanta Council gets funding from all four branches of the U.S. military, the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, as well as funding from the State Department and CIA cutouts like the National Dome of Democracy.

00:26:33.640 They were all joined together in a formal partnership called the Election Integrity Partnership, which was handcrafted by CISA, the DHS, seven months before the election started in order to, in the words of the head of EIP, to do what the government wanted to do in terms of censorship but could not do itself.

00:26:53.500 They deliberately confessed to the DHS wanting to violate the First Amendment but knowing they couldn't and so running it and laundering it through an outside private group that were closely together with them.

00:27:08.140 And there's a formal pitch to even form them.

00:27:11.060 And not only that, in order to do that, they used this DHS-funded infrastructure to access the domestic disinformation switchboard to be able to make sure that everything was censored in real time.

00:27:21.220 Incredible.

00:27:21.620 I mean, it is just utterly incredible.

00:27:24.780 We're talking with Mike Benz.

00:27:26.760 He's the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:27:30.680 We're going to come back.

00:27:31.700 And when we do, we're going to get a handle on just exactly where was the intelligence community in all of this during this period, during this period in which we live as well.

00:27:43.460 We'll be right back with Mike Benz.

00:27:45.140 Stay with us.

00:27:46.800 Lou Dobbs here.

00:27:47.980 I'm delighted to let you all know that the program Lou Dobbs Tonight has returned to the air.

00:27:54.280 That's right.

00:27:55.420 Lou Dobbs Tonight is back.

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00:28:01.400 Eastern and 6 p.m.

00:28:03.160 Central on Rumble.com slash Lou Dobbs.

00:28:07.200 That's Rumble.com slash Lou Dobbs.

00:28:10.340 I hope you'll be joining us for Lou Dobbs Tonight as our fight to save this country has only begun.

00:28:17.620 We're back now.

00:28:24.540 We're talking with Mike Benz.

00:28:26.660 He is the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:28:33.460 And I want to just get to where we are, it seems to me, in this conversation, Mike.

00:28:38.140 And that is, who is in charge of this country?

00:28:41.500 Who is in charge of, I think I know the answer, but our government?

00:28:47.300 And is there any place to hide in the midst of all of this?

00:28:51.700 So my stock answer to that question is simply the blob.

00:28:55.120 And then the magic of that is, what is the shape of the blob?

00:28:58.120 The blob was a term that Obama's deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, described as being what you're up against when you're trying as a president to actually affect foreign policy in the country.

00:29:14.040 And the blob refers to this foreign policy establishment, which is a really sort of cute way, a sort of boring way of describing the managers of the American empire.

00:29:24.340 And so here, I think, at a sort of theoretical level, it's important to draw a distinction between the managers of the American empire and the citizens of the American homeland.

00:29:33.540 Because the power structures that run Washington, there's a very sharp divide between those two things.

00:29:39.400 We have, America is not just the 330-odd million people who live here.

00:29:45.460 It is, America is the world. 0.58

00:29:47.620 And it has been for, you know, almost a century now, in the sense that, you know, in 1898, we became this global empire when we took the Philippines and the Spanish-American War.

00:29:56.700 And we took Cuba and we had to defend all these foreign territories.

00:29:59.840 Frankly, you can take it back farther than that into the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and the Banana Wars.

00:30:05.220 And we are an industrial nation of multinational corporations in a big, bad, mean, old world where every country's government is trying to do what's best for its own corporations and its own people.

00:30:19.880 And so their resource nationalism is real.

00:30:22.840 Market protectionism is real.

00:30:24.780 And so we, in order to maintain our pull over the American empire, we needed to create this vast blob structure that is, at the government level, is localized to three different sort of legs.

00:30:41.580 There's the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community.

00:30:45.000 And they all play different roles.

00:30:47.300 But it's important when you think of those three different categories of institutions, they are one thing.

00:30:52.040 If you have a job at the Pentagon as a deputy assistant secretary there, the very next year, you could be a deputy assistant secretary of the State Department or go into the CIA or NSA or any of the other 17 agencies.

00:31:02.380 It's one thing.

00:31:04.060 And so that's the government side of it.

00:31:06.620 But then you have the donors and drafters off of the battering rim of the blob.

00:31:10.520 And I should say the blob is imbued with a Department of Dirty Tricks power to be able to overthrow governments, to be able to bribe or censor foreign media, to be able to do all manner of psychological operations, to run color revolutions, to take over unions, to run this whole society playbook.

00:31:28.660 Where if there's a territory that we want to extract resources from, or we want to put a military base in, or we want that country to vote our way in a U.N. Security Council vote, we have this Department of Dirty Tricks to be able to co-opt all the different private sector, civil society, and media institutions in that region in order to make it more pliant to the empire's interests.

00:31:49.940 And so this is essentially the main power structure in Washington because the empire is much, much bigger than the homeland.

00:31:59.520 The issue is, while that may have been in some ways responsible for our prosperous middle class in the 20th century, because all of our multinational corporations, Pepsi-Cola could export to billions of people, Microsoft, our oil and gas companies,

00:32:15.760 they would not be able to have access to these foreign markets unless the State Department pried them open, or unless the Pentagon or NATO basically forced free market reforms, or unless our intelligence agencies were able to pipe in surround sound media or groom a sort of political class to emerging leader programs and whatnot.

00:32:36.280 The issue is, is we had this Department of Dirty Tricks, which was supposed to be this kind of, you know, multi-headed hydra, you know, pit bull orca whale defending our American interests, and it was never supposed to come inside the house.

00:32:51.300 It's supposed to protect us and sort of, you know, acquire territory politically in order to increase U.S. national interests.

00:32:59.200 But after the 2016 election, they broke two and a half, you know, they broke, you know, what's effectively two and a half centuries of precedent, going, you know, going back to our founding, but certainly a century of precedent since the founding of this apparatus in 1948.

00:33:14.660 In the same way, they broke that precedent, by the way, at the Justice Department level, you know, with indicting Trump and with these bankruptcy lawsuits.

00:33:22.140 But in 2016, we took our magic Department of Dirty Tricks democracy blob of power, and we turned it inward to do the same thing to our own homeland, what we did to other regions in the empire.

00:33:36.440 And that is, of course, that Washington, domestic-focused politicians in Washington have not been prepared.

00:33:43.640 And frankly, it will take decades to really be prepared to confront.

00:33:46.300 Decades to be prepared to confront, yet we are in conflict, and it looks like mortal conflict, frankly, to me, right now.

00:33:57.480 We have an election, a presidential election, that is absolutely existential.

00:34:01.740 I know that sounds like hyperbole to some.

00:34:04.000 I truly believe that if Donald Trump does not win this election, there are very few options open to us.

00:34:10.240 And that, in effect, the Marxist Dem Party, led by Marxist Dems, will have its way.

00:34:19.620 It will become the uniparty.

00:34:21.440 There will only be room for one party.

00:34:24.140 And we have an election that we can't assure is secure, because our cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency

00:34:33.740 is a major part, a focal point, frankly, in terms of constricting our freedoms and directing outcomes of elections.

00:34:47.400 I don't know why anyone with any common sense would assume that the CIA, for example,

00:34:54.600 could be fixing elections in Ecuador, Chile, Peru, but wouldn't bring those tools home to greet us.

00:35:06.420 And I think there are a lot of people who have a conspiracy theory that that's precisely what happened.

00:35:11.380 And like nearly every other conspiracy theory of the last 10 years, it just happens to be true.

00:35:18.280 Entirely.

00:35:19.000 I mean, the CIA is all over this.

00:35:20.720 And it's also important to understand that when the CIA operates, it operates through hundreds of cutouts.

00:35:29.780 I mean, when we, you know, as you mentioned, if we're going to overthrow the government,

00:35:33.980 if the CIA is going to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, you know, they don't march in there with, you know,

00:35:39.640 they don't W-2, you know, they're not W-2 employees with big badges saying,

00:35:44.480 Hi, my name is Mike.

00:35:45.840 I'm from the CIA.

00:35:46.980 You know, what they do is they use a sophisticated interlinking network of front companies,

00:36:00.080 of shell corporations, of laundered money, and of, you know, different categories of institutions

00:36:07.300 that span the whole society.

00:36:09.380 You know, they work through academic centers.

00:36:11.520 They work through NGOs.

00:36:13.140 They work with so-called independent media, which happens to be funded by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy

00:36:18.780 and the State Department, you know, which is basically just cover.

00:36:22.680 And then, you know, they'll work with, you know, they'll work through sort of opposition groups

00:36:26.320 that they're providing money to through Cayman Islands bank accounts or, you know, crypto now.

00:36:30.920 The issue is, is once the people don't, I think, fully appreciate the magic spell word of democracy

00:36:41.980 and what a loose term like threat to democracy does in terms of the blob's ability to break open the Department of Dirty Tricks.

00:36:52.760 You know, the blob's favorite president is Woodrow Wilson.

00:36:55.220 They are obsessed with Woodrow Wilson.

00:36:57.040 They will defend Woodrow Wilson against progressive leftists who's trying to say that he's a racist.

00:37:02.580 There will be a sort of exception for all that just because Wilson is so central to the power that the blob derives politically.

00:37:10.480 And this is, you know, Wilson's whole call to make the world, you know, safe for democracy, you know, 1917 or whatnot.

00:37:16.280 Was our banner to be able to use this word, you see, the CIA basically operates under two conditions

00:37:24.780 in terms of its political legitimacy and its jurisdiction.

00:37:28.180 That is, if a foreign country is committing aggression externally, and if we can't nail them on that, repression internally.

00:37:37.120 Now, the oppression externally, I'm sorry, aggression externally is a national security factor.

00:37:45.640 You know, it's very easy to justify if, you know, if Iraq is, you know, attacking its neighbor or if Serbia is attacking people in Kosovo.

00:37:56.640 You can say, OK, well, that is external aggression.

00:37:59.420 And we need to, you know, and that undermines our national security because we're seeing this right now with, you know, the Ukraine situation.

00:38:05.620 Well, Poland's next. And so it's going to actually be an aggression against NATO states. 0.81

00:38:10.700 But if we can't nail them on that and we still need, we still want regime change, then we have this catch-all for domestic repression.

00:38:19.280 Well, if they're not hurting other people, they're hurting themselves and they need a new government, which happens to be a U.S.-installed puppet government.

00:38:26.140 And by the way, I don't mean to sound like an anti-imperialist leftist.

00:38:29.040 I don't know that I had a problem with any of this until they brought it home after the 2016 election, because that means the managers of the American empire are not serving the homeland anymore.

00:38:38.760 It's literally just for their own interests, for their own, you know, for their own money, for their own power.

00:38:43.240 And it just becomes no distinction between Boston and Baghdad.

00:38:48.640 So I think what I'm just trying to describe here is the moment you say something or someone is a threat to democracy, it allows the blob to unleash this department of dirty tricks.

00:38:59.700 And that is exactly what happened when Trump was labeled a threat to democracy.

00:39:03.700 And they also had the Russiagate thing.

00:39:05.680 I mean, the CIA got involved in this immediately because, first, if you remember, it was actually the 15-page CIA memo published on January 6th, 2017.

00:39:13.120 That was the very first, you know, intelligence community assessment that Russia had hacked the 2016 election and that Russiagate was real.

00:39:22.860 That came straight from the CIA.

00:39:24.660 The censorship industry then grew out of the Russiagate, and then they transitioned it with the foreign to domestic switcheroo starting after July 2019.

00:39:31.900 And that turned out to be just about as accurate as their propaganda about Vladimir Putin's health conditions immediately following his invasion of Ukraine.

00:39:45.200 It's been remarkable.

00:39:46.840 And, Mike, thank you so much for your time today.

00:39:49.320 I would love for you to come back soon and continue the conversation.

00:39:53.660 I know the audience would as well.

00:39:55.800 But thank you so much for your time today and for the tutorial, as always.

00:40:00.800 Thanks, Lou.

00:40:01.900 I'd love to continue the conversation.

00:40:04.140 Great.

00:40:04.440 Thank you.

00:40:05.420 Mike Benz, the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:40:12.020 And I recommend everyone go to it.

00:40:14.540 It's just a wonderful website.

00:40:16.940 And you've heard the power behind it.

00:40:21.260 Mike Benz.

00:40:22.060 Thanks so much, Mike.

00:40:23.460 Thank you.

00:40:24.460 Mike Benz, a great American.

00:40:26.660 And thanks for being with us, Mike.

00:40:28.200 And thank you, everybody, for joining us.

00:40:30.440 And be here tomorrow for The Great America Show.

00:40:32.680 Our guest is attorney Mike Davis, the head of the Article III Project.

00:40:37.240 And please join us for Lou Dobbs tonight.

00:40:39.860 Watch us each and every weeknight on Twitter, Rumble, Frank Speech, and more at 7 p.m. Eastern, 6 central.

00:40:48.840 Follow me on Twitter and true social at Lou Dobbs.

00:40:51.620 And thank you, everybody.

00:40:53.180 God bless you.

00:40:54.040 And may God bless America.

00:40:55.640 Thank you.

The Great America Show - February 21, 2024

MIKE BENZ： MILITARY CONTROLS AMERICA

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