00:00:53.820I mean, you can't be an accredited journalist
00:00:57.100working for the mainstream media, can you? No, no. I've started a new publication effort news.
00:01:03.340The idea is almost all journalism right now is solicited. You literally have stories basically
00:01:09.280pitched to you by sources. And that's the number one skill that's developed in schools like the
00:01:16.080Columbia Journalism School for a good reason. And I'm doing something different, which is
00:01:21.180starting from actual documents, not some anonymous sources, whatever, starting from
00:01:26.820verifiable financial data and using that to build up into an entire story. And I think that that's
00:01:33.600resulted in some massive stories that have gone uncovered for a very long time.
00:01:39.060And there's a very interesting theme, as I sort of mentioned with your work, is that
00:01:41.980quite often you're looking at how governments wish to achieve a certain thing. They know that
00:01:47.480they can't really do it through the democratic process. It's not like they can pass primary
00:01:52.000legislation that achieves these things. So they fund people to basically advance what they wanted
00:01:58.300to do anyway, and then use this as evidence as to why they need to bring in whatever reason they
00:02:03.400want to bring in all along anyway. Yeah, that's exactly right. There are many situations where
00:02:09.420organizations are presented as neutral or unbiased or representative of a certain constituency in a
00:02:16.560lot of different ways, representatives of the people, when really they're funded, they're in
00:02:22.360some cases directed, and they're organized around the government itself. And that's an incredibly
00:02:30.200common tactic. It's interesting, there's been for decades, this theory of transparency, that if only
00:02:37.580we had the laws that mandated the right disclosures, that the sort of corruption would all come to an
00:02:44.280end and that hasn't happened for you know two or three decades but with the tools that we have now
00:02:49.940it might finally be happening and i really hope i'm contributing to that so i mean i i mean you
00:02:55.100published a number of stories lately um i mean where do you want to start i mean what what sort
00:02:59.820of typifies what you're talking about there so over the day we're recording um we've broken the
00:03:07.380story on sueta so um i'm sure your audience is very familiar there's yeah spain gets invaded by
00:03:13.920by Moroccans again. Happens a bit in their history.
00:03:17.520Yeah. And the European Commission is controlling the information around that using the Digital
00:03:24.640Services Act. This is, I believe, a 2023 law that's already been used to fine Elon 120 million
00:03:33.120euros for not censoring what they call disinformation. And how they choose what to
00:03:40.700call disinformation, follows exactly that pattern you're talking about, where the government
00:03:46.640designated two, you know, quote unquote, independent, reliable and trustworthy fact
00:03:53.160checkers. These are two NGOs, the International Organization for Migration. I wonder where they
00:03:58.620stand on that issue. And the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. And both of
00:04:05.800these get the vast overwhelming uh amount of their funding like more than 90 percent from governments
00:04:12.200and what they've done is that they've laundered their opinions through these organizations
00:04:18.020which are funded almost all by these governments and do the opinion of these organizations in order
00:04:26.560to enforce the censorship on platforms like meta um which controls you know facebook and instagram
00:04:32.260as well as tiktok so can i just pick on that point you you say 90 of their funding is is sorry
00:04:38.560coming from where is it because for me if a normal company you know let's say they're producing
00:04:45.440anything from military drones to paper clips was getting 90 of their funding from the government
00:04:50.620they would be considered a government contractor but right is that right you're saying they're
00:04:56.840getting 90 percent from which government and and and this is used to do advocacy on behalf of
00:05:04.600things that the this government knows that it can't just get away with through democratic means
00:05:09.760is that right yes exactly and um they're funded by multiple governments around the world so um
00:05:17.160osc is funded uh 28.3 that's uh 21.8 million uh euros by the european union uh 17.88 million
00:05:26.820by Germany. That's 23%. 10 million from Norway. That's 13% of its funding. 7 million from the
00:05:34.060United States. That's 7%. And then Sweden, Finland, United Kingdom, and a bunch of other donors
00:05:40.660round out the list. And with IOM, it's more than half funded by the United States. That's around
00:05:50.68050 it's 52 16.5 is funded by the european commission and that doesn't include other
00:05:57.340european countries and then we have canada the united kingdom germany united nations pooled
00:06:02.660funds um so that one's not not a state actor but that's the next next biggest one um and then
00:06:07.700netherlands um australia japan italy so so i mean this is a government contract amount of their
00:06:14.620funding is from governments. Yes, exactly. And what is their actual output? Is it basically
00:06:21.520just advocating for more immigration? I mean, what are the governments getting in exchange for
00:06:26.480all this funding? Yes. So OSCE appears to be primarily an advocacy organization
00:06:33.160publishing various papers. And then the International Organization for Migration
00:06:39.540both also publishes these papers also does this advocacy especially in this case with the with
00:06:45.260the digital services act um but uh also facilitate those immigration services okay and so i mean i
00:06:53.700mean that's that's striking for me in itself that the governments are basically paying so they are
00:06:58.260both so yeah so they're both paying for the migration services and they're treated as an
00:07:04.700objective arbiter when it comes to the migration services.
00:07:08.980Okay. And what is it they were particularly advocating in the center case?
00:07:14.480In general, their main issue, of course, migration, this is, you know,
00:07:19.000it's an organization called the International Organization for Migration. It's in the name.
00:07:26.960And in their mission statements, they say that their purpose is to make arrangements for the
00:07:32.360organized transfer of migrants. So it's really not hidden in this case, what they're trying to
00:07:40.300accomplish. So how does that feed back in? Because I mean, presumably the United States feels that
00:07:47.640it's getting something for its money. So how does that circulate back into the US ecosystem?
00:07:53.400Well, for a very long time, there's been this implicit assumption, I mean, it's still ongoing,
00:07:58.700that the U.S. government is a way for left-wing interests to build power.
00:08:05.020So all of these non-government organizations
00:08:10.220that can start off with essentially private funders or foundation funders,
00:08:17.140and these are organizations whose explicit goal is to build up
00:08:21.620and become government or kind of government-adjacent programs,
00:08:25.640Just like the IOM, just like another story that I'm sure we'll talk about, the religious resettlement organizations, other migration contractors, this is a policy pipeline where they start off as, or in these cases, maybe they were always majority government funded, but in the case of the religious groups, start off as claiming to represent an organic movement, claiming to represent an ordinary group of people.
00:08:55.640With the implicit goal, with the implicit bargain, that they will eventually receive government funding from the left.
00:09:03.080Okay. And I mean, what I was getting from your piece on this is that a lot of the efforts are going into encouraging the EU to place rules over Meta, Google, TikTok, all the rest of them.
00:09:17.300And presumably for those companies, the whole attraction of the business model of a digital
00:09:24.920service is you spend many billions getting it set up in the first place. And then each
00:09:30.940incremental sale, each incremental eyeball is the cost of activating a transistor. It's the
00:09:36.240cost of electricity going down the wire. So basically it's zero. So these companies,
00:09:41.200they like to operate on a single set it up and then use it but if these organizations are successful
00:09:49.340in making um through eu legislation if they're successful in making meta and google and tiktok
00:09:55.860apple whoever it is change their censorship because they have to service 450 million people
00:10:01.540in europe i would imagine it's unlikely they're then going to build a separate censorship service
00:10:07.660or one that doesn't have that for the US.
00:10:35.400that these notices pop up in the United States, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.
00:10:43.260So all sorts of non-EU countries. I mean, as we started talking about, the US is funding a lot
00:10:48.620of this. So what's happening here? Do you think that this is a deliberate effort to bypass the
00:10:58.980First Amendment, because they know that that is too much of a legal challenge if they did it at
00:11:03.980home so they can pay foreign organizations, European organizations, in order to put it on
00:11:11.500the EU regulators, which by default makes it the path of least resistance for US tech companies.
00:11:17.700Yes, that's exactly right. And not only do we have evidence of them doing this,
00:11:22.260but we have evidence that that is their stated goal. Fieri Breton of the European Commission
00:11:27.780has specifically talked about regulating the world this is something that is their explicit goal as
00:11:35.100well as the goal of many of these exactly like you're saying these eu or u.s government funded
00:11:41.860organizations they take issue with the first amendment itself and they will take issue with
00:11:46.800the first amendment on various legal rulings and opinions and policy papers so it's very clear where
00:11:53.960they stand on the First Amendment from their perspective getting in their way.
00:12:02.020Is there any realistic chance of the US extracting themselves from this? Because it's quite difficult
00:12:09.080once a major market like the EU, unless you're willing to cut off 450 consumers, which presumably
00:12:14.920none of these big tech companies are, it doesn't strike me that there's an easy way to basically
00:12:20.680uphold the First Amendment in the US? Yeah. So when Trump first took office,
00:12:27.980both he and especially J.D. Vance were very aggressive on this issue. They would stop
00:12:33.020foreign censorship. This is their claim. Evidently, from what is continuing to go on,
00:12:39.640they've not really succeeded at that. Part of that, it was claimed, was the justification
00:12:44.300for the trade war, that in some sense, it was retaliatory. You can think of these fines,
00:12:49.840including ones that have already been issued against X for refusing to censor.
00:12:55.620You can think of them as sort of like tariffs going the other way from the EU on U.S. companies.
00:13:01.700And this was some justification for them to put some retaliatory tariffs from their perspective on the EU.
00:13:09.360And that entire conversation, that entire policy area is a topic for itself.
00:13:15.580but it's safe to say that it's not worked given that we still have censorship on this
00:13:20.260story we still have censorship in uh many other ways so you know there there has been some stated
00:13:27.260commitments against that and you know trying to solve the problem from the new administration
00:13:32.800but it's been a year and a half almost two years and um they have not solved the problem now okay
00:13:39.720so they talked about it but they didn't follow through essentially is what you're saying
00:13:42.280Yeah, you can say that they tried to do some things regarding the tariffs or regarding some other tech censorship laws. There's evidence, actually, that they've succeeded in canceling funding for some of those programs at home at the US. So it's not exactly nothing. But in terms of accomplishing the end goal of preventing foreign censorship, they have not accomplished that goal.
00:14:07.620So are they still funding this, this organization?
00:14:09.860Yeah. So this is ongoing. This number is originally from 2024. So that's before the
00:14:21.100Trump administration. But we do believe that there is still ongoing funding for these organizations
00:14:27.060by the US government. Well, that is worrying. And that may be due to past commitments that
00:14:31.460they have to continue paying out as well. So there may be legal requirements around that.
00:14:35.180okay well that's very just i suppose fixing it isn't your job but um uh yeah i suppose the first
00:14:41.480step is exactly what you're doing which is highlighting this um so that somebody might
00:14:46.480actually do something that they promise to do at some point which would be nice did you want to
00:14:51.120talk more about this one because i'm just i'm just conscious you've got a number of interesting
00:14:53.760stories we can touch upon yeah we can keep rolling yeah yeah please do tell me more yeah
00:14:58.620So there was a fascinating story actually involving the UK. This is a story that I think got a bit less coverage than the other ones. But, you know, of course, what's happening in the UK is that laws that you can say were passed with good intentions or, you know, had some legitimate justifications now collectively form a system which essentially makes certain political speech illegal.
00:15:26.640that literally arrests people for political speech.
00:15:52.620you know, if you can really restrict it to children,
00:15:55.700But of course, the question is, how can you know that someone's a child without checking the ID for adults? And that ends up being what all these laws do. In the UK, that's led to essentially a dissolution of internet anonymity.
00:16:12.960It's led to people not being able to access the Internet anonymously and in combination with other laws, not being able to criticize political speech effectively.
00:16:25.240So you have all of these organizations which have sort of won at home and are now being exported to the U.S. and presumably to many other countries as well.
00:16:34.160Many of these organizations also have European counterparts, for example.
00:16:38.820But this article takes a look at the foreign lobbying that is done by these organizations or their kind of U.S. clones, their U.S. counterparts, and the organizational hierarchy around that.
00:16:53.860yeah i mean and and it's also a thing that i noticed um i don't know if if where you're
00:17:01.680building on this way whether you find these are sort of genuinely um native british organizations
00:17:08.000are doing this and exporting these sort of censorship controls but again with this one
00:17:11.900i know there's quite a lot of americans that operate within these organizations as well i
00:17:16.400believe nina jankowicz turned up in one of them that one who was going to be the sort of censor
00:17:21.040chief for the Biden she ended up showing up here yeah I mean I mean it's always a thing that in
00:17:25.180London we do get a lot of Americans come over because it's a very simple it's a similar language
00:17:28.680a similar culture so it's normal to see lots of Americans in London um but in this area in
00:17:35.180particular it does seem to be again one of these sort of revolving doors where people who
00:17:39.540wish to overturn the first amendment but know they can't do it openly uh basically launder it
00:17:45.620through a another country uh and fund it and then set up a system get it working and then which can
00:17:52.320then you know roll back to the u.s or or ideally i suppose in their view everywhere yes and it's
00:17:59.820this revolving door where you can never quite be out of power right you're you're creating these
00:18:05.280massive grants to foreign organizations and in some cases effectively transfers to foreign governments
00:18:11.640members of foreign governments and when you do that you end up in the situation where you know
00:18:19.220if your guy is in power then you know your guy's in power that's great you're distributing funding
00:18:23.420you're you're paying your clients you're paying your patrons and when you're out of power those
00:18:29.120patrons form a sort of ruling class where either by collaborating with foreign governments or by
00:18:37.620you know, doing these pressure campaigns against social media, like they've already provably done
00:18:43.500against X, they continue to enforce that power, even after they lose an election, they make it
00:18:50.200as difficult as possible for the outcome of the election to actual actually change what policy
00:18:56.220is enacted. It's two very different approaches to politics, one where it's like, you know,
00:19:01.600the kind of classical liberal or lowercase c conservative tradition where it's like, oh,
00:19:06.180OK, I lost. I guess I'm going to, you know, go home and accept this and maybe try harder next election.
00:19:12.820And really this tooth and claw approach of doing everything you can to hold on to power through these mechanisms of federal funding and funding of NGOs and of foreign governments whenever you're in power or not.
00:19:27.020yeah so i mean i think you mentioned that these have now started showing up in did you say 21
00:19:34.120different state congresses yes um it's been more than uh it's been more than 21 uh or sorry it's
00:19:43.360been it's been 21 for uh states that they've um had activity in so either lobbying or kind of
00:19:50.160co-drafting a bill advocacy and um it's been nine states where they've actually succeeded already
00:19:56.520where they've actually passed the law okay so can you can you walk me through that what is the
00:20:01.380transmission mechanism between a british based at least in if not entirely british funded um
00:20:09.240censorship organization can you walk me through the steps as to how that actually arrives as being
00:20:15.200a past bit of legislation in a in a u.s state what's the transmission mechanism a very good
00:20:23.440case study for this is um ab 2273 which was explicitly co-offered by a british ngo called
00:20:32.080the five rights foundation this was an ngo um founded by um baroness um b-band tanya kidron
00:20:39.380who is this uh uh upper house literally a baroness uh service serving in the upper house so this is
00:20:45.740The NGO founded by a British parliamentarian, which is now co-authoring this American bill, along with very powerful politicians in the California legislature, Buffy Wicks and Jordan Cunningham.
00:21:02.320They released this unified statement. It literally has both of their logos on it, both of the assembly members logos, as well as the logo of Five Routes Foundation.
00:21:13.940And it's a statement talking about how they explicitly draw upon the UK age appropriate design code. So they named it the same bill. They named it the same bill as the UK version. They say in the bill, they confess they're copying the UK version, and they're co-publishing the statement where they talk about designing the bill alongside this British NGO, which is started by this British parliamentarian.
00:21:39.540So the process is essentially these NGOs, they go to state assembly members, they go to essentially state politicians, and they have those state politicians basically copy their laws and introduce them and vote on them and so on.
00:21:57.080And then once those laws are in the process, CCDH engaged with it, and Five Rights Foundation actually paid an organization to lobby for it in the California legislature, which they then had to disclose as part of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
00:22:13.140um and something interesting around that as well is that they number one they didn't disclose this
00:22:19.740until a year after the original bill had passed so that's a that's a late disclosure it's not
00:22:24.900necessarily a crime by itself but it's certainly something suspicious and in that disclosure um
00:22:31.580they failed to answer multiple of these questions so it's this funny thing in american law where you
00:22:37.080can lobby on behalf of what's called a foreign uh foreign principle right and um you can you can
00:22:44.680represent their interests um financially um and politically but you have to register ahead of time
00:22:51.680and you know they didn't even do that at least not when they're actually lobbying for the bill
00:22:56.680okay um the the only i suppose the only pushback i could try and give on this
00:23:02.960is does it I mean does it even require deliberate coordination could it just be that these people
00:23:09.360just have the same set of incentives I think they do have the set of incentives but you also have
00:23:15.220the you have the deliberate coordination there it's not secret it's not some kind of like
00:23:20.700smoke-filled back room they're talking about it in the letters they publish to the public
00:23:24.760It's a crazy thing. And I think it's kind of speaking of the ecosystem we find ourselves in, that there's not enough investigative reporting to actually break these stories. And that's not just something I'm complaining about, that's something that I'm trying to fix.
00:23:41.120But in this case, we don't have to speculate.