The Tucker Carlson Show - Mike Benz： The Real Reason for Pavel Durov’s Arrest, and the Deep State’s Plan to Control Our Speech

00:00:00.000 The big tech companies censor our content.

00:00:03.020 I hate to tell you that it's still going on in 2024,

00:00:05.260 but you know what they can't censor?

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00:01:25.720 Here's the episode.

00:01:27.280 So this feels like, you know,

00:01:30.540 there's been a lot of arrests in the last few years,

00:01:33.180 including of a number of people.

00:01:34.800 I know, you know, get arrested for political reasons.

00:01:37.140 But the jailing of the founder and owner of Telegram feels like a pivot point.

00:01:44.760 It feels like a moment in history and probably a harbinger of,

00:01:49.000 you know, the next few years or decades.

00:01:50.500 I hope I'm wrong.

00:01:52.200 So the question is like, what is this?

00:01:54.220 How did this happen?

00:01:55.520 France arrests him on a fuel stop.

00:01:57.280 He's a French citizen, by the way,

00:01:58.880 but he lives in Dubai.

00:02:01.660 Arrests him.

00:02:02.260 That's a big step.

00:02:04.340 Very hard for a bystander without direct knowledge being me to believe that

00:02:09.440 Macron could or would have done that without the encouragement or at least

00:02:13.780 agreement of the Biden administration.

00:02:16.000 You were the first person I thought of.

00:02:19.100 Got you here as fast as we could.

00:02:20.960 So I'm going to just stand back and I would very much like to hear you explain

00:02:25.320 what you think happened in this arrest, how it happened, what it means,

00:02:28.940 who was involved.

00:02:29.720 Well, we don't know yet.

00:02:32.340 And part of what I've been talking about,

00:02:35.060 which is the suspected role of the U.S.

00:02:37.780 embassy in the arrest, or as you put it, I think perfectly,

00:02:42.020 we don't know if it was participation or approval or nothing.

00:02:45.460 And I'll play devil's advocate against my own my own argument here.

00:02:48.780 But I feel compelled to make this argument because we're not getting the

00:02:52.520 answer from the Congress who should be getting it for us,

00:02:55.280 which is to say that an entity like the House Foreign Affairs Committee,

00:02:58.620 if it was committed to free speech, would be interrogating whether or not there

00:03:02.940 was a U.S.

00:03:03.960 embassy back channel to French law enforcement or French intelligence or the

00:03:07.940 French government in terms of doing this, because this is a pattern of

00:03:10.960 practice that the U.S.

00:03:12.400 embassy has pursued all over the world and particularly in Europe through,

00:03:16.960 you know, brands, branding like anti-corruption or whatnot.

00:03:20.700 You know, this is something, you know, even dating back to Norm Eisen when he was the

00:03:25.400 ambassador to the Czech Republic, you know, championing these sort of corruption,

00:03:29.660 anti-corruption reforms from the Czech government to arrest the, you know,

00:03:35.380 the politicians who essentially opposed the State Department agenda there.

00:03:39.220 This is very common.

00:03:40.560 If you go to places like the Journal of Democracy, which is the academic journal for

00:03:44.740 for the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a very probably the most notorious CIA cutout

00:03:49.960 in the whole arsenal.

00:03:51.200 They have whole academic journals on how to push the Poland government to arrest the

00:03:57.100 politicians from the PIS party, from the Law and Order party, especially in the judicial

00:04:02.840 system.

00:04:03.460 To arrest them?

00:04:04.420 Yes, yes, to mass arrest the, we have, we have a concept in American statecraft called

00:04:10.460 transitional justice, which is this idea that essentially after the U.S. overthrows a

00:04:15.220 country, we make, we arrest all of the opposition politicians, opposition judges, opposition journalists,

00:04:22.940 propaganda spreaders in order to stop the reemergence of threats to democracy.

00:04:28.900 Well, no, I'm not joking.

00:04:31.100 You make it a one party state so it can be a democracy.

00:04:33.760 Right, well, this is.

00:04:34.620 Is this China pushing this or the United, just to be clear, or the United States?

00:04:37.660 This is the United States.

00:04:38.940 And we do that to stabilize the democratic institutions and effectively make it cheaper

00:04:44.460 for the United States to manage because you don't need to manage the constant recurring

00:04:48.600 threat of the party you just vanquished.

00:04:50.920 So this is, this was something that, that the U.S. State Department was spearheading years

00:04:56.340 before Trump got into office.

00:04:58.180 And it was so effective that the same cast of characters are back for Trump.

00:05:03.280 Norm Eisen was one who spearheaded, you know, the impeachment, drafted articles of impeachment

00:05:07.260 before Trump was even, even took the oath of office and also led the, you know, elements

00:05:13.160 of the, the 2019 Ukraine impeachment, the lawfare that's currently being done with the 90 plus

00:05:20.200 felonies against Trump.

00:05:21.120 So this is, this is a instrument of statecraft, the use of prosecutions in order to bring leverage

00:05:27.800 against and to get rid of pesky people who oppose the State Department's priorities.

00:05:33.600 But in the specific case of Telegram, there's, there's a lot going on here.

00:05:37.320 Let's ask you to pause really quick.

00:05:38.880 We could know a lot more about the Biden administration's involvement through the U.S.

00:05:44.120 embassy in Paris if a single house committee controlled by Republicans would just jump

00:05:51.240 on it.

00:05:52.020 Yes.

00:05:52.240 I think that's what you said earlier.

00:05:53.640 Yes.

00:05:54.360 Yes, absolutely.

00:05:55.760 And the problem is, is our Congress is not sticking up for us as the, as this is happening

00:06:01.880 all over the world.

00:06:03.200 Just this year, you know, the drama around Brazil has been a huge issue for Elon Musk and

00:06:08.620 X.

00:06:08.940 And one, you know, the house held a hearing on it and then the, the house foreign affairs

00:06:14.100 committee title, the hearing was Brazil, a crisis of democracy, rule of law and governance

00:06:19.480 question mark.

00:06:20.760 But they did not interrogate the, the U S state department's role in censorship in Brazil.

00:06:26.320 It was actually the U S state department who capacity built spending tens of millions of

00:06:30.360 dollars, the entire censorship ecosystem in Brazil.

00:06:33.280 They spent tens of millions of dollars paying Brazilian journalists, Brazilian censors, Brazilian

00:06:40.340 fact checkers, uh, even members of these, of the legal scholarship associated with Brazil's,

00:06:46.800 uh, censorship court and effectively pressured through that NGO soft power swarm Brazil to

00:06:53.680 set up the entire censorship architecture.

00:06:56.020 It now has, they set that up.

00:06:57.960 Why would the U S government, which represents the U S constitution and democracy be trying

00:07:04.780 to end, you can't have democracy with censorship of by definition.

00:07:07.700 So why would we be trying to end democracy in country after country?

00:07:11.560 Like what is the point of that?

00:07:13.520 Well, this is one of the great ironies of American statecraft in the post 2016 era.

00:07:18.400 Uh, free speech has been an instrument of statecraft since for, for, for U S diplomacy, military

00:07:24.440 and intelligence purposes, since the 1940s, free speech around the world has been something

00:07:29.280 we've championed in part because we believe it, but, uh, in part, in large part, I should

00:07:35.780 note, uh, because this, this is how you can capacity build resistance movements or political

00:07:42.140 movements or paramilitary movements in countries that the U S state department seeks to attain

00:07:47.840 political control over.

00:07:49.000 If there's no free speech, then there's no political movement that you can capacity build

00:07:53.780 to regime change the government or to maintain elements of control over the existing government.

00:07:58.440 And so this is why the state department capacity built all these NGOs.

00:08:03.100 The USA does it as well, like freedom house and the whole wing of, for example, the 26 NGOs

00:08:09.680 who condemned Russia for attempting to ban telegram in, uh, in 2018.

00:08:16.120 You know, why would 26 U S government funded NGOs all say that Russia was attacking free speech

00:08:22.200 in Russia by threatening to block telegram.

00:08:24.360 What was because the U S state department was using telegram as through its, the power

00:08:29.840 of its encrypted, you know, chat and all the functionality and the fact that so much of Russia

00:08:34.040 was using it to foment protests and riots within Russia, just as they did in Belarus, just

00:08:40.360 as they did in Iran, just as they did in Hong Kong, just as they attempted to do in China.

00:08:44.800 So telegram is this very, very powerful vehicle for the U S state department to be able to

00:08:50.980 mobilize protests, to be able to galvanize political support against authoritarian countries.

00:08:56.720 This is why the U S government loved telegram so much from 2014 to 2020, because it was this

00:09:03.620 powerful way to evade state control over media or state surveillance over private chats because

00:09:10.500 of the, the, the private functions and anonymous forwarding, all these unique features of telegram

00:09:15.120 allow it to have U S funded political groups or political dissidents get tens of thousands of people

00:09:23.500 to their cause with relative impunity. It's, it's, it's effectively unstoppable by a regime like

00:09:30.320 Lukashenko in the summer of 2020 when, when the U S government was, you know, effectively

00:09:35.420 orchestrating a color revolution in Belarus. And let me just take a sip for a second.

00:09:40.500 Telegram was the main channel for that. The national endowment for democracy was actually

00:09:47.500 paying the main administrators of the telegram channels who were orchestrating those riots,

00:09:53.420 those protests, not, not employees of telegram, but people by the channel administrators,

00:09:59.720 the people who would, people are using it or organizing others to use it. Right. Right. People,

00:10:04.260 you know, you would get a telegram channel with, you know, a million people in it.

00:10:09.120 And the administrator of it would be on national endowment for democracy payroll and the national

00:10:15.360 endowment for democracy, you know, even the head of it, it was just, it's a CIA cutout. It was

00:10:19.920 basically created when, you know, in a letter from the CIA director, William Casey in 1983 is a means

00:10:26.540 for the CIA to get control, uh, get functions back that it had lost after the scandals of the,

00:10:32.780 of the church committee hearing in 1975, 1976, the Reagan administration wanted to be able to get

00:10:38.880 back the powers that the, that the Democrats in the late 1970s, uh, considered to be human rights

00:10:44.720 abuses and too much cloak and dagger stuff. So they put it under the banner of the national

00:10:48.480 endowment for democracy as a public facing NGO with the CIA back channel. Again, the CIA called for

00:10:53.600 this and the founders of, uh, of the national endowment for democracy, even openly, you know,

00:10:58.280 even openly say that they do what they do now at the CIA used to do, but they have a, it was

00:11:04.680 literally scrubbed from the, from the legislative, uh, from the, the original bill that there, that

00:11:09.880 the CIA would not coordinate it. I mean, this is, this, it's one, it's one of the most prolific

00:11:14.400 CIA cutouts in the arsenal. And they, they were the ones who were paying the telegram channel

00:11:19.840 administrators who were, who were organizing these, you know, the attempt to overthrow the,

00:11:25.300 the Belarusian government. And I'm not even weighing in on, you know, the normative question

00:11:29.620 about whether or not that's a good or bad thing. I will. It's terrible. All I care about is freedom

00:11:35.500 of speech on the internet, but what people have to understand, and this is the point I've been

00:11:39.840 screaming into the wind for eight years now is that internet censorship is not some domestic event

00:11:46.260 done by domestic actors, uh, you know, intermediated by a domestic government and, and domestic

00:11:52.340 tech platform policies. Internet censorship came to the United States and has been exported around

00:11:58.400 the world because free speech is a casualty of a proxy war of the blob against populism. And what I

00:12:05.680 mean by the blob is our foreign policy establishment, which is primarily concentrated within the U S state

00:12:12.120 department, the U S intelligence services, like the CIA, the Pentagon, USAID, and, and the soft power

00:12:19.480 swarm army that we have through our NGOs and state department, C CIA, USAID funded, um, civil society

00:12:27.440 institutions. And what happened was is, and we've had this long range plan to seize Eurasia. You know,

00:12:34.440 Russia has $75 trillion worth of natural resources in it. The United States only has 45 trillion. I mean,

00:12:39.620 just to put in perspective how bountiful, you know, this, the region that we're so preoccupied with

00:12:44.640 is. And if you recall, you know, no, no less than Lindsey Graham, you know, frustrated at the lack

00:12:50.660 of Republican political support for Ukraine, Ukraine aid, uh, finally implored, sort of took

00:12:56.600 the mask off a few months ago and said, listen, even if you don't believe in democracy, Ukraine's

00:13:00.800 got $14 trillion worth of, of, uh, natural resources. So even if it's just for cynical self-serving

00:13:07.140 purposes, the U S should support the war in Ukraine in order to control $14 trillion worth

00:13:12.240 of mineral wealth and oil and gas wealth. And this is, this is the story of Eurasia after the,

00:13:20.420 after 1990, the U S the UK and partners in NATO set on, set on a quest to take political control

00:13:29.100 over the territories of the former Soviet union. And we're very successful until Vladimir Putin

00:13:35.420 rose to power and began to assert energy diplomacy as a means for Russia to reassert

00:13:41.780 political influence over central and Eastern Europe. This is one of the reasons that the

00:13:46.160 Nord Stream pipeline was, you know, the absolute ire of, uh, of the blob of our foreign policy

00:13:52.160 establishment, because those financial interlinkages to Europe were allowing Russian influence over

00:13:58.700 its politics, over its economy, it fostering diplomatic ties, all these things, which, which are

00:14:05.340 fly in the face of this long range plan to seize Eurasia. And so, you know, with the Nord Stream case,

00:14:11.860 you had, you know, sanctions on it prior, prior to it being blown up. Uh, you know, it came out in,

00:14:18.640 in essentially leaked documents from something called the integrity initiative that, uh, that the UK

00:14:25.140 foreign office had been, you know, basically orchestrating, orchestrating PR campaigns to get the

00:14:32.140 Nord Stream pipeline killed in 2015. Uh, and so, you know, it being blown up, uh, is, is no surprise,

00:14:41.500 uh, you know, and, but, but understand it's because of Russia's energy diplomacy with Europe, which is

00:14:49.280 what gave rise to this whole need to kill Russia's energy connections. And if I can just flesh this out a

00:14:57.280 little bit, if you can get rid of Russian energy relations with, with Europe, this was what the

00:15:05.020 theory was, then you bankrupt Russia. You also strip them of their military industrial complex.

00:15:11.000 Russia is the military, uh, enemy of, of the United States, not just in Europe now, but if you recall,

00:15:18.220 the Obama administration tried to, uh, try to invade, try to invade Syria. And the only reason they were

00:15:23.640 unable to do so is because Russia militarily backstopped the Assad government. And it's the

00:15:28.980 same thing in Africa. You know, Africa is one third of the world's natural resource wealth.

00:15:33.000 There's a mad scramble for the, for the natural resources in Africa. And Russia is the bane of

00:15:38.780 both the U S and French military forces there. If you can bankrupt Russia through, uh, getting,

00:15:44.920 you know, taking out Gazprom and, uh, and it's, and it's oil exports, then you, you get rid of

00:15:50.300 Russia's ability to be an, an arms supplier to the rebel groups there. Now get, getting back to the

00:15:55.940 telegram case. Telegram is an instrument of statecraft and it's also an element in an instrument

00:16:03.680 of military and intelligence projection. So on the statecraft side, we just talked about how telegram

00:16:08.860 has been the darling of the CIA, the state department, USAID, uh, for operations stretching

00:16:16.920 from Belarus to inside of Moscow, to Iran, to Hong Kong, to China, and all over the world,

00:16:22.260 because it's got a billion users. And so it's very easy to get all of the native population who

00:16:28.020 you're trying to recruit to your political cause onto the channels they're already using,

00:16:31.980 and then also give them the anonymity and the, and the, you know, encryption safety, uh, to be able

00:16:39.480 to organize and express their political support safely, relatively safely. But the pro, so the

00:16:47.740 problem is because telegram is also an open playing field because Pavel has not relinquished either to

00:16:53.920 the United States or to Russia. It has also allowed Russian propaganda to propagate. And this is a problem

00:16:59.780 right now in Ukraine. Uh, just two weeks after your interview with Pavel, the radio free Europe,

00:17:07.040 which is in an institution that was created by the CIA and it was run directly, but for its first 20

00:17:14.340 years by the CIA, just two weeks after your interview with Pavel called, uh, called, uh, telegram a spy in

00:17:22.220 every Ukrainian's pocket and made the argument that, that, uh, Ukraine needs to wrest control over

00:17:28.420 telegram. And it laid out the following reasons for doing so and said that, uh, 70, 75% of Ukrainians

00:17:36.120 currently use telegram and they have been using telegram. This is up from 20% just a few years

00:17:42.540 ago because of Pavel's solidarity with the concept of free speech. It's been highly trusted for many

00:17:50.200 years, but they're not sure if there's a Russian back channel now. And they cite several reasons

00:17:54.760 around Pavel's, uh, potential financing, uh, from a, from a bond raise several years ago that may have

00:18:03.060 had Russian investors in it. They cite the fact that Russian internal documents, uh, promote,

00:18:09.140 promote the use of telegram for its own military. The fact that, uh, over 50% of Russia itself uses

00:18:16.320 telegram. The fact that, uh, the fact, so the fact that the Russian military uses it safely and has no

00:18:22.700 problem with it. And the fact that, uh, there may be Russian financing of, of Pavel. This is the argument

00:18:29.380 that they make that perhaps it was compromised. Perhaps the reason Russia dropped its attempt to

00:18:36.200 ban telegram after the 2018 affair may have been because an agreement was secretly reached. And if

00:18:43.580 that is the case, then that would essentially make all of the military operations and all of the state

00:18:50.260 craft and, and secret channels that Ukraine is currently using, uh, be spied on, you know,

00:18:58.100 all communications, the entire war effort, maybe the reason Ukraine is losing is because Russia knows

00:19:02.860 everything Ukraine is doing. We hear a lot from viewers about big tech censorship and those reports

00:19:09.100 are more frequent than ever right now. Censorship, meaning shutting down your access to information,

00:19:15.020 not lies or misinformation, but true things. It's only the truth that they censor facts that get in the

00:19:21.920 way of the lies they're trying to tell you. The net effect of this, of course, is interfering in the

00:19:27.380 2024 presidential elections. That's why they're censoring more than ever now, because the stakes

00:19:31.560 are even higher. You're probably not shocked by this, but the specific examples of it do throw you

00:19:37.080 back a little bit. We've seen screenshots and videos showing how a Google search to learn more about the

00:19:41.960 attempted assassination on Donald Trump. Instead, push users to information on Harry Truman or Bob Marley

00:19:48.700 or the Pope, anything other than the relevant truth, which is that they just shot Trump in the

00:19:54.980 face. They don't want you to know that because it might help Trump. We've seen examples where Facebook

00:20:00.180 marked true photos of a bloodied and defiant Trump as misleading. Somehow those pictures were a lie and

00:20:06.140 then limited their visibility. Its AI assistant explicitly denied the shooting ever took place.

00:20:10.920 This is insanity, but it's at the core of big tech's editorial policy, which is denying the truth to you

00:20:17.200 in order to control the outcome of this presidential election. That's not democracy.

00:20:21.600 We've seen examples where a generic search for information about Donald Trump was automatically

00:20:25.560 rephrased to show positive stories about Kamala Harris instead. Is there any clear example of election

00:20:32.600 interference? So what do you do about it? Well, Parler has been down this road. Parler is pulled right

00:20:40.540 off the internet for telling the truth, but it's back and it's reaffirmed its lifelong, unwavering

00:20:46.640 commitment to free speech. On Parler, the Bill of Rights lives. The First Amendment is real. You can

00:20:52.600 say what you think because you're a human being and an American citizen and not a slave. On Parler,

00:20:58.260 users can freely express themselves, tell the truth, express their conscience, and connect with others

00:21:03.400 who are doing the same, and they will not be interfered with. They will not be censored.

00:21:07.720 Designers support a wide range of viewpoints. Everyone is welcome on Parler. Parler is committed to

00:21:13.660 ensuring that everybody is heard. And so it's become a place where independent journalism is

00:21:18.800 protected and respected. It's protected because it's respected. So as this censorship by big tech

00:21:25.040 intensifies, standing up for your God-given right as an American to say what you think is essential.

00:21:32.620 We're on Parler. That's why we're on Parler. Our handle is at Tucker Carlson, and we encourage you to

00:21:37.480 join us there. You have the right to say what you believe. So does every American, and you can do it

00:21:43.380 on Parler. Get the Parler app today.

00:21:58.940 I just can't get over the fact that the Biden administration, the U.S. government, which you and

00:22:03.720 I pay for, which is supposed to be defending their freedom of speech above all other freedoms,

00:22:10.420 is encouraging its proxy government, the Ukrainian government, to seize or take over a media outlet.

00:22:16.900 I mean, that's so—why is that NATO legal?

00:22:19.940 Well, I mean, this has been part and parcel of our diplomacy for decades.

00:22:26.240 But it's just criminal.

00:22:27.120 Well, if you recall, when NATO—you know, NATO's first use of military hard power in its entire

00:22:35.200 history, you know, it was created in 1949. The first time it ever fired an offensive bullet

00:22:40.980 was in 1995 and 1999 in Yugoslavia.

00:22:43.120 I remember it well.

00:22:44.720 Well, one of the things we did when we bombed—when we bombed Yugoslavia was we took out its state

00:22:51.560 media propaganda organ, its state media channel, state TV, its state radio broadcaster. We bombed

00:23:00.160 the headquarters of the media building and killed dozens of people in the process.

00:23:05.880 Journalists.

00:23:06.280 Yes. And said that that was fair game because they were a keynote in Yugoslavia's war effort.

00:23:12.740 And so we killed their journalists in order to slow down their military.

00:23:16.900 So the whole idea that there's like a free exchange of information or a battle of ideas

00:23:22.720 and may the, you know, best idea win, which is really kind of the foundation of American

00:23:28.700 civil society. I mean, that's what this whole project is based on.

00:23:33.000 Yes.

00:23:34.280 They don't mean it at all. In fact, and they're moving in exactly the opposite direction.

00:23:37.940 It's something—

00:23:38.560 Sorry to sound so shocked, but I am shocked. I hate this.

00:23:41.220 It's something for 50, 60 years was very useful to us when other countries did not have robust

00:23:49.420 propaganda or communications infrastructure themselves. And one of the reasons that Voice

00:23:54.980 of America and Radio for Europe and Radio Liberty and all those were so effective at the time

00:23:58.840 was because other countries didn't really have their own developed native programming in radio or TV

00:24:05.500 or print. And so the ability to project that, you know, with limited options allowed saturation

00:24:11.460 of the CIA narrative in those regions.

00:24:14.580 Well, I just—I mean, this is—I don't really any desire to talk about it, but I can't even control

00:24:19.280 myself since my father was the director of the Voice of America and I grew up hearing about this,

00:24:24.520 you know, every day at the dinner table. You know, the whole idea was, at least the public-facing idea,

00:24:31.840 the publicly-articulated idea, was we're disseminating, you know, news and—or news, you know,

00:24:37.920 ideas, information, facts, and allowing the populations of these countries access to this,

00:24:43.820 and they can make up their own mind. I mean, it really was part of, at least publicly—and

00:24:48.080 I'm very aware, you know, I know it was more complicated than that—but I really believed

00:24:54.280 that. This was part of the battle of ideas, and we were winning because we had better ideas.

00:24:58.320 Well, we allowed freedom of speech because we were winning. And fair. And this is the issue now,

00:25:05.740 which is everything changed in 2014 in terms of our free speech diplomacy toolkit. We set up a swarm

00:25:13.400 army of pro-free speech NGOs, civil society institutions, university centers, journalists,

00:25:20.600 legal groups in order to pressure and lobby all foreign countries around the world to create an open

00:25:25.660 society for journalists so that those could be penetrated by U.S. statecraft and intelligence.

00:25:30.600 And until the free and open internet started to backfire on the State Department, that was the

00:25:37.380 unequivocal position of the State Department.

00:25:39.940 Because their ideas suck, and nobody wants trans kids, is the truth. And they don't want any more

00:25:44.640 freaking rainbow flags. And maybe if you sold a product people liked, like Marlboros or Big Macs or

00:25:50.140 Levi Jeans or Freedom or Hot Blonde Girls or whatever you're selling, maybe it's something

00:25:57.060 that people actually want. But if you're selling trannyism and gay race communism, nobody actually

00:26:02.780 wants that. Nobody wants that.

00:26:04.520 Right. Well—

00:26:05.480 Sorry.

00:26:06.080 Right. Well, if support is not earned, it has to be installed.

00:26:13.220 Exactly. Nicely put.

00:26:15.060 And this is one of the great issues here, which is that it's these very free speech institutions

00:26:22.260 that were capacity built by the State Department that have all incorporated this censorship element.

00:26:27.180 So we still do have a lot of free speech diplomacy. Just two years ago, we sanctioned the government

00:26:31.860 Iran, the government of Iran for having the temerity to censor its own internet. This is so

00:26:37.620 funny because, you know, our own Department of Homeland Security was doing the exact same thing

00:26:42.320 to censor Americans—

00:26:43.840 To us.

00:26:44.600 To us. You know, so, I mean, technically, the United States should be kicked off the dollar

00:26:48.440 for, you know, for doing, you know, exactly what we accuse foreign countries of doing. But we

00:26:56.160 selectively promote either free speech or censorship, depending on what's most advantageous for political

00:27:01.100 control in any particular country. So, for example, if Bolsonaro were to have rose, you know,

00:27:07.700 rose to—back to power in Brazil, have no doubt about it, you know, free speech would be back on

00:27:13.800 the menu and Bolsonaro would be accused of censorship, you know, over, you know, jaywalking, you know,

00:27:20.720 on a random street corner. And we would be pumping up through NGOs and university centers and

00:27:28.520 journalists on payroll. We'd be pumping $100 million into Brazil's free speech economy in order to

00:27:36.880 create anti-Bolsonaro sentiment.

00:27:38.940 That's right.

00:27:39.680 But, you know, one of the things beginning—and I come back to this Brazil case—

00:27:43.260 Can I just ask you to pause one last time? One of the things I've learned from you over the past

00:27:46.820 couple of years—I've learned a lot from you—but one big-picture idea that I didn't fully appreciate

00:27:52.220 until I listened to you carefully—was that our foreign policy drives our domestic policy.

00:27:58.700 There's no such thing as domestic policy.

00:28:00.600 Exactly.

00:28:01.320 Every country—

00:28:01.960 I didn't understand. I grew up in a world where there was the foreign policy and, like,

00:28:04.700 you overthrow Mosaddegh or whatever. Maybe that's good for America. You don't even think about it.

00:28:07.540 We're fighting the Soviets. It's not a problem. Because we are an island of freedom here in the

00:28:12.080 United States. And your reporting and analysis suggests exactly what you just said. There is no

00:28:18.240 domestic policy. Everything that happens in this country is an outgrowth, a function of

00:28:22.440 our management of the world.

00:28:24.700 Yes. There's no such thing as domestic policy because every country's domestic policy is another

00:28:30.400 country's foreign policy. Whatever you do in the United States or whatever any foreign country—a

00:28:35.660 foreign country wants to change its labor laws. Well, guess what? That impacts the bottom line of

00:28:40.200 U.S. corporations who employ labor pools there. A foreign country wants to nationalize its graphite

00:28:46.820 industry. Well, guess what? Now America can't make pencils. Every internal policy of every other

00:28:53.840 country on Earth impacts the bottom line of some U.S. national champion. Now, how the State Department

00:29:00.040 defines national interest is essentially the college of corporations and financial firms

00:29:04.280 that are U.S. national champions. So, for example, if Georgia or Azerbaijan does something that impacts

00:29:14.960 the bottom line of ExxonMobil or Chevron or Halliburton, that becomes a State Department priority in order to

00:29:21.880 protect U.S. national interests against this nationalization law that's happening in Georgia or

00:29:28.180 Azerbaijan. And it's the same thing with every industry. And so, I do want to get back to this

00:29:35.460 sort of exporting the First Amendment concept that was such a big part of American statecraft.

00:29:39.960 I think almost no one, there's almost no better example of this than what happened with the State

00:29:46.140 Department's Global Engagement Center, which is the main censorship artery of the U.S. State Department.

00:29:51.500 It also works with a lot of, a million of these censorship NGOs and USAID and this whole network.

00:29:58.520 It was set up by Rick Stengel. And, you know, Rick Stengel, you know, would say that his job was to

00:30:04.940 export the First Amendment, former, you know, managing editor of Time Magazine. And it's when

00:30:10.140 Donald Trump was elected in 2016, you know, the guy whose job was to export the First Amendment

00:30:15.060 wrote an op-ed, I believe in the Washington Post, effectively calling for an end to the First

00:30:19.360 Amendment, that it needs to mirror that what Europe and other countries have.

00:30:24.360 And then he wrote a book making the same case.

00:30:26.440 Right, right. But again, this is the guy who was the undersecretary of public affairs.

00:30:31.000 This is a very evil man, Rick Stengel. Well, the point that I'm trying to make here is

00:30:36.320 the free speech absolutist who was in charge of U.S. government projection of free speech.

00:30:43.420 All it took was one election for the entire diplomacy architecture that, you know, that this

00:30:50.080 principle of free speech was based on to get completely bottomed out. All it took was Donald

00:30:56.120 Trump getting elected for, you know, arguably 200 years of a First Amendment principle and

00:31:02.040 70 years of this principle of exporting the First Amendment to be entirely discarded because it was

00:31:08.020 leading to the wrong kinds of people being elected. Free speech on the Internet was blamed for the loss

00:31:13.220 of the Philippines election by the State Department in 2016. It was blamed for the events of Brexit.

00:31:17.760 This is why the U.S. State Department funds so many London-based NGOs and university centers

00:31:23.360 and influence operations to stop Nigel Farage and the Brexit movement. It was blamed for the

00:31:28.060 rise of Trump in 2016. It was blamed for the rise of Bolsonaro. It was blamed for the rise of Modi in

00:31:33.840 India. In country after country, the free and open Internet, unfiltered alternative news, the rise of

00:31:41.860 citizen journalists, the rise of citizens in those countries who have larger voices than CIA-backed

00:31:48.360 media, than USAID-funded media, than State Department-funded media, has meant that the State

00:31:53.960 Department has lost control of those countries. And what happened was, after 2016, the technology and

00:31:59.780 the networks were established to be able to add a new toolkit to American diplomacy, which is diplomacy

00:32:05.520 by censorship. And we have formal government programs at the State Department dedicated to getting foreign

00:32:11.580 countries to pass domestic censorship laws to stop the rise of right-wing populist parties in those

00:32:17.240 countries. I'm going to say that again. We have formal government programs at the State Department

00:32:21.620 whose job is to lobby foreign countries and pressure foreign countries to pass censorship laws to stop the

00:32:28.660 rise of domestic populist groups. So you have truckers in America whose income tax is going to pay

00:32:34.420 foreign governments to censor their citizens. This is the sort of schizophrenia right now of America.

00:32:44.080 We're becoming the Soviet Union, which exported poison around the world for all those years.

00:32:49.460 I really felt like the United States was, you know, the bullwark against that. But whether that's true

00:32:54.960 or not, I don't know. I'm trying to reassess. What is true now is we're doing what they did. We're

00:33:00.460 sowing chaos and tyranny around the world. It's like, I am so heartbroken to see this.

00:33:08.120 Well, it's amazing you say that because as someone who is sort of present at creation in terms of

00:33:12.820 watching this all get established and spending my whole life monitoring it and chronicling it,

00:33:18.780 they were very aware of that when they were setting this up. And when I say they, I mean NATO,

00:33:25.100 the U.S. State Department, the U.K. Foreign Office. After the 2016 election and after Brexit,

00:33:31.200 and they began this whole consensus-building quest about how to get all the relevant stakeholders

00:33:37.380 from the government, from the private sector, from civil society, and from the media to all

00:33:41.860 come together and create this whole society censorship coalition, whole society counter

00:33:47.100 misinformation coalition, technically they call it. But they were very aware of the, that what they

00:33:53.220 were doing was exactly what they accused Russia and China of doing. Intensely aware. And there was

00:33:57.960 much, much hand-wringing in the beginning of this in late 2016, early 2017, that we need to be

00:34:04.000 extremely careful as we are establishing this infrastructure, that it does not appear to be

00:34:08.940 what Russia and China are doing. That Russia and China have a, what they said was effectively,

00:34:15.220 Russia and China don't have the problem that we have. They don't have rising populist movements

00:34:21.460 in their countries that are opposed to the state institutions, that are opposed to the state

00:34:26.840 priorities, that are winning political power. How do Russia and China solve this problem of domestic

00:34:32.200 populist insurgency? Well, they use, I'm not joking when I say this. Giving their citizens

00:34:37.340 political power, in other words? Yes, yes. Do they ever stop and just ask, like, since when is it

00:34:43.440 okay for the people in charge of a government to ban populism? I don't understand, like, when did we

00:34:49.880 all agree that populism is bad? I thought the whole system was fundamentally a populist system. The

00:34:55.420 country belongs to its citizens. I thought that was the whole deal. Oh, I can answer that because it's

00:34:59.520 basically doctrine. There's been a redefinition of democracy from meaning the consensus of individuals

00:35:06.240 to meaning the consensus of institutions. And this is a very clever, sleight of hand,

00:35:10.460 reframing trick that they played after the 2016 election in the U.S. And they were setting this up.

00:35:15.660 So just to, just to get- They're playing with revolution here. I mean, they could,

00:35:20.660 they've lost their legitimacy. So I'm not going to try to overthrow the U.S. government.

00:35:25.580 I'm 55. I'm not going to do that. But at some point, you know, someone's going to try to do that.

00:35:32.080 And it's going to be kind of hard to see why they're not justified in doing that. Because

00:35:36.360 it's not legitimate. Their legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed. That's our system.

00:35:42.220 And when they no longer have the consent of the governed, they're not legitimate, period.

00:35:46.120 So all I care about is freedom of speech on the internet.

00:35:49.080 But if you have no freedom of speech, it's not a legitimate country.

00:35:54.220 So there's a lot to get to on all of this that I think is maybe actually picking up where,

00:36:00.980 what we were talking about with when they were setting this all up. I think it actually kind of

00:36:04.800 elegantly dovetails with the point that you just made. When they were setting this up,

00:36:08.680 they said, Russia and China don't have this problem. We will have a PR nightmare,

00:36:12.920 a crisis of legitimacy if we simulate exactly what Russia and China do, which is top-down

00:36:17.760 government control. So what they did is they came up with a concept called the whole of society

00:36:23.300 framework that would, in order to astroturf a, you know, the appearance of a kind of bottom-up

00:36:29.520 organic censorship industry that the government would simply fund and intermediate and direct

00:36:35.700 and pressure. So this whole society concept is that the government is not the censor. It is simply

00:36:43.100 the quarterback of the, of the censorship ecosystem. So it is not like Russia and China in the sense

00:36:48.480 that, you know, the Russian Federation says you, this media channel is banned. Instead, it would be

00:36:54.580 the American government paying to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, all the different

00:37:01.180 censorship ecosystem players and exploiting that leverage to have that outcome arrive semi-organically.

00:37:07.420 And they, and they were very careful in establishing it, you know, according to this, to this idea that

00:37:13.260 what we will do is we, we will be able to essentially have plausible deniability, but even though we're

00:37:21.100 funding it and we're directing it and we are pressuring everyone to join this censorship coalition.

00:37:25.620 And so, so this is how you had tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. State Department funding the

00:37:33.460 private sector pop-up censorship mercenary firms, funding these, the civil society institutions, the

00:37:38.860 universities, the censorship activists, the NGOs, the nonprofits, the researchers, and also the, on the media

00:37:47.300 side and all these U.S. funded, U.S. aid funded media outlets, all pushing for censorship. And, and there's an

00:37:53.880 elegant structure to it, which is that the government pays the civil society institutions to do

00:37:59.380 essentially CIA, CIA work against our own citizens. This is why there's so many CIA analysts at the,

00:38:05.860 at these censorship universities, the censorship labs, they, they'll call them disinfo labs, you know,

00:38:10.780 at 60 plus U.S. universities, all funded by the U.S. government. They do.

00:38:16.340 And I assume on cable television too, there are everyone on all the channels.

00:38:19.740 Yes. DHS actually, you know, on boards, you know, media organizations into its, into its

00:38:26.320 counter disinformation work. And again, because media is the fourth quadrant in the whole society

00:38:30.520 framework. And it's government, private sector, civil society, media, all aligned like a magnet to

00:38:35.400 create the censorship outcomes so that the, so there's no holes in the Titanic. No one can resist

00:38:40.140 it. No one can stop it. This is the prop. This is, and it was so effective until Elon Musk essentially

00:38:45.160 burst that bubble. And until they went a little bit too far with the disinformation governance board,

00:38:49.100 and finally a certain faction within the Republican party woke up and was able to exert some pressure

00:38:54.320 through, through the house and Jim Jordan in November, 2022. But getting back to this point

00:38:59.900 about, about populism and what this whole counter, you know, disinformation, the censorship whole

00:39:04.980 society network does is they did a clever reframing. If you, and this is really cute. If you run a

00:39:11.500 Boolean search on Google right now, and you look at what places like the Atlanta council and, and

00:39:18.820 Brookings and the national endowment for democracy, we're all saying in the months after Trump's

00:39:23.480 election in 2016, they were making the argument that maybe democracy was a mistake because it leads

00:39:28.400 to outcomes. Like before they doubled down on it, there was a brief window where they said, you know

00:39:32.380 what, actually democracy leads to outcomes like Donald Trump and Brexit. And at the time, NATO would,

00:39:40.340 you know, its biggest fear was free speech on the internet. In 20, in early 2017, NATO periodicals

00:39:46.860 were saying the biggest threat to NATO is not a hostile foreign attack from Russia. They would come

00:39:50.260 to eat these words five years later. They would argue, they argued conventional warfare is over.

00:39:54.020 The biggest threat to NATO is free speech on the internet because it's allowing the rise of

00:39:57.340 Marine Le Pen in France. It's allowing the rise of Matteo Salvini in Italy. It's allowing the rise of

00:40:01.860 the Vox party in Spain, AFD in Germany. So we would have Frexit, Grexit, Italexit, Spexit.

00:40:06.600 The entire EU would come undone, which meant NATO's commercial arm comes undone, which means NATO

00:40:11.800 comes undone, which means there's no enforcement arm for the IMF and the World Bank. So it would be

00:40:16.620 like the ending scene from Fight Club where the credit card companies all crash down just because

00:40:21.020 you're allowed to speak your mind on the internet. This is so sick. If you've got good taste in hats,

00:40:28.720 sweatshirts, and t-shirts, and a good sense of humor, you probably know

00:40:31.700 of Old Row. They're everywhere, and we're happy to partner with them to launch an apparel line.

00:40:37.060 Check out our store at tuckercarlson.com. Highly recommend it.

00:40:40.000 So they had this sort of crisis of, well, what do we do about it? Democracy is the problem.

00:41:01.540 And then they said, well, the problem is our entire diplomatic toolkit, everything that the CIA does,

00:41:07.160 everything the State Department does, everything USAID does, everything that the Pentagon Civil

00:41:10.920 Affairs does, is all under this rubric of promoting democracy. This is how we topple foreign governments.

00:41:17.340 We only have two predicates for toppling a government. One of them is aggression. The other

00:41:21.980 one is repression. So if they are aggressing against a foreign country, we get to be the

00:41:26.160 world's policemen. We get to topple them for their military activity. But if we can't nail them on

00:41:31.920 that, we can always get them on repression. We can say they're repressing their own people. So we need

00:41:36.440 to bring democracy there. And this is the lion's share of, this is what we did in Belarus. This is

00:41:42.340 what we did in Moscow from 2010 to 2020. This is what we did in all these other countries. And I'm not

00:41:49.640 even arguing normatively about whether that's right or wrong. But you have to understand that free speech on

00:41:54.320 the internet is the collateral damage of this proxy war. But here's how they rescued democracy.

00:41:59.620 They said, we can't, okay, we need to stick with democracy, even though we don't like its outcomes,

00:42:03.660 because we take too long to turn the Titanic. All of our cloak and dagger, black ops,

00:42:13.460 you know, plausibly deniable toppling of governments worldwide, all in the name of democracy,

00:42:18.300 all the NGOs we fund, all the civil society activists, all the media institutions, it's all

00:42:22.160 democracy, democracy, democracy. So we need to simply, instead of getting rid of this concept

00:42:26.760 of championing democracy, we need to redefine what democracy is. We need to make it not about

00:42:32.200 the consensus of individuals, how people vote, but make it about the consensus of institutions.

00:42:37.420 And we will simply define democratic institutions as anyone who supports the U.S. foreign policy

00:42:42.360 establishment and its transatlantic partners in the U.K.

00:42:45.580 So in the United States, that would mean redefining the system of government from one in which a

00:42:51.540 majority of 350 million people believe something, to one in which a group of, what would it be,

00:42:59.280 100,000 people?

00:43:01.300 Yeah, about that.

00:43:02.320 Yeah, maybe 100,000 people, probably a third of whom I know. In other words, it's like,

00:43:07.780 it just takes, they just took all the power from the American population and awarded it to themselves.

00:43:11.480 Yes. And this clever rhetorical sleight of hand allows unspeakable powers that

00:43:18.660 Americans have no idea about. I'll give you one example. So I said, it's all about institutions

00:43:24.220 now. And, you know, if you want to watch a funny clip, I posted this on my X account recently,

00:43:30.080 the Bergeron Institute, where Reid Hoffman is a board member, and they were involved in this whole

00:43:35.680 transition integrity project, domestic color revolution blueprint for stopping Trump from

00:43:41.460 getting, from being installed as president, even if he won the electoral college. And they

00:43:45.940 contemplated using Black Lives Matter as a street muscle. And the whole thing was run by a senior

00:43:51.120 Pentagon official with a CIA blue badge. And they have, you know, that conference in 2019,

00:43:57.800 the title of it was how elections, how elections erode the democratic process, how elections are a

00:44:04.780 threat to democracy. And because they were moving to this concept that it, that, that the blobs control

00:44:12.320 over the political and commercial ecosystem of a country cannot be left to the people.

00:44:17.940 If we define democracy to be about democratic institutions, then the popular will of the people

00:44:24.260 can still be categorized as a threat to democracy, which would still therefore still allow the funding of

00:44:31.620 the billions of dollars worldwide that we have deployed as capital for this. And I'll give you a

00:44:37.020 great example of this. The National Science Foundation is probably the, the, the main funding

00:44:43.060 artery for most of the censorship ecosystem in the United States. Now this comes from a million places.

00:44:48.160 Wait, the what?

00:44:49.100 I know it sounds crazy, but listen, the National Science Foundation is the civilian arm of DARPA.

00:44:56.760 It is, and it has been since-

00:44:58.400 For those who aren't from DC, will you explain what DARPA is?

00:45:00.800 DARPA is the Pentagon's brain. DARPA is the reason that we have the internet. You know, DARPA,

00:45:06.500 the internet started as a military technology to be able to send and receive information digitally

00:45:12.780 because the Pentagon manages, it's the largest employer in the United States. Pentagon manages the

00:45:17.960 American empire when after World War II, we had this yawning empire stretching from here to, you know,

00:45:24.060 to Latin America, to, to Europe under the Marshall Plan, you know, and all the way out to the Philippines

00:45:28.980 and Asia, we had this worldwide empire. We had to manage all these counterinsurgency threats,

00:45:33.900 all the domestic populations that were opposed to U.S. hegemony over their own, over their own lands.

00:45:40.020 And so the Pentagon had to be extremely versed in all the regions, understand what was happening

00:45:45.260 politically, what was happening culturally. And so the Pentagon farmed out to U.S. universities.

00:45:50.780 This is a part of why so much of U.S. universities, so much work is funded by the Defense Department

00:45:56.840 and is funded by the National Science Foundation. It's civilian, civilian arm. In fact, the National

00:46:01.720 Science Foundation is the leading subsidizer of all, it's the leading source of funding for all higher

00:46:06.860 education funds. It's, it's, I'm not even like, people think we have a private education, you know,

00:46:12.120 higher education market. We don't. It's subsidized by the U.S. government. And that is a quid pro quo.

00:46:16.900 But through DOD.

00:46:18.660 But through DOD and through the National Science Foundation, which is the civilian, you know, which

00:46:22.260 is, you know, but the National Science Foundation and even the story of the internet, again, it was

00:46:28.040 created by the U.S. military and it was turned over to the National Science Foundation. And that, and that's

00:46:34.020 where the dual use comes in. When the military, you know, the military developed the cell phone,

00:46:37.780 the military developed GPS, you know, the military developed most of the technology at the R&D level

00:46:45.260 that we now live under. In fact, the military developed all the internet anonymity software

00:46:51.160 in order to help Pentagon and CIA and State Department-backed political groups be able to orchestrate

00:46:58.480 regime change. You know, the VPNs, the Tor network, NN Encrypted Chat, all these things

00:47:03.960 were Pentagon projects before they became dual use, just like the internet became dual

00:47:07.800 use. It was a military project, but then the civilian commercial architecture was built

00:47:12.920 on top of it. But the National Science Foundation has two major domestic censorship programs.

00:47:19.760 And in the charter documents establishing one of them in 2021, when, you know, in February

00:47:25.640 2021, right when, you know, the month after Biden took office, this is a, this is a $40 million

00:47:32.060 program. And in the charter document, it says that the purpose is to stop misinformation about

00:47:36.100 democratic institutions. And they, and one of the democratic institutions they define is

00:47:41.160 the media. So understand this, this is the Pentagon civilian arm funding $40 million worth of censorship,

00:47:53.020 explicitly, exclusively censorship institutions to stop Americans from delegitimizing the media,

00:48:00.080 to stop Americans from undermining trust in media. If North Korea did this, we would pass sanctions

00:48:06.100 on them. If Iran did this, we would pass sanctions on them. This is because establishment media,

00:48:12.320 and again, politically aligned media with the blob has to be propped up as a buffer to drown out the

00:48:19.380 voices of populace. So the, so the strategy here is twofold, turning up the knobs of the blob's

00:48:24.940 propaganda channels and turning down the knobs of anyone who opposes that because you can win two

00:48:29.820 ways. You can win, you know, three ways you win in a fair fight, or you can win by super saturating

00:48:34.980 your own media voice, or you can win by default because the opposition political party, the opposition

00:48:40.680 political movement is not allowed. This is why the U S state department after 2016 established in

00:48:47.440 like 140 countries. Now these censorship programs in the name of countering disinformation,

00:48:51.960 in the name of media literacy, in the name of digital resilience, they have all these branding

00:48:55.320 terms for it because they perceived this Eldorado gold mine of, of a new method for, for total

00:49:02.840 political control over a region, which is winning by default by winning by censorship. A lot of times

00:49:08.720 people don't believe state department propaganda. They don't believe CIA propaganda. And so no matter

00:49:13.920 how much money you pump in to the region, no matter $5 billion, Victoria Nuland bragged about being

00:49:20.160 pumped into Ukrainian civil society ahead of the Maidan protests, it still did not penetrate

00:49:24.940 Eastern Ukraine, which broke away within the Donbass. It still did not penetrate Crimea, who, you know,

00:49:31.040 voted shortly after to join the Russian Federation in a, in a democratic vote. So they, from their

00:49:38.980 perspective, funding propaganda was not enough. We need to kill the ability to surface alternative ideas

00:49:45.240 because then they can't even make a counter argument. Even if they don't believe the propaganda, there's

00:49:49.700 simply no other choice in the room. You don't get access to the other ideas. You don't get access to the

00:49:54.340 other data points or news events that might undermine public trust in the state department's preferred

00:49:59.560 narrative. This is what, where malinformation came from. Mis, dis, and malinformation. You may have heard that

00:50:04.700 phrase. Misinformation is something that is false, but you, you know, it was an innocent mistake.

00:50:09.900 Disinformation is, it's wrong, but you did it on purpose. Malinformation is, it's right, but it still

00:50:15.440 undermines public faith and confidence in something that's more important. This is why, for example,

00:50:19.600 you had the censorship of COVID in the name of, of malinformation. You're banning people from telling

00:50:24.220 the truth. Yes. So how are you not like just full blown on Satan's team at that point? You're ban,

00:50:30.220 you're not allowing your own citizens to tell the truth. You're, you're forcing lies at the point of a gun.

00:50:35.080 This is literally what the federal government's partners pressured using and exploiting government

00:50:40.760 pressure and threatening them with, with crisis PR. If they, uh, if they allowed true statements about

00:50:47.960 COVID-19 to be articulated, if they, you know, and this came out in the Twitter files, for example,

00:50:53.400 you know, where you had entities like the virality project who were, who were telling Yul Roth and

00:50:58.140 Jay Gadi, the, you know, the, the former Twitter 1.0 censorship team that you need to censor,

00:51:03.560 you know, self-reported, uh, you know, vaccine adverse events, because even if these things are

00:51:09.200 true, they still undermine public faith and confidence in the efficacy of vaccines.

00:51:13.060 They might increase vaccine hesitancy once people realize it can hurt them. Like they don't want to

00:51:17.800 take it. Right. And part of the issue is, is their, their initial solution to this was fact

00:51:22.640 checkers, but the problem is in, and trying to get legitimacy for censorship because fact checkers

00:51:28.520 identify something is wrong, but the problem is fact checkers are slow. Fact checkers have limited

00:51:32.540 influence on certain platforms. And so you can't hire enough fact checkers. And also a lot of times

00:51:38.680 the fact checkers can't prove something's wrong. You're citing CDC data. You know, you're, you're

00:51:43.340 citing a widely reported mainstream media event, but you can still get it banned under the category of

00:51:49.140 malinformation because it's still undermines public faith and trust in a critical narrative.

00:51:54.520 So it's sort of this censorship mercenary ecosystem created to protect noble lies,

00:52:00.160 but nobilize at home and also no, and also nobilize abroad. So this is why I come back to the U S state

00:52:08.620 department and maybe this is a good time to introduce, you know, the, the telegram, you know,

00:52:14.960 issue here, which is that you had this strange situation where the government of France arrested

00:52:21.060 Pavel and it took everyone by surprise. And this is a major, major act, which has major implications

00:52:27.620 for U S platforms. The fact is, is if Pavel is liable for every act of speech, criminally liable,

00:52:35.200 every act of speech on his platform, there's no reason that the head of rumble, the head of X,

00:52:40.320 the head of YouTube, that everybody can't be hauled in for 20 years. The moment they stepped foot in

00:52:45.260 Paris as well, they can all die in prison for letting people criticize their governments. Like,

00:52:49.080 right. It is a major diplomatic event. It impacts U S national champions. It impacts U S citizens,

00:52:57.720 the U S embassy in France, it's job. The only reason it's there is to protect U S national

00:53:05.880 interests, U S citizens, and U S corporations from hostile foreign laws in France, hostile foreign

00:53:12.620 actions by France. And given how critical telegram is to the U S militarily, to the U S on statecraft

00:53:20.980 grounds, to the U S on intelligence grounds. Again, as we speak in dozens of countries, telegram is the

00:53:27.940 main artery of the CIA for, for cultivating political resistance movements. And so the impact on the

00:53:37.820 United States is absolutely massive of, of doing this. And again, as, you know, as we discussed,

00:53:41.760 the United States has funded, you know, Ukraine with about almost $300 billion. And Ukraine's

00:53:48.000 military intelligence chiefs say that they need to get control over telegrams backend to, to know

00:53:54.380 whether or not the Russians are in control of it and to get control essentially over its front end

00:53:58.540 content moderation policies to ban Russian propaganda channels. Now, mind you, this comes just two weeks

00:54:03.240 after the FBI raided the homes of Scott Ritter and other journalists simply for appearing on Russia

00:54:09.180 today. He had his hard drive seized his phone, his phone seized. Other people had their, the paintings

00:54:15.220 in their own, in their own houses seized by the FBI, not arrested by the way, no charges against them

00:54:21.140 simply for appearing on a Russian propaganda channel, a Russian state TV channel. So these are American

00:54:27.600 citizens living in America who simply appeared on a channel, uh, from, from Russia that had their

00:54:33.920 homes raided, their electronics seized, and even their, their paintings in their own home seized.

00:54:38.940 If, if they thought a Russian painter may have painted the picture here in the United States just

00:54:44.120 two weeks ago, was that legal? Well, technically they're not facing charges, but the idea was, is

00:54:49.340 because they have overt ties to a Russian propaganda outlet, they may have covert ties. And so the,

00:54:54.380 so the FBI now, uh, basically, you know, has them in the spider web, but understand this makes me want

00:55:01.160 to go on RT every single day of the year, just to make the point, not because I, for any other reason

00:55:08.360 than to make the point, I'm an American citizen. I can have any political opinion I want and I can

00:55:13.160 speak to anyone I want, but does anyone, any other media outlet see this as kind of the end of America

00:55:20.580 when people are raided by the FBI for having political opinions? Well, it's funny you say that

00:55:25.140 because I, this is really what started my own journey, which was that I'm not a foreign policy

00:55:30.580 zealot. I'm, I, if, if, if the gun were taken off of my head and an apology and restitution made

00:55:36.220 for, for the, the destruction of the free and open internet, I might consider whether or not it is in

00:55:42.160 U S interest to fund the war in Ukraine to, you know, to pursue the seas, Eurasia, to do these things.

00:55:48.040 I don't know. I don't know. I see the arguments on both sides of it, but the problem is the fact

00:55:53.840 that they have destroyed so many lives, the fact that so much pursuing, pursuing this in my own free

00:56:01.500 speech rights has cost me so much, but I have the same response that you do, which is that, well,

00:56:06.620 because you told me that I can't talk about this, I will not stop talking about this until the internet

00:56:14.260 is free. They, they broke into my private text account. The NSA did to keep me from talking to

00:56:20.320 Putin. And then I just said, I don't care what it takes. I'm going to, I'm going to Moscow to see

00:56:23.560 Putin took me two years, but they really hardened my resolve beyond like any point of reason. Like I

00:56:29.180 was going period. And I think that's the healthy response. You can, I'm an American citizen. I was

00:56:34.600 born here. You can not, you are not allowed. It's illegal for you to trample my God-given speech rights.

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00:58:31.980 Well, this is the actual crux of our counterinsurgency paradox, which is that we have

00:58:39.120 two things that we do for political control in a region. You know, one of them is counterterrorism.

00:58:45.820 If we, you know, the military sets in on a country, if we say there's terrorists there, but if we,

00:58:50.160 if there's no counterterrorism, we still have a doctrine called counterinsurgency, which is managing

00:58:54.020 the rise of opposition political parties in a country and the, and using, you know, potentially

00:59:01.020 sometimes kinetic or, you know, hard power or drone striking people.

00:59:05.400 Pathetic meaning violence.

00:59:06.540 Yes. Yes. And, you know, the problem with counterinsurgency doctrine is a critical component

00:59:12.000 of the country does not believe the government, the U.S. installed government is legitimate.

00:59:15.960 So they are, you know, organizing a political movement to rise to power instead. We call that

00:59:22.600 a political insurgency. And the issue is, is to, you know, we want to get them, we want to get them

00:59:28.280 stabilized. We want to, you know, yeah, have them, make them have nothing and be happy. When people

00:59:34.320 have grievances, you know, this is what gives rise to this whole, you know, insurgent problem.

00:59:38.800 But the problem is in counterinsurgency is in order to get legitimacy in the government,

00:59:43.400 you need to take out the insurgents. But every time you take out an insurgent, you create 10 new

00:59:48.280 ones because all the bystanders who didn't have a dog in the fight, who maybe, you know, believed

00:59:53.760 what the U.S. government propaganda was saying, just saw their cousin get taken out at the wedding

00:59:58.360 and said, you know, so, so this is the problem, this, but this is also where the whole of society

01:00:03.640 framework comes from. The whole society framework comes from coin. It comes from counterintelligence.

01:00:08.540 We have a doctrine, you know, within counterinsurgency called whole of government,

01:00:11.420 whole of society, which is, which means every agency within the U.S. government and then every

01:00:16.620 institution in society. Again, coming back to this watchword institution, because this is the watchword

01:00:21.300 of censor speak. This is, you know, propping up our institutions and censoring anyone who opposes

01:00:25.880 the consensus of institutions. But, but this whole society framework is how you stop the

01:00:31.480 counterinsurgency paradox, which is that you take one, one out, 10, 10 new, you know, you create 10

01:00:37.080 new ones. If, if the pressure is coming, not just from the U.S. military, it's coming from how you get

01:00:42.980 a job in the country. So we onboard the private sector companies, they'll work, you know, either

01:00:47.260 through formal partnerships with the state department or Pentagon, or they'll be funded, or it'll be

01:00:51.400 informal, or it'll be, or it'll be back channeled through something like, you know, the, the center for

01:00:55.360 international private enterprise, which is the chamber of commerce armor of the national endowment

01:00:58.560 for democracy. And so we get the private sector companies, we get the, we get the, the universities,

01:01:03.760 the NGOs, the, you know, the activists, we get all the cultural figures, you know, involved in the

01:01:10.060 counterinsurgency effort, and we get the media involved in it. This is where the censorship

01:01:13.980 architecture was, this, this is the, what they agreed on. They literally borrowed it from the military

01:01:19.780 doctrine for, you know, to solve this, exactly this physiological response that you're articulating

01:01:26.660 right now. But getting back to this, you know, this issue around the state department and telegram,

01:01:33.560 it is, it, it is my contention that there's no way the French government would have done something

01:01:40.240 so absolutely seismic in terms of its implications for the U.S. military, for U.S. intelligence, and the

01:01:45.640 U.S. state department, U.S. state department, without walking next door down the Champs-Élysées

01:01:50.020 and, and telling the U.S. embassy in France that they were going to do this. They had an ongoing

01:01:56.820 investigation, criminal investigation into Pavel before this event took place. Macron even tweeted

01:02:04.080 that, that this was part of an ongoing investigation. It is stock common practice for the U.S. embassy,

01:02:11.080 as we discussed in the Czech Republic and Poland, it is stock common practice for the U.S. embassy

01:02:17.900 in, in, in, in a region to, to coordinate, to be notified, to be essentially a stakeholder in that

01:02:24.140 country's conversations about whether or not, uh, you know, prosecutions in the name of anti-corruption

01:02:30.440 in the name of, of anything will be done because the state department effectively has a soft veto power.

01:02:36.440 You can remember getting back to prosecutions and control of the prosecutors. This was a major

01:02:41.260 scandal with Joe Biden. Joe Biden personally threatened the government of Ukraine. He said

01:02:46.000 this at a Council on Foreign Relations, you know, committee, you know, meeting, if folks recall.

01:02:51.040 Famous tape.

01:02:51.840 Mm-hmm. A billion dollars. You want, either you get rid of your prosecutor or you lose a billion

01:02:58.940 dollars in, you know, critical, uh, you know, U.S. aid to the region. And, you know, by golly,

01:03:05.260 you know, they, they fired the prosecutor. Control over the prosecutors is control over the politics.

01:03:11.460 So the U.S. embassy in the region is constantly back channeling with the prosecutors. The idea

01:03:17.280 that this event, which is exactly what the state department has been soft calling for,

01:03:24.320 for months now, since, you know, at least months, I should, I should note, if not arguably a few

01:03:31.020 years, that this miraculous windfall, because they don't have leverage against Pavel otherwise,

01:03:36.660 you know, he's living in the UAE and they don't have the attack surface on Telegram that they had

01:03:42.380 on WhatsApp. They had this problem with WhatsApp a few years ago because WhatsApp is the other,

01:03:46.440 you know, major end-to-end encrypted chat. There's only two games in town in the encrypted chat space,

01:03:50.680 WhatsApp and Telegram. And I watched this happen with the Brazil story.

01:03:53.460 The U.S. State Department, again, capacity built by essentially bribing through tens of

01:03:58.520 billions of dollars of flooded foreign assistance to all the censorship advocates in Brazil.

01:04:04.620 This plan to stop the use of WhatsApp and Telegram by Bolsonaro supporters in Brazil

01:04:09.620 and in Modi supporters in India, places like the Atlantic Council, which has seven CIA directors on

01:04:15.880 its board, gets annual funding every single year from the U.S. State Department,

01:04:19.280 all four branches of the U.S. military, as well as CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for

01:04:23.900 Democracy. They held a conference in the summer of 2019 about the need to stop the use of WhatsApp

01:04:29.900 and Telegram in countries around the world, especially Brazil and India.

01:04:33.880 Because we can't spy on them as effectively?

01:04:35.340 Because the State Department had already censored social media, had already gotten

01:04:39.960 social media censored in those countries. Bolsonaro supporters were effectively booted from Twitter

01:04:46.300 1.0, Facebook and YouTube after 2016. They were said to be this international movement of ideas

01:04:52.720 between pro-Trump and pro-Bolsonaro. So they all, after the State Department set up this apparatus that

01:04:58.480 got them censored from social media, they all ran to WhatsApp and Telegram. And so the State Department

01:05:03.600 sort of created this encrypted chat problem. They could only talk in an uncensored way because the

01:05:09.280 State Department already censored their other main communication artery. And so WhatsApp and Telegram

01:05:16.120 were put in the crosshairs of this USAID program to kill, USAID State Department program to kill

01:05:23.500 political support for Bolsonaro. And WhatsApp bent the knee within two and a half weeks because

01:05:29.060 WhatsApp is very vulnerable. It is owned by Facebook. And Facebook is a major, major,

01:05:34.740 has a major, is a major surface attack area for WhatsApp. If you recall, Jim Jordan subpoenaed

01:05:40.340 these emails from Facebook a few months ago, the, you know, the Facebook files. And in the Facebook

01:05:45.200 files, it came out that Nick Clegg, the head of public policy, the head of the censorship terms of

01:05:50.320 service at, at Facebook did not want to cooperate with the Biden administration's demands to censor

01:05:55.500 COVID, but urged his team to do so anyway, because we have bigger fish to fry with the Biden

01:06:00.920 administration. And so we need to think creatively about ways to be receptive to their censorship

01:06:04.720 demands, because Facebook is totally dependent on the U.S. State Department, the, the, the

01:06:10.520 intelligence services, and, and to some extent, the, the long range threat of the Pentagon to protect

01:06:15.640 Facebook's data monopolies, to protect its advertising revenue, to protect it from laws like the EU

01:06:20.500 Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, which is so, and, and this has come out as well.

01:06:27.000 And I was at the State Department when I was called by nine Google lobbyists, you know, who told me that

01:06:32.200 the, that the, the number one threat to Google's business model over the next five years is the EU

01:06:37.540 Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. They need the protection of big daddy State Department

01:06:43.240 for favors for their profits. And so they play ball with the State Department censorship demands

01:06:48.920 in order to preserve that, but they are under the barrel of it. And people like Mark Zuckerberg

01:06:53.740 right now are feeling like they're at their, they're at their wits end because they gave

01:06:57.640 the State Department and they gave the Biden administration everything they asked for in

01:07:01.500 terms of censorship demands, and they're still being bullied by them. So just yesterday, Mark

01:07:05.740 Zuckerberg wrote this letter to Chairman Jim Jordan, where he came out in the strongest statement

01:07:10.420 yet that, you know, that the Biden administration forced Facebook effectively to do the

01:07:17.600 censorship, that they, that they pressured them strongly. And that, and that the only reason

01:07:22.020 they did these censorship actions, whether that was the joke, the, the Hunter Biden laptop,

01:07:26.800 or whether that was the, the COVID censorship, censoring COVID origins, censoring, you know,

01:07:32.140 all issues around, you know, the COVID regime was because of pressure from the Biden administration.

01:07:37.600 And not only that, he said that he regretted doing it and would, and now has, as structures in

01:07:44.700 place, to stop Facebook from relenting from such government pressure in the first place.

01:07:50.060 And while this is great to hear Zuckerberg say, it would have been a lot more useful four months

01:07:55.760 ago when there was a Supreme Court case under deliberation, where the Supreme Court effectively

01:08:01.480 argued that there was, there was an insufficient causal relationship between government pressure

01:08:05.260 and platform censorship action. So having a, you know, having a direct letter from Mark Zuckerberg,

01:08:10.220 uh, unequivocally saying that it, that there was, but as the head of, of Facebook would have been

01:08:16.800 very useful to establish a Supreme Court precedent, believing that aside in the sort of, you know,

01:08:21.360 uh, too little, too late nature of that. Uh, this is something that had been percolating,

01:08:25.760 you know, for, for a while. Facebook, you know, Mark Zuckerberg said that he regretted the

01:08:30.920 censorship act actions five months ago on Joe Rogan. So it's no surprise that, you know,

01:08:36.920 that Zuckerberg expressed that in writing, but the fact that he would do it to the Republican chairman

01:08:43.320 of the house weaponization committee. And the fact that he said he's no longer supporting Democrats in

01:08:48.520 this election cycle, uh, signals to me that he fears the blob now and, and feels like the Harris

01:08:58.180 administration's continuity of the Biden administration's pressure policies, that there's

01:09:02.020 no amount of flesh that he can give up as a pound to satiate their bloodlust and, and that he's

01:09:07.820 turning, if not towards Trump, then towards something that's against that and trying to provide

01:09:13.600 whatever moral support to that without making a direct contribution to the, to the other side,

01:09:19.880 sort of maintaining the sort of patina of neutrality on financial and, and, uh, messaging grounds.

01:09:25.960 He's not doing what Elon is doing by voicing explicit support. He's not, you know, providing financial

01:09:30.980 support, but he is, he is very strongly motioning there because I think he thinks that the neutrality

01:09:36.600 of a Biden, of a Trump administration, because Trump was neutral, Trump was completely neutral,

01:09:41.320 frankly, to the point where he should not have been. I mean, you had American platforms who were

01:09:47.160 censoring the American people who had voted for that government and, and, you know, blasting away

01:09:52.940 at our first amendment and doing so, you know, the fact is, is all of the government, you know,

01:09:56.860 how can you protect government? How can the government protect platforms that are censoring

01:10:01.420 the speech of Americans? This would be like the state department, you know, supporting ExxonMobil

01:10:06.320 and overthrowing governments to get oil and gas for ExxonMobil while ExxonMobil was cutting half

01:10:11.500 of Americans off at the pipe, you know, at the, at the pump at a gas station, if they voted for,

01:10:16.560 you know, Eisenhower. I mean, this is, this is, it's such an abuse. It's honestly the end of this sort

01:10:24.660 of idea that this favors or favors relationship between big government and big, big corporations

01:10:29.980 has a trickle down effect to help the welfare of the American people. This has always been the

01:10:34.780 justification for the national champion policy at the state department that when the big, when big

01:10:39.820 government, when the Pentagon and state department and CIA and USAID and the whole swarm of soft power

01:10:44.060 institutions do favors for ExxonMobil or Microsoft or Walmart or Pepsi, then that means cheaper retail

01:10:51.700 products for us. We have the export markets because we control that government. We have the natural

01:10:55.340 resources. So we have cheap gas, middle-class living, but this has completely inverted that

01:11:01.320 because it's big government teaming up with big corporations specifically to deprive Americans of

01:11:08.040 access to those platforms. But again, it's to protect the institutions against the individuals.

01:11:13.740 It's to protect this, you know, this, this constellation of cloistered foreign policy institutions

01:11:19.740 and their, and their international agenda installed at a regional level on every plot of dirt on earth

01:11:26.720 from being opposed by people who might vote against them organically in a free and open information

01:11:32.300 market. What happens to Pavel Durov? It's unclear what kind of pressure may be mounted to set him

01:11:44.220 free. There have been suggestions that potentially the UAE may take some steps on, on, on, on confirmed.

01:11:53.160 The one player in the room who could exert enough pressure to set Pavel free is unfortunately,

01:12:01.200 potentially one of the players who may be implicated in his arrest in the first place. And again,

01:12:06.100 this comes back to the U S embassy in France. And which is why I believe that questions need to be

01:12:11.400 asked by the house foreign affairs committee to ambassador Denise Bauer, were there previous

01:12:15.700 communications, previous emails, previous meetings, previous dialogue with French intelligence,

01:12:21.720 French law enforcement, uh, or, or members of the French government. And when I say, were there, you know,

01:12:26.540 meetings or communications or dialogue, I don't just mean directly by the U S embassy. I also mean through

01:12:31.460 the U S embassy's back channels, which is that many times this is done directly by the U S embassy,

01:12:36.080 but many times it's done by a back channel, which is that instead of the U S embassy talking with French

01:12:42.060 law enforcement directly, a back channel, someone from, uh, a civil society institution funded by the

01:12:48.620 state department, you know, like an, an Atlantic town council type organization or a, or, uh, you know,

01:12:55.480 a, a former member of the state department has these conversations, does this lobbying, does this

01:13:01.420 coordination and then reports to the state department for, you know, updates on the conversations about

01:13:06.780 the, the anti-corruption, uh, prosecution. And then the state department provides guidance to the

01:13:11.340 back channel and the back channel continues the negotiations or pressure. And so, you know,

01:13:15.920 yet the sweep has to be total here because the implications of the U S embassy, either coordinating

01:13:23.280 or at the very least approving this are, are seismic because again, of telegrams, critical

01:13:28.960 military intelligence role in countering Russia and statecraft role in everything that the state

01:13:34.520 department does. Cause again, if Russia does have a backend access to telegram, whether they cracked

01:13:40.580 it through their cyber hackers or whether Pavel had some secret agreement, that means every rent a

01:13:46.040 riot revolution that the CIA does using telegram all over the world is also being, you know, secretly

01:13:52.140 monitored by the Russians. And maybe that's why they were, it was unsuccessful in Belarus. Maybe that's

01:13:56.940 why it was unsuccessful with Alexei Navalny in, in Russia. And they do make, you know, points about

01:14:02.380 the fact that, you know, Russian military uses it freely over half of Russia uses it. Uh, and you

01:14:08.640 know, they point to questions around, around the funding in order to make that argument. So you do

01:14:14.060 have these U S interests, but you also have French interests. Again, I'm not making. Do they have

01:14:17.600 evidence? I mean, the U S funded the creation of signal. It doesn't mean right. And tons of people use

01:14:23.340 signal. Right. Do they have evidence of this? I mean, Pavel Derov left Russia in 2014 in his account.

01:14:31.780 And I think this is true. He felt like he had to leave. He didn't want to leave. He's Russian.

01:14:36.420 Right. But the Putin administration was trying to control telegram and he famously gave the finger

01:14:41.780 to Putin on camera and left and took citizenship in other countries. So like, do they, they, as someone

01:14:48.240 who's been accused of being a Russian asset a million times when I don't speak Russian? And

01:14:54.500 of course, I'm not even that interested in Russia. I'm sensitive to that, uh, to that slander.

01:15:01.760 And I just want to know, like, do they have actual evidence that Putin has a backdoor to telegram?

01:15:06.620 I, it sounds like like a lie to me, but.

01:15:09.440 Well, they argue there would be no other reason for the Russian military to use it, you know,

01:15:15.000 in such an unfettered fashion for, for, you know, official Russian military documents to,

01:15:19.640 you know, to advocate the use of telegram.

01:15:22.800 Of course, there would be another reason, which is it's secure.

01:15:25.320 Right. They, well, if you read CIA media on this, again, being a pointing to what Radio Free

01:15:31.220 Europe wrote two weeks after your interview with Pavel, it was that things may have, well,

01:15:36.020 Telegram.

01:15:36.320 Radio Free Europe is disgusting. Let me just say, I haven't grown up around it. I'm just shocked

01:15:41.360 by what it's become. It's disgusting and they should be ashamed of themselves.

01:15:44.200 Well, Radio Free Europe was lauding, uh, you know, telegram from 2014 to 2020. What they

01:15:48.980 argue is that something may have changed beginning in 2021 with a new round of funding, I believe

01:15:55.280 a debt round, you know, a large dollar figure debt round that was raised. And they argue that

01:16:02.460 there may have been Russian investors in that. And so there may have been some payoff. And so

01:16:07.180 because of that, Russia only stuck because for two years, they were pursuing banning telegram

01:16:12.580 from, uh, from Russia, but then they, they stopped it. And at the time that was considered

01:16:17.980 a major free speech victory by the United States and by the state department, they applauded

01:16:22.900 the NGO pressure on Russia and the threat of sanctions on Russia for if they went ahead

01:16:28.460 and banned telegram. But the fact that they relented and then ubiquitously used telegram,

01:16:33.580 actually telegram usage in Russia massively surged after the ban. Uh, there's only about 10% of

01:16:40.660 Russians who used it before the ban and now it's over 50%. And so they argue between the funding,

01:16:45.000 between the fact that they're losing in all these places where they use telegram now and that,

01:16:49.800 that, you know, Russia may be, may be keen to it. And the fact that there was that the ban,

01:16:54.420 that the attempted ban was dropped and then a massive surge in usage afterwards can only mean

01:16:59.140 that Russia, you know, um, began, began to be pro telegram because of a secret deal between them.

01:17:05.660 So in other words, Ukraine is losing a land war against a country with a hundred million more

01:17:12.900 people because Pavel Durov has some secret arrangement with Putin. I mean, this is the

01:17:19.320 kind of fantastical childish thinking that makes empires fall actually. I mean, the total inability

01:17:27.080 to deal with reality, to assess your own shortcomings, to be honest about anything as it pertains to

01:17:33.960 yourself, to be honest about yourself and how much you suck. Those are fatal weaknesses in people

01:17:39.960 and in countries. And it, I grieve to see the U S government fall into that kind of self-indulgent

01:17:46.600 fantasy. Right. But, but think about the amazing windfall that just befell the CIA. They've had no

01:17:53.320 leverage against Pavel this entire time. And yet the entire Russian military architecture is built on

01:17:58.400 telegram, all high level Russian military military and political officials, the internal workings of,

01:18:04.220 of Russian statecraft and deliberations all happen on telegram. And there has, there has been no window

01:18:10.460 into that because of Pavel's belief in free speech. So now if Pavel cracks under interrogation,

01:18:16.340 if he cracks under pressure, suddenly all communications of all Russian citizens and all Russian military

01:18:22.120 officials and all Russian diplomats that were taking place on telegram for the past five years are now in the

01:18:28.100 hands of the CIA. So this is in a, in a, why don't we just torture him to death? I mean, like, why,

01:18:33.680 why not just like, just drop the pretense and just like, we're North Korea now, um, with slightly better

01:18:39.920 infrastructure, just slightly, um, and like, stop pretending. Cause that's what this is. They're like

01:18:45.100 torturing a man. Um, and in the process stripping us of our God-given speech rights and our right to

01:18:52.640 privacy that they're always crowing about, but only when it pertains to abortion. I mean, this is so

01:18:57.760 immoral what we're participating in. Does anybody, does like even occur to all the creeps on the

01:19:05.200 internet, the Atlantic Council, Alexander Vindman, all the people who think this is great. Does it

01:19:09.260 occur to them that like, they're no better than North Korea in this situation? Well, I think from

01:19:15.980 the Ukrainian perspective, they say our people are dying. We're being massacred by the Russians. And so,

01:19:21.020 you know, free speech has to be a casualty of, you know, of this war and so. And religious freedom

01:19:26.820 and the Russian Orthodox church and, you know, the freedom of like priests to celebrate the

01:19:31.540 Eucharist, like they're in jail now. So it's like, but at a certain point, like what, do you think

01:19:36.520 anyone in Ukraine looks over to Washington and says, you know, you promised us this was a good idea

01:19:40.960 where they've lost at least 600,000 Ukrainians. They've lost the right to their land. Their land can now

01:19:48.320 be bought by foreign corporations. They just made that change and it will be. And like all of that

01:19:52.720 is because they follow the advice of Washington. Do you think they think that? Well, it doesn't

01:19:56.000 matter what the people of Ukraine think. They're not a lot of elections. You're right. They can't

01:20:00.820 vote their way out of it. There's no, there's no elections. And mind you, you know, you can look,

01:20:05.420 everyone listening right now can look up something called the red lines memo from, from the Ukraine

01:20:09.480 crisis media group, which is basically a conglomerate of, you know, all these U.S. funded NGOs and civil

01:20:16.880 society institutions in Ukraine. Uh, the, and they sent a so-called, the so-called red lines memo to

01:20:24.000 Zelensky when he took office and they threatened Zelensky in that letter that if he took any of

01:20:29.500 the below actions on security policy, on energy policy, on media policy, on cultural policy, uh,

01:20:36.320 seven or eight different buckets of, of internal policies that Zelensky might pursue, that if he

01:20:43.320 crossed any of the red lines in terms of restoring use of the Russian language on Ukrainian TV or,

01:20:49.520 um, you know, interfering with, uh, the privatization of NAFTA gas and things like this,

01:20:54.740 that if he crossed those red, any of the red lines of the, the policy issues articulated by this U.S.

01:21:04.240 constellation, uh, you know, this U.S. NGO, which is an umbrella for all these other

01:21:07.700 State Department NGOs, that Ukraine would face immediate political destabilization if, uh, if any

01:21:15.280 of those policies were enacted, basically the same rent-a-riots that were, uh, that were deployed

01:21:20.300 by the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, and to some extent the

01:21:24.040 Pentagon in the 2014 Maidan protests would be redeployed against Zelensky if he decided to chart

01:21:31.120 an independent course for the Ukrainian people, that he would be run out of office the same way,

01:21:36.060 you know, his predecessor Yanukovych was, uh, by the same forces if he did something that was in

01:21:42.960 the will of the Ukrainian people, but opposed the U.S. State Department. This is so grotesque.

01:21:47.760 I just want to pause now and ask you, anyone who's followed this conversation to this point,

01:22:05.340 um, finds it as probably as compelling as I do. So for people who want, I never do this, but in

01:22:10.760 your case, it's, I want people to read what you write. Where's the best place to follow you much

01:22:17.580 more closely than just your appearances here? On X, at Mike Ben Cyber, all one word, at Mike Ben Cyber.

01:22:24.680 Um, you know, I'm prolific. I, I believe in this. I understand what is, you know, probably going to

01:22:31.060 happen to me at some point, but I, again, I'm my, my dog in this fight is not changing U.S. foreign

01:22:39.480 policy to change U.S. foreign policy. Let others decide what to do in Ukraine, what to do all over

01:22:45.780 the world. I did not, I could, I can understand both sides of the issue. I can understand the sort

01:22:51.360 of anti-imperialist. These are human rights violations. You know, we should not be toppling

01:22:56.200 democratically elected governments. I can also understand that it's a big, bad world out there.

01:23:00.420 And if we don't do it, somebody else will, and we need capacities in place to do that.

01:23:04.560 It's a complicated issue. The problem is, is we don't have a democracy when, when our entire

01:23:11.220 political structure is about hearts and minds of the people. That's what democracy is.

01:23:16.620 Hearts and minds of the people are determined by the information ecosystem, freedom of speech.

01:23:20.880 And so if you don't have the freedom of speech to be able to influence hearts and minds and the

01:23:25.760 hearts and minds to be able to give rise to a, to a free and fair election, well, then

01:23:30.300 who's in who you don't have a democracy. You have, you have a military junta effectively.

01:23:35.660 And, and, you know, it's the point that you made before that the legitimacy all falls out.

01:23:39.500 And so all I care about is free, is free speech on the internet. And so.

01:23:44.040 Well, it sounds like what you care about is America. You care about the country that you live in.

01:23:48.020 Yes. Right. And to that point, I want to make another sort of note here, which is that I'm not coming out

01:23:55.300 making a facial allegation that it's, that the United States was the driving force behind Pavel's

01:24:01.620 arrest. I believe that it is highly unlikely that they were not coordinating or encouraging it.

01:24:06.780 And I believe that at the very least there was approval and approval is a sort of light

01:24:13.180 standard. That's a little bit less damning because all it means is that the U S did not

01:24:16.520 was notified, but did not apply counter pressure.

01:24:19.340 Well, sure. But I mean, you could also say, and I would say, having seen it a million times in my

01:24:23.180 long life, when a foreign country, particularly an ally like France does something we disagree with,

01:24:28.480 we can issue a note of protest. The state department could say, we, you know, we disapprove of that.

01:24:33.600 We support human rights, including the right to speech and the right to privacy, et cetera,

01:24:37.520 et cetera. And we didn't do that. Right. No, we can threaten to cut off aid. We can

01:24:40.820 threaten to cut off contracts to French companies. Or just publicly disapprove. I mean, it's France is

01:24:46.340 an ally. If we, if the president has got out or Tony Blinken or the U S ambassador to France and just

01:24:53.240 said, we're against this, that would be a lot. And everyone right now, go to the Twitter page of

01:24:56.820 the U S ambassador to France on X. There's no public statements about it. There's been no statement by the

01:25:01.640 state department, no statement by the U S embassy in France.

01:25:05.540 When an American citizen called Gonzalo Lira was killed by the Ukrainian government, he died in

01:25:09.860 prison for criticizing the Ukrainian government, a government that we support and control in the

01:25:15.720 name of democracy and freedom. The U S state department said nothing, right? The Biden administration

01:25:20.060 said nothing. They approved. Of course. But again, they're behind this in so many cases that

01:25:24.920 it seems highly unlikely, especially given how amazing a windfall this is to the United States

01:25:30.900 foreign policy establishment on this, but there's sort of two related points I want to make about

01:25:35.300 France here, which is that France does have its own independent reasons for doing this, which is that

01:25:40.640 France's whole financial empire is dependent on Africa. They have, you know, France still has a sort

01:25:47.280 of semi-colonial empire, 14 countries in Africa, you know, who basically, you know, use French currency

01:25:54.360 in our Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa, mostly. Yes. And France also derives the lion's share of its

01:26:00.600 own energy resources. And they have had a big problem in the past. So the French, the famous French

01:26:06.620 nuclear program, nuclear energy program, which is, I think the biggest in the world. Yes. 75% of France's

01:26:14.860 energy comes from nuclear. And that comes from Niger. That comes from a French speaking African

01:26:19.020 country, the uranium. Exactly. Exactly. So three out of every four light bulbs in France are, you know,

01:26:24.880 are turned on by the uranium, you know, effectively in Niger and a few other places. And the French

01:26:31.320 lost control of Niger to Russia just last year. You know, there was a, there was a military coup as

01:26:37.280 there was in Mali and several other places where it was a military coup, if not orchestrated,

01:26:43.580 backstopped by the Russian military in these, in these countries, one after another, you've had

01:26:49.160 four or five French colonies effectively fall to Russian military activity in Africa. And so they've

01:26:56.720 lost control over their, their access in, in Niger, for example, they had to close down their embassy.

01:27:00.960 They, all of their, all the French troops, which had their largest presence in Africa were all evicted.

01:27:07.200 They've, they lost all of the soft power influence, you know, over these countries. And in these

01:27:12.260 countries, the, the Africans are burning French flags and raising Russian flags. In fact, you know,

01:27:18.760 many of these African countries are now cutting off diplomatic ties with Ukraine because of how

01:27:23.760 close their affiliation with Russia is because of Russian military competence and, and activity in

01:27:30.260 Africa. France is losing the ability to keep the lights on. Yeah. So, and it should be noted,

01:27:35.460 however, that Russia is doing this because under Macron, France has been jumping up and down about the

01:27:41.480 Ukraine war on pretending to be a meaningful part of NATO, which they are not. And just sort of

01:27:46.120 pretending that they still have a meaningful empire. Everyone cares, anyone cares at all what

01:27:50.000 they think. And they've annoyed Russia to the point where I think this is payback.

01:27:54.080 Right. But Russian, the Russian military is built on telegram, everything they do. Now,

01:27:59.080 now that's not necessarily public telegram channels, but the, but the private, the private version with

01:28:05.240 the end to end encryption and the anonymous, you know, the anonymous forwarding, the ability to

01:28:08.740 aggregate everybody, you know, in a private, in a Russian private military contractor into a,

01:28:13.200 into a common telegram channel, only telegram has that capacity. No other, you know, they can't post

01:28:17.800 this on Facebook. Uh, and they're not going to use Facebook owned CIA intermediated WhatsApp.

01:28:23.640 All they have is telegram for that. So if, if French intelligence is able to get Pavel to sing

01:28:29.820 under questioning or interrogation or threats of spending the rest of his life in prison,

01:28:33.720 France may be able to, you know, finally have a chance to, to retake the colonies that were

01:28:38.320 lost to Russia. Okay. Let me just say though, I would much rather be monitored by the Russian

01:28:44.360 military, by the Israelis, by any foreign government than I would by my own government

01:28:49.680 because I live here. First of all, my government has no right as a, I think a statutory matter to

01:28:56.160 monitor me. Um, but also the implications of being monitored by a foreign government as an American

01:29:01.520 are not as big a deal as they are when I'm monitored by my government. Do you see what I'm saying?

01:29:05.720 No, absolutely. Well, actually there's a great point along this, which gets right to the France

01:29:10.360 story in this intersection between us and French interests, us and French shared military intelligence

01:29:15.840 and diplomatic and economic interests in, in arresting Pavel and finally getting the leverage

01:29:20.860 they've craved for so long to be able to both control telegrams, content moderation practice to

01:29:26.240 ban all Russian propaganda channels, which are infecting the minds of everyone from Ukraine to

01:29:30.300 Belarus to, you know, to sub-Saharan Africa, but also the, you know, the ability to get this backend

01:29:36.360 access to, for, you know, to, to read every Russian text message effectively. There, there's a great

01:29:42.400 example of this in terms of blowback on Americans. So we've talked about this, this group, the Atlanta

01:29:46.820 council, which bills itself as, as, uh, NATO's think tank. It is again, a lot of people don't even know

01:29:52.900 seven CIA directors are still alive, let alone all clustered together on the board of directors

01:29:58.440 of a, you know, of an, an NG, a NATO think tank. Uh, but it gets annual funding from the Pentagon,

01:30:06.840 the state department and CIA cutouts, like, like the national number of democracy, as well as USAID.

01:30:12.120 There are 11 different federal government agencies who all provide federal government funding every

01:30:16.720 single year to what is effectively the civilian influence arm of NATO. Now in March, 2018, the

01:30:24.020 Atlanta council published a, um, a set of white papers called democratic defense against disinformation.

01:30:30.480 And, and in the, in the March, 2018 version of it, the cover photo, again, this is funded by the

01:30:36.400 United States Pentagon, United States state department, United States intelligence service, uh, conduits

01:30:40.820 the front page of this memo called democratic defense against disinformation, which called for

01:30:46.700 this whole of society playbook about how, how the government could organize civil society,

01:30:52.440 censorship from the civil society side, censorship from the private sector side, censorship, uh,

01:30:56.440 advocacy in media organizations. The cover of the memo of the memo was a giant net network map,

01:31:03.100 a network narrative map of the, of the French election, because at the time there was some

01:31:09.680 WikiLeaks had published something called the Macron leaks, which were these sensitive, politically

01:31:14.280 embarrassing, you know, emails, uh, involving Macron when he was neck and neck in the race against

01:31:19.680 Marine Le Pen in 2018. And the front page of it, you know, had in red all these narrative network

01:31:26.020 maps of, of French citizens and Russians, but there were two big green network nodes, uh, that were

01:31:34.500 highlighted at the front of the memo. And one of them was a big network node saying WikiLeaks.

01:31:39.020 The other one was a big network node saying Jack Posobiec. Now let me just, you understand what's

01:31:45.380 going on here. WikiLeaks had published these Macron leaks and Jack Posobiec at the time was this large,

01:31:50.980 you know, us based us citizen social media influencer who was one of the first and most aggressive to

01:31:57.360 popularize the distribution of these Macron leaks on social media. And that was considered an attack

01:32:04.260 on democracy by effectively the Pentagon, the state department, the CIA, NATO. They were not

01:32:11.620 targeting Russians. They were not targeting French. They were targeting a U S citizen for amplifying

01:32:18.460 now publicly available documents that might undermine political support for NATO's preferred

01:32:25.880 political puppet in France. By telling the truth.

01:32:29.100 By publishing true documents. Yeah. That's exactly right. So what I'm saying is there was no

01:32:35.780 allegation. It wasn't like the Hunter Biden laptop in the first weeks where this isn't real. No one

01:32:40.060 contested the fact these were real. These were real, but you just weren't allowed to see them because

01:32:43.620 you can't know the truth because it might make you harder to control. Well, this is the issue is

01:32:48.080 these, this is a U S citizen. This is a U S funded institution gets millions of dollars every year.

01:32:54.960 It has seven CIA directors on its board. The army funds it, the Navy funds it, the air force funds

01:33:00.240 it, USA funds it, the state department. And in the crosshairs of the cover page of the memo is a U S

01:33:07.920 citizen for doing what? That wasn't even a U S event. It was an American citizen publishing about a

01:33:14.960 election in a galaxy far, far away. How much is it going to take if we colonize Mars and there's an

01:33:22.640 election on Mars. Can the central intelligence agency organize the censorship of an American

01:33:27.720 citizen because the CIA's preferred puppet for the, you know, electoral race on Mars, you know,

01:33:34.120 is being undermined because of a social media post, uh, from someone living in rural Montana.

01:33:40.920 There's no end to this. It's, it, there isn't, it's been ongoing, you know, much longer than I

01:33:46.940 realized. And I think that's part of the problem is that people who consider themselves non-liberal or

01:33:53.000 opponents of the democratic party. I've certainly considered myself that we're the slowest to figure

01:33:58.600 out that the DOD, the Pentagon, the military, um, and the Intel agencies, particularly the CIA,

01:34:05.940 also law enforcement, FBI, DHS, that they were, um, threats to the country and to us. And they

01:34:13.740 reflexively supported them. And that's all a 49 year old hangover from the church committee hearings

01:34:19.620 in 1975, where it was like all the conservatives are like, Oh, shut up. You're not patriotic. But

01:34:25.600 actually the left knew right away that what matters is the institutions that are armed. Guns matter.

01:34:31.620 Guns matter more than anything. And so you want to have the armed institutions on your side and use

01:34:36.640 them to oppress your political opponents. And they did that. And it took Republicans. Well,

01:34:40.620 they still haven't figured it out. They're like, you know, check in the box on funding DOD to like,

01:34:46.320 you know, more than any military in the history of the world to lose war after war for 80 years.

01:34:51.880 And they don't understand that they're signing their own death warrant and the, and the death

01:34:54.840 warrant of American democracy. It's like freaking infuriate. It must drive you crazy as a former

01:35:00.200 federal employee. Well, I mean, you nailed it there. What they are doing to populism is what they used

01:35:06.540 to do to communism. If you remember what actually, you know, started the church committee hearings,

01:35:11.020 what gave it the political legitimacy to finally have its day in Congress was the fact that

01:35:14.840 the CIA and the Pentagon and the FBI were all interfering in domestic politics and the Democrats

01:35:22.180 to stop the anti-war faction. In a big way.

01:35:25.180 Domestic political support for, you know, for anti-Vietnam is what was killing the funding

01:35:30.260 legitimacy for, for the war in Vietnam. And it was killing the political mandate. And so it,

01:35:36.700 you know, there's, we have this doctrine, you know, the four theaters of war, we, you know,

01:35:39.960 the four domains of war, this is this U S army doctrine, which is, you know, there's the strategic,

01:35:44.780 the logistical, sorry, the strategic, the tactical, the logistical, and the political four ways you can

01:35:49.440 win or lose a war, you know, on the strategic side is, you know, the grand strategy of it on the

01:35:54.680 tactical side, it's, you know, who, who are you going to attack? How, when the logistics is,

01:35:59.280 how do you get the supplies there? How do you get the funding for it? And the political is,

01:36:03.620 do you have political support at home to be able to fund the logistics, to be able to,

01:36:09.140 to do these particular tactics? You know, if you, if the, if the war is not popular at home,

01:36:13.580 you don't get the funding for all the logistics that you need. You don't get approval for certain

01:36:17.900 tactics that would be deemed human rights violations or war crimes. And so you can, you know,

01:36:23.320 the U S military establishment believes that we lost Vietnam. You know, this is famous called,

01:36:28.000 you know, Vietnam syndrome because we lost in the political domain. This is why the,

01:36:32.220 the, the U S state department and the CIA fund anti-war movements domestically within countries

01:36:38.520 that we go to war with. We pump up the anti-war voices in the country, the anti, the anti-war

01:36:45.100 parliamentarians who might be in control of that country's budget in order to undermine their own

01:36:51.240 ability to capacity, build the war. And this is what's happened here. You know, this was this

01:36:55.780 George H W Bush quote, you know, by God, we kicked Vietnam syndrome when he brought CNN,

01:37:01.040 you know, onto military airplanes to, uh, you know, to propagandize how great the war was.

01:37:06.660 And this is why the media has been so intensely onboarded, uh, in all Pentagon operations, you know,

01:37:14.220 since, since. And yet they're still very unpopular. They're extremely unpopular. The, the Iraq war

01:37:18.840 looking backward, whatever the hell we tried to do in Syria, whatever we did in Libya, um,

01:37:26.280 the 20 years in Afghanistan, those are all seen as failures by a huge percentage of the American

01:37:31.340 population, despite the relentless propaganda. So that should really matter. If the majority of

01:37:37.100 the public is against something, we shouldn't do it because we were supposed to be in charge of the

01:37:40.520 government. Well, this is where I come back to doctrine. When, when you are a part of this

01:37:44.820 apparatus, you are, you are now taught that what democracy means is the institutions,

01:37:50.920 the democratic institutions, the government institutions, the NGO institutions, the media

01:37:55.380 institutions, and, and any private sector companies. It's a really deep and important

01:37:59.760 insight. You said that about what a year ago, you first said that I heard you say it about a year ago

01:38:04.080 and it changed my thinking completely. But this is also because, you know, I'm hearing you react to

01:38:10.440 how evil it all is. No, no, no, no, wait, actually, no, I'm glad you did because I think this is a

01:38:16.420 useful point for the American public to understand, which is that when you're in this thing, it doesn't

01:38:24.000 look like it does from the outside because the language of censors speak is, is a very unique one

01:38:32.360 in the same way that Marxism, you know, sort of rose to some level of cultural mainstream because of

01:38:38.320 a decade of incubation in universities, you know, developing this esoteric jargon, you know, this

01:38:45.780 sort of a Lego tower of abstractions and concepts that went the, when it was finally rolled out to

01:38:53.040 the public, the public could have a sort of set of frameworks to rationalize and support it. There is

01:38:59.000 a thick lexicon of censor speak that totally takes the human element out of it. So when you are a part of

01:39:06.080 this censorship apparatus, you don't really feel like you are censoring people. I'll give you an

01:39:10.860 example. They don't refer to, to people who they censor as citizens or people. They refer to them as

01:39:18.960 cyber threat actors. Okay. So when you are, when you are censoring-

01:39:24.080 When they kill them, they don't say they kill them, they liquidate them.

01:39:26.480 Right, right. Yes. Or neutralize. Yes. When you, they don't refer to your tweets or your Facebook

01:39:33.640 posts or your YouTube video, they call those incidents. So, so, you know, so-

01:39:41.620 Because your opinions are a crime.

01:39:42.680 Right. When, when you capacity build with tens of millions of dollars,

01:39:48.800 U.S. funded censorship mercenary firms, you are not funding censorship. You are building digital

01:39:56.200 resilience. You are engaging in a media literacy campaign.

01:40:01.080 Is it all girls running this? Because this is, you're using the very feminine language here.

01:40:05.220 It's, it's, it's quite egalitarian, I would, I would say. There's, it's, it's an interesting

01:40:11.220 blend in terms of the cast of characters, but the one commonality is they are all vetted.

01:40:16.860 They are all financially dependent on the resources of the blob of this, of the Pentagon, the State

01:40:24.140 Department, USAID, and, and the related swarm army of NGOs who then trickle that down. As I get back

01:40:31.580 to, for example, the National Science Foundation is who's funding all the universities. The Pentagon

01:40:35.880 is funding, you know, countless censorship mercenary firms. USAID, again, has these entire

01:40:41.200 programs with thousands of these, you know, censorship promoting media organizations, censorship,

01:40:47.620 you know, post-flagging, you know, disinformation experts. And so you, you enter this kind of

01:40:55.100 cloistered world with its own language. And there's also a sort of moral justification because

01:41:01.200 these people have unbelievable amounts of power over a kind of godlike feeling over the political

01:41:10.200 ebbs and flows of every country on earth. And yet, you know, they don't necessarily make very much

01:41:16.080 to reflect what they, you know, what they do. I mean, think about the power that the director of

01:41:20.180 the Central Intelligence Agency has, and yet makes less than Tony Fauci, makes less than a six-year,

01:41:27.120 you know, associate, junior, you know, mid-level associate at a New York law firm. And yet this

01:41:32.060 person determines, you know, the rise and fall of, you know, virtually every, you know, every country on

01:41:39.500 earth, or at least has significant influence over it. So the money networks are very important because

01:41:45.000 this has become a boon field. I call it, I don't, I call it the censorship industry

01:41:50.080 because that's the most useful way to understand what the glue that keeps everything together.

01:41:56.140 It is a censorship industrial complex, but it is the industry that keeps the app or every,

01:42:02.720 all the cogs in the wheel going. The private sectors make bank because they do government favors.

01:42:09.040 This is why Microsoft, for example, is such a huge player in the, you know, in the censorship

01:42:13.800 apparatus. They're a huge private sector partner in the whole society network under the, under the

01:42:19.120 private sector banner, because Microsoft is, is hugely dependent on foreign markets, hugely dependent

01:42:25.280 on the U S state department to negotiate on their behalf, to be able to stop foreign laws that might

01:42:29.980 undermine their, you know, that might undermine their profitability. You know, they have almost 10%

01:42:35.020 of their, of their, you know, profits coming from China. So they will join these national

01:42:39.880 endowment for democracy, you know, censorship ecosystems in 2018, when all this was at its sort

01:42:44.860 of adolescent stage of getting created. And when the real concrete of the, of the bricks was getting

01:42:51.640 laid down while there's still some mortar that would be developed in 2019, 2020, you know,

01:42:56.320 Microsoft created this protecting democracy program, which became this major in-house censorship

01:43:01.380 incubator. And they participate in all the DHS censorship meetings, all of the CIA cutout,

01:43:06.920 you know, censorship meetings through the national endowment for democracy, because Microsoft's

01:43:11.580 financial interests are dependent on the government and they are putting a favor in the favor bank to

01:43:15.500 the government by doing it. And the government will in turn reward them by telling that foreign

01:43:20.300 government who, whose political prospects are now protected because all their opposition is censored

01:43:25.760 to do favors for Microsoft. And this is what you, this is why there's such a huge stakeholder

01:43:31.280 apparatus in all of this. You know, one of the four, I've talked about the national endowment for

01:43:35.060 democracy many times here. They have four cores that they call it, you know, the NDI, this was the

01:43:40.220 DNC branch of, of, you know, this CIA cutout. Hunter Biden was on the chairman's advisory board.

01:43:45.460 Nina Jankovitz was a part of it. I mean, just so you can understand the pedigree of this,

01:43:48.980 the international Republican Institute is the, is the RNC branch of it. Mitt Romney's on the board.

01:43:52.640 IRI, John McCain's old group. Exactly. Started it and ran it for 25 years.

01:43:57.960 And the third one is their union branch called the Solidarity Center. So this is basically the CIA

01:44:03.160 intermediary, CIA back channeling with unions because unions play a major role in the rent-a-riots,

01:44:08.980 you know, in Belarus, for example. It's a very, this is how you get workers without a lot to lose

01:44:15.260 who, you know, a little bit of money goes a long way. These are the people who are in control of

01:44:21.220 how the trains work. You can, part of this playbook for destabilizing a country is you

01:44:25.960 shut down all the instruments the government could use. So you shut down the railroads,

01:44:29.540 you block the highways, the hospital, you know, workers all, all walk out. The teachers from the

01:44:35.800 teachers unions all walk out. And so the CIA has to have a back channel to that. So that's the,

01:44:40.320 you know, Solidarity Center among other linkages there. But the fourth one, the fourth of the core

01:44:44.480 four is called the Center for International Private Enterprise. And this is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

01:44:48.600 commercial interests in the region that the CIA is orchestrating a regime change operation in,

01:44:54.180 or is putting influence on the existing government. And so this is a, it was a major event in the

01:44:59.400 Republican Party when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce turned against Trump. The only parody that the

01:45:04.320 Republican Party had against Democrats for the past hundred years has been the fact that,

01:45:08.720 that the Republic, that while Democrats had the media, Hollywood, music and culture, unions,

01:45:16.380 and to some extent finance, Republicans had the war industry, the energy industry, and the Chamber

01:45:23.180 of Commerce. Because the, you know, these Chamber of Commerce companies preferred Republicanism for

01:45:28.580 its free market, enterprise, free enterprise, and low, low tax structure. The problem is Trump sort

01:45:34.620 of, you know, stepped on a, on a rattlesnake with this idea of making America first and American

01:45:42.680 nationalism to the extent that it cut back on American interventionalism, you know, American,

01:45:48.240 you know, over, you know, constant democracy promotion abroad. He was the first president

01:45:52.440 in 40 years not to, you know, declare a new war effectively. So you had all these Chamber of Commerce

01:45:58.520 companies whose, the lion's share of the revenue is dependent on foreign markets or whose supply chains

01:46:04.180 are sourced in foreign countries. And they need a big, bad CIA. They need a big, bad State

01:46:09.180 Department. They need a big, bad USAID and a big, bad Pentagon if necessary. And so Trumpism became

01:46:15.700 a, a sort of threat to the bottom line of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And so the fact, so I come

01:46:23.320 back to this because the commercial interests here are sort of driving what's happening at the

01:46:28.800 intelligence and military and diplomatic policy level, if that makes sense. You know, for example,

01:46:34.780 take Ukraine, right? Ukraine, it was not just, you know, the overthrow of the government in 2014

01:46:41.640 there. Yes, it was a State Department operation. Yes, it was a, you know, USAID funded CIA directed

01:46:47.960 operation as well as with the British government. But who are the financial stakeholders? Why do they

01:46:53.680 do it? Well, the Ukrainian government had just rejected a U.S. Embassy IMF trade deal and sided with

01:47:01.180 Russia. They were, they were squeamish about privatizing NAFTA gas. And the, at the time,

01:47:08.280 the U.S. College of Corporations, these Chamber of Commerce companies, the oil and gas companies

01:47:13.360 had all made massive investments in the Ukrainian energy sphere because the long range plan was to

01:47:18.440 bankrupt Gazprom and take the, you know, trillion dollar market that Gazprom has into Europe, cut them

01:47:24.760 off and have NATO-based energy companies take their market for them. So, and, and the plan was

01:47:31.420 beautiful. If you, if you kill Gazprom, first of all, you have a national security bracket for doing

01:47:35.920 it because if you kill Gazprom, there goes the Russian military. So now, you know, Russia's threat

01:47:40.000 in Africa is neutralized. Russia can't oppose the Pentagon in Syria and in other places. So there's

01:47:46.480 a lot of national security Pentagon reasons to pursue that. But then you had the, all these U.S.

01:47:52.160 companies ink all these deals between 2011 and 2013 with the Ukrainian energy sector.

01:47:57.840 Chevron spent, signed a $10 billion deal with NAFTA gas, which is the state-owned Ukrainian

01:48:03.000 gas company. Burisma was the largest private gas company. It was the feeder to NAFTA gas. Shell

01:48:08.420 from, from the United Kingdom, you know, it was Royal Dutch Shell, but now it's basically headquartered

01:48:13.640 in London. So Shell, Shell also signed a matching $10 billion deal with NAFTA gas, the state-owned

01:48:19.080 gas company. Halliburton, Dick Cheney's, where he used to be, you know, CEO and, and chairman of the

01:48:27.200 board. And also George Soros had a large equity share in Halliburton. Halliburton owns the oil and

01:48:33.360 gas processing rights in, in Ukraine. All of these companies were invested in resources that were solely

01:48:41.680 situated in the Donbass and in Crimea, the Donbass and the mountains and Crimea offshore. And then

01:48:48.220 what happened after, so we overthrow the government in 2014 because the, the Ukrainian government was

01:48:53.660 not giving everything that the state department wanted. We thought we rested total control of it.

01:48:58.540 And now all of these people, you know, who'd made these, all these U.S. corporations who'd made these

01:49:03.440 investments make bank. But then we don't expect this counter coup that happens, you know, the,

01:49:08.800 basically just a few months afterwards when the Donbass broke away and, and Crimea voted to join

01:49:14.100 the Russian Federation and the whole thing was purportedly backstopped by the Russian military.

01:49:17.920 So you've, you have tens of billions of dollars of investments by U.S. oil and gas companies whose

01:49:25.240 investments all go to zero because now how does Burisma mine, you know, mine shale on the Donbass?

01:49:31.600 How does NAFTA gas get the profits from, you know, from that mining if Russia controls the

01:49:36.800 territory? How, how are you going to, you know, do offshore, you know, drill rigging in Crimea when

01:49:42.500 Crimea belongs to Russia? So you have, you have these commercial interests driving the state

01:49:48.840 department policy in the region. When Victoria Nuland in late 2013 gave that famous speech where

01:49:53.840 she bragged about the $5 billion that the U.S. government had pumped into Ukrainian civil society,

01:49:58.380 the very civil society that would go on to overthrow the government just months later.

01:50:01.300 Later. When she gave that speech, she was at a U.S. embassy event being sponsored by Chevron and

01:50:08.200 Exxon. Really? Yes. Yes. You go to my X feed. I got the picture and HD 4K blown up for everyone to

01:50:17.760 see. So again, you have this relationship between the commercial. So it's not just that like you,

01:50:23.460 we have a rogue state department. We have a revolving door between big government and big corporations.

01:50:29.720 And the idea of putting American first, America first in a world where those corporations are

01:50:35.480 primarily multinational means that nationalism is a threat to multinational corporate interests.

01:50:42.740 And so multinational corporate interests will sponsor the state department activity

01:50:46.220 and use the battering ram of the CIA, the state department, the Pentagon, and NATO to achieve those

01:50:53.040 corporate interests. So we have a much bigger problem here, which is why I call for reform because

01:50:59.400 our whole financial ecosystem is actually bent on this.

01:51:03.580 And that's just the nature of globalization. I mean, that was always going to happen if you

01:51:06.580 thought it through from, I mean, why would, you know, Brexit be seen as a threat to U.S. interests?

01:51:13.080 I mean, that's right. Okay. We could go on for hours, but I want to end and we could actually do

01:51:19.220 hours on this specific topic. I want to end on the question of Elon, who I think is, you know,

01:51:25.480 one of the most significant figures in modern history. Obviously he is, but very much a current

01:51:32.000 player a lot depends on what he's doing now on the question of speech with X. And, um, and of course

01:51:38.880 he's, he's, he's, has an incredibly complex life where he's tied into all kinds of different things

01:51:43.180 with all kinds of different companies that rely on government contracts, et cetera, et cetera.

01:51:46.080 But he's holding the line in, in demonstrable ways. Everyone I know who watched the, you know,

01:51:53.680 Durov arrest this weekend, first thought, oh man, you know, who's next? Do you think that the blob

01:52:01.740 you so vividly describe, um, can tolerate Elon Musk allowing the world's population to say what it

01:52:09.800 thinks through the election and beyond? And what implications does this arrest have for him?

01:52:17.820 Well, it's a complicated issue because Elon is, is very unique. You know, I wrote about this

01:52:23.220 when he announced the acquisition before it even closed. I, I wrote an article where I,

01:52:28.760 I described how Elon is actually quite unique in this relative to other, um, billionaire owners

01:52:35.300 of social media companies who folded to pressure. And I cited a few reasons. One is again, the,

01:52:41.240 the strategy on this apart from prosecutions is whole of society contortion of the economics.

01:52:48.940 So what you do is to get Facebook to do what you want. You, you, you offer carrots and you threaten

01:52:54.960 sticks. So if you do what we want, you'll get, you know, bribed, you'll get rewarded. If you don't

01:53:00.140 do what we want, we'll bankrupt you. And so they fastidiously organized the whole society so that

01:53:05.300 pressure is applied from the private sector pressures. So advertiser, advertiser boycotts USAID

01:53:10.940 has an, has a formal disinformation program focused on getting advertisers to cut off revenue to

01:53:18.740 purveyor misinformation sites and purveyors of misinformation. And I have seen the, I mean,

01:53:25.660 they have this formally published. And in fact, my organization foundation for freedom online even

01:53:29.300 published the formal disinformation primer in February, 2021, one month after Biden took office,

01:53:35.220 where in a 97 page USAID disinformation program memo, 31 times, they mentioned the word advertisers

01:53:42.340 as being necessary to kill the revenue to any social media site or any social media account or any

01:53:48.380 independent webpage that, uh, that spreads misinformation. So USAID is contorting the economics

01:53:57.360 of the entire news industry in order to, to get platforms to censor lest they go economically

01:54:05.320 bankrupt. And remember the U S this is the major threat to Elon, uh, still to this day, but particularly,

01:54:11.560 uh, you know, these advertiser boycotts, which crushed the ability. This is why they had to turn

01:54:16.580 to subscriptions and they had to make, you know, this $8 a month, $12 a month type thing because

01:54:21.540 of all the ad boycotts. And again, USAID is a formal program to coordinate that in a whole society

01:54:25.780 fashion. They're Elon, uh, getting back to Elon's uniqueness. So for a couple of things as a triple

01:54:32.660 digit billionaire, he may be more insulated from these kinds of whole society encirclement economic

01:54:38.660 pressure tactics that someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey had tolerance for. They were only

01:54:44.000 double digit billionaires, uh, you know, or Zuckerberg, uh, whereas as a triple digit

01:54:48.460 billionaire, that actually may be robust enough to resist that. Getting back to this Mark Zuckerberg

01:54:53.940 letter in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg was making public speeches saying that he thought censorship had gone

01:54:58.560 too far on Facebook. That was 2019. I remember. But then he got hit with a very interesting boycott

01:55:05.520 that was called hashtag change the terms. And it basically was economically coercing Facebook to

01:55:11.060 change the terms of its terms of service effectively to ban Trump supporters and Brexit supporters and

01:55:15.780 anyone in Europe who is supporting a right wing populist party there. And Facebook lost $60 billion

01:55:21.320 in market cap in 48 hours under this boycott. And so Facebook folded like a lawn chair and gave them

01:55:26.500 everything they asked for because 60 billion was enough to break Zuckerberg's back. At the same time,

01:55:32.620 there's who, who paid for change the terms. Oh, that's how many hours you have. It's a, it's,

01:55:38.360 it's, it's, it's about 60 seconds. Just bottom line it for us. I mean, nominally it was the ADL

01:55:45.020 and color of change under this kind of hate speech idea, but it was joined by dozens of USAID funded

01:55:53.580 US state department funded NGOs, civil society institutions who were all creating the base

01:56:02.500 of that. So nominally you had these, you know, ADL color of change and it's about hate speech on

01:56:07.280 social media, but the, the, the buffering substructure for it were all these US government

01:56:12.200 intermediaries. And you have this issue where, you know, what they said was hate speech, but they,

01:56:18.320 as part of the change, uh, change the terms campaign, anyone who criticized open borders

01:56:23.060 was considered to be doing, you know, hate speech against Hispanics because of the, you know,

01:56:27.960 the disproportionate impact on that. Anybody in, you know, Germany or France or anyone who,

01:56:33.120 you know, uh, opposed anyone who was a part of this pro right-wing populist NATO skeptical

01:56:39.360 faction. Again, this whole Frexit, Brexit, Spexit, it'll exit domino, you know, this, that, that all

01:56:47.820 started because of the migrant crisis after we assassinated Gaddafi and there was a giant, you know,

01:56:52.460 influx of, of migrants, you know, into European countries. And this gave rise to a right-wing

01:56:57.780 populist political opposition force. And they were the ones who were challenging all the NATO

01:57:02.540 preferred political candidates in those regions. And so this was a, this was a proxy attack on all

01:57:07.760 of the political enemies of the blob, but Elon is unique because the US state department needs

01:57:13.880 Elon, or at least they need Elon's properties. You have a Pavel problem here, which is that

01:57:20.300 they don't, they don't care about Pavel. They care about Telegram, but to, but to break into

01:57:26.620 Telegram, to get access to the backend, to be able to censor, you know, the sort of front facing

01:57:31.560 and spy, right. You need, can you need control of the personnel because the policies of the platforms

01:57:38.740 are personnel, personnel is policy with Elon. I don't think they want to take him out. What they want

01:57:45.580 is corporate regime change or him to play ball. And I think they allowed the acquisition because they

01:57:49.580 assumed that he would play ball as everybody else who opposed them in the past did. Jack Dorsey

01:57:54.260 came out and said that it was a business decision, you know, why they censored Trump and that he was

01:57:57.800 squeamish about it, but you know, they were under the gun of the financial pressure. That was the

01:58:02.020 reason Mark Zuckerberg did all the censorship. Dorsey, I can say with some authority, I think

01:58:06.060 really hated censoring Trump, not because he loves Trump. Cause I think Dorsey really was opposed to

01:58:10.640 censorship, like on a philosophical level. Right. So I think they thought, oh, Elon's talking a big

01:58:15.780 game now, but they all did and everyone folded and he'll be just like the rest of them. Cause he has

01:58:20.400 a wide surface of attack, uh, you know, as well. Elon has Tesla, uh, Elon has SpaceX. You know,

01:58:28.460 these are critical, critical companies for U S statecraft. So, you know, space, the U S

01:58:35.040 Pentagon intelligence services state department is, is hugely dependent on SpaceX for all low earth

01:58:42.360 satellites, for all telecommunications. I was at the state department. Rescuing stranded astronauts.

01:58:47.200 Yes. Like actually that too. Yes. No. Yep. And Tesla is hugely important for a, to have a U S national

01:58:53.780 champion in the green energy revolution. The renewable battery technology is, you know, a huge

01:58:59.860 part of, you know, the, the, you know, of the U S of U S leadership, uh, in the climate change

01:59:07.360 transition. One of the reasons that they viewed him as a huge hero up until, you know, he became a free

01:59:13.320 speech advocate. And so, I mean, I don't think I can say any better than one of the writers from the

01:59:19.560 national endowment for democracy. The, this, the very CIA cutout that we've talked about, you know,

01:59:24.920 dozens of times now in this, in this dialogue, which is that one of the writers in the national

01:59:29.100 endowment for democracy wrote just a few months ago that Elon Musk is a greater national security

01:59:35.460 threat to the United States than Russia. This is a few months ago, not post outbreak of the war.

01:59:40.100 This is in 20, 24. And that, uh, that Elon is a greater threat to the United States and U S national

01:59:48.260 security than Russia, because his proximal impact on U S politics and the, and allowing, you know,

01:59:54.540 opposition political movements to rise is, you know, will cause changes in U S government that are

02:00:00.040 more likely to make us lose the war on Russia than Russia itself. It's the same thing NATO said in 2017.

02:00:04.560 He said, though, we're in a pickle because the U S government is so dependent on Elon's properties.

02:00:09.340 And so, you know, basically called for a kind of death by a thousand paper cuts type strategy.

02:00:16.860 And this is, this is what we're seeing. We wrote this in public. Yes. You can look it up. This

02:00:22.020 is a, you know, this is national. You can, I believe the, the, uh, the, uh, author of it was a man named

02:00:27.500 Dean, Dean Jackson, uh, current or former national endowment for democracy fellow. Uh, he's a part of

02:00:34.360 this, this whole censorship industry apparatus that I've talked about that, uh, you know, that is

02:00:39.660 done through the whole society network. Uh, and I can actually post the article on my X account if

02:00:44.240 folks are interested, uh, right after this, but yes, arguing that they get, but the national endowment

02:00:50.460 for democracy is gets its funding by the U S government. It is not only, it is accountable to

02:00:57.420 Congress, but imagine a more anti-American belief than American citizens shouldn't be allowed to

02:01:06.220 talk. American citizens shouldn't be allowed to vote or their votes shouldn't be allowed to count.

02:01:11.360 The American citizens shouldn't be allowed to choose their own leaders. I mean, imagine thinking

02:01:16.400 something like that and imagining that you're an American, right? But understand as soon as you

02:01:20.960 accept the frame that democracy is about the institutions, I know, but wake the fuck up these

02:01:26.220 people. I mean, come on. I mean, like, I get it. I understand. I used to drink too much. I'm very

02:01:30.680 familiar with, you know, ways that we justify unjustifiable behavior to ourselves, but on some

02:01:37.620 level, like, are you ever standing in the shower thinking, wait, in the name of democracy, I'm

02:01:42.140 preventing my fellow Americans from giving their opinions out loud, or I don't think their vote

02:01:47.580 should count. Like, is there no, they have no souls, obviously. I'm sorry to get upset. It's just

02:01:52.840 like so crazy. Well, the reason that I keep coming back to that is because I'm trying to

02:01:57.560 arm everybody watching this with the language necessary to fight it. Well, and you're spinning

02:02:02.080 me into a frenzy, as you always do. I'm sorry. So let me just ask one last question, okay?

02:02:11.960 Once again, do you think that X will stay open through the election?

02:02:16.400 Stay open in the U.S., yes, but the State Department is coercing foreign governments to

02:02:25.180 shut down X operations around the world until X censors everyone the State Department wants

02:02:30.080 censored. Take the EU Digital Services Act, which I've been screaming for years now, is the

02:02:36.400 number one existential threat to Elon and to X. This is a law, this new just came into effect

02:02:44.580 in the EU after years of pressure from NATO for the EU to advance this, which goes beyond

02:02:51.260 the typical European hate speech laws and creates a new sort of category for disinformation, which

02:02:56.860 requires all social media platforms to do disinformation compliance. And the U.S. censorship industry,

02:03:05.440 you know, they did a conference. There was a big 150-page sort of consensus memo that hundreds

02:03:13.040 of these people all sort of co-signed and then they did a launch event where they all talked

02:03:17.900 about it on a live stream afterwards. And in that live stream, they said that they would

02:03:21.440 be in a full-blown panic because of Elon Musk's losing X and Elon's policies, getting rid of

02:03:27.740 all the censorship provisions they had because 2024 has more elections than any year in world

02:03:33.380 history. I think it's something like 65 elections happening all over the world. So the State

02:03:37.360 Department's control is, you know, is at risk in 65 to 85 different countries in the calendar year

02:03:43.860 2024. And they said that we'd be in full-blown panic, but we can panic responsibly because we

02:03:49.080 have basically a trick up our sleeve. And these are U.S. censorship professionals, many of them

02:03:54.220 paid by the U.S. government through grants. And what they are, State Department grants, and what they

02:03:59.600 said is, you know, the trick up our sleeve is that we have the EU Digital Services Act,

02:04:03.840 and that will force Elon to rehire all of the fired censors. And it will force him to basically

02:04:10.660 restaff the censorship apparatus unless he's going to lose X's participation in all of the EU because

02:04:18.460 that imposes a 6% global revenue fine for anyone who doesn't comply. The EU has come out and said

02:04:24.020 they're currently non-compliant. And the EU has a larger market than the U.S. There's 500 million

02:04:28.140 people in the EU. It's more than the U.S. If X is kicked out of the EU, they are no longer a global

02:04:34.780 platform. It's absolutely existential. And part of the requirements for that compliance is for the

02:04:41.320 same disinformation experts and researchers to vet the flow of information, to spot disinformation,

02:04:48.960 demand its takedown. And if X doesn't take it down, then they're kicked out of the EU. So this is a

02:04:53.340 massive, massive, massive lever of power over Elon. And the only question is, will the U.S. State

02:04:58.880 Department, the only organ we have to defend U.S. interests against Europe, will they actually

02:05:05.080 oppose it? The problem is, as you're hearing me say, they're the ones who have been organizing

02:05:11.380 these censorship provisions to begin with. So the only people that we have to be able to defend us

02:05:16.580 from the threat were the people who organized it in the first place.

02:05:20.180 So I don't have time to ask you about the effect of all of this Biden administration censorship on

02:05:28.120 presidential race. But let me just, final question, if Trump wins, will you

02:05:34.720 have any hand in helping the new administration roll back the censorship regime and returning us

02:05:41.640 to some sort of constitutional foundation as a country?

02:05:44.560 My purpose in life is to do everything I can to promote freedom of speech on the internet. It's a

02:05:52.660 very dear thing to me. It has been since, you know, since I was, since I was a kid. And I don't

02:06:00.080 consider myself a political person. I know I had a political appointee spot. I would be equally

02:06:04.780 comfortable in an RFK style or a sense of Democrat type thing.

02:06:08.460 You're a one issue man.

02:06:10.740 I am. I am. But you need to understand these other issues to know what you're up against

02:06:14.680 and to, and this is, you know, I get a lot of pushback. Oh, you know, you're

02:06:19.560 against the U.S. military, against the intelligence agencies. I'm not, I'm not. I'm calling for reform

02:06:25.380 so that this specific narrow new capacity that has become one of the biggest financial boon markets

02:06:32.960 that we, that, that government grants do in such a short period of time, it is newish. It's, it's,

02:06:39.600 it's not a baby anymore, but it's still in its adolescent stage. This can be rooted out. It's

02:06:44.600 not like you're rooting out, you know, uh, the U S war department, you know, which has been around

02:06:50.380 since 1789. So, so, you know, uh, my purpose is to pursue that to the best ability possible in

02:06:58.280 whatever that means. So I don't know, you know, what, what role, you know, might, might even be

02:07:04.760 more useful within the government or if it's more useful for me to simply publish what I publish,

02:07:10.500 provide the insights that I do and have my, you know, I have what I do simply be what I've been

02:07:15.860 doing. I don't know, you know, and, and I'll, I can answer that question when the fog of war has,

02:07:21.320 has lifted more, but you know, I, I'm not a political person. I'm a, I'm a one issue. I'm a one

02:07:27.120 issue guy on this and that touches political matters, but, um, I'm going to be true to that

02:07:32.660 purpose. It would be nice to see a free speech czar since it is the first right enumerated in

02:07:40.420 the bill of rights. A free speech ambassador. Yeah. Yeah. Mike Bentz, amazing, amazing conversation.

02:07:47.500 And I'm sorry you got me so emotional about 11 times in the middle of it, but thank you.

02:07:51.580 Thanks, Tucker.

02:07:52.120 Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to

02:07:57.360 Tucker Carlson.com to see everything that we have made the complete library. Tucker Carlson.com.

The Tucker Carlson Show - August 28, 2024

Mike Benz： The Real Reason for Pavel Durov’s Arrest, and the Deep State’s Plan to Control Our Speech

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