The Tucker Carlson Show - Mike Benz

00:00:00.000 the defining fact of the united states is freedom of speech to the extent this country is actually

00:00:15.820 exceptional it's because we have the first amendment to the bill of rights we have

00:00:20.500 freedom of conscience we can say what we really think there's no hate speech exception to that

00:00:25.940 just because you hate what somebody else thinks you cannot force that person to be quiet because

00:00:30.720 we're citizens not slaves but that right that foundational right that makes this country what

00:00:37.060 it is that right from which all other rights flow is going away at high speed in the face of

00:00:43.600 censorship now modern censorship bears no resemblance to previous censorship regimes in previous countries

00:00:49.740 in previous eras our censorship is affected on the basis of fights against disinformation and

00:00:56.500 malinformation and the key thing to know about these is they're everywhere and of course they

00:01:03.360 have no reference at all to whether what you're saying is true or not in other words you can say

00:01:09.860 something that is factually accurate and consistent with your own conscience and in previous versions

00:01:15.500 of america you have an absolute right to say those things but because someone doesn't like them or

00:01:20.140 because they're inconvenient to whatever plan the people in power have they can be denounced as

00:01:25.020 disinformation and you could be stripped of your right to express them either in person or online in

00:01:31.180 fact expressing these things can become a criminal act and is and it's important to know by the way that

00:01:36.340 this is not just the private sector doing this these efforts are being directed by the u.s government

00:01:41.740 which you pay for and at least theoretically own it's your government but they're stripping your

00:01:47.120 rights at very high speed most people understand this intuitively but they don't know how it happens

00:01:53.300 how does censorship happen what are the mechanics of it mike benz is we can say with some confidence

00:01:59.780 the expert in the world on how this happens mike benz had the cyber portfolio at the state department he's

00:02:07.380 now executive director of foundation for freedom online and we're going to have a conversation with

00:02:11.480 him about a very specific kind of censorship by the way we can't recommend strongly enough if you want

00:02:15.980 to know how this happens mike benz b-e-n-z is the man to read but today we just want to talk about a

00:02:23.360 specific kind of censorship and that censorship that emanates from the fabled military industrial complex

00:02:28.620 from our defense industry and the foreign policy establishment in washington that's significant now

00:02:34.160 because we're on the cusp of a global war and so you can expect censorship to increase dramatically

00:02:39.120 and so with that here is mike benz executive director of foundation for freedom online mike

00:02:44.440 thanks so much for joining us and i and i just can't overstate to our audience how exhaustive

00:02:49.340 and comprehensive your knowledge is on this topic it's almost it's almost unbelievable um and so if you

00:02:55.440 could just walk us through how the foreign policy establishment and defense contractors and dod and

00:03:02.660 just the whole cluster the constellation of defense related publicly funded institutions

00:03:07.860 strip from us our freedom of speech sure you know one of the easiest ways to actually start the story

00:03:14.580 is really with the story of internet freedom and it's switched from internet freedom to internet

00:03:19.700 censorship because free speech on the internet was an instrument of statecraft almost from the outset

00:03:25.580 of the privatization of the privatization of the internet in 1991 uh we quickly discovered through

00:03:31.820 the efforts of the defense department the state department and our intelligence services that people were

00:03:38.300 using the internet to congregate on blogs and forums and free speech was championed more than anybody by

00:03:46.220 the pentagon the state department and our sort of cia cutout ngo blob architecture as a way to support

00:03:55.500 dissident groups around the world in order to help them overthrow authoritarian governments as they

00:04:01.580 were sort of build essentially the internet internet free speech allowed kind of insta regime change

00:04:08.380 operations uh to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishments state department agenda

00:04:15.580 google is a great example of this google began as a darpa grant uh by larry page and sergey brin when

00:04:22.620 they were stanford phds and they they got their funding as part of a joint cia nsa program to chart how

00:04:31.900 quote birds of a feather flock together online through search engine aggregation and then one year later

00:04:38.060 they launched google and then became a military contractor quickly thereafter they got google maps by

00:04:43.900 purchasing a cia satellite software essentially uh and the ability to track to use free speech on the

00:04:51.900 internet as a way to circumvent state control over media over in places like central asia or all around

00:05:00.220 the world was seen as a way to be able to do what used to be done out of cia station houses or out of

00:05:08.140 embassies or consulates in a way that that was totally turbocharged and all of the internet free speech

00:05:15.340 technology was initially created by our national security state vpns virtual private networks to

00:05:21.340 hide your your ip address tour the dark web to be able to buy and trail uh sell goods anonymously

00:05:27.900 end-to-end encrypted chats all these things were created initially as darpa projects or as joint cia nsa

00:05:34.860 projects to be able to help intelligence-backed groups to overthrow governments that were causing a

00:05:42.140 problem uh to the clinton administration or the bush administration or the obama administration

00:05:47.020 and this plan worked magically from about 1991 until about 2014 uh when there began to be an about

00:05:55.180 face on internet freedom and its utility now the high watermark of the sort of internet free speech

00:06:00.060 moment was the arab spring in 2011 2012 when you had this one by one all of the adversary governments of the obama

00:06:08.380 administration egypt tunisia all began to be toppled in facebook revolutions and twitter revolutions

00:06:14.780 and you had the state department working very closely with the social media companies to be able to keep

00:06:21.260 social media online during those periods there's a famous phone call from google's jared cohen to twitter

00:06:27.180 to not do their scheduled maintenance so that uh dis so that the preferred opposition group in iran would be

00:06:33.980 able to use twitter uh to uh to to win that election so it was an instant free speech was an instrument of statecraft

00:06:40.060 from the national security state to begin with all of that architecture all the ngos the relationships

00:06:45.740 between the tech companies and the national security state had been long established for freedom in

00:06:51.180 2014 after the coup in ukraine there was an unexpected counter coup where crimea and the donbass broke away

00:07:00.300 and they broke away with essentially a military backstop that nato was highly unprepared for at the

00:07:05.100 time they had one last hail mary chance which was the crimea annexation vote on uh in in 2014 and when the

00:07:14.620 hearts and minds of the people of crimea voted uh to join the russian federation that was the last straw

00:07:22.300 for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of nato as they saw it the fundamental nature of war

00:07:28.700 changed at that moment and nato at that point declared something that they first called the

00:07:33.500 drossimov doctrine which is named after this russian military a general uh who they claimed made a speech

00:07:39.420 that the fundamental nature of war has changed you don't need to win military skirmishes to take over

00:07:44.940 central and eastern europe all you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem

00:07:50.460 because that's what controls elections and if you simply get the right administration into power

00:07:55.340 they control the military so it's infinitely cheaper than conducting a military war to simply

00:08:00.060 conduct an organized political uh influence operation over social media and legacy media an

00:08:06.620 industry had been created that spanned the pentagon the the british ministry of defense and brussels

00:08:13.100 into a organized political warfare outfit essentially infrastructure that was created initially stationed

00:08:20.860 in germany and in central and eastern europe to create psychological buffer zones basically to create

00:08:26.300 the ability to to have the military work with the social media companies to censor russian propaganda or

00:08:33.260 to censor domestic right-wing populist groups in europe who were rising in political power at the time

00:08:40.060 because of the migrant crisis so you had the systematic targeting by our state department by our ic by the

00:08:46.380 pentagon of groups like germany's afd the alternative for deutschland there and for groups in estonia

00:08:52.620 latvia lithuania now when brexit happened in 2016 it was that was that was this crisis moment where

00:09:01.180 suddenly they didn't have to worry just about central and eastern europe anymore it was coming westward this

00:09:05.820 idea of russian control over hearts and minds and so that that was brexit was june 2016 the very next

00:09:13.580 month at the war at the warsaw conference nato formally amended its charter to to expressly commit

00:09:21.740 to hybrid warfare as their as this new nato capacity so they went from you know basically 70 years of of

00:09:30.460 tanks to this explicit capacity building for for censoring tweets if they were deemed to be

00:09:36.860 russian proxies and again it's not just russian propaganda this was these were now brexit groups

00:09:42.220 or groups like matteo salvini in in italy uh or in greece or in germany or in spain with the vox party

00:09:49.900 and now at the time nato was publishing white papers saying that the biggest threat nato faces is not

00:09:55.660 actually a military invasion from russia it's losing domestic elections across europe in to all these

00:10:02.700 right-wing populist groups who because they were mostly working class movements were campaigning on cheap

00:10:08.380 russian energy at a time when the u.s was pressuring this energy diversification policy and so they

00:10:14.620 made the argument after brexit now the entire rules-based international order would collapse

00:10:19.500 unless the military took control over media because brexit would give rise to frexit in france with marine

00:10:24.380 le pen to spexit in spain with the vox party to italexit in in in italy to grexit in germany to grexit in

00:10:31.260 greece the eu would come apart so nato would be killed without a single bullet being uh being fired

00:10:38.780 and then not only that now that nato's gone now there's no enforcement arm for the international

00:10:43.900 monetary fund the imf or the world bank so now the financial stakeholders who depend on the battering

00:10:49.100 ram of the national security state would basically be helpless against governments around the world

00:10:53.900 so from their perspective if the military did not begin to censor the internet every all of the

00:11:00.460 democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after world war ii

00:11:05.260 would collapse so you can imagine that may ask you to pause later on the 2016 election so you well

00:11:11.660 you just told a remarkable story that i've never heard anybody explain as lucidly and crisply as you

00:11:16.780 just did but did anyone at nato or anyone at the state department pause for a moment and say wait a

00:11:22.220 second we've just identified our new enemy as democracy within our own countries i think that's what you're

00:11:28.060 saying they they feared that the people the citizens of their own countries would get their way

00:11:33.500 and they went to war against that yes now you know there's a rich history of this dating back to the

00:11:38.860 cold war you know the cold war in europe was essentially a similar a similar struggle for

00:11:44.700 hearts and minds of people especially in central and eastern europe yes you know in these sort of you

00:11:49.820 know soviet buffer zones and you know starting in 1948 the national security state was really established

00:11:56.460 then you know you had the 1947 act which established the central intelligence agency you had uh you

00:12:02.700 know this this new world order that had been created with all these international institutions and you

00:12:08.300 had the 1948 u.n declaration on human rights which forbid the territorial acquisition by military force

00:12:15.260 so you can no longer run a traditional military occupation government in the way that that we could

00:12:22.380 in 1898 for example when we took the philippines everything had to be done through a sort of political

00:12:28.140 legitimization process whereby there's some ratification from the hearts and minds of people

00:12:33.500 within the the country now often that involves simply public puppet politicians who are groomed as

00:12:39.340 emerging leaders by our state department but the battle for hearts and minds had been something

00:12:44.140 that we had been giving ourselves a long moral license leash if you will since 1948 one of the

00:12:52.220 godfathers of the cia george kennan at uh 12 days after we rigged the italian election in 1948

00:12:58.780 by stuffing ballot boxes and working with the mob we published a memo called the inauguration of

00:13:04.220 organized political warfare where he said listen uh it's a mean old world out there we at the cia just

00:13:10.220 rigged the italian election we had to do it because if the communist won maybe there'd never be another

00:13:14.700 election in italy again so uh but it's really effective guys uh we need a department of dirty tricks to be

00:13:21.340 able to do this around the world and it's essentially a new social contract we're we're constructing with

00:13:26.620 the american people because this is not the way we've conducted diplomacy before but we are now

00:13:31.020 forbidden from using the war department in 1948 they also renamed the war department to the defense

00:13:35.420 department so again as part of this this diplomatic onslaught for political control rather than it

00:13:41.660 looking like it's overt military control but essentially what ended up happening there is we created this

00:13:47.500 foreign domestic firewall we said that we have a department of dirty tricks to be able to rig

00:13:51.900 elections to be able to control media to be able to meddle in the internal affairs of every other

00:13:58.140 plot of dirt in the country but this this sort of sacred dirt on which the american homeland sits

00:14:03.660 will they are not allowed to operate there the state department the defense department and the cia

00:14:09.420 are all expressly forbidden from operating on u.s soil of course this is so far from the case it's not

00:14:15.100 even funny but uh but that's because of a number of laundering tricks that they've developed over 70

00:14:19.900 years of doing this but essentially there's there was no moral quandary at first with respect to the

00:14:26.220 creation of the censorship industry when it started out in germany and in and in lithuania and latvia and

00:14:33.100 estonia and in sweden and finland uh there began to be a more diplomatic debate about it after brexit

00:14:40.780 uh and then uh it was it became full throttle when trump was elected and what little resistance there

00:14:49.100 was was washed over by the rise and saturation of russiagate which basically allowed them to not have

00:14:56.380 to deal with the moral ambiguities of censoring your own people because if trump was a russian asset you

00:15:03.660 no longer really had a traditional free speech issue it was a national security issue it was only after

00:15:08.620 russiagate died in uh in july 2019 when robert muller basically choked on the stand for three hours

00:15:15.660 and revealed he had absolutely nothing after two and a half years of investigation that the foreign

00:15:20.780 to domestic switcheroo took place where they took all of this censorship architecture spanning dhs the fbi

00:15:28.700 the cia the dod the doj and then the thousands of government funded ngo and private sector mercenary

00:15:37.020 firms were all basically transited from a foreign focus from a foreign predicate a russian disinformation

00:15:43.420 predicate to a democracy predicate by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes

00:15:49.020 from the russians it's actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself and so by that they were able to 1.00

00:15:54.540 launder the entire democracy promotion regime change toolkit uh just in time for the 2020 election

00:16:00.860 it i mean it's it's almost beyond belief that this has happened i mean my own father worked for the u.s

00:16:06.940 government in this business in the information war against the soviet union and you know was a big part

00:16:12.540 of that and the idea that any of those tools would be turned against american citizens by the u.s

00:16:21.340 government it was i i think i want to think was absolutely unthinkable in say 1988 and you're saying that

00:16:28.460 it's there really hasn't been anyone who's raised objections and it's just it's absolutely turned

00:16:33.100 inward to manipulate and rig our own elections as we would in say latvia yeah well as soon as the

00:16:37.980 democracy predicate was established you had this professional class of professional regime change

00:16:43.980 artists and operatives that is the same people who argued that you know we need to bring democracy

00:16:49.180 to yugoslavia to get and that's the predicate for getting rid of you know milosevic or any any other 0.81

00:16:54.620 country around the world where we basically overthrow governments in order to preserve democracy well if

00:17:00.860 if the democracy threat is homegrown now then that becomes uh you know then suddenly these people all

00:17:08.300 have new jobs moving on the on the u.s side and i can go through a million examples of that but one

00:17:14.060 one thing on on what you just mentioned which is that you know from their perspective they they just

00:17:21.820 weren't ready for the internet 2016 was really the first time that social media had reached such

00:17:28.940 maturity that it began to eclipse legacy media i mean this was a long time coming i think folks saw

00:17:35.660 this building from 2006 through 2016. you know uh internet 1.0 didn't even have social media from 1991

00:17:44.060 to 2004 there was no social media at all 2004 facebook came out 2005 twitter 2006 youtube

00:17:51.180 2007 the smartphone and so and in that initial period of social media nobody was getting

00:17:57.500 subscriberships at the level where they actually competed with legacy news media but over the course

00:18:04.460 of being you know so initially even these dissident voices within the u.s uh even though they they may

00:18:11.260 have been loud uh in moments they they never reached 30 million followers they never reached you know

00:18:18.460 a billion impressions a year type thing as a uncensored mature ecosystem allowed citizen journalists and

00:18:27.420 independent voices to be able to out compete legacy news media this induced a massive crisis both in our

00:18:35.340 military and in our state department and intelligence services i'll give a great example of this in 2019 at

00:18:41.820 a meeting of the german marshall fund which is you know an institution that goes back to the u.s uh basically

00:18:51.180 i don't want to say bribe but but the essentially the soft power economic soft power projection

00:18:55.820 in europe as part of the reconstruction of european governments after world war ii to be able to

00:19:01.180 essentially pay them uh with marshall fund dollars and then in return they basically were under our thumb in

00:19:07.820 terms of how they reconstructed uh but the the german marshall fund held a meeting in 2019 they held a

00:19:13.980 million of these frankly but where they where a four-star general uh got up on the panel and and said

00:19:21.900 that uh that the what happens he posed the question what happens to the to the u.s military what happens to

00:19:31.180 the national security state when the new york times is reduced to a medium-sized facebook page

00:19:36.300 and he posed this thought experiment as an example of of we've had these gatekeepers we've had these

00:19:44.540 bumper cars on democracy in the form of a of a century-old relationship with legacy media institutions

00:19:53.020 i mean our our mainstream media is not in any shape or form even from its outset independent

00:19:58.860 from the national security state from the state department from the war department uh you know you

00:20:03.260 had the the initial uh all of the initial uh broadcast news companies nbc abc and cbs were all created

00:20:11.340 by office of war information veterans from the from the war department's effort in world war ii

00:20:16.140 you had the you had these operation mockingbird relationships from the 1950s to the 1970s

00:20:21.500 those continued it through the the use of the national endowment for democracy and the privatization

00:20:27.820 of intelligence capacities in the 1980s under reagan uh there's all sorts of cia reading room memos you

00:20:34.220 can read even on cia.gov about those continued media relations throughout the 1990s and so you always had

00:20:40.700 this backdoor relationship between the washington post the new york times and all the major broadcast

00:20:46.380 media corporations by the way you know rupert murdoch and fox are part of this as well you know rupert

00:20:51.820 murdoch was actually part of the national endowment for democracy coalition in 1983 when it was

00:20:57.500 formed as a way to pro to do cia operations in an above board way after the democrats were so ticked

00:21:04.220 off at the cia for manipulating student movements in the 1970s but essentially there was no cia

00:21:11.740 intermediary to random citizen journalist accounts there was no pentagon backstop you couldn't get a

00:21:18.540 story killed you couldn't have this favors for favors relationship you couldn't promise access to some

00:21:24.060 random person with 700 000 followers who's got an opinion on syrian gas and so this induced and this

00:21:31.340 was not a problem for the initial period of social media from 2006 to 2014 because there were never

00:21:37.980 dissident groups that were big enough to be able to have a mature enough ecosystem on their own and all of

00:21:44.300 the victories on social media had gone uh in the way of where the money was which was from the state

00:21:50.300 department and the defense department and the intelligence services but then as that maturity

00:21:55.180 happened you now had this this situation after the 2016 election where they said okay now the entire

00:22:01.980 international order might come undone 70 years of unified foreign policy from truman until trump

00:22:08.700 are now about to be broken and we need a the same analog control systems we had to be able to put bumper

00:22:16.460 cars on bad stories or bad political movements through legacy media relationships and contacts

00:22:22.780 we now need to establish and consolidate within the social media companies and the initial predicate

00:22:28.140 for that was russiagate but then after russiagate died and they used a simple democracy promotion

00:22:33.180 predicate then it gave rise to this multi-billion dollar censorship industry that joins together

00:22:39.580 the military industrial complex the government the private sector the civil society organizations and then this

00:22:46.140 vast cobweb of media allies and and professional fact checker groups that that serve as this sort

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00:24:38.620 so can you give us and thank you again for this almost unbelievable explanation of why this is

00:24:45.660 happening can you give us an example of how it happens how just and just pick one among i know

00:24:51.900 countless examples of how the national security state lies to the population censors the truth um in real

00:25:00.540 life yeah so you know we have this state department outfit called the global engagement center which was

00:25:07.580 created by a guy named rick stengel who described himself as obama's propagandist in chief he was the

00:25:13.260 undersecretary for public affairs which is essentially the relation which is the liaison office

00:25:18.620 role between the state department and the mainstream media so this is basically the exact nexus where

00:25:24.780 government talking points about war or about diplomacy or statecraft get synchronized with

00:25:30.860 mainstream media and may i add something to that is someone i i know rick stengel he was at one point a

00:25:36.300 journalist um and rick stengel has made public arguments against the first amendment and against

00:25:42.140 free speech and so yeah he wrote a whole book on it and he published an op-ed in 2019 he wrote a whole book

00:25:47.500 on it and he you know he made the argument that that we just you know went over here that essentially

00:25:53.180 uh the the constitution was not prepared for the internet and we need to get rid of the first amendment

00:26:00.700 accordingly and you know he described himself as a free speech absolutist when he was the managing editor of

00:26:06.220 time magazine and even when he was in the state department under obama uh he he started something called the global

00:26:13.180 engagement center which was the first government censorship uh operation within the federal government

00:26:19.820 but it was foreign facing so it was okay now at the time they used the uh the homegrown isis predicate

00:26:26.780 threat for this and so it was very hard to argue against the idea of the state department uh having this

00:26:33.420 formal coordination partnership with every major tech platform uh in the u.s because the you know at the time there were these

00:26:41.180 isis attacks that were and we were told that isis was recruiting on twitter and facebook and so the

00:26:47.260 global engagement center was it was established essentially to be a state department um entanglement

00:26:53.420 with the social media companies to basically put bumper cars on their ability to uh to platform accounts

00:26:59.500 and to and and one of the things they did is they created a new technology which is it's called natural

00:27:06.940 language processing it is a artificial intelligence machine learning uh ability to create meaning out

00:27:14.220 of words in order to map everything that everyone says on the internet and create this vast topography

00:27:22.220 of how communities are organized online who the major influences are what they're talking about what

00:27:27.500 narratives are emerging or trending and to be able to create this sort of network graph uh in order to know

00:27:33.260 who to target and and uh and how information moves through an ecosystem and so they began plotting the

00:27:39.020 language you know the prefixes the suffixes the popular terms the slogans that isis uh folks were

00:27:45.180 talking about on twitter when when trump won the election in 2016 um uh everyone who worked at the state

00:27:53.420 department uh was expecting these promotions then to the white house national security council under hillary

00:27:59.580 clinton who i should remind uh viewers you know was also secretary of state under obama actually ran

00:28:05.420 the state department but these folks were all expecting promotions on november 18th november 8th 2016

00:28:11.580 and were unceremoniously uh put out of jobs by a guy who was a 20 to 1 underdog according to the new

00:28:17.580 york times the day of the election and when when that happened these state department folks took their special set

00:28:23.180 of skills coercing governments uh to credit to uh for sanctions and the state department led the uh

00:28:31.260 the effort to sanction russia over the crimea annexation in 2014 these state department diplomats did an

00:28:38.460 international roadshow to pressure european governments to pass censorship laws to censor the right-wing

00:28:44.540 populist groups in europe and as a boomerang impact to censor populist groups who were affiliated in the u.s

00:28:51.340 so you had folks um you had you had folks who went from the state department directly for example to

00:28:57.180 the atlanta council which was which was this major facilitator uh between the government uh between

00:29:03.180 government to government censorship the atlanta council is a group that was one of biden's biggest

00:29:08.460 political backers they they uh they build themselves as nato's think tank so they represent the political

00:29:15.260 census of nato and in many respects when when nato has uh civil society actions that they want to be

00:29:22.540 coordinated to to synchronize with military action a region the atlanta council essentially is deployed

00:29:28.700 to consensus build and make that political action happen within a region of interest to nato now the

00:29:34.700 atlanta council has seven cia directors on its board a lot of people don't even know that seven cia

00:29:39.660 directors are still alive let alone all concentrated on on the board of a single organization that's kind

00:29:45.020 of the heavyweight in the censorship industry they get annual funding from the department of defense

00:29:49.340 the state department and cia cutouts like the national endowment for democracy the atlanta council in

00:29:54.300 january 2017 moved immediately to pressure european governments to pass censorship laws to create a

00:30:01.100 transatlantic flank attack on free speech in exactly the way that rick stengel essentially called for

00:30:07.180 to have u.s mimic european censorship laws one of the ways they did this was by getting germany to

00:30:13.340 pass something called next dg in august 2017 which was which which was essentially kicked off the era

00:30:19.820 of uh of automated censorship in the u.s what next dg required was unless unless social media platforms

00:30:27.900 wanted to pay a 54 million dollar fine for each instance of speech each post left up on their platform for

00:30:34.140 more than 48 hours that had been identified as hate speech um they would they would be fined basically into

00:30:40.940 bankruptcy when you aggregate 54 million over tens of thousands of posts per day and the the safe haven

00:30:47.580 around that was if they deployed artificial intelligence based censorship technologies which

00:30:53.020 had been again created by darpa to take on isis to be able to scan and ban speech automatically and this

00:31:00.540 was this gave you know i call these weapons of mass deletion these are essentially the ability to

00:31:05.900 censor tens of millions of posts with just a few lines of code and the way this is done is by

00:31:12.620 aggregating basically the the field of censorship science fuses together two disparate groups of study if

00:31:19.900 you will there's the sort of political and social scientists who are the sort of thought leaders of

00:31:25.500 what should be censored and then there are the sort of quants if you will these are the programmers the

00:31:30.300 computational data scientists computational linguistics every university there's over 60

00:31:35.260 universities now who get federal government grants to do this censorship uh the censorship work and

00:31:41.100 the censorship preparation work where what they do is they create these code books of the language that

00:31:45.500 people use the same way they did for isis they did this for example with covid they created these these

00:31:50.540 covid lexicons of what dissident groups were saying about mandates about masks about vaccines about high

00:31:57.100 profile individuals like tony fauci or um or uh peter dashik or any of these others protected vip and

00:32:05.820 individuals whose reputations had to be protected online and they created these code books they broke

00:32:10.860 things down into narratives the atlanta council for example was a part of this this government funded

00:32:16.140 consortium something called the virality project which which mapped 66 different narratives that dissidents were

00:32:22.540 talking about around covet everything from covet origins to vaccine efficacy and then they broke

00:32:28.460 down these 66 claims into all the different factual subclaims and then they plugged these into these

00:32:34.620 essentially machine learning models to be able to have a constant world heat map of what everybody was

00:32:41.260 saying about covet and whenever something started to trend that was bad for what the pentagon wanted or was

00:32:46.380 bad for what tony fauci wanted they were able to take down tens of millions of posts they did this

00:32:51.980 in the 2020 election with mail-in ballots it was the same wait wait let me ask you i'm sorry i just

00:32:57.260 gotta have to there's so much here and it's so shocking so you're saying the pentagon our pentagon

00:33:04.300 the u.s department of defense censored americans during the 2020 election cycle yes they did this

00:33:13.660 oh they did this through the so so there's the two most censored events in human history i would argue to

00:33:20.060 date are the 2020 election and the covet 19 pandemic and i'll explain you know how i arrived there so

00:33:28.540 the the the 2020 election was determined by mail-in ballots and i'm not weighing into the substance of

00:33:35.180 whether mail-in ballots were or were not a legitimate or safe and reliable form of of voting that's a

00:33:40.780 completely independent topic from my perspective than the censorship issue one but the censorship of mail-in

00:33:47.100 ballots is is is really one of the most extraordinary stories in our american history i would argue

00:33:53.420 what happened was is you had this plot within the department of homeland security now this gets back

00:33:59.580 to what we were talking about with the state department's global engagement center you had this

00:34:03.420 group within the atlanta council and the foreign policy establishment which began arguing in 2017 for

00:34:09.340 the need for a permanent domestic censorship government office to serve as a quarterback for what they

00:34:15.660 called a whole of society counter misinformation counter disinformation alliance that just means

00:34:21.500 censorship the counter misdisinfo but the whole of their whole society model explicitly proposed

00:34:27.180 that that we need every single asset within society to be mobilized in a whole of society effort

00:34:34.220 to stop misinformation online it was that much of an existential threat to democracy and so it but

00:34:40.300 they just they fixated in 2017 that it had to be centered within the government because only the

00:34:46.220 government would have the clout and the coercive threat powers and the and the perceived authority

00:34:52.060 to be able to tell the social media companies what to do to be able to summon an ng a government funded

00:34:58.220 ngo swarm to create that media surround sound to be able to arm in a in you know an astroturf army of

00:35:04.620 of fact checkers and to be able to liaise and connect all these different censorship industry actors into

00:35:10.140 a cohesive unified whole and the atlanta council initially proposed with this blueprint called

00:35:15.340 forward defense it's not offense it's forward defense guys they initially proposed that running

00:35:20.700 this out of the state department's global engagement center because they had so many assets there who

00:35:25.420 were so effective at censorship under rick stengel's steed and under the obama administration but they

00:35:30.620 said oh we we're not gonna be able to get away with that because we don't really have a national security

00:35:34.060 predicate and it's supposed to be foreign facing we can't really use that hook unless we have a sort of

00:35:38.300 national security one then they contemplated parking at the cia and they said well actually

00:35:43.500 there's two reasons we can't do that cia is foreign facing we can't really establish a

00:35:47.340 counterintelligence threat to bring it home domestically also we're going to need essentially

00:35:51.020 tens of thousands of people involved in this operation spanning this whole society model you

00:35:55.580 can't really run a clandestine operation that way so they said okay well what about the fbi they said

00:35:59.980 well the fbi would be great it's domestic but the problem is is the fbi is supposed to be the

00:36:04.620 intelligence arm of the justice department and weak and what we're dealing with here are not acts

00:36:10.220 of law breaking it's basically support for trump or if you know if a left-wing populist had risen to

00:36:15.900 power like bernie sanders or jeremy corbyn i have no doubt they would have done in in the uk they would

00:36:20.220 have done the same thing to him there they targeted jerry jeremy corbyn and other left-wing

00:36:23.980 populist nato skeptical groups in europe but in the u.s it was it was all trump and so essentially

00:36:29.820 what they said is well the only other domestic intelligence equity we have in the u.s besides

00:36:34.860 the fbi is the dhs so we are going to essentially take the cia's power to rig and bribe foreign media 0.97

00:36:42.220 organizations which is a power they've had since the day they were born in 1947 and we're going to

00:36:47.900 combine that with the power with the domestic jurisdiction of the fbi by by putting it at dhs so

00:36:55.100 dhs was basically deputized it was empowered through this obscure little cyber security uh

00:37:01.420 agency to have the combined powers that the cia has abroad with the jurisdiction of the fbi at home

00:37:07.340 and the way they did this is how did a cyber an obscure little cyber security uh agency get this power

00:37:13.660 was they they did a funny little series of switcheroos so this little thing called cissa they

00:37:20.300 didn't call it the disinformation governance board they didn't call it the censorship agency they gave

00:37:24.380 it an obscure little name that no one would notice called the cyber security and infrastructure

00:37:28.380 security agency who its founder said we just security we care about security so much it's in

00:37:33.260 our name twice everybody sort of closed their eyes and and pretended you know that's what it was but it

00:37:38.380 was created by active congress in 2018 because of the perceived threat that russia had hacked the 2016

00:37:45.340 election had physically hacked it and so we had need we needed the cyber security power uh to be able to

00:37:52.060 to uh to be able to deal with that and essentially on the heels of a cia memo on january 6 2017

00:37:57.820 and a same day dhs executive order on january 6 2017 arguing that russia had interfered in the 2016

00:38:05.180 election and a dhs mandate saying that elections are now critical infrastructure you had this new power

00:38:11.100 within dhs to say that cyber security attacks on elections are now our purview and then they did two

00:38:18.300 cute things one they they said site they said miss dis and malinformation online are a form of

00:38:27.500 cyber security attack they are a cyber attack because they are happening online and they said well

00:38:34.140 actually russian disinformation is we're actually protecting democracy in elections we don't need a

00:38:39.900 russian predicate after russia gate died so just like that you had this cyber security agency be able to

00:38:46.620 legally make the argument that your tweets about mail-in ballots if you undermine public faith and

00:38:52.940 confidence in them as a legitimate form of voting was now you are now conducting a cyber attack on us

00:38:59.420 critical infrastructure by by articulating misinformation on twitter and just like that now

00:39:05.420 what they did then is wait so in other words complaining about election fraud is the same as

00:39:11.580 taking down our power grid yes you could literally be on your toilet seat at 9 30 on on a thursday

00:39:18.380 night and tweet i think that mail-in ballots are illegitimate and you were essentially then caught

00:39:25.420 up in the crosshairs of the department of homeland security classifying you as conducting a cyber attack

00:39:31.420 on u.s critical infrastructure because you were doing misinformation online in the cyber realm and

00:39:37.980 misinformation is a cyber attack on democracy when it undermines public faith and confidence in

00:39:44.780 in our democratic elections and our democratic institutions they would end up going far beyond

00:39:50.220 that they would actually define democratic institutions as being another thing that was a cyber security

00:39:55.180 attack to uh to undermine and lo and behold the mainstream media is considered a democratic

00:39:59.980 institution that would come later what ended up happening was in the advance of the 2020 election

00:40:05.420 starting in april of 2020 although this goes back before you had this essentially never trump neocon

00:40:11.660 republican dhs working with essentially nato on the national security side and the and essentially

00:40:19.660 the dnc if you will uh to to use dhs as the launching point for a government coordinated mass

00:40:28.140 censorship campaign spanning every single social media platform on earth in order to pre-censor the

00:40:35.820 ability to dispute the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and here's how they did this they aggregated four

00:40:41.980 different institutions uh stanford university the university of washington a company called graphica

00:40:48.780 and the atlantic council now all four of these institutions the centers within them

00:40:53.580 were were were essentially pentagon cutouts you had uh you had at the stanford internet observatory

00:40:59.740 it was actually run by michael mcfall if you know michael mcfall he was the u.s ambassador to russia

00:41:05.980 under the uh under the um obama administration and he personally authored a seven-step playbook for

00:41:13.980 how to successfully orchestrate a color revolution that is and in part of that involved had maintaining

00:41:19.580 total control over media and social media juicing up the civil society outfits uh calling elections

00:41:26.540 illegitimate in order to now mind you all of these people were professional russia gators and professional

00:41:31.740 election delegitimizers in 2016. and then we'll i'll get that in a sec so so stanford university of

00:41:38.060 the nominally the stanford area observatory under michael mcfall was run by alex damos who who was

00:41:44.220 formerly a facebook executive who coordinated with odni and the uh with respect to uh russia gate

00:41:51.980 you know taking down russian propaganda at facebook so this is another uh liaison essentially to the

00:41:57.900 national security state and under alex damos at sanford area uh internet observatory was renee di resta

00:42:03.180 who started her career in the cia and wrote the senate intelligence committee report on russian disinformation

00:42:09.980 and there's a lot more there that i'll leave i'll get to another time but the the next institution was

00:42:15.980 the university of washington which is essentially the bill gates university in seattle who is headed by

00:42:21.340 kate starboard who uh is is basically three generations of military brass who got her phd in

00:42:27.020 crisis informatics essentially doing uh you know social media surveillance for the pentagon and getting

00:42:33.260 darpa funding and uh and working essentially with the national security state then repurposed to take

00:42:38.940 on mail-in ballots the third firm grafica got seven million dollars in pentagon grants uh uh and and

00:42:45.740 got their start as part of the pentagon's minerva initiative the minerva initiative is the psychological

00:42:51.420 warfare research center of the pentagon they they this group was and was doing social media spying and

00:42:59.020 narrative mapping for the pentagon until the 2016 election happened and then were were repurposed into a

00:43:04.780 partnership with the department of homeland security to censor you know 22 million trump tweets uh pro

00:43:10.780 trump tweets about mail-in ballots and then the fourth institution as i mentioned was the atlantic

00:43:14.940 council who's got seven cia directors on the board so one after another it is exactly what ben rhodes

00:43:21.100 described it during the obama era as the blob the foreign policy establishment it's even it's this it's the

00:43:27.420 defense department the state department or the cia every single time and of course this was because they

00:43:32.860 were they were threatened by trump's foreign policy and so while well much of the censorship looks like

00:43:38.780 it's coming domestically it's actually by our foreign-facing department of dirty tricks color

00:43:43.820 revolution blob who are professional government toplers who were then basically descended on the 2020

00:43:49.740 election now they did this d they explicitly said the head of this election integrity partnership

00:43:55.820 on tape and and and my foundation clipped them and it's been played before congress and it's in

00:44:01.340 you know a part of the missouri v biden lawsuit now but they explicitly said on tape that they were

00:44:07.180 set up to do what the government was banned from doing itself and then they articulated a multi-step

00:44:13.820 framework in order to coerce all the tech companies to take censorship actions they said on tape the tech

00:44:19.820 companies would not have done but for their pressure which involved using threats of government force

00:44:24.540 because they were the deputized arm of the government they had a formal partnership with the dhs they

00:44:29.740 were able to use dhs's proprietary domestic disinformation switchboard to immediately talk to top brass at

00:44:36.700 all the tech companies for takedowns and they bragged on tape about how they got the tech companies to

00:44:41.740 all systematically adopt a new terms of service speech violation ban called delegitimization which meant

00:44:48.220 any tweet any youtube video any facebook post any tick tock video any discord posts any twitch video anything on

00:44:56.700 the internet that that uh undermined public faith and confidence in the use of mail-in ballots or early

00:45:03.580 voting drop boxes or or or ballot tabulation issues on election day was a prima facie uh terms of service

00:45:11.820 violation policy under this new delegitimization policy that they only adopted because of pass-through

00:45:18.140 government pressure from the election integrity partnership which they bragged about on tape including

00:45:22.860 the grid that they used to do this and in simultaneously invoking threats of government

00:45:27.660 breaking them up or or government stopping doing favors for the tech companies unless they did this

00:45:32.140 as well as inducing crisis pr by working with their media allies and they said the government dhs could

00:45:37.260 not do that themselves and so they set up this this basically constellation of state department pentagon uh

00:45:44.700 and and ic networks to run this pre-censorship campaign which by their own math had 22 million

00:45:51.980 tweets on twitter alone and mind you did this on 15 platforms this is hundreds of millions of posts

00:45:57.260 which were all scanned and banned or throttled so that they could not be amplified or they exist in

00:46:02.540 a sort of limited state purgatory or had these frictions affixed to them in the form of fact-checking

00:46:08.220 labels where you couldn't actually click through the thing or you had to it was it was an inconvenience

00:46:12.140 to be able to share it now they did this seven months before the election because at the time they

00:46:16.940 they were worried about the perceived legitimacy of a biden victory in the case of a so-called

00:46:22.540 red mirage blue shift event they knew the only way that biden would be able to was would win

00:46:28.300 mathematically was through the disproportionate democrat use of mail-in ballots they knew there

00:46:34.220 would be a crisis because it was going to look extremely weird if if trump looked like he won by seven

00:46:39.660 states in nova you know uh and then three days later it comes out actually the election switch i mean that

00:46:45.500 that would put the election crisis of the bush-gore election uh on a level of steroids that the

00:46:51.260 national security state said well the the public will not be prepared for so what we need to do is

00:46:56.780 we need to in advance we need to pre-censor the ability to even question legitimacy this took out wait

00:47:03.820 wait may i ask you to pause right there so what you're saying is what you're suggesting is they knew

00:47:10.620 the outcome of the election seven months before it was held it looks very bad certainly yes mike it does

00:47:25.020 look very bad uh you know and especially when you combine this with the fact that this is right on the

00:47:31.340 heels of the impeachment the pentagon-led cia-led impeachment you know it was uh eric cimarella from the

00:47:39.500 cia and it was the vinh minns from the pentagon uh who led the impeachment of trump in late 2019

00:47:46.460 over uh you know an alleged phone call around withholding ukraine aid this same network which

00:47:53.260 came straight out of the pentagon uh hybrid warfare network uh military censorship network created

00:48:00.860 after the first you know ukraine crisis in 2014 were the lead architects of the ukraine impeachment in

00:48:08.540 2019 and then essentially came back on steroids as part of the 2020 election censorship operation 0.82

00:48:14.620 but you know from their perspective i mean it certainly looks like the perfect crime these were

00:48:20.700 the people dhs at the time had actually federalized much of of the national election uh um uh administration

00:48:28.860 through this january 6 2017 uh uh executive order from outgoing obama um dhs head jed johnson

00:48:37.260 uh which essentially wrapped all 50 states up into a formal dhs partnership so dhs was

00:48:42.380 simultaneously in charge of the administration of the election in many respects and the censorship of

00:48:47.900 anyone who challenged the administration of the election uh this is like you know putting essentially

00:48:54.220 the defendant uh of a trial uh as the judge and jury of the trial but you're not describing

00:49:01.660 democracy i mean you're describing a country in which democracy is impossible what i'm essentially

00:49:05.660 describing is military rule i mean this is i mean what's happened with the rise of the censorship industry

00:49:12.140 is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself you know democracy sort of draws its legitimacy

00:49:18.620 from the idea that it is uh ruled by consent of the people of the people being ruled that is it's not

00:49:26.380 really being ruled by an overlord because the government is actually just our will expressed by our

00:49:31.500 consent with who we vote for um the whole push after the 2016 election and after brexit and after

00:49:38.620 a couple of other you know social media run elections that went the wrong way from what the state department

00:49:43.900 wanted like the 2016 philippines election uh was to completely invert everything that we described as

00:49:51.500 being the underpinnings of a democratic society in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the

00:49:55.900 internet and what they essentially said is we need to redefine democracy from being about the will of

00:50:01.900 the voters to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions and who are the ins the democratic

00:50:07.660 institutions oh it's us you know it's the military it's nato it's the imf and the world bank it's it's

00:50:13.900 it's uh it's the mainstream media uh who uh it is the ngos and oh the of course these ngos are largely

00:50:20.620 state department funded or ic funded it's essentially all of the elite establishments uh

00:50:27.420 that were under threat from domestic the rise of domestic populism that declared their own consensus

00:50:34.060 to be the new definition of democracy because if you define democracy as being the strength of

00:50:38.620 democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters then what you're left with is

00:50:44.620 essentially democracy is just the consensus building architecture within the can within the democratic

00:50:51.500 institutions themselves and from their perspective that takes a lot of work i mean i mean the amount

00:50:57.260 of work these people do i mean for example we mentioned the atlantic council which is one of these

00:51:01.980 big coordinating mechanisms for the oil and gas industry in a region for the for the finance and

00:51:08.220 the jp morgans and the black rocks in a region for the ngos in the region for the media in the region

00:51:13.260 all of these need to reach a consensus and that process takes a lot of time it takes a lot of

00:51:17.740 work and a lot of negotiation from their perspective that's democracy democracy is getting the ngos to

00:51:23.820 agree with black rock to agree to agree with the with the wall street journal you know to to agree with

00:51:29.500 uh you know the the community and activist groups who are onboarded with respect to a particular

00:51:33.980 initiative that is the difficult vote building process from their perspective at the end of the day

00:51:39.180 a bunch of you know populist groups decide that they like a a truck driver who's popular on tick tock

00:51:45.740 more than the you know carefully constructed consensus of the nato military brass well then from their

00:51:52.780 perspective you know that is now an attack on democracy and this is what this whole branding effort

00:51:59.020 was and of course democracy again has that magic regime change predicate where democracy is is our magic

00:52:05.740 watchword to be able to overthrow governments from the ground up in a sort of color revolution style

00:52:11.740 whole of society effort to topple a go and a democratically elected government from the inside

00:52:17.500 for example as we did in ukraine victor yanukovych was democratically elected by the ukrainian people

00:52:22.380 like like him or hate him i'm not even uh uh issuing an opinion there but the fact is is we color

00:52:28.140 revolutioned him out of office we january 6th him out of office actually to be frank i mean with respect

00:52:33.180 to the you had you know a state department funded right sector thugs and you know five billion

00:52:39.500 dollars worth of civil society money pumped into this to overthrow a democratically elected government

00:52:43.820 in the name of democracy and they took that special set of skills home and now it's here

00:52:51.500 perhaps potentially to stay and this has fundamentally changed the the nature of american governance because

00:52:58.540 of the threat of you know one small voice becoming popular on social media may me ask you a question

00:53:04.460 so into that that group of institutions that you say now define democracy the ngos um foreign policy

00:53:13.100 establishments etc you you included the mainstream media now in 2021 the nsa broke into my private text

00:53:22.540 apps and read them and then leaked them to the new york times against me that just happened again to me

00:53:29.340 last week um and i'm wondering how common that is for the intel agencies to work with so-called

00:53:37.820 mainstream media like the new york times to hurt their opponents well that is the function of these

00:53:44.460 interstitial government-funded non-governmental organizations and think tanks like for example we

00:53:50.780 mentioned the atlantic council which is you know nato's think tank but other groups like the aspen

00:53:54.940 institute which draws the lion's share of its funding from the state department and other government

00:53:59.820 agencies you know the aspen institute was busted doing the same thing with the hunter biden laptop

00:54:04.060 censorship you know you had this strange situation where the fbi had advanced knowledge of the pending

00:54:10.460 publication of the hunter biden laptop story and then magically the aspen institute which is run by

00:54:17.500 essentially former cia former nsa former fbi and then a bunch of sort of civil society organizations

00:54:25.580 all hold a mass uh stakeholder simulation censorship simulation a three-day uh conference you know this

00:54:34.140 came out and joel roth was there this is a big part of the twitter file leaks and it's been mentioned

00:54:38.940 in multiple congressional investigations but somehow the aspen institute uh which is basically an addendum

00:54:47.500 of the national security state uh got the exact same information that the national security state

00:54:54.300 spied on journalists and political figures to obtain and not only leaked it but then basically did a joint

00:55:01.900 coordinated censorship simulator in in september two months before the election in order just like with

00:55:08.620 the censorship of mail-in ballots to be in ready position to pre-censor anyone online amplifying

00:55:15.740 wait a new story that had not even broken yet the aspen institute so i mean which is by the way i

00:55:21.900 spent my life in washington it's kind of a i mean walter isaacson formerly of time magazine ran it

00:55:27.740 from former president of cnn um i had no idea it was part of the national security state i had no idea

00:55:33.500 its funding came from the u.s government you're this is the first time i've ever heard that but given

00:55:38.140 assuming what you're saying is true it's a little weird that walter isaacson left aspen's to to write

00:55:44.860 a biography of elon musk strange or no yeah i'm you know i don't know i i haven't read that book i i

00:55:53.820 from what i've heard from people it's a relatively fair treatment i just total speculation but i suspect

00:55:59.900 that walter isaacson has struggled with this issue and may not even firmly fall in one particular place

00:56:06.460 uh in the sense that you know walter isaacson did a series of interviews of rick stengel uh actually

00:56:13.100 with the atlantic council and in other settings uh where he interviewed rick stengel specifically

00:56:18.700 on the issue of uh of you know the the need to get rid of the first amendment and the threat that free

00:56:25.500 speech on social media poses to democracy now at the time i was very concerned this was between 2017

00:56:31.340 and 2019 when he did these rick stengel interviews i was very concerned because isaacson expressed what

00:56:36.940 seemed to me to be a highly sympathetic uh view about the rick stengel you know perspective on

00:56:43.660 killing the first amendment now he didn't formally endorse that position but it left me very skittish

00:56:49.020 about isaacson but what i should say is at the time i don't think very many people in fact i know

00:56:55.420 virtually nobody in the country um uh had any idea how deep the rabbit hole went when it came to the

00:57:03.100 construction of the censorship industry and the the how deep the tentacles had grown within the military

00:57:09.180 and the national security state in order to buoy and consolidate it much of that frankly did not

00:57:14.460 even come to public light until uh until even last year you know frankly some of that was galvanized by

00:57:20.860 elon musk's acquisition and the twitter files and the republican turnover in the house that allowed

00:57:25.420 these multiple investigations uh the lawsuits like missouri v biden the discovery process there

00:57:31.180 uh and you know multiple other things like the disinformation governance board who by the way the

00:57:35.580 interim head of that you know the head of that nina jankovitz got her start uh in the censorship

00:57:40.860 industry from this exact same um clandestine intelligence community censorship network created after the

00:57:47.900 2014 crimea situation nina jankovitz when when her name came up in 2022 as part of the disinformation

00:57:54.380 disinformation governance board i almost fell out of my chair because i had been tracking nina's network 0.58

00:57:59.900 for almost five years at that point when her when her name came up as part of the uk inner cluster cell

00:58:07.020 of a busted clandestine operation to sense of the internet called the integrity initiative which was

00:58:13.100 created by the uk foreign office and was backed by nato's political affairs uh unit in order to create

00:58:20.940 to carry out this thing that we talked about at the beginning of this of this dialogue the nato's uh

00:58:27.180 sort of psychological inoculation uh and uh the ability to kill so-called russian propaganda or

00:58:34.300 rising political groups who wanted uh to maintain energy relations with russia at a time when the u.s

00:58:40.460 was trying to kill the nord stream and other and other uh pipeline relations well they did that marine

00:58:45.260 the pen and print well nina jankovitz was a part of this this outfit and then who is the who is the

00:58:51.820 head of it after nina jankovitz went down it was michael chertoff and michael chertoff was running the

00:58:56.380 the aspen institute cyber group and then this and the aspen institute then goes on to be the censorship

00:59:01.260 simulator for the hunter biden laptop story and then two years later chertoff is then the head of the

00:59:06.620 disinformation governance board after nina is forced to step down yeah a close friends of

00:59:11.260 of course michael chertoff was the chairman at bay i'm sorry i'm sorry of course you know michael

00:59:15.820 chertoff was the chairman of the yeah the the largest military contractor in europe uh b.a.e. uh

00:59:22.140 military so so you've blown my mind so many times in this conversation that i'm going to need a nap

00:59:28.700 directly after it's done so i've just got two more two more questions for you one short one a little

00:59:33.500 longer short one is for people who've made it this far an hour in and want to know more about

00:59:38.860 this topic and by the way i hope you'll come back whenever you have the time um to explore different

00:59:43.580 threads of the story but for people who want to do research on their own how can your research on this

00:59:51.580 be found on the internet sure so our foundation is foundation for freedom online.com

00:59:56.620 um uh we we publish all manner of of reports on every aspect of the censorship industry

01:00:03.260 from from what we talked about with the role of the military industrial complex in the national

01:00:07.180 security state to what the universities are doing to you know i sometimes refer to as digital mk ultra

01:00:13.820 there's just the field of basically the science of censorship and how and in the funding of these

01:00:18.460 psychological manipulation methods in order to nudge people into different belief systems as they did with

01:00:23.980 covid as they did with energy and and every sensitive policy issue is what they essentially

01:00:29.660 had an ambition for but so the my foundation for for freedom online.com website is one way the other

01:00:34.780 way is just on x uh my handle is at mike ben cyber i'm very active there and uh publish a lot of long

01:00:42.060 form video and written content on all this i think it's one of the most important issues in the world today

01:00:47.420 so it certainly is and so that leads directly and seamlessly to my final question um which is about

01:00:53.820 x and i'm not just saying this because i post content there but i think objectively it's the last

01:00:58.780 big platform that's free or sort of free or more free you post there too um but you know we're at the

01:01:06.140 very beginning of an election year with a couple of different wars unfolding simultaneously uh in in 2024

01:01:13.900 so do you expect that that platform can stay free for the duration of this year it's under an

01:01:20.060 extraordinary an extraordinary amount of pressure and that pressure is going to continue to mount as

01:01:25.260 the election approaches um elon musk is a very unique individual and he has a unique buffer perhaps when

01:01:33.340 it comes to the national security state because the national security state is actually quite reliant

01:01:37.980 dependent on um on elon musk properties whether that's for the uh the electrical you know the

01:01:45.100 sort of the the green revolution when it comes to tesla and uh and the battery technology there when it

01:01:50.380 comes when it comes to spacex uh the state department is hugely dependent on on spacex uh because of

01:01:57.900 its unbelievable uh sort of pioneering and saturating presence in the field of low earth orbit satellites

01:02:06.300 that uh are basically how our telecom you know system runs to things like starlink there there are

01:02:11.820 dependencies that the national security state has on elon musk i'm not sure he'd have as much room to

01:02:17.180 negotiate if he had become the world's richest man selling you know at a lemonade stand uh so there's

01:02:23.980 there's and if the the national security state goes too hard on him by invoking something like cifius

01:02:29.580 to sort of nationalize some of these properties i think the shock wave that it would send to the

01:02:33.340 international investor community would be irrecoverable at a time when we're engaged in

01:02:37.580 great power competition so they're trying to kill you know they're trying to sort of induce a i think

01:02:43.020 a sort of corporate regime change through a series of things involving a sort of death by a thousand

01:02:48.620 paper cuts i think there are seven or eight different um justice department or sec or ftc investigations

01:02:55.740 into elon musk properties that all started um after his acquisition of of x but then what they're

01:03:01.980 trying to do right now is what i call the transatlantic flank attack 2.0 you know we talked in

01:03:06.860 this in this dialogue about how the censorship industry really got its start when a bunch of state

01:03:12.140 department exiles who were expecting promotions took their special set of skills in coercing european

01:03:17.580 countries to pass uh sanctions on themselves to cut off their own leg to spite themselves uh in order

01:03:23.500 to pass sanctions on russia they ran back that same playbook uh with doing a road show for censorship

01:03:29.420 instead of for sanctions we are now witnessing you know transatlantic flank attack 2.0 if you will

01:03:34.940 which is because they have lost a lot of their federal government uh powers to do this same

01:03:40.380 censorship operation they've been doing from 2018 to 2022 in part because the house has has totally

01:03:45.980 turned on them in part because of the media in part because missouri v biden which won a slam dunk

01:03:51.420 case actually banning government censorship at the trial court and appellate court levels is now between

01:03:56.380 the uh before the supreme court they've now moved into two strategies one of them is is state level

01:04:03.820 uh censorship laws california just passed a new law which the censorship industry totally drove from

01:04:09.340 start to finish around require they call it transform platform you know platform accountability and

01:04:13.980 transparency which is basically forcing you know elon musk to give over the kind of narrative mapping

01:04:21.900 data that these cia conduits and pentagon cutouts were using to create these weapons of mass deletion

01:04:27.900 these abilities to just censor everything at scale because they had all the internal platform data

01:04:32.380 elon musk took that away they're using state laws like this new california law to crack that open but

01:04:36.620 the the major threat right now is the threat from europe uh with with you know something called the uh

01:04:43.100 the eu digital services act which was cooked up in tandem with folks like like newsguard which is run by you

01:04:49.900 know which has has a board of michael hayden head of the cia nsa four-star general rick stengel is on

01:04:55.020 that board uh you know from from the state department's propaganda office tom ridge is on that board

01:05:00.140 from the from the department of homeland security oh and andersfo grasmussen is on that board uh he was

01:05:05.020 the uh the general secretary of nato under the obama administration so you have nato the cia the nsa

01:05:10.540 four-star general dhs and the state department working with the eu to craft the censorship laws that

01:05:16.860 now are the largest existential threat to x other than potentially x uh advertiser boycotts because

01:05:22.380 there is now disinformation is now banned as a matter of law in in in the eu and the eu is a

01:05:28.140 bigger market for x than the us there's only 300 million some people in the us there's 450 million in

01:05:33.260 europe x is now forced to comply with this brand new law that just got ratified this year uh where

01:05:39.820 they either need to forfeit six percent of their global annual revenue to the eu to maintain operations

01:05:45.020 there or put in place essentially the kind of you know cia bumper cars if you will that i've been

01:05:52.300 describing over the course of this in order to have a internal mechanism to censor anything that the eu

01:05:58.860 which is just a proxy for nato uh deems to be disinformation and you can bet with 65 elections

01:06:04.300 around the around the globe this year um you can you can predict every single time what they're going

01:06:08.780 to define disinformation as so that's the main the main fight right now is is dealing with the

01:06:13.340 transatlantic flank attack from europe i've said this five times but that's just one of the most

01:06:18.380 remarkable stories i've ever heard and i'm grateful to you for bringing it to us mike benz

01:06:22.620 executive director of the foundation for freedom online and i hope we see you again thanks tucker

The Tucker Carlson Show - February 16, 2024

Mike Benz

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