The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2237 - Mike Benz

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

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00:00:12.000 Alright, we're up.

00:00:13.000 Nice to meet you, Mike.

00:00:14.000 Nice to meet you, Joe.

00:00:16.000 I wish you didn't have to exist.

00:00:19.000 You're one of those guys that when you talk, like, God, I wish what he's saying isn't true, but I know it is.

00:00:25.000 But I'm happy you do.

00:00:27.000 I don't remember where I first saw you speak, but, I mean, right away I was thinking, okay, this makes a lot of sense.

00:00:36.000 When you're explaining, like, the Ministry of Truth or whatever it is.

00:00:41.000 Is that what it's called?

00:00:41.000 Ministry of Truth?

00:00:42.000 Well, yeah.

00:00:43.000 They tried to do that for a while.

00:00:45.000 That was, I think...

00:00:48.000 So just as a background, please tell people what you do and what positions you held.

00:00:54.000 I do all things internet censorship.

00:00:56.000 That's really my mission in life, my North Star.

00:01:00.000 I started off as a corporate lawyer and then worked for the Trump White House.

00:01:05.000 I was a speechwriter.

00:01:06.000 I sort of advised on technology issues and then I ran the The cyber division for the State Department, basically the big tech portfolio that interfaces between sort of big government, international diplomacy issues on technology, and then the sort of private sector, US national champions in the tech space like Google and Facebook.

00:01:27.000 So I was the guy that Google lobbyists would call when they wanted favors from big government.

00:01:33.000 But, you know, my life took a huge sort of U-turn, you might say, when the 2016 election came around and I became obsessed with the early development of the censorship industry, this giant behemoth of government, private sector, civil society organizations, and media all collabing to censor the internet.

00:01:56.000 It was kind of a weird path from there.

00:01:59.000 When did it all start rolling?

00:02:01.000 When did the government realize that they had to get actively involved in censorship and what steps did they initially take to get involved in this?

00:02:08.000 It started in 2014 with the Ukraine fiasco, the coup and then the counter coup.

00:02:16.000 The coup was great for internet free speech.

00:02:18.000 I mean, you really do need to start the story of internet censorship with the story of internet freedom because promotion of censorship is sort of the flip side of promotion of free speech.

00:02:30.000 And we've had this free speech government diplomatic role for 80 years now.

00:02:37.000 When World War II ended, we embarked.

00:02:41.000 We had the international rules-based order that was created in 1948. We had the UN, we had NATO, we had the IMF, the World Bank.

00:02:50.000 We had this big global system now.

00:02:52.000 There was a prohibition in 1948 under the UN Declaration of Human Rights that you can't acquire territory by military force anymore and have it be respected by international law.

00:03:03.000 So everything had to move to soft power influence.

00:03:05.000 And so the U.S. government took a very active role beginning in 1948 to promote free speech around the world.

00:03:11.000 And this was done through all these, you know, initially CIA proprietaries like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

00:03:19.000 And then the whole Wisner's Wurlitzer State Department CIA apparatus, all the early partnerships with the media and the worst, the war machine around propaganda for World War II continued through the Cold War.

00:03:31.000 And then that hit the gas with promotion of free speech on the Internet when the Internet was privatized.

00:03:37.000 It was initially a military project, so it was a government operation from Jump Street.

00:03:42.000 And then in 1991, the World Wide Web came out, civilian use.

00:03:47.000 And right away, the State Department, the military, our intelligence sphere was promoting free speech so that we could have a basically government pressure on foreign countries to open up their internet to allow basically groups that the US government was supporting to be able to combat state control over media in those other countries.

00:04:09.000 So we already had this sort of deep interplay between government, tech companies, universities, NGOs, that dates back 80 years.

00:04:19.000 If you look at the evolution of NGOs like Freedom House or the Atlantic Council or Wilson Center and promoting these free speech things.

00:04:26.000 But what happened was, in 2014, we had had about 25 years of successful free speech diplomacy.

00:04:34.000 And then there was a, you know, we tried to overthrow the government of Ukraine.

00:04:38.000 We successfully did.

00:04:39.000 And I'm not even arguing whether that's a good or a bad thing.

00:04:42.000 But the fact is, is the U.S. did effectively January 6th the Yanukovych government out of power in 2014.

00:04:49.000 I mean, we literally had our assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs, Victoria Newland, handing out cookies and water bottles to violent street protesters as they surrounded the parliament building and ran the democratically elected government out of office.

00:05:03.000 But then what happened is the eastern side of the state completely broke away.

00:05:09.000 So we don't respect this new U.S. installed government.

00:05:11.000 Crimea voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation.

00:05:14.000 And that kicked off that sort of set in motion.

00:05:18.000 The events that would end the concept of free speech diplomacy is like a U.S. government unfettered good, because what they argued is we pumped five billion dollars worth of U.S. government money into media institutions in Ukraine.

00:05:31.000 That's the figure that's cited by Victoria Nuland in December 2013, right before the coup.

00:05:36.000 $5 billion setting up independent media companies, basically sponsoring Mockingbird style are media assets in the region, and they still didn't penetrate eastern Ukraine.

00:05:47.000 Eastern Ukraine was primarily ethnic Russian, didn't penetrate Crimea, so they said, we need something to stop them from being able to combat our media influence.

00:05:58.000 And they initially called this the Jurasimov Doctrine, named after Valerie Jurasimov, who was this Russian general.

00:06:05.000 They took a quote from him saying, the new nature of war is no longer about military to military conflict.

00:06:13.000 All we need to do...

00:06:15.000 Is take over the media in these NATO countries, and that's primarily social media.

00:06:20.000 Get one of our pawns elected as the president, and that president will control the military. 0.99

00:06:25.000 So it's much cheaper and more efficient to win a military war by simply winning civilian elections.

00:06:30.000 So that was called the Gerasimov Doctrine.

00:06:32.000 That's what set up the early censorship infrastructure in 2014. Three years later, the guy who coined that, Mark Gagliotti, would write a Sort of mea culpa saying, oops, I'm sorry, Gerasimov was actually citing what the U.S. does.

00:06:45.000 But by that point, they'd already renamed it hybrid warfare.

00:06:49.000 NATO formally declared the tanks to tweets doctrine, saying that the new role of NATO is no longer just about tanks, it's about controlling tweets.

00:06:57.000 And then Brexit happened in June 2016. In July 2016, the very next month in Warsaw, NATO added hybrid warfare to its formal charter, basically authorizing the military, the diplomatic sphere, and the intelligence world to take control over social media.

00:07:16.000 And then five months later, Trump won the election being called the Russian asset.

00:07:20.000 So all that infrastructure was redirected home to the U.S. Jesus. 0.80

00:07:27.000 It was looking pretty bleak, I would say, in terms of the direction internet censorship was headed.

00:07:33.000 It seemed like the censorship machine was winning up until around the time that Elon purchased X. That seems to me to be our fork in the road.

00:07:46.000 That's the alternative timeline.

00:07:48.000 Mark Andreessen talked about that yesterday, that we've had a couple of alternative timelines where things have shifted.

00:07:53.000 I think that was one of the big ones.

00:07:55.000 That's exactly it.

00:07:56.000 I mean, he's sort of the timeline where we miss the bullet, is where there's a deus ex machina.

00:08:06.000 You know, it's sort of like a deus ex machina, where it's this...

00:08:10.000 Random plot thing that happens, you know, someone descends onto the stage and solves all the plots, loopholes, and magically saves the plucky heroes that were otherwise in danger.

00:08:24.000 There were events in the run-up.

00:08:26.000 Well, it all sort of happened simultaneously, really, because the month that Elon announced his acquisition was the same month that the Disinformation Governance Board was announced at DHS. Which was the first thing that really roused Republicans and frankly anyone with institutional power in DC to Finally stare into the Sun and recognize or at least begin to glimpse the size of what they were up against The disinformation governance board set off a flurry of congressional activity from Chuck Grassley and other You

00:08:57.000 know luminaries in Congress there were a lot of whistleblower documents came out and For years, the entire Republican Party and most of the Democrat Party had denied the existence of government censorship.

00:09:14.000 And frankly, the Ministry of Truth was not the Disinformation Governance Board.

00:09:21.000 The Ministry of Truth had already existed three years earlier at DHS. They just called it a name that masked what it did.

00:09:30.000 It was called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

00:09:33.000 Which is a name that puts you half to sleep by the time you're finished saying it.

00:09:37.000 Ministry of Truth scared the shit out of people just because of the Orwellian context of the term.

00:09:42.000 You know, it just seemed like, what are you, what?

00:09:45.000 Well, the funny thing is they were right.

00:09:47.000 The Disinformation Governance Board was not the Ministry of Truth.

00:09:50.000 It was a dull, boring, mundane, bureaucratic layer to manage the Ministry of Truth that was already created three years earlier.

00:09:57.000 But the fact is nobody called them out on it because of the thick language of censorspeak that hides this whole thing from general public awareness.

00:10:10.000 I mean, in my own path, I've tried to self-reflect about how I ended up here spending my life on this.

00:10:16.000 And I used to think it was primarily about chess and my sort of early encounters with AI and then seeing the censorship AI that really sparked my pursuit into this.

00:10:28.000 But the more I've thought about it, the more it's based, This is kind of coming from a corporate law background where your job is to plant dirty tricks in the in the fine print of 150 page legal documents and to catch dirty tricks in that linguistic framing that's done by opposing lawyers.

00:10:49.000 And that's really how they pulled this off.

00:10:52.000 Nobody thought in 2019 that the cybersecurity agency in DHS would be the Ministry of Truth.

00:10:59.000 They didn't appreciate the layers of censorspeak that were constructed on top of that to say that, well, DHS governs critical infrastructure and elections are critical infrastructure.

00:11:10.000 Public health is critical infrastructure.

00:11:12.000 Misinformation online is a cyber component.

00:11:16.000 So it's a cyber attack on critical infrastructure.

00:11:19.000 And so normally policymakers or people in the public think, oh, cybersecurity, that's hacking, that's phishing, you know, that's for CIA, NSA people to stop Russians from hacking us.

00:11:33.000 And they think critical infrastructure, they think things like dams or subsea cables or low-earth satellites.

00:11:40.000 They don't think it means You sitting on the toilet at 930 p.m.

00:11:44.000 on a Thursday saying, I don't know that I love mail-in ballots, and then suddenly you're being flagged by DHS as a cyber threat actor for attacking the U.S. critical infrastructure of confidence in our elections.

00:11:56.000 But that's how they scaled these definitions into this giant mission creep, and now it's metastasized into the entire U.S. federal government.

00:12:04.000 The Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, DHS, FBI, DOJ, HHS, and the task in front of this administration is just unbelievably enormous in deconstructing that.

00:12:16.000 Is it possible?

00:12:18.000 They're going to run into a lot of headwinds because once this power was discovered and funded to the tune of billions as it has been, we have this foreign policy establishment that manages the American empire that saw internet censorship as kind of an Eldorado key to permanently winning the soft power influence game around the world.

00:12:46.000 And what I mean by that is, okay, so you know how a lot of people talk about the early CIA activity in the media with things like Operation Mockingbird and whatnot and the ability to sort of propagandize things in the media.

00:13:01.000 Well, you never had this capacity in the 1950s while that was going on if you and I were at dinner Thanksgiving or something and there's 12 people at the table and I start talking to you about, I don't know, the COVID vaccines may have adverse side effects. the COVID vaccines may have adverse side effects.

00:13:19.000 There was never an ability to simply reach under the table as an intelligence agency or as the Department of Homeland Security or the Pentagon or the State Department and just turn off the volume when we talk to each other peer to peer.

00:13:34.000 But since the lion's share of all communication is digital, especially the politically impactful ones, that capacity now allows our blob, our foreign policy establishment to effectively control every election or at least tilt every election around the world. our foreign policy establishment to effectively control every election or

00:13:52.000 And they've sprawled this into 140 countries and Trump is going to run into every single regional desk at the State Department, every single equity at the Pentagon arguing that if you don't do not allow us to continue this censorship work.

00:14:07.000 it will undermine national security, because it will allow Russian-favored narratives to win the day in the Ivory Coast, in Chad, in Nigeria, in And Brazil and Venezuela and Central and Eastern Europe.

00:14:23.000 You're going to have the State Department argue that if we don't have this counter misinformation capacity, then extremists will win elections around the world, or populists will win the election around the world.

00:14:36.000 And that will undermine the power of our democratic institutions, essentially our programming, our assets in the region.

00:14:43.000 And they've built this enormous capacity.

00:14:47.000 It's...

00:14:49.000 We use it because it works, because it wins.

00:14:52.000 And the fact is, is Trump probably only won this election because, for the same reason, he probably only won the 2016 election, which was, in both cases, there was largely a free internet.

00:15:03.000 It was when Trump got censored into oblivion in 2020 by the U.S. government under his nose, working with webs of outside NGOs and Pentagon front groups to mass censor Virtually every narrative that he was putting out that he lost.

00:15:22.000 So it does work to win elections.

00:15:24.000 And there's a regional desk at the State Department covering every country on earth.

00:15:30.000 Victoria Nuland had a desk that covered about 20 countries.

00:15:33.000 So every country, the State Department is a preferred winner of that election.

00:15:37.000 We work with all political parties.

00:15:39.000 And that's a hugely powerful tool to lose.

00:15:43.000 It's just twisted and evil, and it needs to.

00:15:45.000 And we need to win.

00:15:49.000 I don't want to say fair fights, but dipping into this sort of dark sorcery power, not only does it crush the First Amendment entirely, but the diplomatic blowback is just absolutely enormous.

00:16:03.000 I can go through examples of that if you're interested.

00:16:05.000 Sure.

00:16:06.000 Well, so we have this thing called the Global Engagement Center at the State Department.

00:16:10.000 It was set up initially to fight ISIS, because in 2014, 2015, when the Obama administration was trying to put military boots on the ground in Syria, there was this sort of giant threat that was publicly talked about all over about ISIS recruiting on Facebook and Twitter.

00:16:29.000 Homegrown ISIS threats, for example, the Garland, Texas fiasco where there was a shooting by an ISIS terrorist and the web of online intrigues around that.

00:16:40.000 Three years later, it would come out that he had been effectively groomed by the FBI.

00:16:46.000 The FBI had paid someone over $100,000 to become his best friend and text him to tear up Texas before that.

00:16:52.000 But never mind.

00:16:53.000 The horse was out of the barn.

00:16:55.000 So this idea that ISIS was recruiting on Facebook and Twitter gave a license to the State Department to create this thing called the Global Engagement Center, which was really the first official censorship capacity in the U.S. government.

00:17:08.000 It predated the DHS stuff that would come along in the Trump era.

00:17:13.000 And this gave the State Department the direct back-channel, the direct coordinating capacity with all the social media companies to tell them about ISIS accounts, ISIS narratives that were trending.

00:17:27.000 The Pentagon poured hundreds of millions of dollars into developing a technique called natural language processing, which is a way to use AI to scan the entire Internet for keywords.

00:17:39.000 And you would have these academic researchers effectively constructing code books of language.

00:17:46.000 What do ISIS advocates or supporters talk like?

00:17:52.000 What words do they use?

00:17:53.000 What prefixes and suffixes?

00:17:55.000 This whole lexicon is then conjoined with the ingested sum of all of their tweets and transcribed YouTube videos and Facebook posts.

00:18:06.000 And then suddenly the State Department is a real-time heat map of everyone who is likely to be or hits a certain confidence level being suspected to support ISIS. That was 2014 to 2016, set up by this guy, Rick Stengel, who described himself as Obama's propagandist in chief.

00:18:25.000 He's now on the advisory board of NewsGuard, one of the largest censorship mercenary firms in the world.

00:18:33.000 But he described himself as a free speech maximalist because before he started this, he was the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.

00:18:40.000 He started this censorship center.

00:18:42.000 He was the former managing editor of Time magazine.

00:18:45.000 And so he's talked about how he used to be a free speech maximalist back when he was in the media, and media companies benefited from that.

00:18:54.000 But when Trump won the election in 2016, he became convinced that actually the First Amendment was a mistake.

00:19:00.000 He actually openly advocated in the Washington Post in an op-ed that we effectively end the First Amendment, that we copycat Europe's laws.

00:19:08.000 True.

00:19:08.000 And they wrote a whole book on it.

00:19:10.000 This is the guy who started effectively the country's first censorship center.

00:19:16.000 But then they did a really cute trick.

00:19:19.000 They went from counterterrorism to counterpopulism.

00:19:23.000 Now we've always had this ability since the 1940s to interfere in the domestic affairs of foreign governments or foreign countries to topple communist countries.

00:19:36.000 This was the whole Cold War, counter-communism work of the CIA and the State Department.

00:19:42.000 But that was primarily targeting left-wing communists or left-wing socialists or left-wing populist-run countries.

00:19:51.000 When Trump won the election in 2016, this was one of the reasons I think Republicans were so slow to move on all this.

00:19:57.000 They never experienced the brunt of the intelligence state against the mainline GOP, or at least the in-power Trump faction of the GOP, in the way that Democrats did in the 1960s and 70s, when the CIA was actively interfering in Democrat Party politics to try to tilt them away from the anti-Vietnam movement and more into the sort of Limousine, liberal, international, interventionalist, neoliberal camp.

00:20:26.000 And so, in 2016, the Global Engagement Center pivoted from being counter-terrorism to counter-populism, arguing that right-wing populist governments, it wasn't just right-wing, they were also against left-wing populists, but they simply never rose to power in the way that Trump did in the US, Bolsonaro did in Brazil, Matteo Salvini did in Italy, Marine Le Pen almost did in France.

00:20:49.000 Nigel Farage was on his way to in the UK and the Brexit referendum, the AFD party in Germany, the Vox party in Spain.

00:20:58.000 In 2016, they were afraid that social media rising all these right-wing populist parties to power was...

00:21:07.000 Would effectively collapse the entire rules-based international order unless there was international censorship, because Brexit would give rise to Frexit if Marine Le Pen won and she was massively overpowered on social media versus Macron.

00:21:20.000 If, you know, as I mentioned, Italy, there was going to be not just Brexit, there's going to be Frexit, Spexit, Italyxit, Grexit, Grexit.

00:21:29.000 So the entire EU would come undone, which would mean all of NATO would come undone, which would mean there's no enforcement arm for the IMF or the World Bank or international creditors, which would mean it would be like the ending scene of Fight Club, where the credit card company buildings all collapse just because you're allowed to shitpost on the internet.

00:21:45.000 And they talked about that quite openly in 2017 as they were creating this whole censorship infrastructure.

00:21:53.000 So the 2016 elections, that was a counterpoint.

00:21:58.000 That was like a turning point.

00:21:59.000 That was a moment where they realized, like, this is actually dangerous.

00:22:03.000 Like, allowing people to freely communicate online and say whatever they want completely undermines the propaganda that they have been distributing, completely undermines their ability to control who's the president, what policies get pursued, things along those lines.

00:22:23.000 Yeah, it was the final straw because, you know, the 2014 Crimea situation is...

00:22:30.000 I mean, the Pentagon was actively working with and funding these censorship operations through the entirety of Central and Eastern Europe starting in 2014. And then Brexit was a major event in that.

00:22:44.000 Basically, it was said to come to Western Europe at that point.

00:22:48.000 But when Trump won...

00:22:51.000 That was, I guess, both the final straw and then the massive anvil that collapsed any residual resistance that existed within the national security state that we didn't need to do this.

00:23:01.000 And Russiagate really was the useful tool to drive that all through.

00:23:07.000 The fact that Trump came into office under the barrel of a gun of a special prosecutor, openly alleging that he may be a Russian asset, effectively a Manchurian candidate of Russia who only rose to power because of social media operations being run by Russia,

00:23:30.000 Allowed that national security predicate to carry forward this infrastructure and be massively funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, the IC, the NGO sphere in order to set this infrastructure.

00:23:43.000 But then in July 2019, Russiagate died on the vine immediately as soon as Bob Mueller completely goofed his three-hour testimony.

00:23:53.000 And a lot of people were thinking before he took the stand that Trump was going to be in jail as a Russian asset because it was kept under such close hold for two and a half years.

00:24:02.000 What was Bob Mueller doing?

00:24:04.000 There's the SNL sort of fanfare around that.

00:24:06.000 But then when it was revealed he had nothing, there was there was a moment in time between July 2019 and September 2019 when all of this could have been shut down.

00:24:20.000 And we could have just called all that censorship work counterintelligence, you know, a national security state thing.

00:24:27.000 But they did something really, really nasty at that point, which we now live in the permanent aftermath of, which is they switched from a sort of counterintelligence, national security threat from Russian interference predicate, which is useful because that gives you a blank check to use the Pentagon and the State Department, the IC on this.

00:24:46.000 To a domestic democracy predicate.

00:24:51.000 Now, this is really, really nasty because it basically transitions censorship from being a strictly military thing that we're doing to stop Russia to being a total permeating apparatus over all civilian domestic affairs, regardless of whether there's a foreign threat.

00:25:08.000 And when that was allowed to go unchallenged for effectively three years, up until Elon announced the acquisition of X, and that same month the disinformation governance board spilled over, and then Republicans won the House in November 2022, which then allowed congressional hearings on all this and the elevation of the Twitter files and the public awareness from that.

00:25:29.000 But for three years, you had this handoff from Russiagate.

00:25:33.000 I call this the foreign to domestic switcheroo.

00:25:36.000 And if you're interested, you know, Jamie, if you look up, not asking to, but if you're curious, I have a whole supercut of what these people were saying from 2016 to 2018, while the Russiagate investigation was going on to 2019, 2020, while the Russiagate investigation was going on to 2019, 2020, after Russiagate, they do this foreign to domestic switcheroo.

00:25:59.000 Those are the key terms if you're interested in it.

00:25:59.000 terms if you're interested in it.

00:26:01.000 There's a compilation.

00:26:02.000 Yeah, I did a compilation of all these DHS officials, State Department officials, Pentagon officials, completely changing their justification for why we need Internet censorship before Russiagate and after Russiagate.

00:26:15.000 And they switched from saying Russian disinformation is the threat.

00:26:18.000 So that's why the Pentagon's involved.

00:26:20.000 That's why the state and CIA and FBI is involved.

00:26:22.000 Just saying, well, actually, domestic disinformation is a threat to democracy.

00:26:28.000 So regardless of whether it's the Russians or not, we need to censor Americans to preserve democracy. 0.94

00:26:35.000 And this happened in tandem with- What examples were they using to justify this?

00:26:39.000 Well, they pulled off a cute trick where they doctrinally redefined democracy to mean a consensus of institutions rather than individuals.

00:26:48.000 They had, when Trump won in 2016 and Brexit passed in 2016, they took this anti-authoritarian toolkit, which has for 80 years been the CIA's predicate for overthrowing governments.

00:27:02.000 And really since the 1910s when Woodrow Wilson announced that America's role is to make the world safe for democracy.

00:27:08.000 We've long had a habit of intervening in foreign countries in order to liberate people from authoritarian control and bring them the gift of democracy and that has always meant in primarily That the government would represent the mass of individuals in the form of voting.

00:27:30.000 When Trump won in 2016, at the same time that all these right-wing populist parties who were just like Trump also won between 2016 and 2018, primarily using free speech on social media and their popularity there, They argue that right-wing populism was the same authoritarian threat that left-wing socialism, left-wing communism was.

00:27:54.000 And so they said, well, populism is the people's ground-up revolt against institutions, against government, science, media, against the NGOs, the experts, the academics.

00:28:11.000 So what they did is they argued that democracy has to be defended from demagoguery.

00:28:18.000 Democracy needs guardrails.

00:28:20.000 We need bumper cars on democracy that go beyond what people vote for, because people voted for Hitler.

00:28:27.000 People voted for Trump.

00:28:28.000 And they were doing this at U.S. government conferences, by the way, in 2017. I can show you some funny ones if you're interested.

00:28:35.000 They were arguing that we need these institutional guardrails against people voting for the wrong person.

00:28:44.000 And those institutional guardrails are so-called democratic institutions, which is another cute rhetorical trick because that's the CIA State Department watchword for asset.

00:28:54.000 When USAID, for example, goes in and funds university centers, media outlets, Parliamentarian groups, activist groups, legal scholars,

00:29:11.000 you name it in a region, they are building up their assets to exert soft power influence on that society, on that government in order to influence the passage of laws, the span of operations that they're doing that touch the U.S. Embassy in the region.

00:29:29.000 And so what they argued is actually democracy is not about the will of individuals.

00:29:33.000 It's about the consensus of institutions.

00:29:36.000 So if there's institutional consensus building between the military, the diplomatic sphere, the intelligence community, the NGOs, the media outlets, the universities, that's really democracy.

00:29:51.000 Those are the institutional guardrails, the people who know best.

00:29:55.000 That's a difficult process, by the way.

00:29:57.000 That's a process that takes months, years.

00:30:00.000 That's why there are these major consensus-building institutions like the Atlanta Council and the Council on Foreign Relations and Wilson Center and the Carnegie Endowment.

00:30:09.000 We have a whole suite of Consensus-building institutions to bring together the banks, the corporations, the government officials, the outside interests, so they all get on the same page about a certain policy or initiative or regional drive or industrial change.

00:30:26.000 If at the end of that process a bunch of people vote for a politician because he does funny TikTok videos or he's got a popular dance and throws a monkey wrench in those years of consensus-building, That they began to view as an attack on democracy.

00:30:43.000 And so they said democracy is really about institutions.

00:30:47.000 And you can actually look up, for example, Reid Hoffman.

00:30:51.000 In 2019, they were doing all of these conferences where they said elections are a threat to democracy.

00:30:59.000 Elections corrupt democracy.

00:31:01.000 Because we can't think of democracy as elections anymore.

00:31:04.000 For example, Ukraine has banned elections.

00:31:07.000 We still say we are providing $300 billion of military support to promote democracy in Ukraine, even though they don't have elections.

00:31:14.000 Well, it's because it's controlled by U.S. institutions.

00:31:19.000 You can look up something called the Red Lines Memo, by the way, on my account, if you're curious.

00:31:24.000 So when you say that Ukraine no longer has democracy, essentially what happened is Zelensky was supposed to leave office and he did not.

00:31:31.000 Is that what happened?

00:31:32.000 Well, they've indefinitely canceled elections.

00:31:36.000 So he is...

00:31:37.000 Because of the war.

00:31:38.000 Because of the war is their argument.

00:31:39.000 Now, we had elections during the Civil War here in the U.S. This is not uncommon for countries to be at war and still have elections.

00:31:50.000 The issue is, is Zelensky is...

00:31:52.000 Unpopular and not winning in those election polls.

00:31:56.000 And we no longer define democracy as being about elections, because elections allow populists to circumvent the consensus of institutions.

00:32:06.000 And if you want to see a great example of this, you can look at something called the Red Lines Memo, which is, I think I have it near the top of my exit counter.

00:32:14.000 You can look for just the phrase Red Lines Memo, and you will see Zelensky's first month in office, he was given a threat letter effectively by the U.S. State Department where they had something like 70 U.S. funded NGOs who wrote a letter to Zelensky telling him, ordering him not to cross the below-listed red lines, or else there will be political instability in your country.

00:32:40.000 Now, political instability in the country caused by the U.S. State Department is the reason Zelensky ultimately became president.

00:32:47.000 The 2014 coup in Ukraine was U.S. and U.K. orchestrated political instability to have a January 6th-style mob destabilize the government and literally run it out of the country— And they gave him red lines on every single aspect of what he could do as president.

00:33:06.000 Security red lines, cultural red lines, energy policy red lines.

00:33:11.000 What were these red lines, cultural red lines?

00:33:13.000 So, for example, that he could not allow the use of Russian language to be aired on any of the major Ukrainian media channels.

00:33:22.000 This is part of a drive by the US State Department in tandem with the censorship work that started at that same time in order to prevent the sort of affinity, the sort of Russian affinity network that happens because of Russian propaganda spreading from Russian language news sources and to try to Probably the country off of the Russian ethnic faction and have essentially the Ukrainian dialect.

00:33:51.000 This is in response for what happened in Crimea?

00:33:53.000 Yes, yes.

00:33:53.000 And Crimea and the Donbass, the whole eastern side breakaway.

00:33:58.000 But this is effectively the long arm of Langley, the long arm of the State Department and CIA telling Ukrainians that they can't, what kind of language they can use in their own country.

00:34:11.000 Ukraine was effectively forced to transfer over its education ministry to an EU commissioning body so that Russian-adjacent mythologies couldn't be taught in the country.

00:34:23.000 They were told what industries they needed to privatize and to block any attempt to maintain sovereign control of those energy assets.

00:34:34.000 This is ultimately what gave rise to the Burisma scandal, by the way, and the Hunter Biden I'd love to get back to that.

00:34:49.000 But this is...

00:34:54.000 Every aspect of Ukrainian society, effectively top-down controlled by democratic institutions, funded by the U.S. government, when it's stock standard that the only reason we do that, you know, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

00:35:12.000 They're being funded to exert this soft power issue, this soft power force on the Ukrainian government.

00:35:19.000 And Zelensky knows that force because the only reason he occupies the power that he does is because that force ushered him in through the sequence of events from Yatsenyuk in 2014 up to him.

00:35:32.000 And so the issue is, Those are the institutions.

00:35:38.000 By the way, that whole thing was run through something called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, which is effectively a suite of media institutions in the area that are CIA conduits, like the Kiev Independent, which is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

00:35:57.000 Most pernicious forces in the entirety of the censorship industry.

00:36:02.000 And, you know, you were talking with Marc Andreessen about NGOs and their role in internet censorship.

00:36:07.000 And, you know, he was, I think, fleshing out sort of the concept of a gongo, a government-organized, non-governmental organization.

00:36:17.000 So the National Endowment for Democracy is sort of posited as an NGO, but it's got a very curious history.

00:36:23.000 Again, this is what sponsors so much of Ukrainian media.

00:36:26.000 The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 because of a dilemma that the new Ronald Reagan administration faced.

00:36:34.000 The CIA, at that point in the early 80s, its name was DIRT. There were the massive scandals in the 1960s to the 1970s, everything from Operation Mockingbird to MKUltra to Operation Chaos to effectively bribing student groups on college campuses, all sorts of things.

00:36:53.000 The heart attack gun being held up in a public hearing at the church committee in 1975 about ways the CIA was assassinating world leaders and assassinating journalists and political figures.

00:37:10.000 Using methods that included, you know, a gun that would make it look like they organically died of a heart attack.

00:37:17.000 All of these things gave rise to Jimmy Carter being elected in 1976. He was not expected to win in 76, but he won on the back of Democrat mass outrage over the malfeasance of the national security state, the CIA. And so...

00:37:36.000 The following year, Carter does something called the Halloween massacre.

00:37:39.000 He fires 30% of the CIA's operations division in a single night, and then he totally cripples the CIA's budget.

00:37:47.000 Reagan gets to power after the Iran hostage situation, wants the CIA's powers back.

00:37:52.000 The Democrats were still hugely hostile to it.

00:38:22.000 We don't even need to do a Senate confirmation hearing for a CIA director anymore because the CIA is effectively made obsolete by its new tactic that we use through NGOs spearheaded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

00:38:34.000 And you'll find in that article a quote by the National Endowment for Democracy's founder, Carl Gershman, where he explicitly says that it would be a terrible thing for groups supported by the U.S. government to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We did that in the 1960s,

00:38:57.000 and it worked out terribly for us when it turned out they were backed by the CIA. That's why the National Endowment for Democracy was created, so that the CIA could effectively subsidize the group's Without having CIA fingerprints on it.

00:39:15.000 If you look at its legislative history, it passed effectively a bill through Congress that Ronald Reagan approved.

00:39:22.000 The origins of it come from the CIA director William Casey in 1983, working directly with the U.S. Attorney General, as well as an entire USAID blueprint the previous year.

00:39:36.000 The CIA requested this to be set up.

00:39:39.000 It's funded entirely by the U.S. government.

00:39:42.000 It's officially accountable to the House Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

00:39:48.000 So it's funded by the government.

00:39:51.000 It's literally accountable to a U.S. congressional committee.

00:39:57.000 Was the CIA director birthed it?

00:40:00.000 The founder acknowledged that they were created to do what the CIA wants to do, but gets in trouble for doing.

00:40:07.000 And we call this an NGO?

00:40:09.000 I don't think so.

00:40:10.000 And so the issue is, is the National Network for Democracy and the entire intelligence community was...

00:40:17.000 They were the ones who led this conversion from counter-communism to counter-populism.

00:40:22.000 They're the ones who, when Trump rose to power, and when Brexit and the whole NATO-EU country domino, started electing right-wing populists who were hostile to the foreign policy establishment's consensus, and a lot of this has to do with energy geopolitics and military interventionism, and we can get to those if you want to go there.

00:40:46.000 But the NED has its octopus arms around the entirety of the censorship industry.

00:40:54.000 If you want to see something really, really crazy, there's a video that we can watch.

00:40:58.000 It's a two-minute video from one of Ned's global censorship programs where they explicitly work with foreign governments to get foreign governments to pass censorship laws to attack U.S. companies.

00:41:12.000 So this is the U.S. government.

00:41:14.000 Funding a CIA cutout to back channel with regulators and influencers in foreign countries to get those foreign countries to crush U.S. national champions in the tech space.

00:41:27.000 This is the exact opposite of what the State Department was set up in 1789 to do.

00:41:35.000 Where is this video?

00:41:35.000 How can we see it?

00:41:36.000 If you...

00:41:37.000 There you go.

00:41:38.000 Put it up.

00:41:40.000 Disinformation has invaded online conversations on social media platforms, posing challenges to healthy information environments and threats to democracy.

00:41:50.000 It bolsters authoritarians, weakens democratic voices and participation, exploits and exacerbates existing social cleavages, and silences opposition.

00:42:00.000 Countering disinformation and promoting information integrity are necessary priorities for ensuring democracy can thrive.

00:42:08.000 The SEPs Countering Disinformation Guide is a resource including nine thematic sections and a comprehensive database of interventions, highlighting various approaches for advancing information integrity and strengthening societal resilience to disinformation and other harmful online campaigns.

00:42:26.000 The International Foundation for Electoral Systems, International Republican Institute, and National Democratic Institute developed this guide with support from USAID through the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening.

00:42:42.000 Here are nine key takeaways from the guide.

00:42:46.000 Addressing disinformation requires a whole-of-society approach.

00:42:51.000 We need to create a sense of urgency to drive collective action for addressing disinformation.

00:42:58.000 Institutions and platforms have the resources to address disinformation but lack credibility, whereas civil society has the credibility but is chronically under-resourced.

00:43:09.000 Countering disinformation requires a mixed-methods approach, including fact-checking, monitoring, and other interventions.

00:43:18.000 Focusing on major events like election outcomes alone will not achieve a healthy information environment.

00:43:26.000 Developing norms and standards, legal and regulatory frameworks, and better social media content moderation is necessary for a healthy information ecosystem.

00:43:37.000 It is important to establish frameworks to discourage political parties from engaging in disinformation.

00:43:45.000 Not sure where to start?

00:43:46.000 Click here to explore the interventions database of organizations, projects, and donors working to counter disinformation around the world.

00:43:56.000 Whoa.

00:43:57.000 They're in 140 countries.

00:43:58.000 It's entirely funded by the U.S. government.

00:44:02.000 I can break this down in detail.

00:44:05.000 So this SEPs program is basically, in large part, the reason that the Brazil censorship state was was erected.

00:44:14.000 I mean, this came a little bit later in the game, but it's a spawn out of this Ned censorship network.

00:44:19.000 This explicitly created by the CIA director, self-confessed effectively CIA cutout.

00:44:26.000 What SEPs does is they manage in an umbrella portfolio of all of the censorship institutions that they've capacity built in a region.

00:44:39.000 So, capacity building is a phrase in statecraft that effectively means Building up an asset so that it has the capability to be instrumentalized by the US State Department.

00:44:53.000 So for example, whenever we're trying to do something in a foreign country, the first thing we do is we look at the state of the chessboard.

00:45:00.000 What assets are on our side there?

00:45:02.000 What political groups?

00:45:03.000 What demographic groups?

00:45:05.000 What religious groups?

00:45:07.000 What political parties?

00:45:10.000 What universities?

00:45:11.000 What media institutions?

00:45:15.000 What capacities do they currently have?

00:45:17.000 What capacities do they need but don't have?

00:45:20.000 And that is where the flood of State Department and USAID and NED funding comes in to capacity build them so that they can be instruments of US statecraft.

00:45:30.000 Now, it doesn't mean they always use those capacities.

00:45:33.000 Sometimes we create those capacities, even if we don't intend to use them right away, just in case we might need them later.

00:45:39.000 And that's a whole other fascinating field.

00:45:43.000 So what CEFS does is it's a joint program by the U.S. State Department, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

00:45:49.000 Now, USAID is sort of a switch player program.

00:45:55.000 There's no aid in USAID, by the way.

00:45:58.000 Your brain is being tricked when you see the phrase USAID. It's not an aid organization.

00:46:02.000 The aid in USAID stands for U.S. Agency for International Development.

00:46:07.000 It is developing internationally around the world.

00:46:11.000 All of the institutions that the State Department needs to use.

00:46:15.000 So when they are capacity building activist groups in a foreign country, that's because the State Department wants those activists there.

00:46:25.000 Now, USAID for the first time in its history was created in the early 1960s by JFK in 1961. It was created because you had all of this intelligence, statecraft, and military support and logistical aid that was tripping over itself, basically.

00:46:46.000 The military would be funding—would be running aid to certain groups in the region.

00:46:51.000 The State Department would be running aid to certain groups in the region.

00:46:55.000 The Intelligence Committee would— And there was no sort of central coordinator of those capacity building operations.

00:47:02.000 USAID, by the way, is a $50 billion budget.

00:47:04.000 The entirety of the intelligence community is only $72 billion.

00:47:07.000 So it is more than the CIA and more than the State Department.

00:47:13.000 And USAID is effectively a switch player to assist the Pentagon on the national security front, to assist the State Department on the national interest front, or to assist the intelligence community on a sort of clandestine operations front.

00:47:30.000 So you can look up funny moments, by the way, in USAID being a CIA front.

00:47:35.000 If, for example, you want to pull up the Wikipedia of Zunzanillo when USAID created basically a CIA Twitter in Cuba to try to convince the people of basically to try to get a free speech internet, a free speech Twitter knockoff in Cuba at a time when Twitter in 2014 was restricted.

00:48:01.000 And USAID laundered money that was earmarked for Pakistan in order to create an identical version of Twitter, but just for Cuba, and to recruit them using messaging that at first involved music, sports and hurricane updates.

00:48:20.000 And then in their own documents, once they had accumulated about 100,000 users, they would start to feed them in the algorithm messaging to make them want to overthrow their government and form smart mobs to bring a Cuban spring to Cuba in the same way that the they would start to feed them in the algorithm messaging to make them want to overthrow their government and form smart mobs to bring a Cuban spring

00:48:44.000 By the way, I'm not even opining on whether this is good or bad, but you can't bring that home and you can't target U.S. companies like they've done here.

00:48:53.000 But – So USAID provides most of the money.

00:48:58.000 The State Department provides the policy vision for the CEP's censorship program.

00:49:03.000 And NED does the technical implementation work.

00:49:05.000 Now, you saw in that video there were two organizations that were listed.

00:49:10.000 It didn't say they were the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, IRI and NDI. These are the two political branches of the National Nome for Democracy.

00:49:21.000 When this CIA cutout was set up in 1983, they set up their four core fours.

00:49:29.000 One of them, the first two are the political cores.

00:49:32.000 The IRI, the Republican, the GOP wing of the CIA, effectively.

00:49:36.000 The NDI, the Democrat Party wing of the CIA. And then two others, one called the Center for International Private Enterprise, which is the Chamber of Commerce.

00:49:48.000 It's basically the CIA liaising with multinational companies, with our big U.S. national champions.

00:49:54.000 And then the fourth one is called the Solidarity Center, which is the CIA's work with unions, which has been a part and parcel of our CIA work since the 1940s.

00:50:03.000 But these two political branches of the National Endowment for Democracy are designed to basically gel to both sides of the political aisle to make sure they have support for CIA activity in a region.

00:50:16.000 And so this, for example, there was a split on Russia between the GOP and the DNC up until Ukraine in 2014. You may recall in 2012, there was that debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama over Russia policy, where Mitt Romney was flanking Obama from his sort of hawkish Russia right.

00:50:37.000 He was saying, Obama, you're soft on Russia.

00:50:41.000 You're letting Vladimir Putin get everything he wants in Eastern Europe.

00:50:44.000 And Obama's response was, the 1980s called.

00:50:47.000 They want their foreign policy back.

00:50:49.000 Because at the time, it was primarily the GOP economic stakeholders whose energy investments were being sabotaged by Russian activity in Georgia and Azerbaijan.

00:51:01.000 It hadn't yet hit the NDI network, the DNC side of the economics, until Ukraine in 2014. That was when there became a bipartisan consensus on the need to effectively go to war and launch this big energy sanctions Operation against Russia.

00:51:20.000 And so that's who's running that SEPS program.

00:51:26.000 It's both sides of the political aisle, but both of them hate Trump.

00:51:31.000 Both of them hate populists, whether it's the U.S. with Trump, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and again, the whole suite of EU countries that we just talked about.

00:51:40.000 And they descended on Brazil just two weeks after Bolsonaro was elected in 2018. The Atlantic Council and NED held all these meetings about how Bolsonaro only won because of basically social media.

00:51:56.000 Social media and end-to-end encrypted chats like WhatsApp and Telegram.

00:52:00.000 And that we need to basically stop Bolsonaro's presidency in its tracks and stop him from getting reelected by creating a censorship infrastructure in Brazil that is powerful and institutionally as wide and deep as our other diplomatic work.

00:52:16.000 So NDI, which I should note, Hunter Biden was on the Chairman's Advisory Board of NDI, the DNC-CIA wing.

00:52:24.000 So if anyone is a little curious as to why the CIA intervened on the Justice Department investigation, folks remember the IRS wanted to question Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's lawyer, who paid his taxes for five years.

00:52:38.000 And then the CIA intervened and told them, do not look into who is funding Hunter Biden.

00:52:47.000 I find it curious that the CIA's DNC branch, Hunter Biden, was on the Chairman's Advisory Board.

00:52:54.000 But so NDI sets up this sprawl of coalitions called D4D, Design for Democracy.

00:53:01.000 And Design for Democracy, in tandem with this SEPS program, goes on to work with The censorship court, Demorias, the censorship Voldemort on their TSE court, basically the election management and censorship body of their Supreme Court.

00:53:22.000 This is the guy who has gone to war with Elon Musk.

00:53:26.000 They help that censorship court set up a disinformation task force, and their own institutional assets get put on the advisory committee Of the Brazilian Censorship Court to direct the censorship policies of the same institution that banned X from Brazil, that seized Starlink's assets.

00:53:52.000 They worked with the universities, FGV DAP and other very significant Brazilian universities.

00:54:00.000 They set up disinformation centers in there and got academic thought leadership published in Brazil about the need to pass anti-misinformation laws.

00:54:10.000 Their own NDI fellows and operatives were publicly testifying to the Brazilian parliament on the need to pass these laws.

00:54:20.000 They were publicly speaking to the prosecutors association groups in Brazil telling them they need to prosecute misinformation on this.

00:54:29.000 They were funding millions of dollars to Brazilian media institutions to promote internet censorship and to promote the banning effectively of any pro-Bolsonaro content on social media or on end-to-end encrypted chats.

00:54:44.000 The USAID then kicked in...

00:54:47.000 Millions of dollars of funding to Internews, which is another US government-funded media projection arm to promote media literacy programs, information integrity programs, countering mis- and disinformation programs in Brazil.

00:55:00.000 So at every level, Brazilian media companies, they partner with Globo, for example, the largest media outlet in Brazil.

00:55:09.000 The media institutions, the universities and thought leaders, the politicians, the judges, it was full spectrum.

00:55:17.000 It was the same thing that we do when we try to regime change a country.

00:55:21.000 By the way, this is in USAID's charter.

00:55:24.000 This is one of the reasons they're able to get away with this.

00:55:28.000 It allows USAID to capacity build assets to do so-called judiciary reform which means influencing the laws and the structure of the judges and to be able to have our foreign aid money Get laws passed or get structural changes made to the court system there.

00:55:51.000 And this is what SEPs did.

00:55:52.000 This State Department, CIA front censorship organization, they developed a strategy they called EMBs, election management bodies, which is basically focusing in on the court system of different countries that are in charge with adjudicating elections in order to get which is basically focusing in on the court system of different countries that are in charge with adjudicating elections in order to get them to grow And they had all these stakeholders being censored.

00:56:20.000 Some of them are really funny.

00:56:21.000 Some of them, they said, well, some of our EMB partners didn't want to actually, didn't think they could pull this off.

00:56:29.000 They couldn't convince the other political stakeholders in their country to grow the censorship capacity.

00:56:33.000 And they advised them about how they could cleverly use rhetoric to disguise the programs.

00:56:39.000 Don't call it a counter disinformation program if you think that'll ruffle too many feathers.

00:56:44.000 Instead, Simply call it strategic communications.

00:56:47.000 And because, listen, every government agency has some sort of public affairs branch, some sort of communications capacity.

00:56:56.000 Simply say that this is for monitoring and engaging in strategic communications, and then you can mass flag the accounts of the U.S. State Department's political opponents they want to stop from winning the election.

00:57:07.000 Jesus.

00:57:12.000 This is why, you know, when you're saying it's going to be insanely difficult and Trump's going to face so many headwinds trying to unravel all this stuff.

00:57:19.000 Like, there's so many organizations and there's so many people involved and there's so many countries that are in lockstep.

00:57:27.000 Because we waited too long.

00:57:29.000 We waited too long.

00:57:31.000 And now, look, it's not full-blown.

00:57:34.000 This has not yet reached full maturity, where we are at complete 1984 on all of this.

00:57:40.000 But it is no longer in its infant stage.

00:57:43.000 If Elon had acquired...

00:57:48.000 If Congress was aware of that CISA, that cybersecurity branch at DHS, was the real Ministry of Truth in 2019 instead of in 2022, if people were aware of the State Department's Global Engagement Center and USAID's Democracy,

00:58:06.000 Human Rights and Governance and all of this in 2018, 2019 when it was really getting its feet down, It may have been easy to have been pulled out at the roots then because they were skittish at the time about going through with this at first.

00:58:23.000 You heard in that video that we just watched a reference to this phrase called whole of society.

00:58:28.000 This is another funny video.

00:58:31.000 If you want to just pull up the...

00:58:32.000 If you're interested, Jamie, and if you think, Joe, this is appropriate...

00:58:36.000 I could have made this a six-hour supercut, but I made a two-hour supercut of, if you just look up, whole-of-society supercut on my X account, you'll see this.

00:58:48.000 And this phrase is their get out jail free card.

00:58:52.000 So when these CIA cutouts and State Department emissaries and and, you know, the whole apparatus of the blob had this apparition moment in 2016 where the rules based international order would collapse and we have to stop populism.

00:59:08.000 We have to stop Trump from, you know, ending our seize Eurasia foreign policy.

00:59:13.000 When that when that happened, they had a lot of self-reflection where they said China doesn't have this problem.

00:59:19.000 Russia doesn't have this problem.

00:59:22.000 Authoritarian countries don't have to deal with the threat of insurgent populist groups radically altering that country's foreign policy, that country's national security state.

00:59:36.000 But they do it all top down and we have our entire diplomatic apparatus is arrayed as a sort of dichotomy between democracy and autocracy because that's what lets us go over go and take over or overthrow or regime change foreign countries is their autocracies and we're bringing democracy to them so we can't be seen to look like the autocracies we're trying to overthrow we want the we want the autocratic outcome But

01:00:06.000 we can't be seen to use the auto-crack process.

01:00:09.000 So they came up with a really cute trick to prevent the top-down perception.

01:00:14.000 And they called this the whole-of-society counter misinformation framework, the whole-of-society counter misinformation alliance.

01:00:21.000 And the reason I thought it'd be funny to just play this clip before delving into a little bit more is because it actually starts with a clip from CISA, the cybersecurity turned cyber censorship DHS internal meeting where the CISA censorship official leading the meeting apologizes the cybersecurity turned cyber censorship DHS internal meeting where the CISA censorship official leading the meeting apologizes for using the phrase whole society because by that point,

01:00:47.000 It's like a mantra, like an incantation that has to be recited almost like a religious ritual because this is how you get this government, private sector, civil society, media alliance.

01:01:04.000 This thing was completely orchestrated top down to avoid the appearance of top down in 2017.

01:01:11.000 They borrowed this concept from their military counterinsurgency work and they simply grafted it on to censorship.

01:01:17.000 I don't know, do you want to just like I haven't found it yet.

01:01:20.000 If you just look for the phrase, wholeofsociety, at Mike Ben Cyber.

01:01:24.000 I did.

01:01:26.000 You could also...

01:01:27.000 I found a lot of this to be talking about it.

01:01:28.000 Well, if you go to, in my highlights tab, and scroll down, I think you'll see it there.

01:01:34.000 It's a supercut.

01:01:37.000 I use the phrase supercut if that's helpful to highlight it.

01:01:40.000 But whole society is this concept that the government will fund allies to astroturf the appearance of a spontaneous democratic surround sound around the need to do the censorship work.

01:01:58.000 So there are four quadrants in their whole society framework.

01:02:02.000 Government meaning all the different government, they have a whole of government side of that, which is everything from the State Department, the DHS, HHS for COVID censorship work, you know, FBI, DOJ, National Science Foundation, all that.

01:02:17.000 The private sector are the private sector companies, the social media tech platforms where the censorship actually takes place.

01:02:25.000 The civil society quadrant means university censorship centers, disinformation studies is what they call it, misnomer of the century.

01:02:35.000 So there's now about 100 US universities.

01:02:38.000 Every major US university has a censorship center.

01:02:42.000 It'll be called disinformation studies.

01:02:44.000 Sometimes it'll be tucked under their sociology department or their communications, even their applied physics when they do.

01:02:50.000 So you have the civil society layer, you have the universities, the NGOs, the activist groups, the independent nonprofit foundations.

01:03:00.000 And the fourth quadrant is media, which is the government working with media to promote censorship of US citizens.

01:03:07.000 And so by effectively wielding all these assets to So that there's government funding and government coordination, but technically, most of the pressure being put on the tech companies is coming from...

01:03:22.000 Yeah, here we go.

01:03:23.000 You can just watch.

01:03:24.000 It's like a funny supercut.

01:03:25.000 We don't need to watch the whole thing, but you'll get the picture very quickly.

01:03:31.000 And we hear this term all the time.

01:03:35.000 A problem like disinformation, fighting disinformation, really requires a whole society response.

01:03:42.000 I know whole society is a little bit cliche and a term that gets thrown around a lot.

01:03:46.000 Addressing disinformation requires a whole of society approach.

01:03:51.000 Disinformation is not going to be fixed by governments acting alone.

01:03:56.000 I think we've seen that a whole society effort is really key to the solution.

01:04:02.000 There are some countries, more so in Europe or up in other parts of North America, that are more progressive in recognizing that this is a whole society challenge.

01:04:12.000 A whole-of-society approach, what would be your wish list if you could implement anything?

01:04:17.000 Or to be able to trust when somebody tells them it's fake.

01:04:20.000 Is there anything that governments can do on that front?

01:04:23.000 Absolutely.

01:04:23.000 This is a whole-of-society problem.

01:04:25.000 So there's things that governments can do, you know, individual national governments and multilateral institutions.

01:04:33.000 Disinformation challenges in democracy require that we work together as a community to share our experiences and to hold governments, social media platforms, and political leaders accountable for making sure that people are empowered with information that is real and accurate.

01:04:50.000 Democracy depends on a healthy information space that can only be achieved through a whole-of-society effort.

01:04:55.000 Countering disinformation.

01:04:57.000 We often talk about a whole-of-society response.

01:05:00.000 Of course, we need this information, a whole-of-society approach.

01:05:05.000 I want to get into the, quote, whole-of-society response, that whole-of-society network response, private sector, public sector, civil society.

01:05:15.000 Means that we're circulating, and that to me is the whole-of-society approach.

01:05:20.000 I think the solution has to be whole of society, which is the word that we throw around a lot, especially in venues like these, right?

01:05:26.000 We need cooperation from the tech platforms, good faith cooperation, and enforcement of terms of service.

01:05:32.000 But we also need people in the government who are willing to say, yes, this is a problem, and it's not just about foreign actors.

01:05:38.000 Okay, so a few things on that.

01:05:39.000 If you remember the SEPs video, the CIA front NED program to get censorship laws on 140 countries.

01:05:47.000 If you remember, there was one of those nine things they read off is that the US government needs to capacity build these counter misinformation institutions in civil society because the government has the money and the resources, but not the credibility.

01:06:04.000 Civil society organizations, the universities, the NGOs, they've got the credibility but not the money.

01:06:10.000 So that's part of what they're saying here with the role of this civil society is the government can't be seen as telling everyone to do all of this censorship because that's authoritarian.

01:06:22.000 That would look not credible.

01:06:25.000 That would look authoritarian for the government to do.

01:06:26.000 So we've got the muscle and the money.

01:06:30.000 But not the credibility.

01:06:31.000 Our cutout organizations have the credibility, but not the money and the muscle.

01:06:36.000 So we're going to give them the money and the muscle.

01:06:38.000 And so I can show you, if you want to see what this looks like in action, I can show you some great videos that sort of show this.

01:06:45.000 So if you just look up Wise Decks, it's in my highlights.

01:06:50.000 It's also, if you just do, at Mike Ben Cyber, Wise Decks.

01:06:53.000 I'm going to show you a couple of things of how this works.

01:06:57.000 So when Jamie's able to pull that up, so...

01:07:01.000 You're saying Wisedex?

01:07:02.000 Wisedex.

01:07:03.000 W-I-S-E-D-E-X. Wisedex. 0.99

01:07:10.000 Trump did something really ambitious when he was president at the National Science Foundation.

01:07:15.000 The National Science Foundation is the main funder of higher education in the United States.

01:07:21.000 It's a $10 billion pool of money that goes to fund university centers.

01:07:26.000 And it is sort of the civilian arm of DARPA. It's technically a sort of civilian Foundation for science, but if you look at its history, it's when military technology becomes dual use for commercial and civilian purposes.

01:07:48.000 So, for example, the Internet itself started off as DARPA in the 60s.

01:07:53.000 Then it was transferred to the National Science Foundation for civilian, effectively, management.

01:08:00.000 Then it made its way to the World Wide Web.

01:08:03.000 That's why the National Science Foundation has a 15% quota on national security-related projects.

01:08:10.000 And all the technical implementers of the censorship programs at the National Science Foundation come from DARPA, including this that I'm going to show here.

01:08:20.000 So Trump created this thing in his first term at the National Science Foundation called the Convergence Accelerator Program.

01:08:29.000 And the idea was that we were going to converge scientists from different fields to solve these home run swing challenges like cold fusion and all the quantum mechanics challenges that required physicists to talk to data scientists and network modelers and bringing them all together so that they could all converge on a common problem.

01:08:54.000 So we set up about five of these tracks in 2019. Biden gets into office.

01:09:00.000 His first year in office, his National Science Foundation creates a new track.

01:09:03.000 It's called Track F. And the whole thing is for countering misinformation, to converge scientists on developing censorship technology to censor the Internet at scale.

01:09:17.000 So they have spent tens of millions of dollars.

01:09:21.000 This one that we're about to watch was eligible for $5.7 million from the National Science Foundation.

01:09:27.000 It received $750,000 from the National Science Foundation to create this.

01:09:31.000 This is the promo video that they put up on YouTube in connection with their grant.

01:09:36.000 So I'll just let it play and then I'll...

01:09:39.000 Posts that go viral on social media can reach millions of people.

01:09:45.000 Unfortunately, some posts are misleading.

01:09:48.000 Social media platforms have policies about harmful misinformation.

01:09:53.000 For example, Twitter has a policy against posts that say authorized COVID vaccines will make you sick.

01:10:00.000 When something is mildly harmful, platforms attach warnings like this one that points readers to better information.

01:10:07.000 Really bad things they remove.

01:10:10.000 But before they can enforce, platforms have to identify the bad stuff, and they miss some of it.

01:10:17.000 Actually, they miss a lot, especially when the posts aren't in English.

01:10:22.000 To understand why, let's consider how platforms usually identify bad posts.

01:10:28.000 There are too many posts for a platform to review everything.

01:10:32.000 So first, a platform flags a small fraction for review.

01:10:36.000 Next, human reviewers act as judges, determining which flag posts violate policy guidelines.

01:10:43.000 If the policies are too abstract, both steps, flagging and judging, can be difficult.

01:10:51.000 Wisetex helps by translating abstract policy guidelines into specific claims that are more actionable.

01:10:58.000 For example, the misleading claim that the COVID-19 vaccine suppresses a person's immune response.

01:11:05.000 Each claim includes keywords associated with the claim, in multiple languages.

01:11:10.000 For example, a Twitter search for negative efficacy yields tweets that promote the misleading claim.

01:11:17.000 A search on Eficacia Negativa yields Spanish tweets promoting that same claim.

01:11:22.000 The trust and safety team at a platform can use those keywords to automatically flag matching posts for human review.

01:11:31.000 Wisetext harnesses the wisdom of crowds as well as AI techniques to select keywords for each claim and provide other information in the claim profile.

01:11:40.000 For human reviewers, a Wisetext browser plugin identifies misinformation claims that might match the post.

01:11:48.000 The reviewer then decides which matches are correct.

01:11:51.000 A much easier task than deciding if posts violate abstract policies.

01:11:56.000 Reviewer efficiency So COVID-19 was essentially like a proof of concept of all this, right?

01:12:03.000 Like this is something they could utilize and see how everything works because you have this sort of consensus among most people because of the media narrative that this is dangerous, we're all going to die.

01:12:16.000 The thing that's fucking us up is these people who are vaccine deniers and these people who are believing things that are ridiculous like natural immunity.

01:12:24.000 And so you have like a public support of this thing to go full scale where they can try it out with COVID-19 where there was no real specific narratives that we thought of wholly as problematic as a society before COVID-19. 0.68

01:12:44.000 COVID-19 became one that at least a large swath of society Believed the narrative that's being given to you by corporate news and this was a thing that they could combat on social media and have support for this type of censorship.

01:12:58.000 They had already begun doing it for hate speech before COVID-19.

01:13:01.000 It didn't hit the scale, though.

01:13:02.000 But they were already using hate speech as a proxy for populism, both in the U.S. and across NATO. And they were conflating everything with hate speech.

01:13:11.000 Basically, if you opposed open borders in the U.S. or in Italy or in Germany or in the U.K. In fact, that's why the U.S. Justice Department funded Hate Lab.

01:13:19.000 You want to see another crazy video from all this?

01:13:21.000 I'm not saying we have to pull it up.

01:13:23.000 Let's pull it up. 1.00

01:13:24.000 Fuck it. 1.00

01:13:24.000 Look up the Hate Lab website. 1.00

01:13:28.000 Their video on their AI scan and ban dashboard.

01:13:34.000 And all of this is just a large-scale implementation of censorship.

01:13:39.000 Yes.

01:13:40.000 They're just using all these different things to get people accustomed to it and to try to start using this full-scale.

01:13:47.000 Yes.

01:13:48.000 Actually, before we go to the hate lab, I do want to dwell on this COVID thing for a second because that's exactly right.

01:13:55.000 On what we just watched with Wisdex, just coming back to this whole society concept.

01:13:59.000 So this is the National Science Foundation.

01:14:00.000 The administrators for this are both DARPA guys.

01:14:04.000 It is funding the University of Michigan to create an AI censorship claims database so that...

01:14:14.000 The censorship policies that the Biden administration strong-armed onto these social media companies, as we know from Mark Zuckerberg and others, to adopt in the first place, so that there's no escape.

01:14:25.000 Every claim that a COVID vaccine skeptic says will be mapped out in a sort of lexicon codebook of terms and claims that will then be automatically flagged And the National Science Foundation does not want to be seen as having the government tell the private sector companies to do it.

01:14:48.000 So it is capacity building a civil society nonprofit, a University of Michigan disinformation lab, To create this AI censorship technology to then sell to the social media platforms to make sure there's no escape in terms of the ability to criticize government policy on COVID without getting censored.

01:15:11.000 But just to drive home that point on COVID censorship, this is something that I think is really terrifying that people should be aware of.

01:15:19.000 There's a company called Graphica, which figures very heavily in all of the censorship industry.

01:15:25.000 If you pull up Graphica's April 2020 report on COVID and COVID conspiracy theories, it's also on my timeline.

01:15:36.000 If you look up the word Graphica, it's G-R-A-P-H-I-K-A. Graphica is a longtime military contractor that did social media monitoring, surveillance, and analytics work for the U.S. military and intelligence in order to see what narratives, opposition, you know, various political movements or insurgent groups are saying on social media.

01:16:01.000 They were formerly a part of the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative.

01:16:05.000 The Minerva Initiative is the Psychological Operations Research Center of the Pentagon.

01:16:10.000 When the Pentagon is trying to do information shaping operations and they solicit propositions and ideas and thought leadership from outside organizations to help the military achieve psychological operations outcomes that are favorable to the intended military policy.

01:16:27.000 Graphica has gotten over $7 million in Pentagon grants.

01:16:31.000 It was formerly a part of the Pentagon's Psychological Operations Research Center.

01:16:36.000 And Graphica was one of the very first entities to begin the censorship around the world of COVID-19.

01:16:46.000 Given the strange, unresolved role of the Pentagon in potentially giving rise to COVID-19 or the strangeness of the DARPA grants around there and the military networks around the biosecurity state, Grafica began their work before COVID-19 even got its name.

01:17:09.000 They started In their own source documents, they say they started December 16th.

01:17:16.000 The pneumonia-like symptoms were December 12th, 2019. So just four days after.

01:17:22.000 Now, they've said later that actually we started in January 2020, but we backdated our data, our AI ingestion of all the tweets and Facebook posts in January 2020. So even if you accept that, that is still just one month after COVID broke out.

01:17:38.000 And if you pull up their April 2020 report, you will see that they've literally scanned...

01:17:45.000 Yeah, this is the one.

01:17:46.000 And I have a highlighted version of it, by the way, on my X account as well.

01:17:53.000 So if you scroll up...

01:17:56.000 If you start on page one, I'll sort of walk you through this.

01:17:59.000 So again, this is a Pentagon-funded psychological operations research arm of the Pentagon.

01:18:05.000 And you'll see, it's called the COVID-19 infodemic.

01:18:10.000 So they published this in April 2020 after COVID got its name, but they started this before it did.

01:18:14.000 And if you scroll down to, I think, page five here, you'll see.

01:18:18.000 So this is, by the way, an AI-generated network map of all people expressing skepticism about the origins of COVID and different conspiracy theories.

01:18:30.000 So if you scroll down to page five, it says, a key analytical highlights of these maps.

01:18:34.000 Okay.

01:18:35.000 So you'll see that they...

01:18:37.000 So similarly, large megaclusters of U.S. right-wing accounts We're diminishing the mainstreaming of the coronavirus conversation.

01:18:47.000 If you scroll down to the next one, you'll see they've dedicated coronavirus disinformation map, seeded on disinformation-specific hashtags, reels that conservative groups have a larger total presence of COVID heterodox opinions.

01:18:59.000 This is right at the outbreak.

01:19:01.000 One month.

01:19:02.000 You know, into it.

01:19:03.000 A Pentagon-funded psyops firm is doing political mapping, not in the U.S., in the U.K., in Italy.

01:19:13.000 So they found that disproportionately it's conservatives who need to be censored more.

01:19:18.000 If you just scroll down through this, I'll show you some highlights.

01:19:22.000 What was this in regard, this was disinformation in regard to the origin at this point?

01:19:27.000 Yes, yes, and you can run a control F. Which is wild that they were already countering when the origin was not really disclosed yet.

01:19:34.000 It was still being debated.

01:19:35.000 Right, and you'll see they even, so again, this is the Pentagon creating network maps.

01:19:40.000 We're paying for this effectively.

01:19:42.000 To protect the online reputation of Bill Gates and George Soros.

01:19:46.000 You'll see they have a whole section.

01:19:48.000 If you just run a Control-F for Gates or Soros, you'll see this as well.

01:19:52.000 But you'll see that they map these different conspiracy...

01:19:58.000 How much would Bill Gates or George Soros need to pay a cloak-and-dagger public relations shop to scour the entire internet and create targetable, censorable, demographic communities that social media should censor in order to protect their reputation?

01:20:15.000 This is us paying the Pentagon to pay a psyops firm to protect the reputation of Bill Gates and George Soros from conspiracy theories online.

01:20:26.000 And they did the same thing with COVID origins.

01:20:29.000 They did the same thing with vaccines.

01:20:31.000 The same group, Graphica, was a part of something called the Virality Project.

01:20:34.000 Which, you know, had, which mapped out 66 different claims of if you questioned COVID vaccine efficacy, if you question masks and their efficacy, if you question policies around lockdowns.

01:20:48.000 All of that was systematically mapped.

01:20:51.000 All four of the entities involved in the Virality Project, by the way, were U.S. government funded at the organizational level.

01:20:58.000 The University of Stanford and the University of Washington, who are two of those four, received a joint $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, which, again, is this basically civilian side of DARPA.

01:21:12.000 The, you know, Grafica has received $7 million in Pentagon funds.

01:21:16.000 And then the, you know, the nastiest one of them all is this group, the Atlantic Council, which has – which gets annual funding over a million dollars a year from the Pentagon, over a million dollars a year from the State Department.

01:21:28.000 It also gets annual funding from the CIA cutout, National Endowment for Democracy.

01:21:31.000 It gets annual funding from USAID.

01:21:33.000 Basically, every web of U.S. cloak-and-dagger intelligence and diplomatic funding funds the Atlantic Council every year.

01:21:41.000 The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its board of directors.

01:21:46.000 A lot of people don't know seven former number one heads of the CIA are still alive, let alone all locally clustered on the exact organization which is the premier heavyweight in internet censorship around the world.

01:21:59.000 And the Atlantic Council, and I can show you some wild clips of that, by the way, including them training journalists on what to censor.

01:22:06.000 Oh, I need to see that.

01:22:08.000 Yeah.

01:22:08.000 Okay.

01:22:08.000 So if you pull up...

01:22:10.000 You can find this also if you look on Rumble, NATO training journalists.

01:22:17.000 You'll see that.

01:22:19.000 Is Rumble the only place you can put that up right now?

01:22:21.000 No, I have it on my X account.

01:22:23.000 I actually have a 45-minute video.

01:22:24.000 I have a 45-minute video that goes through it and all the supporting receipts that's got, I think, almost 3 million views right now.

01:22:30.000 But there's a two-minute, there's like a two- to four-minute video.

01:22:32.000 If you look at Atlantic Council...

01:22:36.000 Censorship journalists.

01:22:38.000 And I can tell you the source video. 0.99

01:22:41.000 It's called I Call Bullshit. 0.66

01:22:42.000 This was in June 2019, right on the heels of the Bob Mueller investigation.

01:22:49.000 The Atlantic Council, again, with seven CIA directors on its board and annual funding from the State Department Pentagon, does this 360 meeting where they bring in journalists and fact-checkers from all over the world to come to this...

01:23:04.000 I mean, it looks like something straight out of Dr. Strangelove.

01:23:07.000 And Jamie, let me know if you have trouble pulling it up because I can...

01:23:11.000 You're sending me down too many...

01:23:12.000 Adding what you added, pulled up what you were talking about on other podcasts.

01:23:16.000 That's not what I'm looking for, so I have to...

01:23:17.000 It's definitely...

01:23:18.000 I think it's definitely searchable easily on Rumble.

01:23:21.000 I actually wanted to load this up.

01:23:24.000 And I can tell you the exact...

01:23:27.000 If you just look, it's called I Call Bullshit, is what it was, by Ben Nimmo, the Atlantic Council.

01:23:32.000 I'll just show you what I'm seeing, because every time I type in what you're saying, it just brings up you talking about this stuff.

01:23:36.000 Okay, how about Atlantic Council?

01:23:39.000 at land council journalists or training yeah journalists Training too?

01:23:50.000 yeah well i know it's gonna oh yeah i think you need yeah it's still still pretty gonna bring up what you talked about on other ones though there you go that That's the top one.

01:24:05.000 Okay.

01:24:06.000 So, here you go.

01:24:09.000 Censorship training session.

01:24:10.000 Yes.

01:24:11.000 So, can I tell you a little backstory on this real quick?

01:24:13.000 Trump tweets Brexit slogans.

01:24:16.000 Yeah, give me some background first.

01:24:17.000 So, if you pause right there on the thumbnail, if you just see it real quick.

01:24:22.000 Okay.

01:24:22.000 So I found this video in 2019. My whole life has been 24-7, morning, noon, night, tracking, watching.

01:24:31.000 I know these people closer than my own friends and family.

01:24:34.000 I found this video, I think, at around the five or six hour mark of a day two of...

01:24:41.000 I found this, I think, at five or six hour mark of a nine hour video in June 2019, where this is basically the month before the Bob Mueller investigation.

01:24:53.000 And they they wanted to pre-censor and and throttle Trump's ability to be able to fight off charges that he was a Russian asset, because at the time, the Pentagon and the intelligence community want him out.

01:25:06.000 If you remember, the Ukraine impeachment in 2019 came from Sierra Morella, the CIA agent came from the Vindman brothers who were military.

01:25:17.000 Basically, Trump had a big beef with the existing brass of the Pentagon and the intelligence community over Russia policy, over Eurasia policy, which is a whole thing that we can maybe talk about if you're if you're interested.

01:25:29.000 So the Atlantic Council was one of the very, very, very first movers in the censorship industry space.

01:25:35.000 I mentioned how this really started in 2014 with 25 years of free speech diplomacy sort of ended with the 2014 Ukraine fiasco.

01:25:45.000 Because of this Gerasimov Doctrine hybrid warfare thing.

01:25:48.000 And I mentioned that that's when NATO began setting down infrastructure to censor the internet.

01:25:52.000 And that's what snowballed into what we now have.

01:25:55.000 And so the Atlantic Council effectively bills itself as NATO's think tank.

01:26:01.000 That's what it's known as in Washington.

01:26:05.000 Places like the Council on Foreign Relations are sort of more known for Chamber of Commerce and big business sort of working on government policy.

01:26:12.000 The Atlantic Council is one of these that's for NATO. And it's basically NATO's clandestine civilian sort of civil military arm.

01:26:21.000 When there's a NATO military agenda that needs massaging at the political level, they need laws passed, they need sanctions put in place, they need capacity building on the civilian side to help a military thing.

01:26:32.000 That's what the Atlantic Council primarily does. 0.82

01:26:35.000 And I'm not even opining on whether much of what they do, I'm not even saying good or bad organization, but they set up something called the Digital Forensics Research Lab, right at, you know, basically right on the heels of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine countercoup.

01:26:50.000 And it was one of the earliest NATO-US military-liased internet censorship shops that targeted populist governments, Trump, the whole UK, Italy, Germany, Spain network that I talked about, Bolsonaro.

01:27:09.000 Right out the gate.

01:27:11.000 And so this video was, again, right before Russiagate ended.

01:27:15.000 And they thought they could put Trump in prison with this.

01:27:19.000 And this was a training session that they did for journalists and fact checkers in June 2019. You'll see this session is an interactive session.

01:27:27.000 It's called I Call Bullshit.

01:27:29.000 And by the way, Ben Nimmo, he's at the Atlantic Council in this one, but he goes on shortly after this to be effectively the technical lead for Grafica, the same Pentagon.

01:27:41.000 And by the way, he had started his career in the NATO press shop, basically doing media work for NATO. Then he goes over, and again, we fund all of this, but let's just watch and we'll show you this.

01:27:54.000 Anybody who works in this space will, I think, acknowledge that in any information operation, it's not just lies.

01:28:02.000 You take a grain of truth and they will build a pearl of disinformation around it.

01:28:08.000 When we're in this space, there isn't a simple binary true or false.

01:28:12.000 There are all kinds of shades of meaning in between.

01:28:16.000 Now, there are various different ways of modeling how you can identify the ways in which people are trying to twist the story.

01:28:23.000 Wait for it.

01:28:24.000 This gets good.

01:28:24.000 Because it's short and because, frankly, I developed it, is the four Ds.

01:28:29.000 Dismiss, distort, distract, and dismay.

01:28:32.000 These are the four responses that we see time and again.

01:28:36.000 Not false.

01:28:37.000 None of these are false.

01:28:38.000 How can we get censored anyway?

01:28:42.000 All of you should have some of these cards on the table.

01:28:45.000 If you don't look on another table and steal one, that's not being used.

01:28:49.000 Because these are going to help get our attention.

01:28:53.000 We are going to go through a set of slides showing quotes from different organizations and individuals who are using certain rhetorical devices to make their argument.

01:29:05.000 And so If you go through all of them, at least one of these four will apply.

01:29:12.000 Again, dismiss, distort, distract, dismay.

01:29:16.000 Everyone say it with me.

01:29:18.000 Dismiss, distort, distract, dismay.

01:29:22.000 Excellent. 1.00

01:29:23.000 You're welcome to scream I call bullshit, too, if you're comfortable. 0.99

01:29:27.000 This is all funded by U.S. taxpayers. 0.99

01:29:29.000 So, with that, let's play.

01:29:36.000 Witch Hunt.

01:29:39.000 How can you censor the sitting president arguing that what he said is disinformation?

01:29:44.000 How can you tell the tech platforms that that tweet is disinformation?

01:29:49.000 Get creative.

01:29:50.000 Obviously, it can be any number of the Ds.

01:29:53.000 You can say it's distorting what they're saying or distracting them from whatever the issue is saying.

01:29:59.000 The issue isn't real.

01:30:00.000 They're just after me because there's their witches and it's evil. 0.71

01:30:04.000 I'm the injured party here.

01:30:06.000 So it could be a whole lot of them.

01:30:08.000 Trump's got a nice range when it comes to disinformation.

01:30:11.000 Does anyone have a number one pick that they would like to mention related to this one?

01:30:18.000 They said dismissed.

01:30:19.000 Yes, dismissed.

01:30:21.000 Dismissed?

01:30:23.000 How many of you think dismissed?

01:30:25.000 Raise your card please.

01:30:29.000 I think we're onto something here.

01:30:31.000 Absolutely.

01:30:31.000 So you're right that underneath that attempt, he's twisting the story, he's accusing somebody else of the same thing, right?

01:30:40.000 But the main thing is, what he's saying is like, don't listen to them because it's a witch hunt.

01:30:44.000 So that was our first one.

01:30:46.000 Alright.

01:30:47.000 Number two.

01:30:49.000 Getting topical here.

01:30:50.000 Pro-Brexit.

01:30:52.000 This is a Brexit ad saying we should be spending the money on our own national health system.

01:30:59.000 Instead of funny to you.

01:31:00.000 Distort.

01:31:01.000 Any other takers?

01:31:02.000 Any suggestions?

01:31:03.000 Well, let's ask.

01:31:03.000 How many of you think this one is distort involved?

01:31:06.000 Jesus Christ.

01:31:08.000 Okay.

01:31:09.000 That's a lot.

01:31:09.000 Any other...

01:31:10.000 This seems so happy to comply.

01:31:13.000 ...we've got a big hand over here.

01:31:15.000 Let's...

01:31:16.000 Oh, were you just...

01:31:17.000 You just kept your hand up?

01:31:19.000 Her hand goes back down.

01:31:21.000 Are there any others?

01:31:22.000 Are we just going to stick with that one?

01:31:23.000 Yes.

01:31:23.000 Right here.

01:31:25.000 Distract.

01:31:28.000 Ah, okay, so for those who couldn't hear, it's also distract because it's trying to focus attention on the NHS rather than the vote itself.

01:31:39.000 Yeah, so, okay, so this goes on, but what you'll see is this is the exact political adversary group that the intelligence, diplomatic, and military structure is trying to stop Donald Trump, Brexit in the UK, and if you ever wondered why is it that everyone got all on board and suddenly started doing this all together, they were literally having years of these consensus building.

01:32:08.000 You want to get your career made if you're at the Poynter Institute or the International Fact-Checking Union?

01:32:13.000 Or if you're on the disinformation beat for the Washington Post or NPR or Le Monde in France or the Frankfurt Allgemeiner in Germany, you get your bona fides by going to these and you get effectively accredited by the blob.

01:32:28.000 And we're literally training people to find creative ways to mass flag.

01:32:35.000 You can't even run a Brexit ad saying, hey, we should be spending $350 million on ourselves rather than the EU. That's disinformation.

01:32:44.000 Not false.

01:32:45.000 They're saying it's not false.

01:32:47.000 There's any number of ways that we can use to put pressure on the tech platforms to call this disinformation.

01:32:52.000 You're hosting disinformation simply because it's not the agenda item that we want here. 0.88

01:32:59.000 And again, the seven CIA directors currently on the board of that organization, those placards reading I call bullshit were paid for by us.

01:33:08.000 It's just wild to watch everybody happily comply, enthusiastically, try to find ways that this makes any sense with no one having a counter-narrative. 0.85

01:33:17.000 No one standing up and going, wait a minute, who's to decide?

01:33:22.000 What if it turns out it is and it was a witch hunt?

01:33:25.000 Now we know. 1.00

01:33:26.000 All that Russiagate stuff was 100% bullshit. 0.99

01:33:30.000 So he was correct. 1.00

01:33:31.000 Right.

01:33:32.000 But remember, the Mueller disaster wouldn't happen until just the following month.

01:33:36.000 Right.

01:33:36.000 So at the time, they thought, you know, ah, great.

01:33:38.000 If we can get him censored around calling this a witch hunt, then once the findings come in, he's going to be cornered.

01:33:43.000 He won't even be able to defend himself.

01:33:44.000 It'll be like an internet gag order.

01:33:46.000 Right.

01:33:47.000 Headline readers and low-information voters overwhelmingly believed it.

01:33:51.000 Right.

01:33:52.000 Now, I should note that, I mean, this is another thing Elon was a huge game-changer on.

01:33:57.000 A lot of these people did not begin to sort of navel-gaze and self-reflect on this until there was political and social blowback.

01:34:06.000 The fact is, is there were a lot of these people who in 2017-2018 were looking around at these...

01:34:14.000 I've just...

01:34:14.000 I mean, I've watched thousands of hours of these, you know, consensus-building meetings.

01:34:19.000 They literally...

01:34:20.000 You know, there would be some debate in 2017 about whether or not we should do this tactic or whether or not this goes too far.

01:34:28.000 And I watched as these people basically let those early inhibitions go as the thing took wings and as the money poured in.

01:34:40.000 Because that's why I always emphasize the censorship industry.

01:34:44.000 If you get rid of the money, you get rid of the glamour, you get rid of the career track, you get rid of the power, you get rid of the networks.

01:34:56.000 And so, to me, the fact is, if these people could not have their careers made by doing this, they wouldn't be pursuing those careers.

01:35:07.000 But when Elon arrived on the scene and Congress began to take action and media began to report on it, I mean,

01:35:30.000 it wasn't really until there started to be a whole society freedom network on the other side of this that That the moral ambivalences that were expressed in the beginning began to reassert themselves.

01:35:42.000 And I think there is some self-reflection on that.

01:35:45.000 You know, it's funny.

01:35:46.000 In 2022, Harvard wrote this piece.

01:35:49.000 I covered it at my foundation.

01:35:51.000 It was called, Disinformation Studies is Too Big to Fail.

01:35:55.000 And they made the argument, this is right before the bottom fell out on this stuff.

01:36:03.000 September, October 2022, Harvard Misinformation Review, disinformation studies is too big to fail.

01:36:08.000 They made the argument, we've arrived.

01:36:11.000 It took a while.

01:36:13.000 In the beginning of it, they say the catalyst for this entire field was the 2016 election.

01:36:17.000 Basically, we created this entire spanning octopus of censorship work because Trump won the election in 2016. Now it's 2022. We've gone unchallenged for six years.

01:36:29.000 And now, if they want to get rid of us, they can't.

01:36:31.000 They were making the argument that they were basically like Citibank during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

01:36:38.000 That they were simply a bank that's too big to fail.

01:36:40.000 Because now they are so deeply ingrained in the media disinformation.

01:36:44.000 They're so deeply ingrained in the private sector interstitials working with all the trust and safety people at every platform.

01:36:50.000 They're so deeply funded by 12 different U.S. government departments and 50 different U.S. government programs.

01:36:58.000 There's no way to get rid of us, even if you want to.

01:37:00.000 That's what they were stunting on right before Elon finished the acquisition of X and Republicans won the House in 2022, and all of this went in reverse.

01:37:12.000 And now you'll see just this week in the news that There's quotes about them wanting to flee the country and that the whole field is potentially in disarray if Trump does indeed go forward and defund this.

01:37:27.000 Because now you're going to have 100 university centers gone.

01:37:29.000 There goes your State Department funding.

01:37:31.000 There goes your NSF funding.

01:37:33.000 And I have a great example of that, by the way, that's pretty eye-opening on our topic of institutions.

01:37:37.000 That's a quick receipt if you're interested.

01:37:40.000 Sure, yeah, yeah.

01:37:40.000 Feel free to guide Jamie any way you want.

01:37:43.000 Yeah, so Jamie, if you go to the Arizona State University Global Security Initiative, I'm going to show you some of this in action a little bit.

01:37:52.000 Arizona State University Global.

01:37:54.000 That's very vague.

01:37:55.000 Go to their website, go to...

01:37:56.000 Oh, yeah.

01:37:57.000 Google Arizona State University Center on Narrative Disinformation and Strategic Influence.

01:38:09.000 Disinformation and strategic what?

01:38:11.000 Influence, yeah.

01:38:13.000 Arizona State University Center narrative.

01:38:16.000 Just go to their website?

01:38:17.000 Yeah, just go to the website.

01:38:19.000 If you pull it up...

01:38:20.000 So, this is...

01:38:26.000 If you click on Global Security Initiative, I'm just going to show you an example real quick.

01:38:31.000 Just click on the top thing.

01:38:33.000 This is Global Security Initiative, and then you will hit the back button in a second.

01:38:36.000 But if you scroll down...

01:38:38.000 So this is Arizona State University.

01:38:40.000 This is basically John McCain University.

01:38:42.000 Now, this is significant because John McCain was the founding president of the IRI. Isn't it funny that in the picture, the girl with the mask is wearing it wrong?

01:38:50.000 Her nose is exposed.

01:38:51.000 Oh my gosh. 1.00

01:38:52.000 I mean, it just kind of shows you how fucking stupid all this stuff is. 1.00

01:38:55.000 That's exactly right. 1.00

01:38:56.000 You know, they had to have her wearing a mask still, even in 2024. You go to the website, she's wearing a mask, and she's wearing it wrong. 0.97

01:39:03.000 Her nose is exposed.

01:39:04.000 Not only that, it's a surgical mask. 1.00

01:39:06.000 It's the dumbest one. 1.00

01:39:07.000 The one that provides zero, literally zero protection. 1.00

01:39:11.000 Right.

01:39:11.000 Okay, so...

01:39:12.000 Especially with your nose open.

01:39:13.000 No, that's fantastic.

01:39:15.000 So a few things as background.

01:39:16.000 Arizona State University, its current president...

01:39:20.000 Michael Crow is now and was, since the day it was born in 1999, the chairman of In-Q-Tel.

01:39:28.000 In-Q-Tel is the CIA's venture capital arm.

01:39:31.000 This is literally the CIA's proprietary investments in early-stage technology companies.

01:39:37.000 And the head of Arizona State University, its president, is the chairman of In-Q-Tel and has been for 25 years.

01:39:43.000 Arizona State University has these very deep partnerships with John McCain, who is the senator from Arizona.

01:39:49.000 John McCain, who ran for president against Barack Obama in 2008, before he ran for president in 2008, for 25 years, he was the founder and the president of the IRI, the CIA wing of the Republican Party.

01:40:03.000 Again, the IRI is the GOP side of the National Endowment for Democracy.

01:40:09.000 That's effectively self-declared CIA cutout.

01:40:12.000 And in fact, Arizona State University has a John McCain Center on disinformation that works in tandem with this one.

01:40:20.000 But I just wanted to show that you'll see this is technically it's Arizona State University, but you'll see that it is an intelligence program.

01:40:26.000 So if you scroll up for a second...

01:40:28.000 You'll see at the bottom, right, this is a program at Arizona State University that is an intelligence program.

01:40:36.000 Its job is to assist the intelligence community with this work.

01:40:39.000 And if you scroll down from here, you'll see the different branches.

01:40:44.000 And then click on the one, Narrative Disinformation and Strategic Influence.

01:40:47.000 Now, this program has a $1.6 million grant from the Pentagon to do censorship work.

01:40:56.000 It has $300,000 in grants from the State Department.

01:40:59.000 It's got another almost $500,000 worth of additional government grants from adjacent U.S. government diplomatic statecraft intelligence folks.

01:41:09.000 So this is a multi-million dollar It's a censorship center, currently still up and running at Arizona State University, funded by us.

01:41:20.000 Now, if you click on why is disinformation dangerous, I want to show you something real quick, because this language is everywhere.

01:41:26.000 This is stock standard language.

01:41:28.000 Why do we have this set up?

01:41:31.000 Disinformation sows confusion and distrust, diminishing people's faith and confidence in the institutions that are critical to a functioning, healthy democracy, such as government, news media and science.

01:41:43.000 I'm going to pause right there.

01:41:46.000 The dirty tricks that this is laden with is what allows them to get away with this.

01:41:51.000 So, note that they are saying that they have set up this apparatus, and I can show you the different projects they're involved with on the censorship side, but the issue they're saying is not that something's wrong, but that people's...

01:42:09.000 The simple act of diminishing public faith and confidence in the news media, government and science, is an attack on democracy.

01:42:20.000 This is the identical language that dozens of university centers and both of the major censorship programs at the National Science Foundation, as well as at State, USA, Pentagon, they all have this stock language now, which is that the purpose of the program is to protect their assets.

01:42:37.000 And legacy news media is one of those assets.

01:42:41.000 If you on social media undermine public faith in the New York Times as a credible institution, you are attacking democracy in the white blood cells of the blob.

01:42:52.000 These disinformation centers being run out of our NGOs and universities and for profit, private sector, censorship, mercenary firms will scan and ban you off the Internet.

01:43:03.000 And I can show you what some of those look like as well, these dynamic disinformation dashboards.

01:43:08.000 But even if you just go to the projects page, you know, for that, I think if you scroll down, you'll see it.

01:43:12.000 Yeah, so these are Semantic Information Defender.

01:43:16.000 This is right out of 1984. Yeah, so if you scroll down...

01:43:21.000 Just the terms.

01:43:23.000 Semantic Information Defender.

01:43:25.000 Okay, this project, again, this is 1.6 million just from the Pentagon alone.

01:43:31.000 This project will develop a system that detects, characterizes, and attributes misinformation and disinformation, whether image, video, audio, or text.

01:43:40.000 ASU provides content and narrative analysis, text detection and characterization methods, and a large data set of known disinformation manipulated objects.

01:43:50.000 So this is a database of all images, videos, audio, text that effectively the ghost of John McCain, the founder of the CIA side of the GOP after Reagan reoriented the IC around the NGO complex. the founder of the CIA side of the GOP after

01:44:10.000 And they've been caught basically conflating anything that's pro-Trump with being pro-Russia and going after rank and file right wing populists and conservatives because that's who the never Trump side of the GOP, the Mitt Romney, John McCain side of the GOP is trying to take out Mitt Romney, by the way, who ran for president against Obama the cycle after John McCain.

01:44:36.000 Remember, John McCain was the founding president of the IRI, the CIA wing of the GOP. Mitt Romney was and still is a board member of the IRI. I should note, Marco Rubio, our incoming Secretary of State, is also a board member of the IRI. He is going to need to confront this in a way I hope everyone is prepared for.

01:44:56.000 But it's all the way down to framing techniques.

01:44:59.000 Could you just look at this for a second?

01:45:01.000 Detecting and tracking adversarial framing.

01:45:04.000 Just listen to how this is phrased.

01:45:05.000 A pilot project with Lockheed Martin.

01:45:10.000 So, defense contractor...

01:45:12.000 Oh, we're going to go deep.

01:45:13.000 You want to see some craze?

01:45:14.000 Oh, yeah.

01:45:14.000 But let's keep going with this.

01:45:16.000 Please go deep.

01:45:17.000 But created an information operations detection technique based on the principle of adversarial framing when parties hostile to U.S. interests frame events in the media to justify support for future actions.

01:45:32.000 That is such a weird way to phrase things because it's so...

01:45:36.000 Okay, here we go.

01:45:37.000 The research helps planners and decision makers identify trends in real time that indicate changes in the information operations strategy, potentially indicating imminent actions.

01:45:46.000 A follow-on project funded by the Department of Defense expands techniques developed in the pilot project to additional countries.

01:45:55.000 Incorporates blog data into the framing analysis alongside known propaganda outlets.

01:46:00.000 Listen to this next one.

01:46:01.000 Studies the transmediation of these frames to non-Russian, non-propaganda services.

01:46:08.000 This is how they get it.

01:46:09.000 Sources, rather.

01:46:10.000 Right.

01:46:10.000 And seeks to develop the ability to automatically detect adversarial...

01:46:13.000 This is the AI censorship.

01:46:14.000 Adversarial framing is a strange way to put it, because U.S. interests could be just simply narratives that turn out to not be true.

01:46:21.000 So they have the ability to censor true information based on U.S. interests.

01:46:25.000 But this is how they get you.

01:46:27.000 See that transmediation of frames to non-Russian propaganda sources?

01:46:30.000 Yes.

01:46:30.000 That's how they get to say that we are spouting Russian disinformation if we say something, but so does some random outlet they don't like in Russia.

01:46:40.000 This is how...

01:46:41.000 Notice the 51 spies who lied about Hunter Biden, they will still insist, yeah, okay, the laptop's real, but it's still Russian, because they argue that Russian propaganda outlets were amplifying it.

01:46:53.000 And it's in Russia's interest to stigmatize the United States or to undermine the credibility of Joe Biden as president or to help Trump because Trump's foreign policy is helpful to them.

01:47:05.000 So this is how they conflate us as U.S. civilians with a First Amendment guarantee with the get-out-of-constitution-free card of our counterintelligence capacities.

01:47:17.000 You know, like the CIA is not allowed to operate at home, right?

01:47:20.000 It's supposed to be a foreign-facing operation.

01:47:22.000 But...

01:47:23.000 They have a get-out-jail-free card on that, which is, if it's counterintelligence, if they think a U.S. citizen is being recruited by or in a network formal or informal with a hostile foreign nation-states intelligence services, now they get to spy on Americans.

01:47:37.000 This is how the NSA, you know, reads Tucker Carlson's signal chats and whatnot.

01:47:41.000 And so they laundered that foreign to domestic switcheroo, which, by the way, is another great, great clip.

01:47:47.000 But anyway, I was going to – I saw your eyes go a little wide with the Lockheed Martin thing.

01:47:56.000 Yeah.

01:47:58.000 If you go to YouTube and you type in MITRE squint misinformation.

01:48:06.000 MITRE? Yeah, MITRE. MITRE is one of the largest military contractors.

01:48:12.000 They are, they're absolutely enormous.

01:48:14.000 They, they, and they're sort of like, you know, a technological version of the, of the Rand Corporation, if you will.

01:48:26.000 So they are funded by the U.S. military.

01:48:29.000 Fighting COVID-19 misinformation.

01:48:31.000 Let's go do it from the beginning.

01:48:32.000 As the nation continues the fight against COVID-19.

01:48:44.000 Wrong mask.

01:48:44.000 Wearing it wrong.

01:48:45.000 Wearing it wrong.

01:48:48.000 Social media is full of conflicting, misleading, and false information.

01:48:52.000 The level and quality of fact-checking varies from one platform to the next.

01:48:57.000 That means that half-truths or flat-out fiction may appear as facts.

01:49:01.000 People who are predisposed to believe the postings will perceive them as truth.

01:49:06.000 When deception and misinformation have the potential to negatively influence personal and national health outcomes, we must call it out and correct it.

01:49:16.000 Mitre Squint for COVID-19 provides a fast, reliable way to report and counter COVID misinformation about the disease, its treatment, and vaccinations.

01:49:26.000 If you're a medical or public health expert or other Squint user, you can report untrue or inaccurate COVID-19-related postings with a single click, whether using a desktop or mobile device.

01:49:38.000 MITRE Squint collects the URL with a screenshot and the coded information for aggregation and analysis.

01:49:45.000 You'll get a secure message to verify that you sent the screenshot.

01:49:49.000 The verification message includes a report that you can share or send to the social media channel asking that the misinformation be removed.

01:49:57.000 What happens then?

01:49:59.000 Mitre Squint analyzes and identifies patterns in social media that are misleading the public.

01:50:04.000 Your report enables faster takedowns and helps maintain the public's trust and confidence in the efforts to battle COVID-19.

01:50:13.000 MITRE Squint for COVID-19 provides an unprecedented opportunity to report dangerous misinformation designed to create additional fear or anger in people already stressed by the pandemic.

01:50:24.000 Contact us to learn more about MITRE Squint and become a participant.

01:50:31.000 Yeah, so MITRE is like a $2.2 billion annual budget and, you know, tens of millions of that come from the Pentagon.

01:50:40.000 They're a major Pentagon contractor.

01:50:42.000 They did the same thing, by the way, that was the second squint AI censorship technology they developed.

01:50:48.000 Again, just like the Pentagon was paying Grafica, censoring COVID origins, censoring conspiracy theories, they're paying AI censorship technology To simultaneously manage the censorship of COVID skeptic narratives.

01:51:04.000 They started this actually in the rump to the 2020 election.

01:51:09.000 If you look at squint misinformation elections.

01:51:12.000 Our democracy, our elections, we must call it out and correct it.

01:51:16.000 Oh, I think that starts at the 40 second.

01:51:17.000 If you go back to the beginning.

01:51:20.000 Oh, I see.

01:51:22.000 Including the viral messages spread through social media.

01:51:26.000 Social media platforms are only as accurate and truthful as the people who post to them.

01:51:31.000 The level and quality of fact checking varies from one platform to the next.

01:51:36.000 That means that half-truths or flat-out fiction may appear as facts.

01:51:41.000 People who are predisposed to believe the postings will perceive them as the truth.

01:51:46.000 When deception and misinformation impact the infrastructure, operations, and processes integral to our democracy — our elections — we must call it out and correct it.

01:51:56.000 MITRE's squint provides a fast, easy, and comprehensive way for election officials to combat the spread of misinformation on social media channels.

01:52:05.000 When elections officials and designated MITRE Squint users see untrue or inaccurate postings about the elections process, you can report it with a single click, whether using a desktop or mobile device.

01:52:16.000 MITRE Squint collects a screenshot and the coded information for aggregation and analysis.

01:52:21.000 You'll get a secure message to verify that you've sent the screenshot.

01:52:25.000 The verification message includes a report that you can share with election peers or send to the social media channel asking that the misinformation be removed.

01:52:34.000 What happens then?

01:52:36.000 MITRE Squint analyzes and identifies patterns in social media that are misleading voters.

01:52:41.000 Your report enables faster takedowns and helps restore integrity to the elections process.

01:52:46.000 MITRE Squint is helping election officials like you defend the elections process from disinformation campaigns designed to undermine election legitimacy.

01:52:55.000 Contact us to learn more about MITRE Squint and become a participant.

01:53:02.000 They were partnered in the whole 2020 censorship operation.

01:53:06.000 There's another thing I just thought of that is just an unbelievable clip with the Atlanta Council.

01:53:12.000 The Atlanta Council was formally partnered with the Department of Homeland Security to censor the 2020 election, to censor Trump supporters.

01:53:19.000 100% of their repeat misinformation spreaders were Trump supporters.

01:53:24.000 There's unbelievable videos on all of this.

01:53:26.000 Some of this has been played on the Congressional Jumbotron.

01:53:29.000 It was election interference.

01:53:31.000 Oh, yeah.

01:53:32.000 An unbelievable level.

01:53:34.000 But they bragged afterwards about, you know, about how this thing could be scaled and how they were able to get this done and how they could use this technique to get social media companies to ban things, you know, well beyond, you know, basically to scale it to every other policy issue so that it's not just around elections where they're, quote, huge regulatory stakes.

01:53:57.000 For the companies, and they go over this strategy.

01:54:00.000 I mean, literally, on a celebration video of how they pulled this off, again, with the Atlanta Council, Grafica, Stanford, these same institutions, in this video, they go over this two-part technique for how they were able to do this and how they can do this in the future.

01:54:16.000 And one is using their front, effectively, as a civil society organization, leveraging the threat of government pressure from their government partners at a top-down level, and leveraging the induction of crisis PR, black PR, if the companies did not do the censorship from the bottom-up, so the government would threaten top-down, and the media would threaten bottom-up.

01:54:42.000 What are the threats?

01:54:44.000 The threats?

01:54:45.000 Yeah, when you say the government would threaten them.

01:54:47.000 Well, so there's several.

01:54:50.000 In that case, in 2020, there was regulatory overhang coming from Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren about breaking the big tech companies up, which they actually moved forward with.

01:55:00.000 Google is now under the gun of this with the U.S. Justice Department.

01:55:04.000 But more significantly, it's the threats, probably one of the most incredible examples of this.

01:55:11.000 If you want to see the receipts on it, it's wild, but I can also just tell you about it.

01:55:14.000 If you look up on my profile the phrase, 10 flaming examples, it'll pull up the Facebook files, what Jim Jordan's committee, the subpoenaed version of the Twitter files, but from Facebook, And you'll see that in early 2021,

01:55:32.000 the Biden administration was pressuring explicitly Facebook to censor COVID origins, heterodox speech, and Facebook was skittish about doing it, saying there's a highly unusual request coming directly from the White House.

01:55:49.000 We don't really want to do this.

01:55:51.000 This is what Nick Clegg, the head of public policy, was emailing with Mark Zuckerberg about.

01:55:56.000 So if you scroll over, so you see this is right.

01:56:00.000 There were five claims.

01:56:01.000 So this is to Mark Zuckerberg from Nick Clegg.

01:56:05.000 Nick Clegg was the former head of the UK Labor Party.

01:56:09.000 He wrote a book called How to Stop Brexit After Brexit Already Passed.

01:56:13.000 Let's show you how interconnected all this stuff is.

01:56:15.000 And the subject is COVID misinformation, Wuhan lab leak theory.

01:56:19.000 On the question of our decision to remove claims related to the origin of COVID. Again, this is June 2021. There were five claims that met the standard.

01:56:28.000 Basically, anyone who accused COVID of potentially being man-made or bioengineered or created by an individual government or country, or that it was modified through gain-of-function research.

01:56:38.000 We reduced distribution, meaning they throttled.

01:56:41.000 They algorithmically zapped out of all virality.

01:56:44.000 They applied virality circuit breakers to content making any of those five buckets of claims.

01:56:51.000 In February 2021, so this is right in tandem with the vaccine rollout, in response to continued public pressure and tense conversations with the new administration, we started, so they only started removing it because of, quote, tense conversations with the new administration.

01:57:04.000 So if you go to the next, if you go to the next image, if you just, yeah.

01:57:07.000 Oh, wait, I'm sorry.

01:57:09.000 Go, go over.

01:57:11.000 Yeah, bigger fish to fry.

01:57:13.000 There should be a, yeah, here you go.

01:57:15.000 In June 2021, Clegg emailed others in the company that given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Biden administration, We should think creatively about how we can be responsive to the Biden administration's concern.

01:57:29.000 Then it says below...

01:57:30.000 What are these bigger...

01:57:31.000 What is he talking about?

01:57:31.000 I can go over those in a second.

01:57:32.000 Just one more thing on this is...

01:57:34.000 You see, in April 2020, the company was seeking to work closely with the Biden administration on multiple policy fronts.

01:57:40.000 So this now gets to the larger issue of the interplay between the profits of multinational corporations and the protection provided by the U.S. government when it actively advocates on their behalf.

01:57:53.000 So, for example, right now, one of the major, major issues, and I'll tell you this because when I ran the cyber desk for the U.S. State Department, I got a call one day from nine Google lobbyists.

01:58:05.000 These were all former lobbyists from big oil companies or from sovereign countries who had moved to Google to lobby the U.S. State Department.

01:58:14.000 The U.S. was the orchestra symphony conductor for all of the assets of the American empire.

01:58:22.000 And these nine lobbyists told me over the course of about a 90-minute call that the number one threat to Google's business model, the most existential threat over the next five years, was the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.

01:58:37.000 And they led a variety of reasons.

01:58:39.000 I won't get into too granular detail.

01:58:41.000 But that basically, you know, because the State Department traditionally defines U.S. interests as being the welfare of U.S. citizens and the aggregate welfare of U.S. national champions, U.S. citizens and U.S. corporations.

01:58:54.000 This is why, again, it's so insane, inflammatory, and there's got to be a way it's friggin' illegal that the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. State Department and USAID are currently running programs To tank U.S. national champions like X because they're hosting, you know, they allow the hosting of pro-populist political content.

01:59:14.000 But so, you know, basically the pitch is we're a U.S. national champion, we're Google.

01:59:19.000 This is another thing that the Trump White House was saying at the time.

01:59:22.000 They were defining MAGA as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon because their stock price being high was a big, you know, I think, boon.

01:59:30.000 I don't know what the political calculus was, but I'm trying to tell them, hey, They're censoring the internet guys.

01:59:37.000 Point is...

01:59:38.000 So they're the G in MAGA. And they... 1.00

01:59:44.000 They are functionally requesting that the U.S. State Department adjust its diplomatic posture with EU counterparts in order to have the appropriate asks and demands of the European Union that protect the profits and business divisions of Google.

02:00:07.000 And without, again, getting too granular, these involve everything from data privacy rights.

02:00:13.000 Europe has something called the GDPR. There are all sorts of fines.

02:00:17.000 It's kind of ironic how this all played out.

02:00:19.000 When Trump won in 2016, Europe was...

02:00:24.000 Many of these...

02:00:26.000 European governments were afraid of a Trump autocracy, and so they set about a sort of policy pivot that they called strategic digital autonomy, meaning that Europe needs to exert more sovereign autonomy over the tech space and the digital sector, rather than purely relying on American projection arms, our US tech giants.

02:00:51.000 And so these new EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are like, for example, Tim Cook at Apple just got hit with a $15 billion fine from this.

02:01:01.000 It's the only people who can stop that, who can negotiate and who can pick winners and losers in that market are the US State Department.

02:01:08.000 Those are the people who negotiate.

02:01:10.000 Those are the people who do the carrots and sticks. 0.64

02:01:12.000 Hey, EU counterpart.

02:01:14.000 Hey, counterpart in France.

02:01:15.000 Hey, counterpart in EU. What was the stick to Apple in relation to?

02:01:19.000 What was it in response to?

02:01:23.000 I just remember the $15 billion.

02:01:25.000 I forget if it was on data grounds or if it was on...

02:01:30.000 You can look up the – because Tim Cook called Donald Trump on that specifically.

02:01:36.000 I think this is another one of these things where Apple felt betrayed that the Biden administration didn't stick up for them as much.

02:01:41.000 But just so I'm not getting the specific thing wrong, if you look up – yeah, here we go.

02:01:46.000 $15 billion fine.

02:01:48.000 Additional $2 billion and a trust fund.

02:01:51.000 EU has been investigating big tech firms to curb their power and ensure a level playing field.

02:01:55.000 Apple recently lost a court battle, was ordered to pay $14.08 billion in back taxes to Ireland.

02:02:02.000 Trump told Cook that he would not let the EU take advantage of US companies if he is elected.

02:02:07.000 This government highlights, this development rather, highlights the ongoing regulatory challenges faced by tech giants like Apple, which may impact their stock performance.

02:02:16.000 Investors should monitor these regulatory developments and their potential impact on Apple's financials and stock price.

02:02:23.000 Right.

02:02:23.000 And this is happening to all the tech companies.

02:02:25.000 And the only reason this hasn't happened yet, you know, in the now 30 years of Internet diplomacy is because the State Department has always gone to bat for them.

02:02:35.000 All sorts of carrots and sticks that we can threaten on that, right?

02:02:38.000 The humanitarian aid, the security assistance.

02:02:40.000 So what do they want from Apple that would allow them to allow Apple to be fined that much money?

02:02:45.000 Well, the State Department, in theory, could open up a diplomatic channel to the EU. The U.S. ambassador to the EU could march into their office, you know, horse's head out of, you know...

02:02:58.000 Out of godfather style and say, you are not going to F with Apple on this.

02:03:03.000 This decision was wrongly made.

02:03:05.000 If you move forward with enforcement of this $15 billion fine, the U.S. government will renegotiate our trade posture, our tariff posture, our humanitarian assistance, our security assistance, our role in...

02:03:21.000 I mean, there's any number of things that you can log roll on this.

02:03:24.000 Our...

02:03:25.000 Joint activities with you in South America, in Africa, in Central Asia, on this particular industry.

02:03:32.000 It's the State Department who's got the assets of the empire to manage and to offer up to foreign countries to protect and, frankly, oftentimes to secure those markets for those tech companies in the first place.

02:03:48.000 What would be the incentive to not do that?

02:03:52.000 Favors to Europe.

02:03:55.000 You're always dipping into political capital when you do that.

02:03:58.000 Whenever you are threatening something with someone you're doing business with, you are Giving up a little bit of political capital and making that threat in the sense that they might...

02:04:12.000 You're sort of sanctioning yourself in a certain respect.

02:04:14.000 This is what, for example, the sanctions on Russia that we led after 2014. They had an agreement with Russia.

02:04:23.000 They're sort of shooting themselves in the leg to try to get the bear that's biting it.

02:04:30.000 You're sort of doing this with the EU. The EU is a very delicate dance with the US, right?

02:04:34.000 It's 550 million people.

02:04:36.000 It's a giant market.

02:04:40.000 There's basically three poles between China, the US, and the EU. There's a ton of overlapping trade arrangements.

02:04:49.000 It's basically the economic arm of NATO. It's So if you were to threaten the EU too hard...

02:05:00.000 So China just overtook the US as the EU's largest trading partner.

02:05:05.000 If we were to go to the mat for Apple in this case on the EU... The EU may turn around and say, fine, well, if you do that, we're going to partner with Saudi Arabia, or we're going to partner with China, or we're going to partner – hey, we may need to turn the natural gas imports from Russia back on.

02:05:25.000 There's all sorts of – it's a constant interplay.

02:05:28.000 play.

02:05:28.000 That's what makes that position both so fascinating, but also so complex is because you're having to manage all the different stakeholder relations from the banks, from the corporations, from the political groups, from the outside ones.

02:05:42.000 And Facebook, I mean, it's data, it's ads.

02:05:47.000 This is another thing.

02:05:48.000 The media companies have been on a crusade against Facebook and Google because many of these media companies feel like their revenues are being stolen by the ad money going to Google and Facebook.

02:06:03.000 There have been laws that have been put in place in Canada and, I believe, Australia where they're basically trying to...

02:06:10.000 I forget if the one in Canada actually passed.

02:06:13.000 They're basically trying to, you know, have the media companies get a cut of the big tech profits because they are monopolists in the ad space.

02:06:20.000 And, you know, Google Ads makes up a huge portion of Google's revenue.

02:06:23.000 Facebook, obviously, the only reason it became profitable in the first place.

02:06:27.000 You know, when Facebook IPO'd, it was initially there was a concern that it might not even be a profitable company, let alone one of the top, you know, eight biggest companies in the world because they had not yet monetized those eyeballs.

02:06:40.000 Through ads in the way that they've scaled incredibly to do.

02:06:43.000 But what happens when our own U.S. government completely betrays them and works with Europe to screw them unless they do censorship?

02:06:51.000 And if you want an incredible receipt on this, you can look up the February 2021 USAID disinformation primer.

02:06:58.000 You can go actually to my foundation's website, foundationforfreedomonline.com, and just type in the word USAID and you'll see that disinformation primer.

02:07:07.000 U.S. aid in tandem with the National Down for Democracy that CIA cut out and includes with state who U.S. aid serves has an instruction manual for how to exert its its soft power influence around the world to regulate ad networks to to hurt U.S. tech companies if they allow pro-populist We're good to

02:07:38.000 to punch the social media companies.

02:07:40.000 And so it's a plot against our own people, and it's being waged as part of a political proxy war to stop populists like Trump from being able to get elected in the first place, and if he gets elected, to be able to throttle his administration and his allies around the world so that he can't implement his agenda. to be able to throttle his administration and his allies Jesus.

02:08:00.000 How does this not...

02:08:05.000 How do you sleep?

02:08:09.000 You know...

02:08:10.000 Like, knowing all this.

02:08:11.000 Like, what...

02:08:12.000 It was...

02:08:14.000 It was really, really hard the first three or four years because there was...

02:08:18.000 Like, I was in this before when the whole thing was totally depressing and there were no wins at all.

02:08:24.000 You know, I was like...

02:08:26.000 And it was...

02:08:27.000 My health deteriorated.

02:08:29.000 I... You know, I didn't look good.

02:08:31.000 I didn't feel good.

02:08:32.000 I... I mean, I tell everyone, you have to go through your five stages of grief on this.

02:08:37.000 You're going to have your denial, and then your anger, and then your depression, and then your bargaining, and then your acceptance.

02:08:48.000 And you'll go through many iterations of those five stages of grief.

02:08:52.000 You get to a certain point, I think, where you accept that this is our inheritance and this is, in a way, as evil as so many components of it are, the larger picture is kind of a fascinating archaeological dive into...

02:09:12.000 The ancient dinosaur bones of the world that we live in.

02:09:15.000 The American empire would not exist without this apparatus.

02:09:19.000 It took a twisted turn in 2016. But the fact is, we are an international empire because of the banana wars in the 1800s that gave the U.S. vassalage control over much of South America.

02:09:31.000 We're an international empire because of the Spanish-American War in 1898. We take the Philippines. 0.99

02:09:37.000 We had...

02:09:40.000 We had the miracle of the 20th century because this free speech diplomacy, which in large part was a State Department, CIA, cynical front just to be able to capacity build our own assets behind the Iron Curtain, that ended up giving us cheap gas.

02:09:59.000 You know, 401ks and middle class lifestyles and affordable homes and pensions and all the favors that the State Department does to pry open markets. 0.93

02:10:12.000 Is the reason that Walmart can export, you know, to the furthest reaches of the world?

02:10:19.000 Is the reason...

02:10:20.000 That, you know, I played this really funny one, you know, a few days ago, the famous Pizza Hut ad with starring Gorbachev after the National Endowment for Democracy pried the Soviet Union open, and he's basically saying we have instability.

02:10:38.000 These are Russians arguing with each other. 0.97

02:10:40.000 You know, we have instability at home.

02:10:42.000 This is horrible.

02:10:43.000 We're basically a satellite state of the United States.

02:10:45.000 And then the other person at the Pizza Hut says, ah, but we have Pizza Hut.

02:10:49.000 And Gorbachev stars.

02:10:50.000 This is a Pizza Hut advertisement.

02:10:54.000 Can you find it online?

02:10:55.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:10:56.000 You can actually chill.

02:10:57.000 It's because of him.

02:10:58.000 We have a barbara economy. 1.00

02:11:00.000 Thanks to him, we have new possibilities.

02:11:04.000 It's because of him.

02:11:06.000 We have political stability.

02:11:07.000 Because of him we have freedom!

02:11:10.000 We have chaos!

02:11:11.000 We have no stability!

02:11:15.000 Because of him we have peace!

02:11:21.000 Oh god, they all agree on Pizza Hut.

02:11:26.000 And Gorbachev.

02:11:27.000 Hail to Gorbachev.

02:11:32.000 Oh my god.

02:11:34.000 That commercial's insane.

02:11:36.000 It seems like a Saturday Night Live sketch.

02:11:38.000 Yeah.

02:11:39.000 So Pizza Hut did not win the market for 200 million customers in Russia because it out-competed the other pizza companies.

02:11:47.000 It won because the CIA pried Russia open.

02:11:51.000 I mean, you can see all the touchdown dances we did about the Boris Yeltsin puppet presidency.

02:11:56.000 Boris Yeltsin was faxing the National Endowment for Democracy in 1993 for permission, effectively, to bomb his own parliament building.

02:12:03.000 There's a whole Hollywood movie called Spinning Boris, which is based on the true story of how the State Department and Hollywood teamed up to prop up a ailing Boris Yeltsin in 1996 when he was polling at 7% in the polls so that we could continue privatizing which is based on the true story of how the State Department and Hollywood teamed up to prop up a ailing You can read Casino Moscow for more on that.

02:12:29.000 But basically, this is...

02:12:31.000 I ate at Pizza Hut as a kid.

02:12:34.000 At some point, it becomes fascinating.

02:12:37.000 At some point, it becomes...

02:12:39.000 The tragedy shifts to a comedy.

02:12:42.000 And when you start looking at the size of some of these forces, it's the most exciting time ever to be alive.

02:12:51.000 It didn't look like there was any light of the tunnel when I started this in 2016. It was L after L after L after L. First, nobody would listen.

02:12:59.000 Then the people who listen say you're crazy. 0.99

02:13:01.000 Then the people who say you're crazy say, well, you're right, but you're hopeless. 0.97

02:13:04.000 Then the people who say you're hopeless say, okay, well, maybe you're not hopeless, but I can't help you.

02:13:09.000 And then it's just constant.

02:13:10.000 And then the dam starts breaking a little bit here, a little bit there.

02:13:14.000 And now this is the most exciting time ever.

02:13:20.000 Ever.

02:13:20.000 We have existential threats that I think may be, in the end, more terrifying than anything we've seen yet.

02:13:26.000 But I'm just honored to be along for the ride with everybody else who's pulling the levers that they are.

02:13:33.000 And, you know, if you can make it through the hard times on thinking about it, there is something beautiful.

02:13:39.000 It's like getting to know, let's just say, you know, Genghis Khan, you know, you're descended from or something.

02:13:46.000 People are going to say Genghis Khan, murder, rape, whatever crimes there are, but if you're descended from that, it's still your family.

02:13:55.000 And I'm not trying to smash these institutions.

02:13:57.000 I'm not trying to get rid of the Pentagon or get rid of the CIA. I want them to be reformed, and they have to go through the gauntlet of public sunlight.

02:14:07.000 J. Bhattacharya, Dr. J. Bhattacharya was just named the NIH. That is one of the most inspiring stories, I think.

02:14:14.000 It's an incredible turnaround.

02:14:15.000 Yeah.

02:14:16.000 Tell the whole story, because some people aren't even aware of what happened with him with the Great Barrington Declaration.

02:14:21.000 Well, he was kicked off of Twitter.

02:14:24.000 He was, you know, basically a premier scientist at Stanford.

02:14:27.000 He was labeled a fringe epidemiologist by Fauci and company.

02:14:33.000 And he was just tapped to be our new NIH director, the National Institute of Health.

02:14:39.000 This is the premier medical research institution in all of medicine.

02:14:44.000 And they put in one of the most critical voices of the entire COVID era to run it.

02:14:53.000 I mean, it's like putting Bobby Kennedy in as the head of HHS. And to me, that's sort of what needs to happen now in the censorship space, which is that When you look back at the church committee with the CIA, they held up that heart attack gun in public.

02:15:12.000 And Frank Church and, you know, James Angleton, we saw...

02:15:18.000 Now, I know a lot of that was a whitewash and wonks in the space are probably getting triggered by me even acknowledging that that was a decent thing. 0.57

02:15:24.000 But the fact is, is...

02:15:26.000 It did have to go through a gauntlet where the way to restore faith in the institution is to make it do a naked lap, make it do its walk of shame, and then it can put its clothes back on and return into the good graces.

02:15:42.000 I'm not trying to take these institutions out.

02:15:44.000 I'm not anti-American empire.

02:15:48.000 But the empire has to serve the homeland.

02:15:50.000 And the fact is, is...

02:15:53.000 It does have to go through this period of penitence, and I hope that the incoming administration understands the magnitude and severity of the need to do that, because if they don't, they're going to be caught flat-footed by something very nasty, I think, coming down the pipe.

02:16:11.000 Have you talked to anyone there?

02:16:14.000 Not in enough detail to be able to feel that we are where we need to be, but maybe that will change.

02:16:23.000 Burisma. 0.97

02:16:24.000 Yeah.

02:16:25.000 Yeah.

02:16:26.000 Oh, it's wild.

02:16:27.000 Yeah.

02:16:27.000 You know how I mentioned the Atlanta Council so many times in this?

02:16:32.000 Seven CIA directors on its board.

02:16:34.000 Yeah.

02:16:34.000 Annual funding for the Pentagon, State Department, CIA cutouts like the NED. Literally sponsoring, at Atlanta Council conferences, the I Call Bullshit censorship training meetings, the partner with DHS to censor Trump, partnered to censor COVID. Yeah.

02:16:52.000 One week before Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017. Burisma signed a formal cooperation agreement with the Atlantic Council for the Atlantic Council to leverage its representation effectively as NATO's brain, the think tank for NATO, to kick energy deals to Burisma.

02:17:17.000 You can look this up.

02:17:18.000 You can pull this on screen.

02:17:19.000 I'll show you these receipts.

02:17:20.000 They're wild.

02:17:20.000 If you just type in Burisma...

02:17:24.000 You know, on my on my ex account or Burisma Atlanta Council, any of these will get you there.

02:17:30.000 So there's a much larger story here that sort of gets us back to to Eurasia.

02:17:35.000 And just for perspective, this issue around Russia gets to something that has been decades of tension in the making.

02:17:47.000 Yeah, so this is Burisma and the Atlantic Council.

02:17:49.000 This is one day, actually, one day before Donald Trump's inauguration, January 19th, 2017. So this group with seven CIA directors on its board.

02:17:57.000 An annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department.

02:17:59.000 By the way, these are old numbers from 2020. It's over a million now for all these.

02:18:04.000 But...

02:18:06.000 What are they doing signing a formal agreement with Burisma to kick them deal flood?

02:18:11.000 Well, so here is where it gets to the geopolitics of the energy space and what a lot of this Russia stuff is about.

02:18:18.000 So if you look up, for example, if you just go to Google and you type in Russia $75 trillion, You'll see what Trump got knifed for in term 1.0, and that is still the knife's edge dangling over Trump term 2.0.

02:18:37.000 So if you pull up like an image graph of it, it'll make it a little bit, I think, more...

02:18:41.000 Yeah.

02:18:42.000 Yeah.

02:18:43.000 Or just like maybe the fourth, the fifth one, if you see, or the fourth or fifth, fourth one or fourth or fifth.

02:18:48.000 Yeah.

02:18:49.000 Any one of those.

02:18:50.000 Right.

02:18:51.000 So, so Russia has the most exploitable natural resources of any country on earth by far, by far, by far.

02:19:00.000 I mean, it's almost double.

02:19:01.000 And that was why you may have heard this term from Francis Fukuyama, the end of history in the 1990s.

02:19:08.000 This was like the moment that America was the unipolar power.

02:19:13.000 There is this long-range plan to pursue at least the political annexation of Eurasia.

02:19:22.000 This is the...

02:19:22.000 This goes back to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the grand chessboard, the idea that he who controls Eurasia controls the world, because this is where two-thirds of the world's resources are.

02:19:32.000 And so there's this big stretch, basically, from Central Europe all the way out into the far reaches of Russia, where so many of these minerals and oil and gas and exploitable resources are concentrated.

02:19:46.000 If you remember, Lindsey Graham finally threw up the white flag about four months ago when he said, listen, even if you don't care about Ukraine, they've got $12.4 trillion worth of minerals and resources.

02:19:57.000 So, you know, do it for that.

02:19:59.000 He just said the other day, he admitted this war is about money.

02:20:03.000 It is.

02:20:04.000 It is.

02:20:05.000 But this is so fascinating to me.

02:20:11.000 I almost have to take a self-indulgent moment, if you'll allow me.

02:20:15.000 I had initially started working on this with a book and a movie that was just about the AI censorship side.

02:20:21.000 It was Weapons of Mass Deletion, and at the time I was...

02:20:25.000 In 2016, early 2017, I was focused on the domestic side, like I think everybody is when they see this.

02:20:31.000 A lot of this was woke stuff.

02:20:33.000 So you see some pink-haired feminist person with an outrageous Twitter account who's a trust and safety person at Twitter, and you say, ah, okay, this is a culture war, right? 1.00

02:20:45.000 And then as I started tracing this and just completely obsessing every day on the research side of this, You'd see these censorship planning conferences with high-ranking military and intelligence officials, and on the panel with them would be Eurasian-focused energy investors and energy companies.

02:21:06.000 And you'd say, well, what are they doing at a censorship conference?

02:21:10.000 Why is Chevron here?

02:21:13.000 Why is Royal Dutch Shell here?

02:21:14.000 Why are representatives from NAFTA Gas at this conference about disinformation on the internet?

02:21:21.000 And to me, that was one of the early breakthroughs in being able to trace the larger networks and history of it was the close conjoined nature of Of censorship in geopolitics, and in particular around the energy world, because, you know, going back to this Milton Friedman sort of argument around free markets versus does the government secure the markets?

02:21:45.000 Milton Friedman was once sort of given a sort of melee style list of entities to afuera, you know, to sort of knock out.

02:21:55.000 And when it got to the Department of Energy, he said, keep that one, but fold it under the Department of Defense.

02:22:03.000 Because our energy work is basically a subset of our military work.

02:22:07.000 Because the military is effectively who secures energy markets.

02:22:10.000 The military and the State Department.

02:22:12.000 The military using kinetic force or the threats of doing so.

02:22:17.000 The State Department on economic sanctions and economic inducements to secure the energy resources.

02:22:23.000 So this is where it gets really interesting.

02:22:24.000 So we were just talking about Boris Yeltsin in the 90s.

02:22:30.000 Putin rises to power in 1999. The Russian economy is totally destroyed.

02:22:36.000 He's got only two assets of the Russian remnant that he can leverage to try to turn Russia back into a world power. 0.88

02:22:46.000 One of them is their sort of military export economy.

02:22:50.000 Russia provides small arms munitions to rebel groups around the world to oppose the US Pentagon, such as in Africa.

02:22:59.000 There's a big battle going on right now between the US and France on the one hand and Russia on the other hand in the Sahel.

02:23:07.000 This is why a lot of these French-run governments...

02:23:09.000 Have been toppled in the past year.

02:23:13.000 Chad, Niger, Cote d'Ivoire.

02:23:16.000 This is one of the reasons that it's very curious that France arrested Pavel Durov, the Telegram founder, when the CIA's own media channels like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America were effectively calling for Telegram to be reined in because it may be a...

02:23:33.000 Russian spy in every Ukrainian's pocket, and we need to stop the ability for Russians to have free speech on Telegram. 0.93

02:23:40.000 A lot of this is because he's arrested in France.

02:23:42.000 He's curious because France is involved in a proxy war against Russia, and that's only made possible because Russia exports those arms.

02:23:50.000 Russia's also the only reason we were not able to successfully topple Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

02:23:55.000 Folks, remember the S-300, S-400 anti-aircraft air defense systems.

02:24:02.000 Basically, if we can get rid of Russia's military machine, there's very, very little resistance to the Pentagon around the world, from Venezuela to Africa to Central Asia to Syria.

02:24:15.000 And Russia's other big economic export, the main one, is that they have the largest energy resources in the world.

02:24:23.000 And exporting that can make them very wealthy if they are able to export that freely.

02:24:30.000 It's sort of a similar issue with Iran and Iranian sanctions.

02:24:32.000 So almost 100% of European gas used to come from Russia.

02:24:40.000 These pipelines have been around for many, many, many, many decades.

02:24:44.000 And it was the motor engine of Russia's economy, oil and gas, Rosneft and Gazprom.

02:24:51.000 And when Putin did something to reassert Russia's political influence over Central and Eastern Europe, after NATO already thought these were NATO-acquired territories, places like Georgia and Moldova, USA.

02:25:08.000 Ukraine, Putin began shutting off the gas in 2005, 2006, or threatening to do so to leave a sort of dark, cold winter to these European countries that were thought to be under U.S.-NATO control.

02:25:22.000 And these countries began to acquiesce to Russian influence on gas, and their politics started shifting to be more pro-Russian.

02:25:31.000 Their civil society organizations got deeper Russian penetration.

02:25:34.000 Their media organizations began to, you know, spout more pro-Russian affinity lines.

02:25:40.000 And so our State Department of Intelligence Services flew into a panic, like, oh my God, we're going to We're going to lose the Cold War late in the game if we do not embark on a quest to destroy Russia's energy diplomacy. 0.68

02:25:55.000 This is what they were calling it, energy diplomacy, their energy soft power influence over Central and Eastern Europe.

02:26:02.000 Germany with the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, Ukraine with the direct gas pipelines that then go all the way out into Western Europe.

02:26:13.000 And we could not compete with Russia strictly because gas is a commodity.

02:26:19.000 It's not like an iPhone or it's not like a phone where it comes in different flavors based on quality.

02:26:28.000 It's just strictly about the price you sell it at.

02:26:30.000 And the only way that you can get gas into Europe effectively other than cheap natural gas pipelines or expensive liquefied natural gas where you basically harvest it in the Permian Basin in Houston.

02:26:47.000 You freeze it.

02:26:49.000 You ship it, you know, 6,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean through the Baltic Strait.

02:26:53.000 You unfreeze it.

02:26:54.000 You then, you know, ship it to Ukraine.

02:26:56.000 It's like orders of magnitude more expensive than the Russian alternative. 0.93

02:27:00.000 So European countries wanted cheap Russian gas.

02:27:05.000 The U.S. and the U.K. and NATO wanted the EU member states to sanction Russian gas, both because it would cripple Russia's economy and also so there's a national security element here.

02:27:18.000 Now we get to take over Africa. 0.99

02:27:20.000 Now we get to take over Central Asia because there's no Russian resistance from the military because they're bankrupt.

02:27:25.000 Now we can beat back Russian influence into Central and Eastern Europe because they're bankrupt.

02:27:29.000 It's the same way we won the Cold War.

02:27:30.000 The Soviet Union collapsed because it was bankrupt.

02:27:32.000 So they embarked on a diplomatic quest to get all these countries to pass sanctions on Russia.

02:27:38.000 But they couldn't do the full sanctions in 2006.

02:27:41.000 So they embarked on what they called energy diversification.

02:27:43.000 Then the 2014 fiasco pops off in Ukraine.

02:27:47.000 And this becomes existential because now half of Ukraine is effectively militarily backstopped by Russia.

02:27:55.000 So they have to get Europe to pass these sanctions on Russia.

02:27:59.000 But the issue is, is a lot of these EU member states did not want to have to buy super expensive Western LNG. It would be ideal if you could simply harvest the endogenous gas supplies in Ukraine.

02:28:14.000 Ukraine happens to sit on Europe's third largest unexploited natural gas resources or the shale that can be converted And so Burisma was a tool to be able to supplement the Western LNG with an endogenous,

02:28:33.000 an at-home Ukrainian alternative gas supply so that the sanctions could go through in Europe and so that Ukraine would not be reliant on Russia to have cheap natural gas.

02:28:47.000 But this required...

02:28:49.000 Naftagas, the state-owned Ukrainian gas company, which George Soros has been locked in a power struggle with Putin over privatization for decades.

02:28:57.000 And Burisma was the largest of the private for-profit firms that had the rights, the gas rights for exploitation of eastern Ukraine and the surrounding countries.

02:29:14.000 And so Burisma was seen as an instrument of statecraft by the U.S. State Department to economically bankrupt Russia and to militarily shut down Russia's war machine as part of the larger play for NAFTA gas and to build up Ukraine's innate gas supplies, which were underexploited, in part because of a military tension over who actually controls that territory.

02:29:42.000 That's why the Donbass is so important. 0.64

02:29:44.000 That's why after the counter coup, the U.S. was sponsoring the military assistance impeachment of Trump.

02:29:52.000 It was about in 2019. We weren't at war with Russia then, right?

02:29:56.000 This is 2019. This is three years before the outbreak.

02:29:58.000 Uh-uh.

02:29:59.000 We were sponsoring the military reconquest of that region because that's where the energy resources are. 0.70

02:30:06.000 The population's mostly in the West.

02:30:09.000 The resources are mostly in the East.

02:30:11.000 It's the same thing with China and Xinjiang.

02:30:15.000 In terms of that dichotomy.

02:30:16.000 And so this is when Hunter Biden said when he was asked what he was doing on Burisma and whether he felt shame about it, he said he was doing a patriotic duty for his country.

02:30:24.000 Burisma was an instrument of statecraft for the State Department.

02:30:29.000 What they were doing is they were building that up.

02:30:32.000 That's why they had funding from USAID. Again, the CIA funding conduit was working on the Atlantic Council with seven CIA directors on its board.

02:30:43.000 Hunter Biden's on the chairman's advisory board of the NDI. Hunter Biden's law firm even has...

02:30:48.000 This just broke four months ago.

02:30:49.000 Hunter Biden's law firm actually had a...

02:30:52.000 He wrote a pitch to the U.S. State Department for how Burisma could serve as basically a vassal for U.S. State Department interests in the region.

02:31:04.000 You had Burisma's back-channeling with the U.S. ambassador in Rome on similar grounds in terms of the Italy-Greece supplies.

02:31:17.000 But...

02:31:19.000 What you have here is a private sector for-profit company.

02:31:22.000 Many such cases, by the way, because not only was Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma as chairman's advisory board of the CIA's DNC cutout, but who else was on the board of directors right next to Hunter Biden?

02:31:36.000 Kofor Black. 0.89

02:31:37.000 Kofor Black, who spent 30 years in the CIA, won CIA Distinguished Metals Awards.

02:31:42.000 You can read the Daily Beast article where Kofor Black is described as Mitt Romney's Sherpa to the intelligence community to get the CIA's blessing to back him against Barack Obama.

02:31:52.000 What is this CIA luminary doing on the board of Burisma?

02:31:57.000 What is Hunter Biden, who the CIA personally calls the Justice Department off investigating his funding sources, and is on the Chairman's Advisory Board of the CIA cutout?

02:32:08.000 It's because, just like we have done since the 1940s, it is a private, it is a dual-use entity.

02:32:16.000 It's a for-profit, standalone private sector firm.

02:32:21.000 But it's also an instrument of statecraft, because every dollar that Burisma generates is one less dollar that Gazprom generates.

02:32:27.000 And so it's the best job in the world if you can get it.

02:32:32.000 You get to keep all the profits, and you're getting the backing of the battering ram of the blob.

02:32:39.000 And remember, we personally intervened.

02:32:42.000 It was Joe Biden at the Council on Foreign Relations who bragged about about forcing using the diplomatic carrots and sticks of the U.S. empire that if Ukraine wanted their billion dollars in assistance, they had to fire the prosecutor who is investigating Burisma.

02:32:58.000 Nobody, nobody in our Congress, I think, is prepared.

02:33:04.000 If there was a total declassification of all CIA and State Department cables and documents and meeting minutes and emails and communications, for all intelligence work related to Burisma, the treasure map that would break open, I think, would frankly be a diplomatic scandal because this gets to the larger play around the IMF and its play to privatize NAFTA gas because there's something very nasty here.

02:33:31.000 Which is that we have been trying to get, just like we put Russia through shock therapy when we won the Cold War and then it was the Harvard Endowment and the Soros crew and the US State Department who privatized trillions of dollars of state-owned wealth by the Soviet Union so that it could become a capitalist society, but then the assets are held by Wall Street and London.

02:33:56.000 This has been the play with Ukraine.

02:33:58.000 They know the potential of the entire European energy market running through Ukraine if they can just get it up and running.

02:34:05.000 So this grand Ukraine energy play has been to privatize NAFTA gas, the feeder that Burisma feeds into, so that you have Western stakeholders who make the money by capturing that market.

02:34:19.000 Have the blob of the State Department, the CIA, and the DOD impose enough pressure to carve Russia out of the market.

02:34:27.000 Now you've got private sector stakeholders who are basically, you know, early stage equity holders in a totally protected, because it's protected by the bayonet of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the IC to make sure that the profits run through there so that Russia doesn't get it. 0.54

02:34:46.000 So it's a great job if you can get it.

02:34:47.000 Jesus Christ.

02:34:51.000 And all this stuff that was on the laptop, what was the whole thing about 10% to the big guy?

02:35:01.000 What evidence is there?

02:35:05.000 Yeah, well, you know, the 10% of the big guy in another text, you know, I think he had said, you know, to one of his family members that, you know, half the paycheck goes to...

02:35:14.000 What you have here is almost a tale as old as time since 1948 in terms of this relationship between private sector profit and foreign policy.

02:35:28.000 I mean, I call it foreign policy for personal profit, which is this idea that if you have a senior level job in blob craft in defense, diplomacy or intelligence, you don't make your money as a W-2 employee of the U.S. government.

02:35:44.000 So, for example, Mark Milley, the CIA director only makes about a little over $200,000 a year.

02:35:52.000 You make, I mean, more as a third year corporate associate than the central intelligence agency director.

02:35:59.000 You get your money from serving the stakeholders afterwards.

02:36:04.000 Like Mark Milley was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

02:36:07.000 What's he doing now?

02:36:08.000 He's at J.P. Morgan doing the macroeconomic forecasting so that they basically have the insider trading vision of the guy who's tapped into everyone at the Pentagon so they know what markets are about to open up because where the Pentagon's about to exert its influence.

02:36:25.000 They know whether to invest in natural gas in companies in Germany or Ukraine because they have the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make phone calls to the people in the Pentagon about what's going to happen to that country in six months.

02:36:40.000 Look up – you want to see a great example of this.

02:36:42.000 Look up the Donilon brothers.

02:36:44.000 Look up Tom Donilon's BlackRock Investment Institute profile.

02:36:50.000 Tom Donilon is the brother of Mike Donilon.

02:36:53.000 Mike Donilon is the closest advisor to Joe Biden and has been for 40 years.

02:36:59.000 Mike Donilon is, you know, I think began working with Biden in 1982. He's literally what they call the inner kitchen cabinet of the West Wing of the White House.

02:37:10.000 Now, that's a great job to have if you are Mike Donilon's brother, Tom Donilon, who's currently the chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute.

02:37:19.000 So while his brother is the closest advisor to the President of the United States, BlackRock, which has $10 trillion of assets under management and portfolio companies in every industry in every region on Earth...

02:37:35.000 Tom Donilon, in theory, only needs to make a phone call to his brother, Mike Donilon, to know exactly what to invest in.

02:37:41.000 Because he knows what billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditure of State Department and Pentagon and intelligence work is going to do to the industries in that region.

02:37:51.000 Yeah, this is basically like Pelosi tracker, but for like military intelligence.

02:37:57.000 It's all legal.

02:37:57.000 Tom Donilon, again, Tom Donilon didn't start out as a banker.

02:38:02.000 He was the National Security Advisor in charge of military intelligence and statecraft for the U.S. Empire.

02:38:09.000 He was at the State Department.

02:38:11.000 He was in IC. He was at DOD. He went straight from the blob.

02:38:18.000 To BlackRock's banker, many such cases.

02:38:21.000 I mentioned Mark Milley.

02:38:22.000 Another one is Jared Cohen, who was the policy planning staff whiz kid at the State Department who introduced the CIA effectively to using social media for regime change work.

02:38:35.000 He was the guy who was known as Condi's party starter for how Condoleezza Rice, as Secretary of State, could get... 0.97

02:38:46.000 Could stop running regime change operations out of U.S. embassies and consulates and CIA station houses.

02:38:56.000 They could simply use social media to organize these.

02:38:59.000 And that's what resulted in the Arab Spring and the Facebook and Twitter revolutions that toppled Tunisia and Egypt.

02:39:05.000 And then Jared Cohen then goes on to start Google Jigsaw, which set in motion the entire world of AI censorship we now live under.

02:39:15.000 He just left Google Jigsaw.

02:39:16.000 What's he doing now?

02:39:17.000 Well, now he's at Goldman Sachs, and he's doing their geopolitical forecasting for Goldman friggin' Sachs.

02:39:26.000 So blob-to-banker pipeline every time.

02:39:30.000 And this is how these people go from You know, making two, three hundred thousand dollars a year to being able to live like the people who they used to have to answer to when they were in government.

02:39:42.000 So they are using the assets of the American empire to They're adjusting U.S. foreign policy in a way that maximizes their own personal gain.

02:39:53.000 They're not necessarily doing the calculus about, well, should we be spending all this money on you?

02:39:57.000 If that's what the stakeholders want, and this is what Biden was doing, and this is what the 10% of the big guy thing comes back to.

02:40:04.000 I mean, you just look at the overwhelming, just unbelievable scope of it.

02:40:09.000 I mean, so first of all, Joe Biden was known as Mr. Foreign Policy by the Council on Foreign Relations for 40 years.

02:40:16.000 That is, he was the blob's inside guy.

02:40:19.000 And the blob is the foreign policy establishment, which now has substantial control over our domestic politics.

02:40:24.000 It's supposed to face outward demands of the American empire, but when homeland politics interfere with the empire's plans, they sick it against us.

02:40:32.000 And so for 40 years, he was on the Senate Farm Relations Committee.

02:40:35.000 For 15 of those years, he was either the chairman or the ranking member.

02:40:39.000 So the top dog for oversight of the U.S. State Department.

02:40:46.000 So, he's got these international connections.

02:40:49.000 People are constantly pitching him for 40 years.

02:40:52.000 There's a great video.

02:40:53.000 I think you can look it up. 0.61

02:40:55.000 If you've ever seen Joe Biden bragging about being a prostitute for the biggest donor, and that when he turns 40, he was told that... 0.83

02:41:06.000 At one meeting that for the real big money, he should come back to them when he turns 40. Have you ever seen this?

02:41:12.000 It's a great clip. 0.91

02:41:13.000 I think if you just look up the word prostitute, Biden prostitute, on my ex account, you can find this. 0.74

02:41:21.000 But basically, Biden Incorporated was running a foreign policy for personal profit operation. 0.95

02:41:30.000 I mean, here's a crazy example.

02:41:32.000 Joe Biden, I'm sorry, Hunter Biden, I believe was, oh yeah, this is great.

02:41:36.000 Well, I'm not sure you should assume I'm not corrupt, but I thank you for that, though.

02:41:46.000 The system does produce corruption, and I think implicit in the system is corruption, when in fact, whether or not you can run for public office, and it costs a great deal of money to run to the United States Senate in a small state like Delaware, You have to go to those people who have money, and they always want something.

02:42:03.000 We were told that we politicians, as the young kids say, rip off the American public.

02:42:07.000 I think the American public, in a way, rips off we politicians by forcing us to run the way they do.

02:42:13.000 To raise $300,000 is no mean feat.

02:42:17.000 And unless you happen to be some sort of anomaly, like myself, being a 29-year-old candidate and can attract some attention beyond your own state, it's very difficult to raise that money from a large group of people.

02:42:27.000 I'm a 29-year-old oddball.

02:42:29.000 The only reason I was able to raise the money is I was able to have a national constituency to run for office.

02:42:34.000 Because I was 29, I'm like the token black or the token woman.

02:42:38.000 I was the token young person.

02:42:39.000 I went to the big guys for the money. 0.83

02:42:41.000 I was ready to prostitute myself in the manner in which I talk about it. 0.63

02:42:45.000 But what happened was they said, come back when you're 40, son.

02:42:48.000 And he's 80. Amazing how good he talked back then.

02:42:53.000 Yeah, right.

02:42:54.000 So smooth.

02:42:54.000 Right.

02:42:55.000 Mike, you gave us a lot to think about, man.

02:42:57.000 I'm gonna have to listen to this one three or four times just to try to begin to absorb it.

02:43:02.000 But if it wasn't for you, we wouldn't know this. 0.98

02:43:04.000 I mean, it takes someone who has done exhausting, deep dives into this shit, and to be able to express it the way you do, I think, is incredibly important. 0.97

02:43:14.000 I think most people, including me, were not aware of the scope of it until you came out with all this.

02:43:22.000 Well, you're the man in the arena, and you've been a personal inspiration for me for a long time, and what you've had to take on just to be able to do this show is something for the history books, so thanks for having me on.

02:43:35.000 My pleasure.

02:43:36.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - December 03, 2024

Joe Rogan Experience #2237 - Mike Benz

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