In this episode of The Great America Show, Tucker Carlson interviews Mike Benz, the Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. They discuss censorship and why it is so rampant in our society. The two greatest instances of censorship in our history were the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 election, which were the most censored events in human history.
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00:01:18.340Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs. Welcome to The Great America Show. It's great to have
00:01:22.340you with us. With the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas moving out of the House and into
00:01:27.200the Senate for trial, so far only three Republican senators calling for Mitch McConnell to hold
00:01:33.620a trial in the Senate. So it seems likely that Mayorkas may easily survive the House impeachment.
00:01:41.200That's too bad. Yesterday, we brought you news that multimillionaire investor Kevin O'Leary
00:01:46.380would no longer be doing business in New York, calling it a loser state. Today,
00:01:52.220we bring you billionaire real estate investor Grant Cardone. The real estate mogul manages
00:01:57.100a $4 billion portfolio, says he no longer wants anything to do with a Marxist-run New York state.
00:02:04.000Cardone and his wife have started a GoFundMe for President Trump, vowing to fight back against
00:02:09.400these corrupt New York Marxist Dems. So far, the GoFundMe account has raised nearly $800,000
00:02:15.120in a few days. Who runs America? I mean, really? It's certainly not Joe Biden,
00:02:20.900and the consent of the governed is obviously no longer required. Our guest today is about to tell
00:02:26.880us who's really running this country. He's one of the foremost cyber experts and a great American.
00:02:32.720He's Mike Benz. He's the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. And Mike,
00:02:38.860thanks for being with us. We appreciate it so much. And your interview with Tucker Carlson to me was
00:02:44.640historic and a great public service. You talked about censorship and said the two greatest instances
00:02:50.240of censorship in our history were the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 elections. Am I quoting
00:02:58.880you correctly? Yeah, that's 100% correct. And your judgment as to why those two events?
00:03:05.860Well, I should sort of preface that by saying that their plan was to scale out what they did for those
00:03:12.140two things, those two events for, quote, every sensitive policy issue. And my foundation's website
00:03:18.380has a whole supercut of clips about the way they want to expand what they did for COVID-19 censorship
00:03:25.140and 2020 election censorship into virtually every issue of concern of foreign policy establishment,
00:03:31.640spanning energy, immigration, abortion, you name it. But essentially what was happening during the
00:03:39.760COVID-19 and the 2020 election mass censorship operations, which again, were the most censored
00:03:46.000events in human history. And I include China's Great Firewall and other things in that when you look at
00:03:51.320the sheer scale of it. But what was happening was you basically had a perfect storm of three things
00:03:56.380that were available then and in ready position that did not exist before and currently do not quite
00:04:04.400exist anymore. And that was you had a combination of censorship technology, censorship institutional
00:04:10.920embedding, and political legitimacy to get away with it. And in the sense that there was not any
00:04:17.280pushback, there was not any, it had not been scandalized, there was no public awareness,
00:04:22.000even trying to say, hey, this might be happening, got you labeled, you know, something between either
00:04:27.360a partisan or a conspiracy theorist. And a lot of people didn't want to believe that the, you know,
00:04:34.020to stare directly into the sun, so to speak, and to understand what they were even up against.
00:04:39.120And so those three things, the technology, the institutional embedding, and the political
00:04:43.580legitimacy allowed them to get away with that. And those three things were essentially the AI censorship
00:04:49.740and narrative detection capabilities in order to detect every emerging narrative, every grouping of
00:04:56.840communities in order to designate them mystics or malinformation. The sort of technology that did not
00:05:02.160exist before 2016, when all speech on the internet was flagged manually, so you couldn't do millions or
00:05:08.820tens of millions of things censored at once. The technology did not exist to be able to track and then scan and
00:05:15.080ban or apply different levels of content moderation at scale. You know, whether that's, you know, they call it
00:05:21.860remove, reduce, inform. Remove is when you just ban something all together. Inform is the fact check label and the
00:05:27.420friction and reduce is this great inter, you know, this great vast tundra of different interventions, as they call them,
00:05:34.740in order to throttle or de-amplify or apply a so-called virality circuit breaker so that technically it's posted,
00:05:41.380but it can't get shared or it can't get above a certain number of shares or click-throughs or whatnot.
00:05:48.140So this was technology that had been in development really since 2014, but then it supercharged after the 2016 election.
00:05:55.660And you had this brand new predicate with democracy after the Mullergate investigation fell apart in July 2019.
00:06:05.660We created these tools around censoring Russian disinformation, and you had the Pentagon and the State Department and the CIA
00:06:11.600and hundreds of NGOs and university centers who all had this institutional embedding with all the major tech companies.
00:06:18.720And they now had their hands on these play toys for these AI weapons of mass deletion, you know, as I refer to them.
00:06:25.320And none of them were household names. You didn't have Elon Musk purchasing Twitter.
00:06:31.360There was no way to even popularize the issue because you couldn't even talk about it.
00:06:35.940You didn't have the House investigations from the Jim Jordan Committee or the House Homeland Security Committee or the Oversight Committee.
00:06:41.820You didn't have the subpoenas. You didn't have people being hauled in for transcribed interviews.
00:06:45.300You 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.
00:06:53.860The 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.
00:07:02.940Because 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,
00:07:11.120around the covid in 2020 election. And then when they did this foreign to domestic switcheroo and took this Russian censorship predicate
00:07:18.120that it existed from January 2017 up until summer of 2019.
00:07:23.080And then four months later, the pandemic starts. And then three months later, the mail in ballot sort of operation started.
00:07:29.360But 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.
00:07:37.840But instead, they just transitioned it all home with this democracy branding.
00:07:41.240And they were able to get away with it until quite recently.
00:07:43.500Until quite recently, the issue here is 2020 and the epidemic government intruding into our private lives as citizens in this country and translation.
00:07:57.960That means diminishing our constitutional rights wholesale in many instances.
00:08:02.600We have a government that actually turned against the American people, because this we can talk about in terms of censorship.
00:08:10.680But the reality is the consent of the governed is absent anywhere in the algorithm that remains.
00:08:18.040Do you agree? Oh, not just in the algorithm at the network level.
00:08:22.160I mean, what you're talking about is not, you know, is not an idea from from you or me.
00:08:27.840It'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.
00:08:49.800And this is this is the argument that that they're making in the Missouri v.
00:08:53.460Biden case, that the traditional interpretation of the First Amendment should no longer apply.
00:08:56.680Now, 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,
00:09:05.680which was initially set up to give the government the capacity to to censor ISIS, because in 2014 and 2015, during the Obama administration,
00:09:14.500as part of the lead up to putting boots on the ground in a military sense into Syria,
00:09:18.600there were all of these, you know, hyperventilated threats, you know, surround sound media about ISIS recruiting Americans on Facebook and Twitter.
00:09:27.440And 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,
00:09:43.760hey, these networks, hey, these networks need to go down. This speech is not allowed. This person sounds like an ISIS or ISIS propaganda.
00:09:50.720And they mapped the whole language, the exact same thing they would do for critics of mail-in ballots or for COVID-19 heterodox opinions,
00:09:58.460which is this process when you're creating these censorship algorithms of mapping the specific linguistics of, you know, the slang terms,
00:10:09.540the prefixes, the suffixes, the slogans, the hashtags, you know, every there's a unique dialect that every belief system articulates.
00:10:19.120You 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.
00:10:31.420We can sort of identify that immediately just with our own sort of human capacities.
00:10:36.420You can only imagine the power of AI to be able to do that.
00:10:39.540And that is that is what, you know, was basically under construction with the assistance from the Global Engagement Center at the State Department.
00:10:47.080And the guy who founded that that censorship center within the State Department, Rich Sengel, came from being the managing editor of Time magazine previously.
00:10:57.240And he was the undersecretary of state for public affairs, which is the, you know, which is the liaison office that coordinates basically the CIA,
00:11:04.420the State Department and mainstream media in order to amplify the State Department's foreign policy priorities.
00:11:10.260And he had said that his mission was, firstly, he described himself as Obama's propagandist chief.
00:11:18.360But he had said that his mission as undersecretary of state for public affairs was to, quote, export the First Amendment.
00:11:23.880But 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,
00:11:35.320because it allows the kind of people to be elected who might undermine democracy.
00:11:40.120So it went from exporting the First Amendment to ending the First Amendment just because they lost an election.
00:11:44.160And recently, listening to Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, being asked about FISA reauthorization and reform,
00:11:53.740suggesting, it's not suggesting, stating clearly that the administration doesn't believe that the First Amendment concerns
00:12:01.920where it pertains to warrantless wiretaps would be helpful to the national interest.
00:12:08.160I 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.
00:12:17.120And because of you, we know that that attitude permeates our federal government, in point of fact,
00:12:22.720that is under the control of the of really the the deep state and the Marxist Dems, as I call them.
00:12:30.800Mike, we're going to take just a quick break here.
00:12:33.380We'll come right back after these quick messages.
00:12:36.260We're talking with Mike Benz and the Foundation for Freedom Online.
00:13:07.100We saw what happened in 2020 when we found ourselves dependent on global supply chains.
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00:14:30.420We're talking with Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
00:14:35.560And I just recommend that you read everything that Mike and his folks produce and follow it carefully.
00:14:44.360I'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.
00:14:55.260Remarkable, and I urge everyone to look at that as well and everything that Mike has in terms of media on his site.
00:15:03.060Let's go to the first instance, the pandemic.
00:15:07.880We saw the government really turn against the people.
00:15:10.840And for the first time, we in this country that I can recall, certainly, we had mandates.
00:15:16.500We had rules imposed by public health agencies, by the White House, by the Defense Department.
00:15:24.460Suddenly, everywhere in government, there was a totalitarian streak.
00:15:29.000Government, obviously, is all about power over the people.
00:15:33.040But we've been fortunate enough to live here where we have power over the government.
00:15:37.660I watched huge chunks of freedom being chewed up by these agencies and departments.
00:15:47.000And suddenly, I realized this is not the America that we had just a few months, a few years previous.
00:15:56.380What is the program, if there is one, the specific program, the specific tool that made it possible for government to strip out dissent online?
00:16:20.980And you have this, you know, at the top of my feed right now on my Twitter account, it's at Mike Ben Seiber.
00:16:27.400The top post is a video showing the Soviet military response to the Chernobyl.
00:16:33.280It's from the, it's a scene from the Netflix documentary called Chernobyl.
00:16:37.020And 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.
00:16:49.360There 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.
00:16:59.100And 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.
00:17:16.060Now, they call it whole society counter misinformation network.
00:17:19.580But countering the misinformation does not mean counter speech.
00:17:23.840It means picking down the posts, you know, remove, produce, and form.
00:17:26.860You 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.
00:17:35.640It becomes Orwellian to a degree we've never experienced before in this country.
00:17:39.740Well, 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.
00:17:52.820I mean, for years, I was watching these people come up with all that.
00:17:55.800You know, we can't quite say it like that.
00:18:05.240Well, 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.
00:18:11.220And it's all done to deliberately mislead you so that you have no idea what's happening behind the scenes.
00:18:16.220And this is why I sometimes joke that the reason that the disinformation governance board was shelved within a week.
00:18:21.820But 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.
00:18:39.840It was our first ever federal government domestic censorship bureau.
00:18:43.700And that was what was responsible for censoring the 2020 election.
00:18:46.840This is how you got hundreds of millions of pro-Trump tweets centered.
00:18:50.860It was through this specific government agency.
00:18:53.260But they didn't call it the Disinformation Governance Board.
00:18:56.040You 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.
00:19:03.740So the systematic wrong naming, you know, I refer to this as censor speak.
00:19:08.380In order to parse the sort of cinematic universe of what you're up against here, you need to speak their language.
00:19:13.920Because everything is coded in order to prevent the sunlight that would instantly be legitimized.
00:19:21.700And 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.
00:19:34.100And you need to get your mind right or you shouldn't be able to access those sites.
00:19:37.800Most people think media literacy means, you know, helping underprivileged kids in inner cities learn how to become more literate.
00:19:43.760They have no idea it's a censorship branding term or the term intervention.
00:19:48.560Most people think that that means, you know, saving someone from drinking themselves to death.
00:19:52.960But 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.
00:20:00.520And 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.
00:20:15.080And I mean, there's a million of these on my website.
00:20:17.120I have a whole sort of lexicon of censor speak.
00:20:19.460But, you know, you need to speak that language, and people are only beginning to learn that now.
00:20:23.580Yeah, and don't hesitate to mention the name of your site, the Foundation for Freedom Online, because it's very important to this audience.
00:20:32.700What you're talking about is, frankly, it's so important to the American people to understand what has happened to this country.
00:20:40.340I want to go to the, you mentioned the agency, the, what is it?
00:20:59.980But they also lied through their teeth in the 2020 election.
00:21:05.280Famously, Chris Krebs came out and said it was the most secure election in American history.
00:21:09.860He 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.
00:21:20.060You couldn't have possibly rendered that judgment because of the variety of votes that were cast and types of votes.
00:21:28.320And 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.
00:21:35.140They didn't apologize, they didn't correct it, but they recanted that statement.
00:21:43.380And the national media didn't pick it up.
00:21:46.400It was really quite interesting to watch because it's a perfect example of what you're talking about.
00:21:52.940This was ducking, bobbing, and weaving in the national media flagrantly and without comment from the national liberal media in this country.
00:22:12.680And the conservatives on the right say that it doggone well better be because we know it was rigged.
00:22:20.420And the fact is, we don't understand what happened in this country fully.
00:22:25.740And I think you've given us a way to get to that answer, your thinking.
00:22:31.320Yeah, 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.
00:22:38.060On my foundation's website, we have an article called The Ultimate Guide to DHS Censorship.
00:22:42.540And 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.
00:22:51.760150 hyperlinks is sort of the definitive story of this DHS censorship of mass mail-in ballots.
00:22:58.120It's been entered into the floor of Congress and multiple lawsuits.
00:23:01.680That's probably the best source for people who want further reading after this.
00:23:05.180But, 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.
00:23:13.660And, 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.
00:23:32.800And then the fourth one is media and fact-checking organizations.
00:23:36.060And 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.
00:24:00.560Yeah, it's called the Stanford Internet Observatory.
00:24:03.500They'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.
00:24:11.180You know, they've been subpoenaed by the Jim Jordan Webinization Committee and are all over the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit.
00:24:16.220You 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.
00:24:31.740So 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.
00:24:49.940You know, their CSO was 25 years in the CIA.
00:24:54.440They'd been doing basically social media mapping for the Pentagon in conflict zones until the 2016 election.
00:25:00.380And then the Pentagon, you know, the Pentagon was at war with Donald Trump.
00:25:04.000I 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.
00:25:15.540The uniparty Pentagon priorities that had basically existed from Truman until Trump were deeply, deeply challenged.
00:25:23.900And not only that, it happened at a time when these things were very fragile in Ukraine.
00:25:28.340And there was an in-process operation to try to basically bring these breakaway states back in.
00:25:32.380And 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.
00:25:41.080And so this, but there by far none, the Pentagon is the largest employer in the entire country, bigger than a private employer.
00:25:49.580They employ something like 2 million people, the Pentagon alone.
00:25:52.340It gets the most money, federal dollars, of any federal government agency.
00:25:57.000And 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.
00:26:17.480And for access, you know, when it comes to media institutions.
00:26:21.640And so, you know, the Atlanta Council is also partnered with Stanford.
00:26:24.740The 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.
00:26:33.640They 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.
00:26:53.500They 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.
00:27:08.140And there's a formal pitch to even form them.
00:27:11.060And 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.
00:27:31.700And 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.
00:28:26.660He is the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
00:28:33.460And I want to just get to where we are, it seems to me, in this conversation, Mike.
00:28:38.140And that is, who is in charge of this country?
00:28:41.500Who is in charge of, I think I know the answer, but our government?
00:28:47.300And is there any place to hide in the midst of all of this?
00:28:51.700So my stock answer to that question is simply the blob.
00:28:55.120And then the magic of that is, what is the shape of the blob?
00:28:58.120The 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.
00:29:14.040And 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.
00:29:24.340And 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.
00:29:33.540Because the power structures that run Washington, there's a very sharp divide between those two things.
00:29:39.400We have, America is not just the 330-odd million people who live here.
00:29:47.620And 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.
00:29:56.700And we took Cuba and we had to defend all these foreign territories.
00:29:59.840Frankly, you can take it back farther than that into the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and the Banana Wars.
00:30:05.220And 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.
00:30:19.880And so their resource nationalism is real.
00:30:24.780And 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.
00:30:41.580There's the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community.
00:30:47.300But it's important when you think of those three different categories of institutions, they are one thing.
00:30:52.040If 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.
00:31:04.060And so that's the government side of it.
00:31:06.620But then you have the donors and drafters off of the battering rim of the blob.
00:31:10.520And 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.
00:31:28.660Where 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.
00:31:49.940And so this is essentially the main power structure in Washington because the empire is much, much bigger than the homeland.
00:31:59.520The 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,
00:32:15.760they 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.
00:32:36.280The 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.
00:32:51.300It's supposed to protect us and sort of, you know, acquire territory politically in order to increase U.S. national interests.
00:32:59.200But 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.
00:33:14.660In 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.
00:33:22.140But 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.
00:33:36.440And that is, of course, that Washington, domestic-focused politicians in Washington have not been prepared.
00:33:43.640And frankly, it will take decades to really be prepared to confront.
00:33:46.300Decades to be prepared to confront, yet we are in conflict, and it looks like mortal conflict, frankly, to me, right now.
00:33:57.480We have an election, a presidential election, that is absolutely existential.
00:34:01.740I know that sounds like hyperbole to some.
00:34:04.000I truly believe that if Donald Trump does not win this election, there are very few options open to us.
00:34:10.240And that, in effect, the Marxist Dem Party, led by Marxist Dems, will have its way.
00:36:13.140They work with so-called independent media, which happens to be funded by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy
00:36:18.780and the State Department, you know, which is basically just cover.
00:36:22.680And then, you know, they'll work with, you know, they'll work through sort of opposition groups
00:36:26.320that they're providing money to through Cayman Islands bank accounts or, you know, crypto now.
00:36:30.920The issue is, is once the people don't, I think, fully appreciate the magic spell word of democracy
00:36:41.980and what a loose term like threat to democracy does in terms of the blob's ability to break open the Department of Dirty Tricks.
00:36:52.760You know, the blob's favorite president is Woodrow Wilson.
00:36:55.220They are obsessed with Woodrow Wilson.
00:36:57.040They will defend Woodrow Wilson against progressive leftists who's trying to say that he's a racist.
00:37:02.580There will be a sort of exception for all that just because Wilson is so central to the power that the blob derives politically.
00:37:10.480And this is, you know, Wilson's whole call to make the world, you know, safe for democracy, you know, 1917 or whatnot.
00:37:16.280Was our banner to be able to use this word, you see, the CIA basically operates under two conditions
00:37:24.780in terms of its political legitimacy and its jurisdiction.
00:37:28.180That is, if a foreign country is committing aggression externally, and if we can't nail them on that, repression internally.
00:37:37.120Now, the oppression externally, I'm sorry, aggression externally is a national security factor.
00:37:45.640You 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.
00:37:56.640You can say, OK, well, that is external aggression.
00:37:59.420And we need to, you know, and that undermines our national security because we're seeing this right now with, you know, the Ukraine situation.
00:38:05.620Well, Poland's next. And so it's going to actually be an aggression against NATO states.
00:38:10.700But 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.
00:38:19.280Well, 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.
00:38:26.140And by the way, I don't mean to sound like an anti-imperialist leftist.
00:38:29.040I 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.
00:38:38.760It's literally just for their own interests, for their own, you know, for their own money, for their own power.
00:38:43.240And it just becomes no distinction between Boston and Baghdad.
00:38:48.640So 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.
00:38:59.700And that is exactly what happened when Trump was labeled a threat to democracy.
00:39:03.700And they also had the Russiagate thing.
00:39:05.680I 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.
00:39:13.120That was the very first, you know, intelligence community assessment that Russia had hacked the 2016 election and that Russiagate was real.
00:39:24.660The censorship industry then grew out of the Russiagate, and then they transitioned it with the foreign to domestic switcheroo starting after July 2019.
00:39:31.900And that turned out to be just about as accurate as their propaganda about Vladimir Putin's health conditions immediately following his invasion of Ukraine.