The Great America Show - The Great America Sunday Show： February 25th, 2024

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00:01:18.340 Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs. Welcome to The Great America Show. Thanks for being

00:01:22.160 with us. A big week ahead for Congress. A potential government shutdown is looming. Parts

00:01:28.200 of the government are due to start shutting down Friday if a budget or continuing resolution

00:01:33.240 is not passed. It's unlikely we'll see a full budget as we haven't seen one in quite some

00:01:39.100 time. More than two dozen conservative congressmen have signed on to a letter floating a year-long

00:01:45.140 continuing resolution because they have no faith in Speaker Johnson's ability to negotiate a

00:01:51.040 conservative tax-cutting budget. Our guest today is about to tell us who's really running this

00:01:57.120 country. He's one of the foremost cyber experts and a great American. He's Mike Benz. He's the

00:02:03.220 executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. And Mike, thanks for being with us. We

00:02:09.140 appreciate it so much. And your interview with Tucker Carlson to me was historic and a great public

00:02:15.040 service. You talked about censorship and said the two greatest instances of censorship in our history

00:02:21.400 were the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 elections. Am I quoting you correctly?

00:02:29.380 Yeah, that's 100% correct.

00:02:31.200 And your judgment as to why those two events?

00:02:34.380 Well, I should sort of preface that by saying that their plan was to scale out what they did for

00:02:40.860 those two things, those two events for, quote, every sensitive policy issue. And my foundation's

00:02:47.160 website has a whole super cut of clips about the way they wanted to expand what they did for COVID-19

00:02:53.680 censorship and 2020 election censorship into virtually every issue of concern of foreign policy establishment,

00:03:00.260 spending energy, immigration, abortion, you name it. But essentially what was happening during the

00:03:08.760 COVID-19 and the 2020 election, mass censorship operations, which again, were the most censored

00:03:15.020 events in human history. And I include China's Great Firewall and other things in that when you look at

00:03:20.320 the sheer scale of it. But what was happening was you basically had a perfect storm of three things

00:03:25.400 that were available then and in ready position that did not exist before and currently do not

00:03:33.120 quite exist anymore. And that was you had a combination of censorship technology, censorship

00:03:38.960 institutional embedding, and political legitimacy to get away with it. And in the sense that there

00:03:45.640 was not any pushback, there was not any, it had not been scandalized, there was no public awareness,

00:03:50.560 even trying to say, hey, this might be happening, got you labeled, you know, something between either

00:03:56.360 a partisan or a conspiracy theorist. And a lot of people didn't want to believe that the, you know,

00:04:03.040 to stare directly into the sun, so to speak, and to understand what they were even up against.

00:04:08.280 And so those three things, the technology, the institutional embedding, and the political

00:04:12.580 legitimacy allowed them to get away with that. And those three things were essentially the AI censorship

00:04:18.760 and narrative detection capabilities in order to detect every emerging narrative, every grouping

00:04:25.320 of communities in order to designate them mistis or malinformation. The sort of technology that did 0.99

00:04:30.980 not exist before 2016, when all speech on the internet was flagged manually, so you couldn't do

00:04:36.500 millions or tens of millions of things censored at once. The technology did not exist to be able to

00:04:42.620 track and then scan and ban or apply different levels of content moderation at scale. You know,

00:04:48.620 whether that's, you know, they call it remove, reduce, inform. Remove is when you just band

00:04:53.300 something all together. Inform is the fact check label and the friction. And reduce is this great

00:04:58.600 inter, you know, this great vast tundra of different interventions, as they call them,

00:05:03.840 in order to throttle or deamplify or apply a so-called virality circuit breaker so that technically it's

00:05:10.020 posted, but it can't get shared or it can't get above a certain number of shares or click-throughs

00:05:16.680 and whatnot. So this was technology that had been in development really since 2014, but then it

00:05:22.700 supercharged after the 2016 election. And you had this brand new predicate with democracy after the

00:05:30.840 Muellergate investigation fell apart in July 2019. We created these tools around censoring Russian

00:05:36.920 disinformation. And you had the Pentagon and the State Department and the CIA and hundreds of NGOs and

00:05:42.740 university centers who all had this institutional embedding with all the major tech companies.

00:05:48.120 And they now had their hands on these play toys for these AI weapons of mass deletion, you know,

00:05:53.020 as I refer to them. And none of them were household names. You didn't have Elon Musk purchasing Twitter.

00:06:00.380 There was no way to even popularize the issue because you couldn't even talk about it.

00:06:04.960 You didn't have the house investigations from the Jim Jordan committee or the House Homeland Security

00:06:09.440 committee or the oversight committee. You didn't have the subpoenas. You didn't have people being

00:06:12.880 hauled in for transcribed interviews. You didn't have the lawsuit with Missouri v. Biden for the

00:06:16.980 America first legal lawsuit or the or the three different state attorney generals who've done

00:06:21.000 these censorship investigations, the whole panoply. And so they got away with it. And what was amazing

00:06:26.760 is I'll just say as a final note is I watched these people's morals evolve over time on this,

00:06:31.920 because I've been doing this for eight years and they didn't start out with the kind of

00:06:35.760 brazenness that they that they walked themselves up to, you know, around the COVID in 2020 election.

00:06:42.460 And then when they did this foreign to domestic switcheroo and took this Russian censorship

00:06:46.600 predicate that it existed from January 2017 up until summer of 2019. And then four months later,

00:06:53.360 the pandemic starts. And then three months later, the mail-in ballot sort of operation started.

00:06:59.300 They at that moment, they could have just shelved it all and said, OK, well,

00:07:02.960 we're not going to do censorship anymore because there's no more Russian threat for the 2020 0.95

00:07:06.480 election. But instead, they just transitioned it all home with this democracy branding and they

00:07:10.800 were able to get away with it until quite recently. Until quite recently. The issue here is 2020

00:07:17.640 and the epidemic, government intruding into our private lives as citizens in this country.

00:07:25.560 And translation, that means diminishing our constitutional rights wholesale in many instances.

00:07:31.620 We have a government that actually turned against the American people because this we can talk about

00:07:38.620 in terms of censorship. But the reality is the consent of the governed is absent anywhere in the

00:07:45.160 algorithm that remains. Do you agree?

00:07:48.860 Oh, not just in the algorithm at the network level. I mean, what you're talking about is not,

00:07:53.200 you know, is not an idea from you or me. It's an idea. It's actually the central thesis

00:08:00.160 of the Biden administration's legal defense of their censorship scheme, which is that the First

00:08:05.500 Amendment needs to be effectively somewhere between shelled altogether or more broadly interpreted in

00:08:13.040 the age of social media because democracy did not anticipate social media. And this is the argument

00:08:20.220 that they're making in the Missouri v. Biden case that the traditional interpretation of the First

00:08:24.580 Amendment should no longer apply. And a great example of this is actually one of the origin points of

00:08:29.100 government censorship. There's a small little nucleus tucked within the State Department called the

00:08:33.400 Global Engagement Center, which was initially set up to give the government the capacity to censor

00:08:39.200 ISIS. Because in 2014 and 2015, during the Obama administration, as part of the lead up to putting boots on the

00:08:45.300 ground in a military sense into Syria, there were all of these, you know, hyperventilated threats, you know, 0.76

00:08:52.780 surround sound media about ISIS recruiting Americans on Facebook and Twitter, and it was everywhere. And that gave this

00:08:58.620 sort of political predicate to set up a group within the State Department that would be able to have a liaison office

00:09:04.660 at the highest levels of YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and every major platform and forum on the Internet to be able to

00:09:12.180 tell them, hey, these networks need to go down. This speech is not allowed. This person sounds like an ISIS

00:09:17.180 or ISIS propaganda. And they mapped the whole language, the exact same thing they would do for critics of mail-in ballots

00:09:24.300 or for COVID-19 heterodox opinions, which is this process when you're creating these censorship algorithms

00:09:33.160 of mapping the specific linguistics of, you know, the slang terms, the prefixes, the suffixes, the slogans, the hashtags, you know, every, there's a unique dialect that

00:09:45.220 every belief system articulates. You know, we, you know, who tend to be more on sort of the right side or conservative side of the aisle

00:09:54.160 can very quickly identify this when we hear social justice or cultural Marxist type type talk. We can sort of identify that immediately just with our own sort of human capacities.

00:10:05.160 You can only imagine the power of AI to be able to do that. And that is, that is what, you know, was, was basically under construction with the assistance from the Global Engagement Center at the State Department.

00:10:16.160 And the guy who founded that, that censorship center within the State Department, Rich Stengel, came from being the managing editor of Time Magazine previously.

00:10:26.160 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, the State Department, and mainstream media in order to amplify the State Department's foreign policy priorities.

00:10:39.260 And he had, he had, you know, he had said that his mission was, firstly, he described himself as Obama's propagandist chief, but he had said that his mission as, as Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs was to, quote, export the First Amendment.

00:10:52.520 But then two years later, when, 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,

00:11:04.300 because it allows the kind of people to be elected who might undermine democracy.

00:11:08.980 So it went from exporting the First Amendment to ending the First Amendment just because they lost an election.

00:11:13.860 And recently, listening to Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, being asked about FISA reauthorization and reform, suggesting,

00:11:23.640 it's not suggesting, stating clearly that the administration doesn't believe that the First Amendment concerns,

00:11:30.960 where it pertains to warrantless wiretaps, would be helpful to the national interests.

00:11:37.320 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.

00:11:46.120 And because of you, we know that that attitude permeates our federal government, in point of fact,

00:11:51.640 that is under the control of the, of really the, the deep state and the Marxist Dems, as I call them.

00:11:59.160 Mike, we're going to take just a quick break here.

00:12:02.340 We'll come right back after these quick messages.

00:12:05.260 We're talking with Mike Benz and the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:12:11.580 I recommend you go to it immediately.

00:12:13.960 It is worth your, I can guarantee you, it is worth your time.

00:12:19.820 Believe me.

00:12:20.540 We'll be right back.

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00:13:57.700 We're back now.

00:13:58.960 We're talking with Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:14:03.660 And I just recommend that you read everything that Mike and his folks produce and follow it carefully.

00:14:13.060 I'll tell you this.

00:14:14.000 We are.

00:14:15.700 And I want to again thank you and Tucker Carlson for the conversation that you had.

00:14:20.700 I guess it was a week ago.

00:14:23.880 Remarkable.

00:14:24.640 And I urge everyone to look at that as well and everything that Mike has in terms of media on his site.

00:14:32.660 Let's go to the first instance, the pandemic.

00:14:36.480 We saw the government really turn against the people.

00:14:39.300 And for the first time, we in this country that I can recall, certainly, we had mandates.

00:14:45.100 We had rules imposed by public health agencies, by the White House, by the Defense Department.

00:14:53.080 Suddenly, everywhere in government, there was a totalitarian streak.

00:14:57.920 Government, obviously, is all about power over the people.

00:15:01.500 But we've been fortunate enough to live here where we have power over the government.

00:15:05.900 I watched huge chunks of freedom being chewed up by these agencies and departments.

00:15:15.020 And suddenly, I realized this is not the America that we had just a few months, a few years previous.

00:15:24.980 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?

00:15:40.460 Right.

00:15:40.760 Well, during the COVID pandemic, we were functionally under martial law.

00:15:45.000 And who administers martial law?

00:15:48.080 The Martians, the military.

00:15:49.580 And you have this, you know, at the top of my feed right now on my Twitter account, it's at Mike Ben Seiber.

00:15:56.000 The top post is a video showing the Soviet military response to the Chernobyl.

00:16:01.880 It's from the, it's a scene from the Netflix documentary called Chernobyl.

00:16:05.500 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.

00:16:17.960 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.

00:16:27.700 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.

00:16:44.580 Now they call it whole society counter misinformation network, but countering the misinformation does not mean counter speech.

00:16:51.000 It means censoring.

00:16:52.440 It means picking down the posts from you have removed, reduced, and form.

00:16:55.360 You know, you know, you know, the, you know, the government that we're in trouble with our government when the government starts labeling everything the opposite of what it is.

00:17:04.260 It becomes Orwellian to a degree we've never experienced before in this country.

00:17:08.340 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.

00:17:21.420 I mean, for years I was watching these people come up with all the, you know, we can't quite say it like that.

00:17:25.780 It won't go down well.

00:17:26.760 You know, we need to be able to persuade this group of stakeholders and, you know, these committees of Congress.

00:17:30.980 So we need to call it this.

00:17:32.180 Well, this doesn't quite work.

00:17:33.240 Well, how about this?

00:17:33.900 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.

00:17:39.820 And it's all done to deliberately mislead you so that you have no idea what's happening behind the scenes.

00:17:44.820 And this is why I sometimes joke that the reason that the disinformation governance board was shelved within a week.

00:17:50.420 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.

00:18:05.920 It had nothing to do with security.

00:18:06.780 It was a censorship agency.

00:18:08.400 It was our first ever federal government domestic censorship bureau.

00:18:12.300 And that was what was responsible for censoring the 2020 election.

00:18:15.440 This is how you got hundreds of millions of pro-Trump tweets censored.

00:18:19.480 It was through this specific government agency.

00:18:21.860 But they didn't call it the Disinformation Governance Board.

00:18:24.620 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.

00:18:32.340 So the systematic wrong naming, you know, I refer to this as censor speak.

00:18:36.980 In order to parse the sort of cinematic universe of what you're up against here, you need to speak their language.

00:18:42.520 Because everything is coded in order to prevent the sunlight that would instantly be legitimized.

00:18:50.280 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 and you need to get your mind right or you shouldn't be able to access those sites.

00:19:06.220 Most people think media literacy means, you know, helping underprivileged kids in inner cities learn how to become more literate.

00:19:12.360 They have no idea it's a censorship branding term or the term intervention.

00:19:15.920 You know, intervention, most people think that that means, you know, saving someone from drinking themselves to death.

00:19:21.560 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.

00:19:29.160 And so we will censor the posts that you can see or we will throttle them in the algorithm or we'll fix these fact checking labels with interstitial playthroughs so that you we are intervening to help to see you from your own wrong thoughts and opinions that you might form.

00:19:43.700 And I mean, there's a million of these on my website.

00:19:45.520 I have a whole sort of lexicon of censor speak.

00:19:48.200 But, you know, you need to speak that language and people are only beginning to learn that now.

00:19:52.180 Yeah.

00:19:52.400 And don't hesitate to mention the name of your site, the Foundation for Freedom Online, because it's very important to this audience.

00:20:01.300 What you're talking about is, frankly, it's so important to the American people to understand what has happened to this country.

00:20:08.940 I want to go to the you mentioned the the the agency, the cyber, cyber security and infrastructure security agency.

00:20:23.440 I mean, all they needed was another another security in there.

00:20:27.280 We had a real title, but they also lied through their teeth in the 2020 election.

00:20:33.900 Famously, Chris Krebs came out and said it was the most secure election in American history.

00:20:38.480 He did that within, I believe, as I recall, six days of the election, which was impossible, no matter how advanced to the the cyber tools that were in use.

00:20:48.660 You couldn't have possibly rendered that judgment because of the variety of votes that were cast and types of votes.

00:20:56.520 And then a year and a half later, and most people didn't pay a bit of attention.

00:21:00.640 They came out with a paper in which they recanted.

00:21:03.740 They didn't apologize.

00:21:05.400 They didn't correct it, but they recanted that document, that statement.

00:21:11.960 And the national media didn't pick it up.

00:21:15.020 It was really quite interesting to watch because it's a perfect example of what you're talking about.

00:21:19.440 This was this was mind control.

00:21:21.500 This is ducking, bobbing and weaving in the national media flagrantly and without comment from the national liberal media in this country.

00:21:30.880 And it's outrageous. And people still think that the election of 2020, you know, is either on the left.

00:21:37.560 They say it shouldn't be relitigated.

00:21:39.680 They don't understand it.

00:21:41.260 And the conservatives on the right say that it doggone well better be because we know it was rigged.

00:21:48.700 And the fact is, we don't understand what happened in this country fully.

00:21:54.840 And I think you've given us a way to get to that answer.

00:21:58.420 You're thinking.

00:21:59.180 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.

00:22:06.700 On my foundation's website, we have an article called The Ultimate Guide to DHS Censorship.

00:22:11.260 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.

00:22:19.900 150 hyperlinks is sort of the definitive story of this DHS censorship of mass mail-in ballots.

00:22:26.540 It's been entered into the floor of Congress and multiple lawsuits.

00:22:30.260 That's probably the best source for people who want further reading after this.

00:22:33.840 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.

00:22:42.020 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 activists and researcher groups.

00:23:01.760 And then the fourth one is media and fact-checking organizations.

00:23:04.140 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.

00:23:19.040 There was no observing about it.

00:23:20.480 This was a Death Star that was blasting millions of posts, you know, off the Internet.

00:23:24.440 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.

00:23:28.400 Is that even a bit again?

00:23:29.620 It's called the Stanford Internet Observatory.

00:23:31.960 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.

00:23:39.420 You know, they've been subpoenaed by the Jim Jordan Webinization Committee and are all over the Missouri v.

00:23:44.180 Biden lawsuit.

00:23:45.840 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.

00:24:00.300 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.

00:24:19.080 You know, their CSO was 25 years in the CIA.

00:24:22.780 They'd been doing basically social media mapping for the Pentagon in conflict zones until the 2016 election.

00:24:28.980 And then the Pentagon, you know, the Pentagon was at war with Donald Trump.

00:24:32.800 I mean, let's just say what it was.

00:24:34.020 The Ukraine policy that he articulated and 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.

00:24:43.780 The uniparty Pentagon priorities that had basically existed from Truman until Trump were deeply, deeply challenged.

00:24:52.500 Not only that, it happened at a time when these things were very fragile in Ukraine and there was an in-process operation to try to basically bring these breakaway states back in.

00:25:01.400 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.

00:25:09.180 And so this, but there by far none, the Pentagon is the largest employer in the entire country, bigger than a private employer.

00:25:18.120 They employ something like 2 million people, the Pentagon alone.

00:25:20.960 It gets the most money of the federal dollars of any federal government agency.

00:25:26.200 And 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,

00:25:38.420 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 and for access, you know, when it comes to media institutions.

00:25:50.240 And so, you know, the Atlanta Council is also partnered with Stanford.

00:25:53.340 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.

00:26:02.240 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,

00:26:16.680 to do what the government wanted to do in terms of censorship but could not do itself.

00:26:22.100 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.

00:26:36.740 And there's a formal pitch to even form them.

00:26:39.660 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.

00:26:49.040 Incredible. I mean, it is just utterly incredible.

00:26:53.400 We're talking with Mike Benz.

00:26:55.380 He's the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:26:59.280 We're going to come back.

00:27:00.280 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.

00:27:12.060 We'll be right back with Mike Benz.

00:27:13.740 Stay with us.

00:27:15.740 Lou Dobbs here.

00:27:16.920 I'm delighted to let you all know that the program Lou Dobbs Tonight has returned to the air.

00:27:23.240 That's right.

00:27:24.340 Lou Dobbs Tonight is back.

00:27:26.720 We're live each and every weeknight at 7 p.m. Eastern and 6 p.m. Central on Rumble.com slash Lou Dobbs.

00:27:36.160 That's Rumble.com slash Lou Dobbs.

00:27:39.280 I hope you'll be joining us for Lou Dobbs Tonight as our fight to save this country has only begun.

00:27:46.920 We're back now.

00:27:53.080 We're talking with Mike Benz.

00:27:55.180 He is the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:28:01.840 And I want to just get to where we are, it seems to me, in this conversation, Mike.

00:28:06.720 And that is, who is in charge of this country?

00:28:09.960 Who is in charge of, I think I know the answer, but our government?

00:28:14.420 And is there any place to hide in the midst of all of this?

00:28:19.680 So my stock answer to that question is simply the blob.

00:28:23.660 And then the magic of that is, what is the shape of the blob?

00:28:26.960 The blob was a term that Obama's deputy's national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, described as being, you know,

00:28:35.580 what you're up against when you're trying as a president to actually, you know, affect foreign policy in the country.

00:28:42.580 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.

00:28:52.860 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.

00:29:02.080 Because the power structures that run Washington, there's a very sharp divide between those two things.

00:29:07.940 We have, America is not just the 330-odd million people who live here.

00:29:13.980 It is, America is the world. 0.58

00:29:16.140 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.

00:29:25.220 And we took Cuba and we had to defend all these foreign territories.

00:29:28.360 Frankly, you can take it back farther than that into the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and the Banana Wars.

00:29:33.740 And, you know, we are an industrial nation of multinational corporations in a big, bad, mean, old world where every country's government is, you know, trying to do what's best for its own corporations and its own people.

00:29:48.380 And so their resource nationalism is real, market protectionism is real.

00:29:53.320 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.

00:30:10.100 There's the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community.

00:30:13.400 And they all play different roles.

00:30:15.840 But it's important when you think of those three different categories of institutions, they are one thing.

00:30:20.580 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.

00:30:30.920 It's one thing.

00:30:32.580 And so that's the government side of it.

00:30:35.140 But then you have the donors and drafters off of the battering ram, the blob.

00:30:39.200 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, you know, bribe or censor foreign media,

00:30:48.700 to be able to do all manner of psychological operations, to run color revolutions, to take over unions, to run this whole society playbook where if there's a territory that we want to extract, you know, resources from or we want to put a military base in or we want that country to vote our way in a U.N.

00:31:06.420 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 client to the empire's interests.

00:31:18.480 And so this is essentially the main power structure in Washington because the empire is much, much bigger than the homeland.

00:31:28.040 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,

00:31:40.060 Microsoft, Microsoft, you know, our oil and gas companies, 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, you know,

00:31:52.920 basically forced free market reforms or unless, you know, our intelligence agencies were able to pipe in, surround sound media or groom a sort of political class to emerging leader programs and whatnot.

00:32:04.820 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.

00:32:17.620 And it was never supposed to come inside the house.

00:32:19.840 It's supposed to protect us and sort of, you know, acquire territory politically in order to increase U.S. national interests.

00:32:27.720 But after the 2016 election, they, 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,

00:32:37.740 but certainly a century of precedent since the founding of this apparatus in 1948.

00:32:43.180 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.

00:32:50.660 But in 2016, we took our magic department of dirty tricks, democracy blob power, and we turned it inward to do the same thing to our own homeland, what we did to other regions in the empire.

00:33:04.740 And that is, of course, that Washington, domestic focused politicians in Washington have not been prepared.

00:33:12.160 And frankly, it will take decades to really be prepared to confront.

00:33:14.840 Decades to be prepared to confront, yet we are in conflict, and it looks like mortal conflict, frankly, to me right now.

00:33:26.020 We have an election, a presidential election, that is absolutely existential.

00:33:29.920 I know that sounds like hyperbole to some.

00:33:32.600 I truly believe that if Donald Trump does not win this election, there are very few options open to us.

00:33:38.800 And that, in effect, the Marxist Dem Party, led by Marxist Dems, will have its way.

00:33:48.140 It will become the uniparty.

00:33:49.960 There will only be room for one party.

00:33:52.660 And we have an election that we can't assure is secure,

00:33:55.880 because our cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency is a major part, a focal point, frankly,

00:34:08.060 in terms of constricting our freedoms and directing outcomes of elections.

00:34:15.920 I don't know why anyone with any common sense would assume that the CIA, for example,

00:34:23.140 could be fixing elections in Ecuador, Chile, Peru, but wouldn't bring those tools home to greet us.

00:34:34.940 And I think there are a lot of people who have a conspiracy theory that that's precisely what happened.

00:34:39.560 And like nearly every other conspiracy theory of the last 10 years, it just happens to be true.

00:34:45.920 Oh, entirely.

00:34:47.540 I mean, the CIA is all over this.

00:34:49.600 And it's also important to understand that when the CIA operates, it operates through hundreds of cutouts.

00:34:58.320 I mean, when we, you know, as you mentioned, if we're going to overthrow the government,

00:35:02.520 if the CIA is going to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, you know,

00:35:05.720 they don't march in there with, you know, they don't W-2, you know,

00:35:10.460 they're not W-2 employees with big badges saying, hi, my name is Mike.

00:35:14.060 Like, I'm from the CIA, you know, they, what they do is-

00:35:17.740 And you're to help.

00:35:18.620 Right.

00:35:19.360 Right.

00:35:19.740 No, what they do is they use a sophisticated interlinking network of front companies,

00:35:28.240 of shell corporations, of laundered money, and of, you know, different categories of institutions

00:35:35.820 that span the whole society.

00:35:37.920 You know, they work through academic centers.

00:35:40.220 They work through NGOs.

00:35:41.660 They work with so-called independent media, which happens to be funded by USAID and the

00:35:46.080 National Endowment for Democracy and the State Department, you know, which is basically just cover.

00:35:50.420 And then, you know, they'll work with, you know, they'll work through sort of opposition groups

00:35:54.840 that they're providing money to through Cayman Islands bank accounts or, you know, crypto now.

00:35:59.900 The issue is, is once the people don't, I think, fully appreciate the magic spell word of democracy

00:36:10.520 and what a loose term like threat to democracy does in terms of the blob's ability to break open

00:36:19.360 the Department of Dirty Tricks.

00:36:21.280 You know, the blob's favorite president is Woodrow Wilson.

00:36:23.960 They are obsessed with Woodrow Wilson.

00:36:25.580 They will defend Woodrow Wilson against progressive leftists who's trying to say that he's a racist.

00:36:31.100 There will be a sort of exception for all that just because Wilson is so central to the power

00:36:36.900 that the blob derives politically.

00:36:39.020 And this is, you know, Wilson's whole call to make the world, you know, safe for democracy,

00:36:43.100 you know, 1917 or whatnot, was our banner to be able to use this word.

00:36:49.600 You see, the CIA basically operates under two conditions in terms of its political legitimacy

00:36:55.240 and its jurisdiction.

00:36:56.620 That is if a foreign country is committing aggression externally.

00:37:01.480 And if we can't nail them on that, repression internally.

00:37:05.640 Now, the oppression externally, I'm sorry, aggression externally is a national security factor.

00:37:14.180 You know, it's very easy to justify if, you know, if Iraq is, you know, attacking its neighbor 1.00

00:37:21.680 or if Serbia is attacking people in Kosovo, you can say, okay, well, that is external aggression.

00:37:27.940 And we need to, you know, and that undermines our national security because we're seeing this

00:37:32.020 right now with, you know, the Ukraine situation.

00:37:34.500 Well, Poland's next. 1.00

00:37:35.880 And so it's going to actually be an aggression against NATO states.

00:37:39.160 But if we can't nail them on that and we still need, we still want regime change,

00:37:43.100 then we have this catch-all for domestic repression.

00:37:47.820 Well, if they're not hurting other people, they're hurting themselves and they need a new government,

00:37:52.560 which happens to be a U.S.-installed puppet government.

00:37:54.560 And by the way, I don't mean to sound like an anti-imperialist leftist.

00:37:57.700 I don't know that I had a problem with any of this until they brought it home after the 2016 election,

00:38:02.700 because that means the managers of the American empire are not serving the homeland anymore.

00:38:07.300 It's literally just for their own interests, for their own, you know, for their own money,

00:38:10.940 for their own power.

00:38:11.960 And it just becomes no distinction between Boston and Baghdad.

00:38:16.720 So I think what I'm just trying to describe here is the moment you say something or someone is a threat to democracy,

00:38:23.660 it allows the blob to unleash this department of dirty tricks. 1.00

00:38:28.240 And that is exactly what happened when Trump was labeled a threat to democracy.

00:38:32.480 And they also had the Russiagate thing.

00:38:34.220 I mean, the CIA got involved in this immediately because first, if you remember,

00:38:37.540 it was actually the 15-page CIA memo published on January 6, 2017.

00:38:41.020 That was the very first, you know, intelligence community assessment that Russia had hacked the 2016 election

00:38:49.100 and that Russiagate was real.

00:38:51.400 That came straight from the CIA.

00:38:53.200 The censorship industry then grew out of the Russiagate,

00:38:56.020 and then they transitioned it with the foreign to domestic switcheroo starting after July 2019.

00:39:00.700 And that turned out to be just about as accurate as their propaganda about Vladimir Putin's health conditions

00:39:07.680 immediately following his invasion of Ukraine.

00:39:13.760 It's been remarkable.

00:39:15.360 And, Mike, thank you so much for your time today.

00:39:17.820 I would love for you to come back soon and continue the conversation.

00:39:22.180 I know the audience would as well.

00:39:24.360 But thank you so much for your time today and for the tutorial, as always.

00:39:30.000 Thanks, Louis.

00:39:30.500 I'd love to continue the conversation.

00:39:32.620 Great.

00:39:32.980 Thank you.

00:39:33.320 Mike Benz, the Foundation for Freedom online.

00:39:40.580 And I recommend everyone go to it.

00:39:43.060 It's just a wonderful website.

00:39:45.480 And you've heard the power behind it.

00:39:49.680 Mike Benz.

00:39:50.620 Thanks so much, Mike.

00:39:52.020 Thanks.

00:39:53.060 Thanks, everybody, for being with us.

00:39:54.760 Our guest here tomorrow on The Great America Show will be former special assistant to President Trump,

00:39:59.840 Peter Navarro.

00:40:00.680 Please join us for that tomorrow and join us each and every day.

00:40:04.720 Follow me on Twitter and Truth Social at Lou Dobbs and on Facebook and Instagram at Lou Dobbs Tonight.

00:40:10.780 And check out loudobbs.com.

00:40:13.260 Thanks, everybody.

00:40:14.220 God bless you.

00:40:15.200 And may God bless America.

00:40:16.880 We'll see you next time on The Great America Show.

The Great America Show - February 25, 2024

The Great America Sunday Show： February 25th, 2024

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