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Episode: #2237 - Mike Benz

Author: Joe Rogan
Duration: 02:51:21

Episode Shownotes

Mike Benz is a former official with the U.S. Department of State and current Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, is a free speech watchdog organization dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet.

www.foundationforfreedomonline.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan hosts Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department official, discussing the increasing concerns around internet censorship and its implications for free speech. Benz outlines the evolution of censorship from a government-promoted principle of free speech post-World War II, influenced by geopolitical events, through hybrid warfare narratives to current social media dynamics. The conversation critically examines how government and tech collaborations impact democratic discourse and free expression, highlighting the need for a collective societal response to misinformation and censorship.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#2237 - Mike Benz) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_05
Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06 Speaker_18
Join my day, Joe Rogan podcast, my night, all day.

00:00:09 Speaker_10
All right, we're up. Nice to meet you, Mike. Nice to meet you, Joe. I wish you didn't have to exist.

00:00:19 Speaker_10
You're one of those guys that when you talk like God, I wish what he's saying isn't true, but I know it is But I'm happy you do I I don't remember what I where I first saw you speak, but I mean right away I was thinking okay, this makes a lot of sense when you're explaining like the Ministry of truth or whatever it is.

00:00:41 Speaker_10
Is that what it's called the ministry of truth. Well, yeah, they tried to do that for a while that was a I think So just as a background, please tell people what you do and what positions you held.

00:00:54 Speaker_02
I do all things internet censorship. That's really my mission in life, my North Star. I started off as a corporate lawyer and then worked for the Trump White House. I was a speech writer. I sort of advised on technology issues and then I ran the

00:01:11 Speaker_02
the cyber division for the State Department, basically the big tech portfolio that interfaces between sort of big government, international diplomacy issues on technology, and then the sort of private sector U.S.

00:01:23 Speaker_02
national champions in the tech space like Google and Facebook. So I was the guy that Google lobbyists would call when they wanted favors from big government.

00:01:33 Speaker_02
But, you know, my life took a huge sort of U-turn, you might say, when the 2016 election came around and I became obsessed with the early development of the censorship industry.

00:01:47 Speaker_02
You know, this giant behemoth of government, private sector, civil society organizations, and media all collabing to censor the internet. It was kind of a weird path from there.

00:01:59 Speaker_10
When did it all start rolling? When did the government realize that they had to get actively involved in censorship? And what steps did they initially take to get involved in this?

00:02:08 Speaker_02
It started in 2014 with the Ukraine fiasco, the coup and then the counter coup. The coup was great for internet-free speech.

00:02:18 Speaker_02
I mean, you really do need to start the story of internet censorship with the story of internet freedom, because promotion of censorship is sort of the flip side of promotion of free speech.

00:02:30 Speaker_02
And we've had this free speech government diplomatic role for 80 years now. When World War II ended, we embarked, we had the International Rules-Based Order that was created in 1948.

00:02:44 Speaker_02
We had the UN, we had NATO, we had the IMF, the World Bank, we had this big global system now. There was a prohibition in 1948 under the UN Declaration of Human Rights that

00:02:58 Speaker_02
You can't acquire territory by military force anymore and have it be respected by international law. So everything had to move to soft power influence. And so the U.S.

00:03:06 Speaker_02
government took a very active role beginning in 1948 to promote free speech around the world. And this was done through all these, you know, initially CIA proprietories like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

00:03:19 Speaker_02
And then the whole Wisners, Wurlitzer, State Department, CIA apparatus, all the early partnerships with the media and the war machine around propaganda for World War II continued through the Cold War.

00:03:32 Speaker_02
And then that hit the gas with promotion of free speech on the internet when the internet was privatized. It was initially a military project, so it was a government operation from

00:03:41 Speaker_02
from Jump Street, and then in 1991, the World Wide Web came out, civilian use.

00:03:47 Speaker_02
And right away, the State Department, the military, our intelligence sphere was promoting free speech so that we could have a basically government pressure on foreign countries to open up their internet to allow basically groups that the U.S.

00:04:02 Speaker_02
government was supporting to be able to combat state control over media in those other countries. So we already had this sort of deep interplay between government, tech companies, universities, NGOs that dates back 80 years.

00:04:19 Speaker_02
If you look at the evolution of NGOs like Freedom House or the Atlanta Council or Wilson Center and promoting these free speech.

00:04:26 Speaker_02
But what happened was is in night in 2014 we had had about 25 years of successful free speech diplomacy and Then there was a you know, we tried to overthrow the government of Ukraine We successfully did and I'm not even arguing whether that's a good or a bad thing.

00:04:42 Speaker_02
But the fact is is The u.s. Did effectively January 6th the Yanukovych government out of power in 2014? I mean we literally had our assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian affairs

00:04:54 Speaker_02
Victoria Newland handing out cookies and water bottles to violent street protesters as they surrounded the parliament building and ran the democratically elected government out of office.

00:05:04 Speaker_02
But then what happened is the eastern side of the state completely broke away, said, we don't respect this new US installed government. Crimea voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation.

00:05:16 Speaker_02
And that kicked off that sort of set in motion the events that would end the concept of free speech diplomacy is like a U.S. government unfettered good because what they argued is we pumped $5 billion worth of U.S.

00:05:28 Speaker_02
government money into media institutions in Ukraine. That's the figure that's cited by Victoria Nuland in December 2013.

00:05:35 Speaker_02
right before the coup, $5 billion, setting up independent media companies, basically sponsoring, Mockingbird style, our media assets in the region. And they still didn't penetrate Eastern Ukraine.

00:05:47 Speaker_02
Eastern Ukraine was primarily ethnic Russian, didn't penetrate Crimea. So they said, we need something to stop them from being able to combat our media influence.

00:05:58 Speaker_02
And they initially called this the Gerasimov Doctrine, named after Valery Gerasimov, who was this Russian general. They took a quote from him saying, the new nature of war is no longer about military to military conflict. All we need to do

00:06:15 Speaker_02
is take over the media in these NATO countries, and that's primarily social media, get one of our pawns elected as the president, and that president will control the military.

00:06:25 Speaker_02
So it's much cheaper and more efficient to win a military war by simply winning civilian elections. So that was called the Gerasimov Doctrine. That's what set up the early censorship infrastructure in 2014.

00:06:35 Speaker_02
Three years later, the guy who coined that, Mark Gagliotti, would write a sort of mea culpa saying, oops, I'm sorry, uh, dross me off was actually citing what the U S does. But by that point, they'd already renamed it hybrid warfare.

00:06:49 Speaker_02
NATO formally declared that tanks to tweets doctrine saying that the new role of NATO is no longer just about tanks. It's about controlling tweets.

00:06:58 Speaker_02
And then Brexit happened in June, 2016, in July, 2016, the very next month in Warsaw, NATO added hybrid warfare to its formal, uh, formal charter. Uh,

00:07:09 Speaker_02
basically authorizing the military the diplomatic sphere in the intelligence world to Take control over social media and then five months later Trump won the election being called the Russian asset So all that infrastructure was redirected home to the u.s

00:07:25 Speaker_10
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00:08:52 Speaker_10
It was looking pretty bleak, I would say, in terms of the direction internet censorship was headed. It seemed like the censorship machine was winning up until around the time that Elon purchased X. That seems to me to be our fork in the road.

00:09:11 Speaker_10
That's the alternative timeline. Mark Andreessen talked about that yesterday. We've had a couple of alternative timelines where things have shifted. I think that was one of the big ones.

00:09:20 Speaker_02
That's exactly it. I mean, he's sort of the timeline where we miss the bullet is where there's a deus ex machina, you know, it's sort of like a deus ex machina where it's this...

00:09:35 Speaker_02
random plot thing that happens, you know, someone descends onto the stage and solves all the plots, loopholes, and magically saves the, you know, the plucky heroes that were otherwise in danger. There were events in the run-up.

00:09:51 Speaker_02
Well, it all sort of happened simultaneously, really, because the month that Elon announced his acquisition was the same month that the Disinformation Governance Board was announced at DHS.

00:10:00 Speaker_02
which was the first thing that really roused Republicans and frankly, anyone with institutional power in DC to finally stare into the sun and recognize, or at least begin to glimpse the size of what they were up against.

00:10:15 Speaker_02
Uh, the disinformation governance board set off a flurry of congressional activity from Chuck Grassley and other, um, you know, luminaries in Congress. Uh, there were a lot of whistleblower documents came out and for years,

00:10:31 Speaker_02
the entire Republican Party and most of the Democrat Party had denied the existence of government censorship. And frankly, the Ministry of Truth was not the Disinformation Governance Board.

00:10:46 Speaker_02
The Ministry of Truth had already existed three years earlier at DHS. They just called it a name that masked what it did. It was called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

00:10:58 Speaker_10
Which is a name that puts you have to sleep by the time you're finished saying it Ministry of truth scared the shit out of people just because the Orwellian context of the term You know, it just seemed like what what are you what?

00:11:10 Speaker_02
Well, the funny thing is they were right. The Disinformation Governance Board was not the Ministry of Truth. It was a dull, boring, mundane bureaucratic layer to manage the Ministry of Truth that was already created three years earlier.

00:11:23 Speaker_02
But the fact is nobody called them out on it because of the thick language of censor speak that hides this whole thing from general public awareness. I mean, in my own path, I've tried to self-reflect about how I ended up here.

00:11:40 Speaker_02
spending my life on this. And I used to think it was primarily about chess and, you know, my sort of early encounters with AI and then seeing the censorship AI that really sparked my pursuit into this.

00:11:53 Speaker_02
But the more I thought about it, the more it's based, I think it's just kind of coming from a corporate law background where your job is to plant dirty tricks

00:12:02 Speaker_02
in the fine print of 150 page legal documents and to catch dirty tricks in that linguistic framing that's done by opposing lawyers. And that's really how they pulled this off.

00:12:17 Speaker_02
Nobody thought in 2019 that the cybersecurity agency in DHS would be the Ministry of Truth. They didn't appreciate the layers of censor speak that were constructed on top of that.

00:12:29 Speaker_02
to say that, well, DHS governs critical infrastructure and elections are critical infrastructure. Public health is critical infrastructure. Misinformation online is a cyber component. So it's a cyber attack on critical infrastructure.

00:12:44 Speaker_02
And so normally policymakers or people in the public think, oh, cybersecurity, that's hacking, that's phishing, you know, that's for CIA, NSA people to stop Russians from hacking us.

00:12:59 Speaker_02
And they think critical infrastructure they think things like dams or subsea cables or low-earth satellites. They don't they don't think it means You sitting on the toilet at 9 30 p.m.

00:13:09 Speaker_02
On a Thursday saying I don't know that I love mail-in ballots and then suddenly you're being flagged by DHS as a cyber threat actor and

00:13:17 Speaker_02
for attacking the US critical infrastructure of confidence in our elections But that's how they scaled these definitions into this giant mission creep and now it's metastasized into the entire US federal government the Pentagon the State Department USAID the National Endowment for Democracy DHS FBI DOJ HHS and the task in front of this administration is just unbelievably enormous in deconstructing that is it possible that

00:13:43 Speaker_02
they're going to run into a lot of headwinds because once this power was discovered and funded to the tune of billions, as it has been, we've, we have this foreign policy establishment that manages the American empire that saw internet censorship as kind of an Eldorado key to permanently winning the soft power influence game around, around the world.

00:14:11 Speaker_02
And what I mean by that is, okay, so you know how in a lot of people talk about the early CIA activity in the media with things like Operation Mockingbird and whatnot, and the ability to sort of propagandize things in the media.

00:14:27 Speaker_02
you never had this capacity in the 1950s while that was going on.

00:14:31 Speaker_02
If, if you and I were at dinner, Thanksgiving or something, and there's 12 people at the table and I start talking to you about, I don't know, the COVID vaccines may have adverse side effects. There was never an ability to simply

00:14:48 Speaker_02
reach under the table as an intelligence agency or as the Department of Homeland Security or as the Pentagon or the State Department, just turn off the volume when we talk to each other peer to peer.

00:14:59 Speaker_02
But since the lion's share of all communication is digital, especially the politically impactful ones, that capacity now allows our

00:15:09 Speaker_02
blob, our foreign policy establishment, to effectively control every election, or at least tilt every election around the world. And they've sprawled this into 140 countries.

00:15:19 Speaker_02
And Trump is going to run into every single regional desk at the State Department.

00:15:26 Speaker_02
Every single equity at the pentagon arguing that if you don't do not allow us to continue this censorship work It will undermine national security because it will allow russian favored narratives to win the day in the ivory coast in chad in nigeria and

00:15:44 Speaker_02
And and brazil and venezuela and central and eastern europe You're going to have the state department argue that if we don't have this counter misinformation capacity then extremists will win elections around the world where populists will win the election around the world and that will undermine the power of our democratic institutions essentially our programming our assets in the region and They've built this enormous capacity.

00:16:12 Speaker_02
It's it We use it because it works because it wins and the fact is is Trump probably only won this election because For the same reason he probably only won the 2016 election, which was in both cases.

00:16:26 Speaker_02
There was largely a free internet It was when Trump got censored into oblivion in 2020 by the US government under his nose working with webs of of outside NGOs and Pentagon front groups to mass censor

00:16:42 Speaker_02
Virtually every narrative that he was that he was putting out that that he lost so it does work to win elections and every There's a regional desk at the State Department covering every country on earth, Victoria, Newland You know at a desk that cover about 20 countries.

00:16:58 Speaker_02
So every country the State Department is a preferred winner of that election we work with all political parties and That's a that's a hugely powerful tool to lose. It's just twisted and evil and it needs to and we we need to win

00:17:14 Speaker_02
I don't want to say fair fights, but dipping into this sort of dark sorcery power has – not only does it crush the First Amendment entirely, but the diplomatic blowback is just absolutely enormous.

00:17:28 Speaker_02
I can go through examples of that if you're interested. Well, so we have this thing called the Global Engagement Center at the State Department.

00:17:35 Speaker_02
It was set up initially to fight ISIS, because in 2014, 2015, when the Obama administration was trying to put military boots on the ground in Syria, there was this sort of giant threat that was publicly at, you know, talked about all over about ISIS recruiting on Facebook and Twitter, homegrown ISIS threats, for example, the Garland, Texas

00:17:59 Speaker_02
fiasco where there was a shooting by a ISIS terrorist and the web of online intrigues around that. Three years later, it would come out that he had been effectively groomed by the FBI.

00:18:11 Speaker_02
The FBI had paid someone over $100,000 to become his best friend and text him to tear up Texas before that. But never mind, the horse was out of the barn.

00:18:20 Speaker_02
This so this idea that that Isis was recruiting on Facebook and Twitter Gave a gave a license to the State Department to create this thing called the Global Engagement Center Which was really the first official censorship capacity in the US government it predated the DHS stuff that would come along in the Trump in the Trump era and

00:18:38 Speaker_02
And this gave the State Department the direct back channel, the direct coordinating capacity with all the social media companies to tell them about ISIS, ISIS accounts, ISIS narratives that were trending.

00:18:53 Speaker_02
The Pentagon poured hundreds of millions of dollars into developing a technique called natural language processing.

00:19:00 Speaker_02
which is a way to use AI to scan the entire internet for keywords, and you would have these academic researchers effectively constructing code books of language. What do ISIS advocates or supporters talk like? What words do they use?

00:19:18 Speaker_02
What prefixes and suffixes?

00:19:20 Speaker_02
This whole lexicon is then conjoined with the ingested sum of all of their tweets and transcribed YouTube videos and Facebook posts, and then suddenly the State Department is a real-time heat map of everyone who is likely to be, or hits a certain confidence level of being suspected to support ISIS.

00:19:42 Speaker_02
That was 2014 to 2016, set up by this guy, Rick Stengel, who described himself as Obama's propagandist in chief. He's now on the advisory board of NewsGuard, one of the largest censorship mercenary firms in the world.

00:19:59 Speaker_02
But he described himself as a free speech maximalist, because before he started this, he was the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. He started this censorship center. He was the former managing editor of Time Magazine.

00:20:10 Speaker_02
And so he's talked about how he used to be a free speech maximalist back when he was in the media and media companies benefited from that. But when Trump won the election in 2016, he became convinced that actually the First Amendment was a mistake.

00:20:25 Speaker_02
He actually openly advocated in The Washington Post in an op-ed that we effectively end the First Amendment, that we copycat Europe's laws. And then he wrote a whole book on it.

00:20:36 Speaker_02
This is the guy who started, effectively, the country's first censorship center. But then they did a really cute trick. They went from counterterrorism to counterpopulism.

00:20:48 Speaker_02
Now, we've always had this ability since the 1940s to interfere in the domestic affairs of foreign governments or foreign countries. To topple communist countries.

00:21:01 Speaker_02
This is the whole cold cold war counter-communism work of the CIA and the State Department But that was primarily targeting left-wing Left-wing communists or left-wing socialists or left-wing populist run countries

00:21:16 Speaker_02
When Trump won the election in 2016, this was one of the reasons I think Republicans were so slow to move on all this.

00:21:23 Speaker_02
They had never experienced the brunt of the intelligence state against the mainline GOP, or at least the in power Trump faction of the GOP in the way that Democrats did in the 1960s and 70s when the CIA was actively interfering in Democrat party politics to try to tilt them away from the anti-Vietnam movement and more into the sort of

00:21:45 Speaker_02
limousine, liberal, international, interventionalist, neoliberal camp.

00:21:51 Speaker_02
And so in 2016, the Global Engagement Center pivoted from being counter-terrorism to counter-populism, arguing that right-wing populist governments, it wasn't just right-wing, they were also against left-wing populists, but they simply never rose to power in the way that Trump did in the US, Bolsonaro did in Brazil, Matteo Salvini did in Italy, Marine Le Pen almost did in France.

00:22:15 Speaker_02
Nigel Farage was on his way to, in the UK, in the Brexit referendum, the AFD party in Germany, the Vox party in Spain. In 2016, they were afraid that social media, rising all these right-wing populist parties to power,

00:22:32 Speaker_02
would effectively collapse the entire rules-based international order unless there was international censorship. Because Brexit would give rise to Frexit if Marine Le Pen won and she was massively overpowered on social media versus Macron.

00:22:45 Speaker_02
If, you know, as I mentioned, Italy, Germany, there was going to be not just Brexit, there's going to be Frexit, Spexit, Italexit, Grexit, Gorexit.

00:22:54 Speaker_02
So the entire EU would come undone, which would mean all of NATO would come undone, which would mean there's no enforcement arm for the IMF or the World Bank or international creditors, which would mean it would be like the ending scene of Fight Club, where the credit card company buildings all collapse just because you're allowed to shitpost on the internet.

00:23:10 Speaker_02
And they talked about that quite openly in 2017 as they were creating this whole censorship infrastructure.

00:23:18 Speaker_10
So the 2016 elections was, that was a counterpoint. That was like a turning point. That was a moment where they realized like this is actually dangerous.

00:23:29 Speaker_10
Like allowing people to freely communicate online and say whatever they want completely undermines the propaganda that they have been distributing, completely undermines their ability to control who's the president, what policies get pursued, things along those lines.

00:23:48 Speaker_02
Yeah, it was, it was the final straw because you know, the 2014 Crimea situation is, is, I mean, the Pentagon was actively working with and funding these censorship operations through the entirety of Central and Eastern Europe starting in 2014.

00:24:06 Speaker_02
And then Brexit was, it was a major event in that basically it was said to come to Western Europe at that point. But when it, when Trump won,

00:24:16 Speaker_02
That was, I guess, both the final straw and then the massive anvil that collapsed any residual resistance that existed within the national security state that we didn't need to do this.

00:24:26 Speaker_02
And Russiagate really was the useful tool to drive that all through.

00:24:33 Speaker_02
the fact that Trump came into office under the barrel of a gun of a special prosecutor, openly alleging that he may be a Russian asset, effectively a Manchurian candidate of Russia who only rose to power because of social media operations being run by Russia,

00:24:55 Speaker_02
allowed that national security predicate to carry forward this infrastructure and be massively funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, the IC, the NGO sphere, in order to set this infrastructure.

00:25:08 Speaker_02
But then in July 2019, Russiagate died on the vine immediately as soon as Bob Mueller completely goofed his three-hour testimony. And a lot of people were thinking before he took the stand that

00:25:21 Speaker_02
Trump was going to be in jail as a Russian asset because it was kept under such close hold for two and a half years. What was Bob Mueller doing? There's the SNL sort of fanfare around that.

00:25:33 Speaker_02
But then when it was revealed he had nothing, there was a moment in time between July 2019 and September 2019 when all of this could have been shut down.

00:25:45 Speaker_02
And we could have just called all that censorship work counterintelligence, you know, a national security state thing, but they did something really, really nasty at that point, which we now live in the permanent aftermath of, which is they switched from a sort of counterintelligence national security threat from Russian interference predicate, which is useful because that gives you a blank check to use the Pentagon and the state department, the IC on this.

00:26:12 Speaker_02
to a domestic democracy predicate.

00:26:16 Speaker_02
Now, this is really, really nasty because it basically transitions censorship from being a strictly military thing that we're doing to stop Russia to being a total permeating apparatus over all civilian domestic affairs, regardless of whether there's a foreign threat.

00:26:34 Speaker_02
And when that was allowed to go unchallenged for effectively three years up until Elon announced the acquisition of X and that same month the disinformation governance board spilled over and then Republicans won the house in November 2022 which then allowed congressional hearings on all this and the elevation of the Twitter files and the public awareness from that and

00:26:54 Speaker_02
But for three years you had this handoff from Russiagate, I call this the foreign to domestic switcheroo, and if you're interested, you know, Jamie, if you look up, not asking to, but if you're curious, I have a whole supercut of what these people were saying

00:27:13 Speaker_02
from 2016 to 2018, while the Russiagate investigation was going on, to 2019, 2020, after Russiagate, they do this foreign to domestic switcheroo. Those are the key terms, if you're interested in that.

00:27:26 Speaker_10
Yeah, we'll see it. There's a compilation?

00:27:27 Speaker_02
Yeah, I did a compilation of all these DHS officials, State Department officials, Pentagon officials,

00:27:34 Speaker_02
Completely changing their justification for why we need internet censorship before Russiagate and after Russiagate and they switched from saying Russian disinformation is the threat So that's why the Pentagon's involved.

00:27:45 Speaker_02
That's why the state and CIA and FBI is involved just saying well actually domestic disinformation is is a threat to democracy. So regardless of whether it's the Russians or not, we need to censor Americans to preserve democracy.

00:28:00 Speaker_10
And this happened in tandem with... What examples were they using to justify this?

00:28:04 Speaker_02
Well, they pulled off a cute trick where they doctrinally redefined democracy to mean a consensus of institutions rather than individuals.

00:28:13 Speaker_02
They had, when Trump won in 2016 and Brexit passed in 2016, they took this anti-authoritarian toolkit, which has for 80 years been the CIA's predicate for overthrowing governments.

00:28:27 Speaker_02
And really since the 1910s, when Woodrow Wilson announced that America's role is to make the world safe for democracy.

00:28:33 Speaker_02
We've long had a habit of intervening in foreign countries in order to liberate people from authoritarian control and bring them the gift of democracy. And that has always meant in primarily

00:28:49 Speaker_02
that the government would represent the mass of individuals in the form of voting.

00:28:55 Speaker_02
When Trump won in 2016, at the same time that all these right-wing populist parties who were just like Trump also won between 2016 and 2018, primarily using free speech on social media and their popularity there,

00:29:11 Speaker_02
They argued that right-wing populism was the same authoritarian threat that left-wing socialism, left-wing communism was.

00:29:20 Speaker_02
And so they said, well, populism is the people's ground-up revolt against institutions, against government, science, media, against the NGOs, the experts, the academics.

00:29:36 Speaker_02
So what they did is they argued that democracy has to be defended from demagoguery. Democracy needs guardrails. We need bumper cars on democracy that go beyond what people vote for, because people voted for Hitler. People voted for Trump.

00:29:53 Speaker_02
And they were doing this at U.S. government conferences, by the way, in 2017. I can show you some funny ones if you're interested. They were arguing that we need these institutional guardrails against people voting for the wrong person.

00:30:10 Speaker_02
And those institutional guardrails are so-called democratic institutions, which is another cute rhetorical trick, because that's the CIA State Department watchword for asset.

00:30:20 Speaker_02
When USAID, for example, goes in and funds university centers, media outlets,

00:30:31 Speaker_02
Parliamentarian groups, activist groups, legal scholars, you name it in a region, they are building up their assets to exert soft power influence on that society, on that government, in order to influence the passage of laws.

00:30:48 Speaker_02
the You know the the span of operations that they're doing that that touched the US Embassy in the region And so what they argued is actually democracy is not about the will of individuals.

00:30:59 Speaker_02
It's about the consensus of institutions so if if there's institutional consensus building between the military the diplomatic sphere the intelligence community the NGOs the the media outlets the universities that's really democracy.

00:31:16 Speaker_02
Those are the institutional guardrails, the people who know best. That's a difficult process, by the way. That's a process that takes months, years.

00:31:25 Speaker_02
That's why there are these major consensus-building institutions like the Atlanta Council and the Council on Foreign Relations and Wilson Center and the Carnegie Endowment. We have a whole suite of

00:31:36 Speaker_02
consensus-building institutions to bring together the banks, the corporations, the government officials, the outside interests, so they all get on the same page about a certain policy or initiative or regional drive or industrial change.

00:31:51 Speaker_02
If at the end of that process, a bunch of people vote for a politician because he does funny TikTok videos or he's got a popular dance and throws a monkey wrench in those years of consensus-building, that they began to view as an attack on democracy.

00:32:08 Speaker_02
And so they said democracy is really about institutions. And you can actually look up, for example, Reid Hoffman, in 2019, they were doing all of these conferences where they said elections are a threat to democracy. Elections corrupt democracy.

00:32:26 Speaker_02
Because we can't think of democracy as elections anymore. For example, Ukraine has banned elections.

00:32:32 Speaker_02
We don't, we still call, we still say we are providing $300 billion of military support to promote democracy in Ukraine, even though they don't have elections. What's because of the, it's controlled by U.S. institutions.

00:32:44 Speaker_02
You can look up something called the Red Lines Memo, by the way, on my ex account, if you're curious.

00:32:49 Speaker_10
So when you say that Ukraine no longer has democracy, essentially what happened is Zelensky was supposed to leave office and he did not. Is that what happened?

00:32:58 Speaker_02
Well, they've indefinitely canceled elections, so he is... Because of the war. Because of the war is their argument. Now, we had elections during the Civil War here in the U.S. This is not uncommon for countries to be at war and still have elections.

00:33:15 Speaker_02
The issue is, is Zelensky is unpopular and not winning in those election polls. And we no longer define democracy as being about elections, because elections allow populists to circumvent the consensus of institutions.

00:33:31 Speaker_02
And if you want to see a great example of this, you can look at something called the Red Lines Memo, which is, I think I have it near the top of my Exit Counter, you can look for just the phrase Red Lines Memo, and you will see

00:33:43 Speaker_02
Zelensky's first month in office, he was given a threat letter effectively by the U.S. State Department where they had something like 70 U.S.

00:33:50 Speaker_02
funded NGOs who wrote a letter to Zelensky telling him, ordering him not to cross the below listed red lines or else there will be political instability in your country. Political instability in the country caused by the U.S.

00:34:08 Speaker_02
State Department is the reason Zelensky ultimately became president. The 2014 coup in Ukraine was U.S. and U.K. orchestrated political instability to have a January 6th-style mob

00:34:22 Speaker_02
destabilize the government and literally run it out of the country, and they gave him red lines on every single aspect of what he could do as president. Security red lines, cultural red lines, energy policy red lines.

00:34:36 Speaker_10
Trevor Burrus So what were these red lines, like cultural red lines?

00:34:38 Speaker_02
David So for example, that he could not allow the use of Russian language to be aired on any of the major Ukrainian media channels. this was this was part of a drive by the U.S.

00:34:49 Speaker_02
State Department in tandem with the censorship work that that started at that same time in order to prevent the sort of affinity the sort of Russian affinity network that happens because of Russian propaganda spreading from Russian language news sources and to try to

00:35:09 Speaker_02
pry the country off of the Russian ethnic faction and have essentially the Ukrainian dialect.

00:35:16 Speaker_10
This is in response for what happened in Crimea?

00:35:18 Speaker_02
Yes, yes. And Crimea and the Donbass, the whole eastern side breakaway.

00:35:23 Speaker_02
But this is effectively the long arm of Langley, the long arm of the State Department and CIA, telling Ukrainians that they can't, what kind of language they can use in their own country.

00:35:36 Speaker_02
Ukraine was effectively forced to transfer over its education ministry to an EU commissioning body so that Russian adjacent mythologies couldn't be taught in the country.

00:35:48 Speaker_02
They were told what industries they needed to privatize and to block any attempt to maintain sovereign control of those energy assets. This is ultimately what gave rise to the Burisma scandal, by the way, and the Hunter Biden

00:36:04 Speaker_02
State Department affairs that ran through all that Which is which is a whole other fascinating topic I should add but the fact is get back to that. Yeah. Yeah, but but this is this is

00:36:19 Speaker_02
every aspect of Ukrainian society effectively top-down controlled by democratic institutions funded by the U.S. government when it's stock standard that the only reason we do that, you know, he who calls the piper, who pays the piper calls the tune.

00:36:37 Speaker_02
They're being funded to exert this soft power issue every this the soft power force on the Ukrainian government and Zelensky knows that force because the only reason he occupies the power that he does is because that force ushered him in through the sequence of events from Yatsenyuk in 2014 up to him and so The issue is is

00:37:02 Speaker_02
Those are the institutions.

00:37:03 Speaker_02
By the way, that whole thing was run through something called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, which is effectively a suite of media institutions in the area that are CIA conduits, like the Kiev Independent, which is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

00:37:19 Speaker_02
The National Endowment for Democracy is one of the

00:37:22 Speaker_02
most pernicious forces in the entirety of the censorship industry and It you know you were talking with Marc Andreessen about NGOs and their role in internet censorship And you know he was I think fleshing out sort of the concept of a gongo a government organized non-governmental organization and

00:37:43 Speaker_02
So the National Endowment for Democracy is sort of posited as an NGO, but it's got a very curious history. Again, this is what sponsors so much of Ukrainian media.

00:37:52 Speaker_02
The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 because of a dilemma that the new Ronald Reagan administration faced. The CIA at that point in the early 80s, its name was dirt.

00:38:04 Speaker_02
There were the massive scandals in the 1960s to the 1970s, everything from Operation Mockingbird, to MKUltra, to Operation Chaos, to effectively bribing student groups on college campuses, all sorts of things.

00:38:19 Speaker_02
The heart attack gun being held up in a public hearing at the church committee in 1975 about ways the CIA was assassinating world leaders and assassinating journalists and political figures.

00:38:36 Speaker_02
using methods that included, you know, a gun that would make it look like they organically died of a heart attack. All of these things gave rise to Jimmy Carter being elected in 1976.

00:38:48 Speaker_02
He was not expected to win in 76, but he won on the back of Democrat mass outrage over the malfeasance of the national security state, the CIA. And so, The following year, Carter does something called the Halloween Massacre.

00:39:05 Speaker_02
He fires 30% of the CIA's operations division in a single night, and then he totally cripples the CIA's budget. Reagan gets to power after the Iran hostage situation, wants the CIA's powers back, But the Democrats were still hugely hostile to it.

00:39:19 Speaker_02
The public still had not fully forgiven the CIA So they came up with a cute trick and you can actually look at a September 1991 David Ignatius article called spyless coups This is in the Washington Post the article begins with a By saying that we don't even really need to have we don't really need even need to nominate Robert Gates the the the Senate the new CIA director for

00:39:48 Speaker_02
We don't even need to do a Senate confirmation hearing for a CIA director anymore, because the CIA is effectively made obsolete by its new tactic that we use through NGOs spearheaded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

00:40:00 Speaker_02
And you'll find in that article a quote by the National Endowment for Democracy's founder, Carl Gershman, where he explicitly says that it would be a terrible thing for groups supported by the US government to be seen as subsidized by the CIA.

00:40:21 Speaker_02
We did that in the 1960s, and it worked out terribly for us when it turned out they were backed by the CIA. That's why the National Endowment for Democracy was created, so that the CIA could effectively subsidize the groups

00:40:37 Speaker_02
without having CIA fingerprints on it. If you look at its legislative history, it passed effectively a bill through Congress that Ronald Reagan approved.

00:40:47 Speaker_02
The origins of it come from the CIA Director William Casey in 1983, working directly with the U.S. Attorney General, as well as an entire USAID blueprint the previous year. The CIA requested this to be set up. It's funded entirely by the US government.

00:41:07 Speaker_02
It's officially accountable to the House Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So it's funded by the government. It's literally accountable to a US congressional committee. It was the CIA director, birthed it.

00:41:26 Speaker_02
The founder acknowledged that they were created to do what the CIA wants to do, but gets in trouble for doing. And we call this an NGO? I don't think so.

00:41:36 Speaker_02
And so the issue is, is the National Endowment for Democracy and the entire intelligence community was They were the ones who led this conversion from counter-communism to counter-populism.

00:41:47 Speaker_02
They're the ones who, when Trump rose to power, and when Brexit and the whole NATO-EU country domino started electing right-wing populists who were hostile to the foreign policy establishment's consensus, and a lot of this has to do with energy geopolitics and military interventionism, and we can get to those if you want to go there.

00:42:11 Speaker_02
But the NED has its octopus arms around the entirety of the censorship industry. If you want to see something really, really crazy, there's a video that we can watch.

00:42:23 Speaker_02
It's a two minute video from one of Ned's global censorship programs where they explicitly work with foreign governments to get foreign governments to pass censorship laws to attack US companies. So this is a US government

00:42:39 Speaker_02
funding a CIA cutout to back channel with regulators and influencers and foreign countries to get those foreign countries to crush U.S. national champions in the tech space.

00:42:53 Speaker_02
This is the exact opposite of what the State Department was set up in 1789 to do.

00:43:00 Speaker_10
Where is this video? How can we see it?

00:43:01 Speaker_02
Uh, if you, if you, if you got it, put it up.

00:43:05 Speaker_05
Disinformation has invaded online conversations on social media platforms, posing challenges to healthy information environments and threats to democracy.

00:43:15 Speaker_05
It bolsters authoritarians, weakens democratic voices and participation, exploits and exacerbates existing social cleavages, and silences opposition.

00:43:25 Speaker_05
Countering disinformation and promoting information integrity are necessary priorities for ensuring democracy can thrive.

00:43:34 Speaker_05
The SEPS Countering Disinformation Guide is a resource including nine thematic sections and a comprehensive database of interventions highlighting various approaches for advancing information integrity and strengthening societal resilience to disinformation and other harmful online campaigns.

00:43:51 Speaker_05
The International Foundation for Electoral Systems, International Republican Institute, and National Democratic Institute developed this guide with support from USAID through the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening.

00:44:08 Speaker_05
Here are nine key takeaways from the guide. Addressing disinformation requires a whole-of-society approach. We need to create a sense of urgency to drive collective action for addressing disinformation.

00:44:23 Speaker_05
Institutions and platforms have the resources to address disinformation, but lack credibility, whereas civil society has the credibility, but is chronically under-resourced.

00:44:35 Speaker_05
Countering disinformation requires a mixed methods approach, including fact-checking, monitoring, and other interventions. Focusing on major events, like election outcomes alone, will not achieve a healthy information environment.

00:44:52 Speaker_05
Developing norms and standards, legal and regulatory frameworks, and better social media content moderation is necessary for a healthy information ecosystem.

00:45:02 Speaker_05
It is important to establish frameworks to discourage political parties from engaging in disinformation. Not sure where to start?

00:45:12 Speaker_05
Click here to explore the interventions database of organizations, projects, and donors working to counter disinformation around the world.

00:45:21 Speaker_10
Whoa.

00:45:22 Speaker_02
They're in 140 countries. It's entirely funded by the U.S. government. I can break this down in detail. So this SEPS program, is basically, in large part, the reason that the Brazil censorship state was erected.

00:45:39 Speaker_02
I mean, this came a little bit later in the game, but it's a spawn out of this NED censorship network, this explicitly created by the CIA director, self-confessed, effectively CIA cutout,

00:45:52 Speaker_02
What CEPS does is they manage an umbrella portfolio of all of the censorship institutions that they've capacity built in a region. So capacity building is a phrase in statecraft that effectively means

00:46:11 Speaker_02
building up an asset so that it has the capability to be instrumentalized by the U.S. State Department. So, for example, whenever we're trying to do something in a foreign country, the first thing we do is we look at the state of the chessboard.

00:46:25 Speaker_02
What assets are on our side there? What political groups? What demographic groups? What religious groups? What political parties? What universities? What media institutions? What capacities do they currently have?

00:46:43 Speaker_02
What capacities do they need but don't have? And that is where the flood of State Department and USAID and NED funding comes in to capacity build them so that they can be instruments of U.S. statecraft.

00:46:55 Speaker_02
Now, it doesn't mean they always use those capacities. Sometimes we create those capacities, even if we don't intend to use them right away, just in case we might need them later. And I can, that's a whole other fascinating field.

00:47:07 Speaker_02
But so what what seps does is it's a joint program by the US State Department USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy now USAID is You know a very notor it's it's sort of a switch player There's no aid in USAID by the way, that's your brain is being tricked when you see the phrase USAID It's not an aid organization the aid and USAID stands for agent US Agency for International Development it is developing internationally around the world

00:47:36 Speaker_02
all of the institutions that the State Department needs to use. So when they are capacity building activist groups in a foreign country, that's because the State Department wants those activists there.

00:47:50 Speaker_02
Now, USAID for the first time in its history, it was created in the early 1960s by JFK, 1961. It was created because you had all of this intelligence, statecraft, and military support and logistical aid that was tripping over itself, basically.

00:48:11 Speaker_02
The military would be funding, you know, would be running aid to certain groups in the region. The State Department would be running aid to certain groups in the region. The Intelligence Committee would

00:48:21 Speaker_02
There was no way there was no sort of central coordinator of those of those capacity building operations USA by the way is a 50 billion dollar budget the entirety of the intelligence community is only 72 billion So it is as more than the CIA and more than the State Department Wow

00:48:37 Speaker_02
Aid is basically as USAID is effectively a switch player to to assist the Pentagon with with on the national security front to assist the State Department on the national interest front or to assist the Intelligence community on a on a sort of clandestine operations front so you can look up funny moments by the way in USAID being a CIA front if you if for example you want to pull up the Wikipedia of Zunzunio when USAID

00:49:07 Speaker_02
Created a basically a CIA Twitter in Cuba to try to to try to convince the people of basically to try to get a free speech internet a free speech Twitter knockoff in Cuba at a time when Twitter in 2014 was was restricted and

00:49:26 Speaker_02
And USAID laundered money that was earmarked for Pakistan in order to create an identical version of Twitter, but just for Cuba, and to recruit them using messaging that at first involved music, sports, and hurricane updates.

00:49:45 Speaker_02
And then in their own documents, once they had accumulated about 100,000 users, they would start to feed them in the algorithm messaging to make them want to overthrow their government and form smart mobs to bring a Cuban spring to Cuba in the same way that the CIA, the State Department and USAID pulled off the Arab spring in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, 2012.

00:50:09 Speaker_02
By the way, I'm not even opining on whether this is good or bad. But you can't bring that home, and you can't target US companies like they've done here. So USAID provides most of the money.

00:50:23 Speaker_02
The State Department provides the policy vision for the CEPS censorship program. And NED does the technical implementation work. Now, you saw in that video there were two organizations that were listed.

00:50:35 Speaker_02
It didn't say they were the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, IRI and NDI. These are the two political branches of the National Endowment for Democracy.

00:50:46 Speaker_02
When this CIA cutout was set up in 1983, they set up their four core fours.

00:50:54 Speaker_02
One of them, the first two are the political cores, the IRI, the Republican, the GOP wing of the CIA, effectively, the NDI, the Democrat Party wing of the CIA, and then two others, one called the Center for International Private Enterprise, which is the Chamber of Commerce.

00:51:13 Speaker_02
is basically the CIA liaising with multinational companies with our big U.S. national champions.

00:51:20 Speaker_02
And then the fourth one is called the Solidarity Center, which is the CIA's work with unions, which has been a part and parcel of our CIA work since the 1940s.

00:51:28 Speaker_02
And so you have these two political branches of the National Endowment for Democracy are designed to basically gel to both sides of the political aisle to make sure they have support for CIA activity in a region.

00:51:41 Speaker_02
And so this, for example, there was a split on Russia between the GOP and the DNC up until Ukraine in 2014. You may recall in 2012, there was that debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama over Russia policy, where

00:51:58 Speaker_02
Mitt Romney was flanking Obama from his hawkish Russia right. He was saying, Obama, you're soft on Russia. You're letting Vladimir Putin get everything he wants in Eastern Europe. And Obama's response was, the 1980s called.

00:52:12 Speaker_02
They want their foreign policy back. Because at the time, it was primarily the GOP economic stakeholders whose energy investments were being sabotaged by Russian activity in Georgia and Azerbaijan.

00:52:26 Speaker_02
It hadn't yet hit the NDI network, the DNC side of the economics until Ukraine in 2014. That was when there became a bipartisan consensus on the need to effectively go to war and launch this big energy sanctions

00:52:44 Speaker_02
operation against russia and so there's that so that's who's running that sex program it's it's both sides of the political aisle but both of them hate trump both of them hate populists whether it's in the u s in with trump bolsonaro in brazil and again the whole suite of e u countries that we just talked about and they descended on brazil just two weeks after bolsonaro was elected in twenty eighteen

00:53:13 Speaker_02
The Atlantic Council and NED held all these meetings about how Bolsonaro only won because of basically social media. Social media and end-to-end encrypted chats like WhatsApp and Telegram.

00:53:25 Speaker_02
And that we need to basically stop Bolsonaro's presidency in its tracks and stop him from getting reelected by creating a censorship infrastructure in Brazil that is powerful and institutionally as wide and deep as our other diplomatic work.

00:53:42 Speaker_02
So NDI, which I should note, Hunter Biden was on the chairman's advisory board of NDI, the DNC CIA wing.

00:53:49 Speaker_02
So if anyone is a little curious as to why the CIA intervened on the Justice Department investigation, folks remember the IRS wanted to question Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's lawyer, who paid his taxes for five years.

00:54:03 Speaker_02
And then the CIA intervened and told them, do not, you know, do not look into who is funding Hunter Biden. I find it curious that the CIA's DNC branch, Hunter Biden, was on the chairman's advisory board.

00:54:19 Speaker_02
But so NDI sets up this sprawl of coalitions called D4D, Design for Democracy. And Design for Democracy, in tandem with this CEPS program, goes on to work with

00:54:35 Speaker_02
The censorship court, Demorais, the censorship Voldemort on their TSE court, it's basically the election management and censorship body of their Supreme Court. This is the guy who has gone to war with Elon Musk.

00:54:51 Speaker_02
They help that censorship court set up a disinformation task force and their own institutional assets get put on the advisory committee of the Brazilian censorship court to direct the censorship policies

00:55:07 Speaker_02
of the same institution that banned X from Brazil, that seized Starlink's assets. They worked with the universities, FGV DAP and other very significant Brazilian universities.

00:55:25 Speaker_02
They set up disinformation centers in there and got academic thought leadership published in Brazil about the need to pass anti-misinformation laws.

00:55:35 Speaker_02
their own NDI fellows and operatives were publicly testifying to the Brazilian parliament on the need to pass these laws.

00:55:45 Speaker_02
They were publicly speaking to the prosecutors association groups in Brazil, telling them they need to prosecute misinformation on this. They were funding

00:55:56 Speaker_02
millions of dollars to Brazilian media institutions to promote Internet censorship and to promote the banning, effectively, of any pro-Bolsonaro content on social media or on end-to-end encrypted chats.

00:56:09 Speaker_02
The USAID then kicked in millions of dollars of funding to Internews, which is another U.S. government-funded media projection arm, to promote

00:56:19 Speaker_02
Media literacy programs information integrity programs countering this and disinformation programs in Brazil So at every level Brazilian media companies they partner with Globo for example the largest the largest media outlet in Brazil

00:56:35 Speaker_02
The media institutions, the universities and thought leaders, the politicians, the judges, it was full spectrum. It was the same thing that we do when we try to regime change a country. By the way, this is in USAID's charter.

00:56:49 Speaker_02
This is one of the reasons they're able to get away with this. In USAID's charter,

00:56:53 Speaker_02
It allows USAID to capacity-build assets to do so-called judiciary reform, which means influencing the laws and the structure of the judges and to be able to have our foreign aid money

00:57:08 Speaker_02
get laws passed or get structural changes made to the court system there. And this is what SEPS did, this State Department CIA front censorship organization. They developed a strategy they called EMBs, election management bodies.

00:57:28 Speaker_02
which is basically focusing in on the court system of different countries that are in charge with adjudicating elections in order to get them to grow a censorship capacity to censor the ability for people to question their elections.

00:57:43 Speaker_02
And they've had all these stakeholder meetings. Some of them are really funny. Some of them they said, well, some of our EMB partners didn't want to actually, didn't think they could pull this off.

00:57:54 Speaker_02
They couldn't convince the other political stakeholders in their country to grow the censorship capacity. And they advised them about how they could cleverly use rhetoric to disguise the programs.

00:58:04 Speaker_02
Don't call it a counter disinformation program if you think that'll ruffle too many feathers. Instead,

00:58:10 Speaker_02
simply call it strategic communications and because every listen every every government agency has some sort of public affairs branch some sort of communications uh capacity simply say that this is for monitoring and engaging in strategic communications and then you can mass flag the accounts of the u.s state department's political opponents they want to stop from winning the election

00:58:37 Speaker_10
This is why, you know, when you're saying it's going to be insanely difficult and Trump's going to face so many headwinds trying to unravel all this stuff like it's the there's so many organizations and there's so many people involved and there's so many countries that are in lockstep.

00:58:52 Speaker_02
because we waited too long. We waited too long. And now look, it's, it's not full blown. Um, this has not yet reached full maturity where, where we are at complete 1984 on, on all of this, but it is no longer in its infant stage.

00:59:08 Speaker_02
There was, if, if Elon had acquired, if,

00:59:14 Speaker_02
If Congress was aware of that CISA, that cybersecurity branch at DHS, was the real mystery of truth in 2019 instead of in 2022, if people were aware of the State Department's Global Engagement Center and USAID's Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance, and all of this in 2018, 2019, when it was really getting its feet down,

00:59:41 Speaker_02
It may have been easy to have been pulled out at the roots then because they were skittish at the time about going through with this at first You heard in that in that video that we just watched a reference to this phrase called whole of society Yeah, this is another funny, you know funny video if you want to just pull up though if you're interested Jamie and if you think Joe this is appropriate

01:00:01 Speaker_02
I could have made this a six-hour supercut, but if you just I made a two-hour supercut of If you just look up whole of society supercut on my on my ex account, you'll you'll see this and this phrase is their get-out-jail-free card.

01:00:17 Speaker_02
So when these CIA cutouts and State Department emissaries and, you know, the whole apparatus of the blob had this apparition moment in 2016 where the rules-based international order would collapse and we have to stop populism, we have to stop Trump from, you know, ending our seize Eurasia foreign policy,

01:00:39 Speaker_02
When that happened, they had a lot of self-reflection where they said, China doesn't have this problem. Russia doesn't have this problem.

01:00:47 Speaker_02
Authoritarian countries don't have to deal with the threat of insurgent populist groups, you know, radically altering that country's foreign policy, that country's national security state.

01:01:01 Speaker_02
but they do it all top down and we have our entire diplomatic apparatus is arrayed as a sort of dichotomy between democracy and autocracy because that's what lets us go over go and take over or overthrow or regime change foreign countries is their autocracies and we're bringing democracy to them so we can't be seen to look like the autocracies we're trying to overthrow we want the we want the autocratic outcome

01:01:30 Speaker_02
With a but we don't we can't be seen to use the autocratic process So they came up with a really cute trick to prevent the top-down perception And they called this the whole of society counter misinformation framework the whole society counter misinformation alliance

01:01:46 Speaker_02
And the reason I thought it'd be funny to just play this clip before delving into it a little bit more is because it actually starts with a clip from CISA, the cyber security turned cyber censorship DHS internal meeting where the CISA censorship official leading

01:02:04 Speaker_02
leading the meeting apologizes for using the phrase whole society, because by that point, everyone is so sick of hearing it.

01:02:12 Speaker_02
It's like a mantra, like an incantation that has to be recited almost like a religious ritual, because this is how you get this government, private sector, civil society,

01:02:28 Speaker_02
Media Alliance this thing was completely orchestrated top-down to avoid the appearance of top-down in 2017 they borrowed this concept from their military counterinsurgency work and they simply grafted it on to censorship But I don't know.

01:02:43 Speaker_02
Do you want to just like watch this?

01:02:45 Speaker_02
If you just look for the phrase whole of society at Mike Ben cyber, I did it You could also find a lot of history talking about it Well, if you go to in my highlights tab in in scroll down, I think you'll you'll see it there. It's It's a super cut

01:03:02 Speaker_02
I use the phrase supercut if that's helpful to highlight it. But whole society is this concept that the government will fund allies to astroturf the appearance of a spontaneous democratic surround sound around the need to do the censorship work.

01:03:23 Speaker_02
So there are four quadrants in their whole society framework.

01:03:27 Speaker_02
Government meaning all the different government they have a whole of government side of that which is everything from the State Department the DHS HHS for kovat censorship work You know FBI DOJ National Science Foundation all that the private sector are the private sector companies the social media tech platforms where the censorship actually takes place and

01:03:50 Speaker_02
The civil society quadrant means university censorship centers count Disinformation studies is what they call it misnomer of the century.

01:03:59 Speaker_02
But but so they've there's now about a hundred US universities Every major US University has a censorship center whether it's it'll be called disinformation studies sometimes will be tucked under their sociology department or their communications even their applied physics when they do and

01:04:15 Speaker_02
AI censorship so you have the universe in the civil society layer you have the universities the NGOs the activist groups the the Independent nonprofit foundations and the fourth quadrant is media, which is the government working with media to promote censorship of US citizens and so by by a set effectively wielding all these assets

01:04:38 Speaker_02
so that there's government funding and government coordination. But technically, most of the pressure being put on the tech companies is coming from... Yeah, here you go. You can just watch. It's like a funny supercut.

01:04:50 Speaker_02
We don't need to watch the whole thing, but you'll get the picture very quickly.

01:04:56 Speaker_00
And we hear this term all the time. A problem like disinformation, fighting disinformation, really requires a whole society response. I know whole society is a little bit cliche and the term gets thrown around a lot.

01:05:11 Speaker_05
Addressing disinformation requires a whole of society approach.

01:05:16 Speaker_12
This information is not going to be fixed by governments acting alone. I think we've seen that a whole of society effort is really key to the solution.

01:05:27 Speaker_17
There are some countries, more so in Europe or up in other parts of North America, that are more progressive in recognizing that this is a whole of society challenge.

01:05:37 Speaker_07
whole of society approach and what would be your wish list if you if you could if you could implement anything or to be able to trust when somebody tells them it's fake is there anything that governments can do on that front absolutely this is a whole of society problem so there's things that governments can do um you know individual national governments and and multilateral institutions this information challenges democracy require that we work together as a community

01:06:03 Speaker_04
to share our experiences and to hold governments, social media platforms, and political leaders accountable for making sure that people are empowered with information that is real and accurate.

01:06:15 Speaker_04
Democracy depends on a healthy information space that can only be achieved through a whole of society effort.

01:06:21 Speaker_07
countering disinformation. We often talk about a whole-of-society response.

01:06:25 Speaker_18
Of course, we need disinformation, a whole-of-society approach. I want to get into the, quote, whole-of-society response, that whole-of-society network response, private sector, public sector, civil society.

01:06:40 Speaker_16
means that we're circulating, and that to me is the whole-of-society approach.

01:06:45 Speaker_07
I think the solution has to be whole-of-society, which is the word that we throw around a lot, especially in venues like these, right? We need cooperation from the tech platforms, good faith cooperation, and enforcement of terms of service.

01:06:57 Speaker_07
But we also need people in the government who are willing to say, yes, this is a problem, and it's not just about foreign actors.

01:07:03 Speaker_02
Okay, so a few things on that. If you remember the SEPS video, the CIA front NED program to get censorship laws in 140 countries.

01:07:13 Speaker_02
If you remember, there was this, one of those nine things they read off is that the US government needs to capacity build these counter misinformation institutions in civil society because the government has the money and the resources, but not the credibility

01:07:29 Speaker_02
civil society organizations, the universities, the NGOs, they've got the credibility, but not the money.

01:07:35 Speaker_02
So that's part of what they're saying here with the role of this civil society is they can't be, the government can't be seen as telling everyone to do all of this censorship because that's authoritarian. That would look not credible.

01:07:50 Speaker_02
That would look authoritarian for the government to do. So we've got the muscle and the money, But not the credibility.

01:07:56 Speaker_02
Our cut-out organizations have the credibility, but not the money in the muscle, so we're going to give them the money in the muscle.

01:08:03 Speaker_02
And so, I can show you, if you want to see what this looks like in action, I can show you some great videos that sort of show this. So, if you just look up Wise Decks, it's in my highlights. It's also, if you just do at Mike Ben Cyber, Wise Decks.

01:08:18 Speaker_02
I'm gonna show you a couple of things of how this how this works. So if when Jamie's able to pull that up so Wise decks w-i-s-e-d-e-x Mm-hmm. And so Trump did something really ambitious when he was president at the National Science Foundation.

01:08:40 Speaker_02
The National Science Foundation is the main funder of higher education in the United States. It's a $10 billion pool of money that goes to fund university centers. And it is sort of the civilian arm of DARPA.

01:08:56 Speaker_02
It's technically a sort of civilian organization you know, foundation for science. But if you look at its history, it basically has a it's when military technology becomes dual use for commercial and civilian purposes.

01:09:13 Speaker_02
So, for example, the Internet itself started off as DARPA in the 60s.

01:09:18 Speaker_02
Then it was transferred to the National Science Foundation for civilian Effectively management that and then it made its way to the World Wide Web That's why the National Science Foundation has a like a 15% quota on national security related projects and that's and all the technical implementers of the censorship programs at the National Science Foundation are

01:09:41 Speaker_02
come from DARPA, including this that I'm gonna show here. But so, Trump created this thing in his first term at the National Science Foundation called the Convergence Accelerator Program.

01:09:54 Speaker_02
And the idea was, is that we were going to converge scientists from different fields to solve these home run swing challenges like cold fusion and, you know,

01:10:07 Speaker_02
all the quantum mechanics challenges that required physicists to talk to data scientists and network modelers and bringing them all together so that they all converge on a common problem. So he set up about five of these tracks in like 2019.

01:10:24 Speaker_02
Biden gets into office. His first year in office, his National Science Foundation creates a new track. It's called Track F.

01:10:30 Speaker_02
And the whole thing is for countering misinformation, to converge scientists on developing censorship technology to censor the internet at scale. So they have spent tens of millions of dollars. This one that we're about to watch

01:10:49 Speaker_02
Was eligible for 5.7 million dollars from the National Science Foundation it received $750,000 from the National Science Foundation to create this This is the promo video that they put up on YouTube in connection with their with their grant so in so I'll just let it play and then I'll Posts that go viral on social media can reach millions of people Unfortunately some posts are misleading

01:11:13 Speaker_14
Social media platforms have policies about harmful misinformation. For example, Twitter has a policy against posts that say authorized COVID vaccines will make you sick.

01:11:25 Speaker_14
When something is mildly harmful, platforms attach warnings, like this one that points readers to better information. Really bad things, they remove. But before they can enforce, platforms have to identify the bad stuff, and they miss some of it.

01:11:42 Speaker_14
Actually, they miss a lot, especially when the posts aren't in English. To understand why, let's consider how platforms usually identify bad posts. There are too many posts for a platform to review everything.

01:11:57 Speaker_14
So first, a platform flags a small fraction for review. Next, human reviewers act as judges, determining which flagged posts violate policy guidelines. If the policies are too abstract, both steps, flagging and judging, can be difficult.

01:12:16 Speaker_14
Wise Text helps by translating abstract policy guidelines into specific claims that are more actionable. For example, the misleading claim that the COVID-19 vaccine suppresses a person's immune response.

01:12:30 Speaker_14
Each claim includes keywords associated with the claim in multiple languages. For example, a Twitter search for negative efficacy yields tweets that promote the misleading claim.

01:12:42 Speaker_14
A search on eficacia negativa yields Spanish tweets promoting that same claim. The trust and safety team at a platform can use those keywords to automatically flag matching posts for human review.

01:12:56 Speaker_14
WiseDex harnesses the wisdom of crowds as well as AI techniques to select keywords for each claim and provide other information in the claim profile.

01:13:06 Speaker_14
For human reviewers, a WiseDex browser plugin identifies misinformation claims that might match the post. The reviewer then decides which matches are correct. A much easier task than deciding if posts violate abstract policies. Reviewer efficiency

01:13:23 Speaker_10
So, so COVID-19 was essentially like a proof of concept of all this, right?

01:13:28 Speaker_10
Like this is a, this is something they could utilize and see how everything works because you have this sort of consensus among most people because of the media narrative that this is dangerous. We're all going to die.

01:13:41 Speaker_10
The thing that's fucking us up is these people who are vaccine deniers and these people who are believing things that are ridiculous like natural immunity.

01:13:49 Speaker_10
And so you have like a public support of this thing to go full scale, where they can try it out with COVID-19, where there was no real specific narratives that we thought of wholly as problematic as a society before COVID-19.

01:14:09 Speaker_10
COVID-19 became one that at least a large swath of society believed the narrative that's being given to you by corporate news and this was a thing that they could combat on social media and have support for this type of censorship.

01:14:23 Speaker_02
They had already begun doing it for hate speech before COVID-19. It didn't hit the scale, though. But they were already using hate speech as a proxy for populism, both in the US and across NATO.

01:14:34 Speaker_02
And they were conflating everything with hate speech, basically. If you opposed open borders in the US, or in Italy, or in Germany, or in the UK. In fact, that's why the US Justice Department funded Hate Lab.

01:14:44 Speaker_02
You want to see another crazy video from all this? I'm not saying we have to pull it up. Let's pull it up. Fuck it. Yeah. Look up the Hate Lab.

01:14:53 Speaker_02
Their their video on the their AI Scan and ban dashboard for all of this is just a large-scale Implementation of censorship.

01:15:05 Speaker_10
Yes using all these different things to get people accustomed to it and to try to Start using this full scale.

01:15:12 Speaker_02
Yes, actually before we go to the hate lab I do want to dwell on this kovat thing for a second because that's that's exactly right and What we just watched with wise decks just coming back to this whole society concept.

01:15:24 Speaker_02
So this is the National Science Foundation The administrators for this are both DARPA guys It is it is funding the University of Michigan to create an AI censorship claims database so that

01:15:39 Speaker_02
the censorship policies that the Biden administration strong-armed onto these social media companies, as we know from Mark Zuckerberg and others, to adopt in the first place, so that there's no escape.

01:15:51 Speaker_02
Every claim that a COVID vaccine skeptic says will be mapped out in a sort of lexicon code book of terms and claims that will then be automatically flagged

01:16:05 Speaker_02
And the National Science Foundation does not want to be seen as having the government tell the private sector companies to do it. So it is capacity building a civil society nonprofit, a University of Michigan disinformation lab.

01:16:21 Speaker_02
to create this AI censorship technology to then sell to the social media platforms to make sure there's no escape in terms of the ability to criticize government policy on COVID without getting censored.

01:16:36 Speaker_02
But just to drive home that point on COVID censorship, this is something that I think is really terrifying that the people should be aware of. There's a company called Grafica, which figures very heavily in all of the censorship industry.

01:16:51 Speaker_02
If you pull up Grafika's April 2020 report on COVID and COVID conspiracy theories, it's also on my timeline if you look up the word Grafika. It's G-R-A-P-H-I-K-A.

01:17:07 Speaker_02
Grafica is a longtime military contractor that did social media monitoring, surveillance, and analytics work for the US military and intelligence in order to see what narratives opposition, various political movements or insurgent groups are saying on social media.

01:17:26 Speaker_02
They were formerly a part of the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative. The Minerva Initiative is the Psychological Operations Research Center of the Pentagon.

01:17:35 Speaker_02
when the Pentagon is trying to do information-shaping operations and they solicit propositions and ideas and thought leadership from outside organizations to help the military achieve psychological operations outcomes that are favorable to the intended military policy.

01:17:52 Speaker_02
So Graphika has gotten over $7 million in Pentagon grants. It was formerly a part of the Pentagon's Psychological Operations Research Center. And Graphika was one of the very first entities to begin the censorship around the world of COVID-19.

01:18:12 Speaker_02
given the strange unresolved role of the pentagon in potentially giving rise to COVID-19 or the you know the strangeness of the DARPA grants uh around there in the military networks around the biosecurity state, Grafica began their work in before COVID-19 even got its name.

01:18:35 Speaker_02
They started In their own source documents, they say they started December 16th. The pneumonia-like symptoms were December 12th, 2019, so just four days after.

01:18:47 Speaker_02
Now, they've said later that, actually, we started in January 2020, but we backdated our data, our AI. You know ingestion of all the tweets and facebook posts in january 2020.

01:18:57 Speaker_02
So even if you accept that that is still Just one month after kovat broke out And if you pull this if you pull up their their april 2020 report, you will see that they've they've literally scanned Yeah, this is the one and and I have a highlighted version of it by the way on my um

01:19:16 Speaker_02
On my ex account as well if but but so if you if you scroll up So so if you let's just if you start on page one, I'll sort of walk you through this.

01:19:24 Speaker_02
So again, this is a Pentagon funded Psychological operations research arm of the Pentagon and you'll see like the you know, it's called the kovat 19 infodemic

01:19:35 Speaker_02
So they published this in April 2020 after COVID got its name, but they started this before it did. And if you scroll down to, I think, page five here, you'll see.

01:19:43 Speaker_02
So this is, by the way, an AI-generated network map of all people expressing skepticism about the origins of COVID and different conspiracy theories. So if you scroll down to page five, it says, a key analytical highlights of these maps.

01:19:59 Speaker_02
Okay, so you'll see that they, Uh, so similarly large mega clusters of u.s.

01:20:06 Speaker_02
Right-wing accounts Were diminishing the the mainstreaming of the coronavirus conversation if you scroll down to the next one You see they've dedicated coronavirus misinformation map seated on disinformation specific hashtags reels that conservative groups had a larger total presence of covid heterodox opinions This is right at the outbreak one month

01:20:28 Speaker_02
into it. A Pentagon-funded psyops firm is doing political mapping, not in the U.S., in the U.K., in Italy. So they found that disproportionately it's conservatives who need to be censored more.

01:20:44 Speaker_02
If you just scroll down through this, I'll show you some highlights.

01:20:47 Speaker_10
What was this in regard, this was disinformation in regard to the origin at this point?

01:20:52 Speaker_02
Yes. Yes.

01:20:52 Speaker_10
And you can run a control F. Which is wild that they were already countering when the origin was not really disclosed yet. It was still being debated.

01:21:00 Speaker_02
Right. And you'll see they even, so again, this is the Pentagon. Creating network maps.

01:21:05 Speaker_02
We're paying for this effectively to protect the political the online reputation of bill gates and george soros You'll see they have a whole section on if you just run a control f for gates or soros.

01:21:16 Speaker_02
You'll see this as well but you'll see that they map these different conspiracy

01:21:23 Speaker_02
How much would Bill Gates or George Soros need to pay a cloak-and-dagger public relations shop to scour the entire internet and create targetable, censorable, demographic communities that social media should censor in order to protect their reputation?

01:21:40 Speaker_02
this is us paying the pentagon to pay a psyops firm to protect the reputation of bill gates and george soros from conspiracy theories online and they did the same thing with covet origins they did the same thing with with vaccines the same group grafica was a part of something called the virality project

01:22:00 Speaker_02
which mapped out 66 different claims of if you questioned COVID vaccine efficacy, if you questioned masks and their efficacy, if you questioned policies around lockdowns. All of that was systematically mapped.

01:22:16 Speaker_02
All four of the entities involved in the Virality Project, by the way, were U.S. government-funded at the organizational level.

01:22:24 Speaker_02
The University of Stanford and the University of Washington, who were two of those four, received a joint $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, which, again, is this basically civilian side of DARPA.

01:22:38 Speaker_02
The, you know, Graphica has received seven million in Pentagon funds and then the, you know, the nastiest one of them all is this group, the Atlantic Council, which has, which gets annual funding over a million dollars a year from the Pentagon, over a million dollars a year from the State Department.

01:22:53 Speaker_02
It also gets annual funding from the CIA, cut out National Endowment for Democracy, gets annual funding from USAID. Basically every web of US cloak and dagger intelligence and diplomatic funding

01:23:04 Speaker_02
funds the atlantic council every year the atlantic council has seven cia directors on its on its board of directors a lot of people don't know seven former number one heads of the cia are still alive let alone all locally clustered on the exact organization which is the premier heavyweight in internet censorship around the world and the atlantic council

01:23:27 Speaker_02
And I can show you some wild clips of that, by the way, including them training journalists on what to censor. I need to see that. Yeah. OK.

01:23:33 Speaker_02
So if you pull up if you can find this also, if you look for on Rumble, NATO training journalists, you'll see that.

01:23:44 Speaker_10
Is Rumble the only place you can put that up right now?

01:23:46 Speaker_02
No, I have it on my X account. I actually have a 45 minute video. I have a 45 minute video that goes through it and all the supporting receipts that's got, I think, almost 3 million views right now.

01:23:55 Speaker_02
But there's a two minute, there's like a two to four minute video. If you look at Atlantic Council,

01:24:02 Speaker_02
Censorship journalists or the videos and I can tell you that the source video is called I call bullshit This was in this is in June 2019 Right on the heels of the Bob Mueller investigation The Atlantic Council again with seven CIA directors on his board an annual funding from the State Department Pentagon Does this this 360 meeting where they bring in journalists and fact-checkers from all over the world to come to this?

01:24:29 Speaker_02
You know, I mean it looks like something straight-out dr. Strange love and Jamie Let me know if you have you have trouble pulling it up because I can Send me down to me adding what you added pulled up what you were talking about on other podcasts That's not what I'm looking for.

01:24:42 Speaker_02
So after it's definitely I think it's definitely searchable easily on rumble. I should want to load this up, but the and I can I can tell you the exact

01:24:52 Speaker_02
If you just look it's called I call bullshit is what it was by Ben Nimmo the Atlantic Council I'll just show you what I'm saying because every time I type in what you're saying, it just brings up you talk. Okay. Okay. How about how about it?

01:25:03 Speaker_02
How about Atlantic Council?

01:25:04 Speaker_19
I land Council journalists Or training yeah journalists Yeah, I think yeah

01:25:24 Speaker_02
There you go, that that's the top one, okay, so So here you go the censorship training session Yes, so can I tell you a little backstory on this real Trump tweets brexit slogans? Yeah, give me some. Okay.

01:25:42 Speaker_02
All right So if you pause wait, if you pause right there on the on the thumbnail if you just see it real quick Okay So I found this video in 2019, you know, my, like my whole life has been 24 seven morning, noon, night tracking, watching.

01:25:56 Speaker_02
I know these people closer than my own friends and family. This is, you know, I found this video, I think at around the five or six hour mark of, of a day two of,

01:26:07 Speaker_02
I found this I think at five six hour mark of a nine hour video in in June 2019 Where this this is basically the month before the Bob Mueller investigation and they they wanted to pre-censor and and throttle Trump's ability to be able to Fight off charges that he was a Russian asset

01:26:29 Speaker_02
Because at the time, the Pentagon and the intelligence community want him out. If you remember, the Ukraine impeachment in 2019 came from C.R. Morella. The CIA agent came from the Vindman brothers who were the military. Basically, Trump had a big beef.

01:26:44 Speaker_02
with the existing brass of the Pentagon and the intelligence community over Russia policy, over Eurasia policy, which is a whole thing that we can maybe talk about it if you're interested.

01:26:54 Speaker_02
But so the Atlantic Council was one of the very, very, very first movers in the censorship industry space. I mentioned how this really started in 2014 with 25 years of free speech diplomacy sort of ended with the 2014 Ukraine fiasco.

01:27:10 Speaker_02
Because of this Jirassimov doctrine hybrid warfare thing and I mentioned that that's when NATO began setting down infrastructure Just to censor the internet and that's what snowballed into what we now have and so the Atlantic Council Effectively bills itself as NATO's think-tank.

01:27:26 Speaker_02
That's what it's known as in Washington, you know, there's you know, places like the Council on Foreign Relations are sort of more known for Chamber of Commerce and big business sort of working on government policy.

01:27:37 Speaker_02
The Atlantic Council is one of these that's for NATO. And it's basically NATO's clandestine civilian sort of civil military arm.

01:27:46 Speaker_02
When there's a NATO military agenda that needs massaging at the political level, they need laws passed, they need sanctions put in place, they need capacity building on the civilian side to help a military thing.

01:27:57 Speaker_02
That's what the Atlantic Council primarily does.

01:28:00 Speaker_02
And I'm not even opining on whether much of what they do, I'm not even saying good or bad organization, but they set up something called the Digital Forensics Research Lab right at, you know, basically right on the heels of the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine counter coup.

01:28:15 Speaker_02
And it was one of the earliest NATO U.S. military liaised internet censorship shops that targeted populist governments, Trump, the whole UK, Italy, Germany, Spain network that I talked about, Bolsonaro, right out the gate.

01:28:37 Speaker_02
So this video was, again, right before Russiagate ended, and they thought they could put Trump in prison with this. And this was a training session that they did for journalists and fact checkers in June 2019.

01:28:49 Speaker_02
You'll see this session is an interactive session. It's called I Call Bullshit. And by the way, Ben Nimmo, he's at the Atlanta Council on this one, but he goes on shortly after this to be effectively the technical lead for Grafica, the same Pentagon.

01:29:06 Speaker_02
And by the way, he had started his career in the NATO press shop, basically doing media work for NATO. Then he goes over and again, we fund all of this, but let's just watch and we'll show you this.

01:29:19 Speaker_13
Somebody who works in this space will, I think, acknowledge that in any information operation, it's not just lies. You take a grain of truth and they will build a pearl of disinformation around it.

01:29:33 Speaker_13
When we're in this space, there isn't a simple binary true or false. There are all kinds of shades of meaning in between. Now, there are various different ways of modeling how you can identify the ways in which people are trying to twist the story.

01:29:48 Speaker_13
And the one that I use, because it's short and because, frankly, I developed it, is the four Ds. Dismiss, distort, distract, and dismay. These are the four responses that we see time and again. Not false.

01:30:02 Speaker_02
None of these are false. How can we get censored anyway?

01:30:05 Speaker_08
All of you should have some of these cards on the table. If you don't look on another table and steal one, that's not being used. Because these are going to help get our attention.

01:30:18 Speaker_08
We are going to go through a set of slides showing quotes from different organizations and individuals who are using certain rhetorical devices to make their argument. And so... If you go through all of them, at least one of these four will apply.

01:30:37 Speaker_08
Again, dismiss, distort, distract, dismay. Everyone say it with me. Dismiss. Jesus Christ. Distort. Distract. Dismay. Excellent. You're welcome to scream I call bullshit too if you're comfortable, but it's not.

01:30:52 Speaker_02
This is all funded by US taxpayers.

01:30:54 Speaker_08
So with that, let's play.

01:31:01 Speaker_10
Witch hunt.

01:31:04 Speaker_02
How can you censor the sitting president arguing that what he said is disinformation? How can you tell the tech platforms that that tweet is disinformation?

01:31:13 Speaker_19
Thank you.

01:31:14 Speaker_02
Get creative.

01:31:15 Speaker_01
Obviously it can be any number of the D's. You can say it's distorting what they're saying or distracting them from whatever the issue is saying. The issue isn't real. They're just after me because as they're witches and it's evil.

01:31:29 Speaker_01
I'm the injured party here. So it could be a whole lot of them. Trump's got a nice range when it comes to disinformation.

01:31:36 Speaker_08
Does anyone have a number one pick that they would like to mention related to this one? They said dismiss.

01:31:45 Speaker_19
Yes, dismiss.

01:31:49 Speaker_08
Dismiss? How many of you think dismiss? Raise your card, please. I think we're on to something here.

01:31:55 Speaker_13
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So you're right that, that underneath that attempt, there are, he's twisting the story. He's, he, he's accusing somebody else at the same thing. Right.

01:32:05 Speaker_13
But the main thing is what, what, what he's saying is like, don't listen to them because it's a witch hunt. So that was our first one. All right.

01:32:12 Speaker_08
Number two, getting topical here. Pro Brexit.

01:32:16 Speaker_02
When you have an idea, this is a Brexit ad saying we should be spending the money on our own national health system. instead of funding the EU. Distort.

01:32:26 Speaker_08
Any other takers? Any suggestions? Well, let's ask, how many of you think this one has distort involved? Jesus Christ. Okay, that's a lot. Any other? They seem so happy to comply. We've got a big hand over here.

01:32:40 Speaker_08
Let's, oh, were you just, you just kept your hand up? Her hand goes back down. Uh, are there any others? Are we just going to stick with that one? Yes, right here. Distract.

01:32:54 Speaker_02
Okay, so for those who couldn't hear It's also distract because it's trying to focus attention on the NHS rather than the vote itself Yeah, so okay So this this goes on but what you'll see is this is the exact political adversary group that the and that the intelligence diplomatic and military structure is trying to stop

01:33:20 Speaker_02
Donald Trump Brexit in the UK and You know, if you ever wondered why is it that everyone got all on board and suddenly started doing this all together?

01:33:30 Speaker_02
They were literally having years of these consensus building that you want to get your career made if you're at the point or Institute or the International fact-checking Union or

01:33:38 Speaker_02
or if you're on the disinformation beat for the Washington Post or NPR or Le Monde in France or the Frankfurt Allgemeine in Germany, you get your bona fides by going to these and you get effectively accredited by the blob.

01:33:53 Speaker_02
And they are, we're literally training people to find creative ways to mass flag. You can't even run a Brexit ad saying, hey, we should be spending $350 million on ourselves rather than the EU. That's disinformation, not false.

01:34:10 Speaker_02
They're saying it's not false. There's any number of ways that we can use to put pressure on the tech platforms to call this disinformation. You're hosting disinformation simply because it's not the agenda item that we want here.

01:34:24 Speaker_02
And again, that's seven CIA directors currently on the board of that organization. Those placards reading I call bullshit were paid for by us.

01:34:33 Speaker_10
It's just wild to watch everybody happily comply Enthusiastically try to find ways that this makes any sense with no one having a counter narrative No one's standing up and go wait. Wait a minute. Who's to decide?

01:34:47 Speaker_10
What it what if it turns out it is and it was a witch hunt Now we know all that Russiagate stuff was a hundred percent bullshit, right? So he was correct

01:34:57 Speaker_02
Right, but remember, the Mueller disaster wouldn't happen until just the following month.

01:35:01 Speaker_02
So at the time, they thought, you know, ah, great, if we can get him censored around calling this a witch hunt, then once the findings come in, he's going to be cornered. He won't even be able to defend himself. It'll be like a internet gag order.

01:35:11 Speaker_02
Right.

01:35:12 Speaker_10
Headline readers and low information voters overwhelmingly believed it.

01:35:16 Speaker_02
Right. Now, I should note that, I mean, this is another thing Elon was a huge game changer on. A lot of these people did not begin to sort of navel gaze and self-reflect on this until there was political and social blowback.

01:35:32 Speaker_02
The fact is, is there were a lot of these people who in 2017, 2018 were looking around at these. I've just, I mean, I've watched thousands of hours of these You know consensus building meetings.

01:35:44 Speaker_02
They they literally, you know, there would be some debate in 2017 about whether or not we should do this tactic or whether or not you know, this goes too far and I watched as these people basically Let those early inhibitions go as the thing took wings and as the money poured in because that's why I always emphasize the censorship industry if you

01:36:11 Speaker_02
If you get rid of the money you get rid of the glamour you get rid of the career track You get rid of the the power you get rid of the networks.

01:36:21 Speaker_02
And so To me it's it's The fact is is if these people could not have their careers made by doing this they wouldn't be pursuing those careers but when Elon arrived on the scene and Congress began to take action and media began to report on it and

01:36:39 Speaker_02
the Twitter file spilled open and the Murphy Missouri Lawsuit spearheaded by the Missouri and Louisiana State Attorney General's, you know put this in the court system in America first legal Stephen Miller and Gina Hamilton's group Began to I mean it wasn't really until there started to be a whole society freedom network on the other side of this that

01:37:01 Speaker_02
that the moral ambivalences that were expressed in the beginning began to reassert themselves. And I think there is some self-reflection on that.

01:37:10 Speaker_02
You know, it's funny, in 2022, Harvard wrote this piece, I covered it at my foundation, it was called Disinformation Studies is Too Big to Fail. And they made the argument, this is right before the bottom fell out on this stuff.

01:37:28 Speaker_02
It's September October 2022 a Harvard misinformation review disinformation studies is too big to fail They made the argument We've arrived it took a while in the beginning of it.

01:37:38 Speaker_02
They say the catalyst for this entire field was the 2016 election Basically, we created this entire spanning octopus of of censorship work because Trump won the election in 2016 and Now, it's 2022. We've gone unchallenged for six years.

01:37:54 Speaker_02
And now, if they want to get rid of us, they can't.

01:37:56 Speaker_02
They were making the argument that they were basically like Citibank during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, that they were simply a bank that's too big to fail because now they are so deeply ingrained in the media disinformation.

01:38:10 Speaker_02
They're so deeply ingrained in the private sector interstitials working with all the trust and safety people at every platform. They're so deeply funded by 12 different U.S. government departments and 50 different U.S.

01:38:21 Speaker_02
government programs, there's no way to get rid of us even if you want to. That's what they were stunting on in right before Elon, you know, finished the acquisition of X and Republicans won the House in 2022 and all this went in reverse.

01:38:38 Speaker_02
And now you'll see just this, you know, just this week in the news that

01:38:41 Speaker_02
They're, you know, there's quotes about them wanting to flee the country and that the whole field is potentially in disarray if Trump does indeed go forward and defund this, because now you're going to have 100 university centers gone.

01:38:55 Speaker_02
There goes your State Department funding. There goes your NSF funding. And I have a great example of that, by the way, that's pretty eye-opening on our topic of institutions. That's a quick receipt, if you're interested.

01:39:05 Speaker_10
So, yeah.

01:39:08 Speaker_02
So, Jamie, if you go to the Arizona State University Global Security Initiative, I'm going to show you some of this in action a little bit.

01:39:17 Speaker_10
Arizona State University Global. It's very vague.

01:39:20 Speaker_02
I just want to go to their website, go to... Oh yeah, Google Arizona State University Center on Narrative Disinformation and Strategic Influence.

01:39:34 Speaker_10
Disinformation and strategic what influence?

01:39:37 Speaker_02
Yeah, we're just Arizona State University Center narrative. Yes Yeah, just go to the website if you pull it up So this so This is if you click on global security initiative. I'm just going to show you an example real quick Just click on the top thing.

01:39:58 Speaker_02
This is global security initiative and then hit you will hit the back button in a second But if you scroll down So this Arizona State University, this is basically John McCain University.

01:40:07 Speaker_02
Now, this is significant because John McCain was the founding president of the IRI.

01:40:11 Speaker_10
Isn't it funny that the picture, the girl with the mask is wearing it wrong. Her nose is exposed. Oh my gosh. I mean, it just kind of shows you how fucking stupid all this stuff is. That's exactly right.

01:40:21 Speaker_10
You know, they had to have her wearing a mask still, even in 2024, you go to the website, she's wearing a mask and she's wearing it wrong. Her nose is exposed.

01:40:29 Speaker_10
Not only that it's a surgical mask is the dumbest one zero literally zero Protection, right? Okay, so especially with your nose open.

01:40:38 Speaker_02
No, that's that's fantastic. So so a few things is background Arizona State University its current president Michael Crow is now, and was since the day it was born in 1999, the chairman of In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is the CIA's venture capital arm.

01:40:56 Speaker_02
This is literally the CIA's proprietary investments in early stage technology companies. And the head of Arizona State University, its president, is the chairman of In-Q-Tel, and has been for 25 years.

01:41:08 Speaker_02
Arizona State University has these very deep partnerships with John McCain, who is the senator from Arizona,

01:41:14 Speaker_02
John McCain, who ran for president against Barack Obama in 2008, was the, before he ran for president in 2008, for 25 years, he was the founder and the president of the IRI, the CIA wing of the Republican Party.

01:41:28 Speaker_02
Again, the IRI is the GOP side of the National Endowment for Democracy. That's effectively self-declared CIA cutout. And in fact, Arizona State University has a John McCain Center on disinformation that works in tandem with this one.

01:41:45 Speaker_02
But I just wanted to show that you'll see this is technically it's Arizona State University, but you'll see that it is an intelligence program. So if you just scroll up for a second.

01:41:53 Speaker_02
You'll see at the bottom, right, this is a program at Arizona State University that is an intelligence program. Its job is to assist the intelligence community with this work. And if you scroll down from here, you'll see the different branches.

01:42:09 Speaker_02
And then click on the one, Narrative Disinformation and Strategic Influence. Now, this program has a $1.6 million grant from the Pentagon to do censorship work. It has $300,000 in grants from the State Department.

01:42:24 Speaker_02
It's got another almost $500,000 worth of additional government grants from adjacent U.S. government diplomatic statecraft intelligence. So this is a multi-million dollar program.

01:42:38 Speaker_02
a censorship center currently still up and running at Arizona State University funded by us. Now, if you click on why is disinformation dangerous, I want to show you something real quick, because this language is everywhere.

01:42:51 Speaker_02
This is stock standard language. Why do we have this set up?

01:42:56 Speaker_02
Disinformation sows confusion and distrust, diminishing people's faith and confidence in the institutions that are critical to a functioning, healthy democracy, such as government, news media, and science.

01:43:08 Speaker_02
I'm gonna pause right there The dirty tricks that this is laden with is what allows them to get away with this So note that they are saying that they have set up this Apparatus and we can get it.

01:43:23 Speaker_02
I can show you the different projects are involved with on the censorship side But the the issue they're saying is not that something's wrong but that people's the simple act of diminishing public faith and confidence in the news media.

01:43:42 Speaker_02
Government and science is an attack on democracy.

01:43:45 Speaker_02
This is the identical language that dozens of university centers and both of the major censorship programs at the National Science Foundation, as well as at State, USAID, Pentagon, they all have this stock language now, which is that the purpose of the program is to protect their assets.

01:44:03 Speaker_02
And legacy news media is one of those assets. If you on social media undermine public faith in the New York Times, As a credible institution, you are attacking democracy in the white blood cells of the blob.

01:44:18 Speaker_02
These disinformation centers being run out of our NGOs and universities and for-profit, private sector, censorship mercenary firms will scan and ban you off the internet.

01:44:28 Speaker_02
And I can show you what some of those look like as well, these dynamic disinformation dashboards. But even if you just go to the projects page for that, I think if you scroll down, you'll see it. Yeah, so these are Semantic Information Defender.

01:44:41 Speaker_10
This is right out of 1984.

01:44:43 Speaker_02
Yeah, so if you scroll down the side.

01:44:46 Speaker_10
Just the terms.

01:44:48 Speaker_02
Semantic Information Defender. OK, this project, again, this is $1.6 million just from the Pentagon alone.

01:44:56 Speaker_02
This project will develop a system that detects, characterizes, and attributes misinformation and disinformation, whether image, video, audio, or text,

01:45:06 Speaker_02
ASU provides content and narrative analysis, text detection and characterization methods, and a large data set of known disinformation manipulated objects. So this is a database of all images, videos, audio, text that effectively

01:45:26 Speaker_02
The ghost of John McCain, the founder of the CIA side of the GOP after Reagan reoriented the IC around the NGO complex. And they've been caught basically conflating anything that's pro-Trump with being pro-Russia.

01:45:43 Speaker_02
uh and and going after rank-and-file right-wing populists and conservatives because that's who the never trump side of the gop the mit romney uh john mccain side of the gop is trying to take out mit romney by the way who ran for president obama the the the cycle after john mccain remember john mccain was the founding president of the iri the cia wing of the gop mit romney is was and still is a board member of the iri

01:46:09 Speaker_02
I should note Marco Rubio, our incoming Secretary of State, is also a board member of the IRI. He is going to need to confront this in a way I hope everyone is prepared for. But it's all the way down to framing techniques.

01:46:24 Speaker_10
Could you just look at this for a second? Detecting and tracking adversarial framing. Just listen to how this is phrased. A pilot project with Lockheed Martin So defense contractor- Oh, we're going to go deep.

01:46:38 Speaker_02
You want to see some crazy?

01:46:39 Speaker_10
Oh yeah. Let's keep going with this. Please go deep.

01:46:42 Speaker_10
But created an information operations detection technique based on the principle of adversarial framing when parties hostile to US interests frame events in the media to justify support for future actions.

01:46:57 Speaker_10
That is such a weird way to phrase things because it's so... Okay, here we go.

01:47:02 Speaker_10
The research helps planners and decision makers identify trends in real time that indicate changes in the information operations strategy, potentially indicating imminent actions of follow-on project funded by the Department of Defense expands techniques developed in the pilot project to additional countries.

01:47:19 Speaker_10
Incorporates blog data into the framing analysis alongside known propaganda outlets listen this next one studies the Transmediation of these frames to non-russian Non-propaganda services, this is how they sources rather right and seeks to develop the ability to automatically detect adversarial from that This is the AI adversarial framing such a strange way to put it as u.s Interests are could be just simply narratives that turn out to not be true.

01:47:45 Speaker_10
I So they have the ability to censor true information based on u.s.

01:47:50 Speaker_02
Interests, but this is how they get you see that trans mediation frames to non-russian not propaganda sources Yes, that's how they get to say that we are spouting Russian disinformation if we say something But so does some random outlet they don't like in Russia.

01:48:05 Speaker_02
This is how Now, notice the 51 spies who lied about Hunter Biden, they will still insist, yeah, okay, the laptop's real, but it's still Russian because they argue that Russian propaganda outlets were amplifying it.

01:48:17 Speaker_02
And it's in Russia's interest to stigmatize the United States or to undermine the credibility of Joe Biden as president or to help Trump because Trump's foreign policy is helpful to them. So this is how they conflate us as U.S.

01:48:34 Speaker_02
civilians with a First Amendment guarantee with the get-out-of-Constitution-free card of our counterintelligence capacities. You know, like the CIA is not allowed to operate at home, right? It's supposed to be a foreign-facing operation. But

01:48:48 Speaker_02
They have a get-out-of-jail-free card on that, which is, if it's counterintelligence, if they think a U.S.

01:48:53 Speaker_02
citizen is being recruited by or in a network, formal or informal, with a hostile foreign nation state's intelligence services, now they can spy on Americans. This is how the NSA, you know, reads Tucker Carlson's signal chats and whatnot.

01:49:07 Speaker_02
And so they launders that foreign-to-domestic switcheroo, which, by the way, is another great, great clip. But anyway, I was going to... I saw your your eyes go a little wide with the Lockheed Martin thing.

01:49:21 Speaker_02
Yeah, can If you if you go to YouTube and you type in MITRE squint MITRE squint misinformation MIT ER yeah, MIT MIT RE MITRE is one of the largest military contractors They are they're absolutely enormous they

01:49:45 Speaker_02
They and they're sort of like, you know, a technological version of the Rand Corporation, if you will. Now this so they are funded by the US military. And fighting COVID-19 misinformation.

01:49:56 Speaker_10
Let's go do it from the beginning.

01:50:06 Speaker_11
as the nation continues the fight against COVID-19. Social media is full of conflicting, misleading and false information. The level and quality of fact checking varies from one platform to the next.

01:50:22 Speaker_11
That means that half-truths or flat-out fiction may appear as facts. People who are predisposed to believe the postings will perceive them as truth.

01:50:31 Speaker_11
When deception and misinformation have the potential to negatively influence personal and national health outcomes, we must call it out and correct it.

01:50:41 Speaker_11
MITRE Squint for COVID-19 provides a fast, reliable way to report and counter COVID misinformation about the disease, its treatment, and vaccinations.

01:50:51 Speaker_11
If you're a medical or public health expert or other Squint user, you can report untrue or inaccurate COVID-19 related postings with a single click, whether using a desktop or mobile device.

01:51:03 Speaker_11
MITRE Squint collects the URL with a screenshot and the coded information for aggregation and analysis. You'll get a secure message to verify that you sent the screenshot.

01:51:14 Speaker_11
The verification message includes a report that you can share or send to the social media channel asking that the misinformation be removed. What happens then?

01:51:24 Speaker_11
MITRE Squint analyzes and identifies patterns in social media that are misleading the public. Your report enables faster takedowns and helps maintain the public's trust and confidence in the efforts to battle COVID-19.

01:51:38 Speaker_11
MITRE Squint for COVID-19 provides an unprecedented opportunity to report dangerous misinformation designed to create additional fear or anger in people already stressed by the pandemic.

01:51:49 Speaker_11
Contact us to learn more about MITRE Squint and become a participant. squintatmitre.org

01:51:56 Speaker_02
Yeah, so MITRE is like a $2.2 billion annual budget, and tens of millions of that come from the Pentagon. They're a major Pentagon contractor. They did the same thing. By the way, that was the second squint AI censorship technology they developed.

01:52:13 Speaker_02
Again, just like the Pentagon was paying Grafica, censoring COVID origins, censoring conspiracy theories, they're paying AI censorship technology

01:52:24 Speaker_02
To simultaneously manage the the censorship of covid skeptic narratives They started this actually in 20, uh in the rump to the 2020 election if you look at squint misinformation Elections our democracy our elections.

01:52:39 Speaker_06
We must call it out.

01:52:40 Speaker_02
I think I think that starts at the 42nd if you go back to the beginning Including the viral messages spread through social media

01:52:51 Speaker_06
Social media platforms are only as accurate and truthful as the people who post to them. The level and quality of fact-checking varies from one platform to the next. That means that half-truths or flat-out fiction may appear as facts.

01:53:06 Speaker_06
People who are predisposed to believe the postings will perceive them as the truth. When deception and misinformation impact the infrastructure, operations, and processes integral to our democracy, our elections, we must call it out and correct it.

01:53:22 Speaker_06
MITRE Squint provides a fast, easy, and comprehensive way for election officials to combat the spread of misinformation on social media channels.

01:53:30 Speaker_06
When elections officials and designated MITRE Squint users see untrue or inaccurate postings about the elections process, you can report it with a single click, whether using a desktop or mobile device.

01:53:41 Speaker_06
MITRE Squint collects a screenshot and the coded information for aggregation and analysis. You'll get a secure message to verify that you sent the screenshot.

01:53:51 Speaker_06
The verification message includes a report that you can share with election peers or send to the social media channel asking that the misinformation be removed. What happens then?

01:54:01 Speaker_06
MITRE Squint analyzes and identifies patterns in social media that are misleading voters. Your report enables faster takedowns and helps restore integrity to the elections process.

01:54:12 Speaker_06
MITRE Squint is helping election officials like you defend the elections process from disinformation campaigns designed to undermine election legitimacy. Contact us to learn more about MITRE Squint and become a participant.

01:54:27 Speaker_02
Oh, they were partnered in the whole 2020 censorship operation. There's another thing I just thought of that is just an unbelievable clip with the Atlanta Council.

01:54:37 Speaker_02
See, the Atlanta Council was formally partnered with the Department of Homeland Security to censor the 2020 election, to censor Trump supporters. 100% of their repeat misinformation spreaders were Trump supporters.

01:54:48 Speaker_02
There's unbelievable videos on all of this. Some of this has been played on the congressional jumbotron.

01:54:54 Speaker_10
It was election interference.

01:54:56 Speaker_02
Yeah an unbelievable level, but they they bragged afterwards about You know about how this thing could be scaled and how they were able to get this done and how they could use this technique to get social media companies to to ban things You know well beyond, you know, basically to scale it to every other policy issue so that it's not just around elections where they're quote huge regulatory stakes and

01:55:22 Speaker_02
for the companies, and they go over this strategy.

01:55:25 Speaker_02
I mean, literally, on a celebration video of how they pulled this off, again, with the Atlanta Council, Grafica, Stanford, these same institutions, in this video, they go over this two-part technique for how they were able to do this and how they can do this in the future.

01:55:41 Speaker_02
And one is using their front, effectively, as a civil society organization, leveraging the threat of government pressure from their government partners at a top-down level, and leveraging the induction of crisis PR, black PR, if the companies did not do the censorship from the bottom up, so the government would threaten top-down, and the media would threaten bottom-up.

01:56:07 Speaker_10
Darrell Bock What are the threats?

01:56:09 Speaker_02
The threats?

01:56:10 Speaker_10
Yeah, when you say the government would threaten them.

01:56:12 Speaker_02
Well, so there's several. So in that case, in 2020, there was regulatory overhang coming from Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren about breaking the big tech companies up, which they actually moved forward with.

01:56:25 Speaker_02
Google is now under the gun of this with the US Justice Department.

01:56:29 Speaker_02
But more significantly, it's it's the threats probably that one of the most incredible examples of this If you want to see the receipts on it, it's it's wild But I can also just tell you about it.

01:56:39 Speaker_02
If you look up on my profile the the phrase ten flaming examples It'll pull up the Facebook files what Jim Jordan's committee, you know, they're the subpoenaed version of the Twitter files, but from Facebook and

01:56:53 Speaker_02
you'll see that in in early 2021 the Biden administration was pressuring explicitly Facebook to censor kovat origins heterodox speech and Facebook was skittish about doing it saying there's a highly unusual request coming directly from the White House We don't really want to do this this is what Nick Clegg the head of public policy was emailing with Mark Zuckerberg about and

01:57:21 Speaker_02
So if you scroll over, um, so you see, this is right. So this is, there were five claims. Uh, so this is, this is to Mark Zuckerberg from Nick Clegg. Nick Clegg was the former head of the UK labor party.

01:57:33 Speaker_02
Um, he wrote a book called how to stop Brexit after Brexit already passed. Uh, let's show you how interconnected all this stuff is. And the subject is COVID misinformation, Wuhan lab leak theory.

01:57:44 Speaker_02
On the question of our decision to remove claims related to the origin of COVID, again this is June 2021, there were five claims that met the standard.

01:57:54 Speaker_02
Basically anyone who accused COVID of potentially being man-made or bioengineered or created by an individual government or country or that it was modified through gain-of-function research.

01:58:03 Speaker_02
We reduced distribution, meaning they throttled, they algorithmically zapped out of all the applied virality circuit breakers to content making any of those five buckets of claims.

01:58:16 Speaker_02
In February 2021, so this is right in tandem with the vaccine rollout, in response to continued public pressure and tense conversations with the new administration, we started, so they only started removing it because of, quote, tense conversations with the new administration.

01:58:29 Speaker_02
So if you go to the next, if you go to the next image, if you just, yeah. Oh wait, I'm sorry. Go, go over. Yeah, bigger fish to fry. There should be a, yeah, here we go.

01:58:40 Speaker_02
In June 2021, Clegg emailed others in the company that given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Biden administration. We should think creatively about how we can be responsive to the Biden administration's concerned.

01:58:54 Speaker_02
Then it says below, what are these bigger? What is it? I can go over those and say, but just one more thing on this is, uh, you see in April 22, the company was seeking to work closely with the Biden administration on multiple policy fronts.

01:59:05 Speaker_02
So this now gets to the larger issue of the interplay between the profits of multinational corporations and the protection provided by the U S government when it actively advocates on their behalf.

01:59:19 Speaker_02
So, for example, right now, one of the major, major issues, and I'll tell you this, because when I ran the cyber desk for the U.S. State Department, I got a call one day from nine Google lobbyists.

01:59:30 Speaker_02
These were all former lobbyists from big oil companies or from sovereign countries who had moved to Google to lobby. the U.S. State Department, the U.S., you know, was the orchestra symphony conductor for all of the assets of the American empire.

01:59:47 Speaker_02
And these nine lobbyists told me over the course of about a 90-minute call that the number one threat to Google's business model, the most existential threat over the next five years, was the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.

02:00:02 Speaker_02
And they laid out a variety of reasons. I won't get into too granular detail. But that basically, you know, because the State Department traditionally defines U.S. interests as being the welfare of U.S. citizens and the aggregate welfare of U.S.

02:00:16 Speaker_02
national champions, U.S. citizens and U.S. corporations. This is why, again, it's so insane, inflammatory, and there's got to be a way it's friggin' illegal that the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S.

02:00:28 Speaker_02
State Department and USAID are currently running programs to tank U.S. national champions, like X, because they allow the hosting of pro-populist political content. But so, you know, basically the pitch is we're a U.S. national champion. We're Google.

02:00:44 Speaker_02
This is another thing that the Trump White House was saying at the time. You know, they were defining Maga as Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon because their stock price being high was a big, you know, I think boon.

02:00:55 Speaker_02
I don't know what the political calculus was, but I'm trying to tell them, hey, they're censoring the Internet, guys. And well, the point is, is, you know, so they're they're the G in Maga and they They are functionally requesting that the U.S.

02:01:12 Speaker_02
State Department adjust its diplomatic posture with EU counterparts in order to have the appropriate asks and demands of the European Union that protect the profits and business divisions of

02:01:31 Speaker_02
Google on and I won't without again getting too granular these involve everything from data privacy rights The Europe is something called the GDG DPR.

02:01:40 Speaker_02
There are all sorts of fines It's kind of ironic how this all played out when Trump won in 2016 Europe was many of these

02:01:51 Speaker_02
European governments were afraid of a Trump autocracy and and so they set about a Sort of policy pivot that they called strategic digital autonomy meaning that Europe needs to exert more Sovereign autonomy over the tech space in the digital sector rather than purely relying on American projection arms our US tech giants

02:02:16 Speaker_02
And so these new EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are, like, for example, Tim Cook at Apple just got hit with a $15 billion fine from this.

02:02:26 Speaker_02
It's the only people who can stop that, who can negotiate and who can pick winners and losers in that market are the U.S. State Department. Those are the people who negotiate. Those are the people who do the carrots and sticks. Hey, EU counterpart.

02:02:39 Speaker_02
Hey, counterpart in France. Hey, counterpart in EU.

02:02:41 Speaker_10
What was the stick to Apple in relation to, like, what was it in response to?

02:02:48 Speaker_02
I just remember the $15 billion. I forget if it was on a data, if it was on data grounds or if it was on You can look up the, because Tim Cook called Donald Trump on that specifically.

02:03:01 Speaker_02
I think this is another one of these things where Apple felt betrayed that the Biden administration didn't stick up for them as much. But just so I'm not getting the specific thing wrong, if you look up, yeah, you got a $15 billion fine.

02:03:13 Speaker_10
Additional $2 billion in a trust fund. The EU has been investigating big tech firms to curb their power and ensure a level playing field. Apple recently lost a court battle, was ordered to pay $14.08 billion in back taxes to Ireland.

02:03:27 Speaker_10
Trump told Cook that he would not let the EU take advantage of U.S. companies if he is elected.

02:03:32 Speaker_10
This government highlights the, this development rather, highlights the ongoing regulatory challenges faced by tech giants like Apple, which may impact their stock performance.

02:03:41 Speaker_10
Investors should monitor these regulatory developments and their potential impact on Apple's finances and stock, financials and stock price.

02:03:48 Speaker_02
Right. And this is happening to all the tech companies. And the only reason this hasn't happened yet, you know, in the now 30 years of internet diplomacy, is because the State Department has always gone to bat for them.

02:04:00 Speaker_02
We all sorts of carrots and sticks that we can threaten on that right the humanitarian aid the security assistance What do they want from apple that would allow them to allow apple to be fined that much?

02:04:10 Speaker_02
Well, the state department can in theory could open up a diplomatic channel to the eu the u.s Ambassador to the eu could march into their office um, you know horse's head, uh out of you know

02:04:23 Speaker_02
out of godfather style and say uh you are not going to f with apple on this this decision was wrongly made if you move forward with enforcement of this 15 billion dollar fine the u.s government will renegotiate our trade posture our tariff posture our humanitarian assistance our security assistance our role in i mean there's any number of things that that you can log roll on this our our

02:04:50 Speaker_02
Joint activities with you in South America in Africa and Central Asia on this particular industry it's the State Department who's got the assets of the Empire to to manage and and to offer up to foreign countries to protect the and to frankly oftentimes to secure those markets for those tech companies in the first place be the incentive to not do that and

02:05:17 Speaker_02
Fave favors to Europe and European.

02:05:20 Speaker_02
I mean you've you're always dipping into political capital when you do that, right like whenever you are Threatening something with someone you're doing business with you are Giving up a little bit political capital in making that threat in the sense that they might you're sort of sanctioning yourself in a certain respect This is what for example the sanctions on on on Russia that we led after 2014 you're

02:05:45 Speaker_02
They had an agreement with Russia. They're sort of shooting themselves in the leg to try to, you know, get the bear that's biting it. So you're sort of doing this with the EU. The EU is a very delicate dance with the US, right? It's 550 million people.

02:06:01 Speaker_02
It's a giant market. It's you know, it is the there's there's basically three poles between China the US and the EU There's a ton of overlapping trade arrangements It's it's basically the economic arm of NATO it's

02:06:20 Speaker_02
So if you were to, if you were to threaten to, if you were to threaten the EU too hard, so China just overtook the US as the EU's largest trading partner. If, if we were to go to the mat for Apple in this case on the EU,

02:06:37 Speaker_02
The EU may turn around and say, fine, well, if you do that, we're going to partner with Saudi Arabia. We're going to partner with China. We're going to partner. Hey, we may need to turn the natural gas imports from Russia back on.

02:06:50 Speaker_02
There's all sorts of it's a constant interplay. That's what makes that position.

02:06:55 Speaker_02
both so fascinating but also so complex is because you're having to manage all the different stakeholder relations from the banks, from the corporations, from the political groups, from the outside ones. And Facebook, I mean, it's data, it's ads.

02:07:12 Speaker_02
This is another thing. The media companies, have been on a crusade against Facebook and Google because they, many of these media companies feel like their revenues are being stolen by the, you know, the ad money going to Google and Facebook.

02:07:28 Speaker_02
There've been laws that have been put in place in Canada and I believe Australia where they're basically trying to, I forget if the one in Canada actually passed, but

02:07:38 Speaker_02
They're basically trying to, you know, have the media companies get a cut of the big tech profits because they are monopolists in the ad space. And, you know, Google Ads makes up a huge portion of Google's revenue.

02:07:48 Speaker_02
Facebook, obviously, the only reason it became profitable in the first place, you know, when Facebook IPOed, it was initially, there was a concern that it might not even be a profitable company, let alone one of the top, you know, eight biggest companies in the world because they had not yet monetized those eyeballs.

02:08:05 Speaker_02
through ads in the way that they've scaled incredibly to do. But what happens when our own US government completely betrays them and works with Europe to screw them unless they do censorship?

02:08:16 Speaker_02
And if you want an incredible receipt on this, you can look up the February 2021 USA disinformation primer. You can go actually to my foundation's

02:08:25 Speaker_02
website foundationforfreedomonline.com and just type in the word USAID and you'll see that disinformation primer. USAID, in tandem with the National Endowment for Democracy, that CIA cut out, and in cahoots with State, who USAID serves,

02:08:41 Speaker_02
as an instruction manual for how to exert its soft power influence around the world to regulate ad networks, to hurt U.S. tech companies if they allow pro-populist

02:08:57 Speaker_02
speech on the platforms by getting the, getting advertiser boycotts and advertiser blacklists to punch the social media companies.

02:09:05 Speaker_02
And so, you know, it's, it's a plot against our own people and it's being waged as part of a political proxy war to stop populists like Trump from being able to get elected in the first place.

02:09:18 Speaker_02
And if he gets elected to be able to throttle his administration and his allies around the world so that he can't implement his agenda.

02:09:24 Speaker_10
Jesus. How does this not how do you sleep?

02:09:34 Speaker_02
You know like knowing all this like what It was It was really really hard the first three or four years because there was like I was in this before When the whole thing was totally depressing and there were no wins at all, you know, I was like And it was bad my health deteriorated.

02:09:54 Speaker_02
I You know, I didn't look good. I didn't feel good. I I I I mean, I tell everyone you have to go through your five stages of grief on this.

02:10:02 Speaker_02
You know, you're going to have your, you know, your, your denial and then your anger and then your, you know, your bargain, your depression and then your bargaining and then your acceptance and you, you'll go through many iterations of those five stages of grief.

02:10:18 Speaker_02
You get to a certain point I think where you you accept that this is our inheritance and this is In a way as as evil as so many components of it are the larger picture is is kind of a fascinating archaeological dive into

02:10:37 Speaker_02
the ancient dinosaur bones of the world that we live in. The American empire would not exist without this apparatus. It took a twisted turn in 2016.

02:10:47 Speaker_02
But the fact is we are an international empire because of the banana wars in the 1800s that gave the US, you know, vassalage control over much of South America. We're an international empire because of the Spanish-American War in 1898.

02:11:01 Speaker_02
We take the Philippines. We had, you know, we,

02:11:04 Speaker_02
Have the we had the miracle of the 20th century because this free speech diplomacy which in large part was a state department CIA Cynical front just to be able to capacity build our own assets behind the Iron Curtain that ended up giving us cheap gas and if

02:11:25 Speaker_02
401ks and middle class lifestyles and affordable homes and pensions and all the favors that the State Department does to pry open markets. Is the reason that Walmart can export to the furthest reaches of the world, is the reason

02:11:45 Speaker_02
That, you know, I played this really funny one a few days ago, the famous Pizza Hut ad starring Gorbachev after the National Endowment for Democracy pried the Soviet Union open, and it's basically saying we have We have instability.

02:12:02 Speaker_02
These are Russians arguing with each other. We have instability at home. This is horrible. We're basically a satellite state of the United States. And then the other person at the Pizza Hut says, ah, but we have Pizza Hut.

02:12:14 Speaker_02
And Gorbachev stars and sponsors. This is a Pizza Hut advertisement.

02:12:18 Speaker_10
Could you find that online?

02:12:20 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah. You can actually.

02:12:29 Speaker_03
Oh god, they all agree on Pizza Hut.

02:12:51 Speaker_10
And Gorbachev. Hail to Gorbachev. Oh my god. That commercial's insane. It seems like a Saturday Night Live sketch.

02:13:03 Speaker_02
Yeah, so Pizza Hut did not win the market for 200 million customers in Russia because it out-competed the other pizza companies. It won because the CIA pried Russia open.

02:13:16 Speaker_02
I mean, you can see all the touchdown dances we did about the Boris Yeltsin puppet presidency. Boris Yeltsin was faxing the National Endowment for Democracy. 1993 for permission, effectively, to bomb his own parliament building.

02:13:30 Speaker_02
There's a whole Hollywood movie called Spinning Boris, which is based on the true story of how the State Department and Hollywood teamed up to prop up a ailing Boris Yeltsin in 1996 when he was pulling at 7% in the polls so that we could continue privatizing state-owned Russian assets and selling them off to George Soros' investment fund.

02:13:51 Speaker_02
You can read Casino Moscow. for more on that. But basically, this is... I ate pizza as a kid. At some point it becomes fascinating. At some point it becomes... the tragedy shifts to a comedy.

02:14:07 Speaker_02
And when you start looking at the size of some of these forces, it's the most exciting time ever to be alive. It didn't look like there was any light at the tunnel when I started this in 2016.

02:14:19 Speaker_02
It was L after L after L after L. First, nobody would listen. Then the people who listen say you're crazy. Then the people who say you're crazy say, well, you know, you're right, but you're hopeless.

02:14:29 Speaker_02
Then the people who say you're hopeless, you know, say, okay, well, maybe you're not hopeless, but I can't help you. And then it's just constant. And then the dam starts breaking a little bit here, a little bit there.

02:14:39 Speaker_02
And now this is the most exciting time

02:14:45 Speaker_02
And we have existential threats that I think may be in the end more terrifying than anything we've we've seen yet but I'm just honored to be along for the ride with everybody else who's who's pulling the levers that they are and You know, if you can make it through if you can make it through the the hard times I'm thinking about it There is something beautiful.

02:15:04 Speaker_02
It's like getting to know Let's just say, you know Genghis Khan, you know, you're descended from or something and People are going to say Genghis Khan, murder, rape, whatever crimes there are. But if you're descended from that, it's still your family.

02:15:21 Speaker_02
And I'm not trying to smash these institutions. I'm not trying to get rid of the Pentagon or get rid of the CIA. I want them to be reformed. And they have to go through the gauntlet of public sunlight.

02:15:32 Speaker_02
Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was just named the NIH. That is one of the most inspiring stories, I think.

02:15:39 Speaker_10
It's an incredible turnaround. Yeah. Tell the whole story because some people aren't even aware what happened with him with the Great Barrington Declaration.

02:15:46 Speaker_02
Well, he was kicked off of Twitter. He was, you know, basically a premier scientist at Stanford. He was labeled a fringe epidemiologist by Fauci and company. And he was just tapped to be our new NIH director the National Institute of Health.

02:16:04 Speaker_02
This is the premier medical research institution in all of medicine and They put in one of the most critical voices of the entire kovat era To run it.

02:16:18 Speaker_02
I mean, it's like it's like putting Bobby Kennedy in as the head of HHS, right and to me that's sort of what needs to happen now in the censorship space, which is that

02:16:30 Speaker_02
When you look back at the church committee with the CIA They held up that heart attack gun in public and Frank Church and you know, James Angleton it We saw now I know a lot of that was a whitewash and wonks in the space or like or probably triggered by me even acknowledging that that was a decent thing, but the fact is is

02:16:51 Speaker_02
It did have to go through a gauntlet, where the way to restore faith in the institution is to make it do a naked lap, make it do its walk of shame, and then it can put its clothes back on and return into the good graces.

02:17:07 Speaker_02
I'm not trying to take these institutions out. I'm not anti-American empire. But the empire has to serve the homeland. And the fact is, We, it does have to go through this period of penitence.

02:17:23 Speaker_02
And I hope that the incoming administration understands the magnitude and severity of the need to do that. Because if they don't, they'll, they're going to be caught flat footed by something very nasty. I think coming down the pipe.

02:17:36 Speaker_10
Have you, have you talked to anyone there?

02:17:38 Speaker_02
Um, not in enough detail to be able to, uh, feel that we are where we need to be, but maybe that will change. Um burisma.

02:17:50 Speaker_10
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's wild.

02:17:52 Speaker_02
Yeah You know how I mentioned, um, the atlanta council so many times in this Seven cia directors on its board annual funding the pentagon state department cia cutouts like the ned Literally sponsoring At atlanta council conferences the icall bullshit censorship training meetings the work partner with dhs to censor trump partnered, you know to to censor covet um

02:18:17 Speaker_02
One week before Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017 Burisma signed a formal cooperation agreement with the Atlanta Council For the Atlanta Council to leverage its Representation effectively as as NATO's brain the think-tank for NATO To kick energy deals to Burisma.

02:18:42 Speaker_02
You can look this up if you can pull us on screen I'll show you these receipts are wild if you just type in Uh, you know, Burisma, uh, you know, on my, on my ex account or Burisma Atlantic Council, any of these will get you there.

02:18:55 Speaker_02
So there's a much larger story here that sort of gets us back to, to Eurasia. And just for, for perspective, um, This issue around Russia gets to something that has been decades of tension in the making.

02:19:12 Speaker_02
Yeah, so this is Barisma and the Atlantic Council. This is one day, actually, one day before Donald Trump's inauguration, January 19th, 2017.

02:19:19 Speaker_02
So this group with seven CIA directors on its board, and annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department, by the way, these are all numbers from 2020. It's over a million now for all these.

02:19:29 Speaker_02
But what are they doing signing a formal agreement with Burisma to kick them deal flow?

02:19:36 Speaker_02
So here is where it gets to the the geopolitics of the energy space and what a lot of this Russia stuff is about so if you look up for example a If you just go to Google and you type in Russia 75 trillion You'll see what Trump got knifed for You in in term 1.0 and that is still the knife's edge dangling over Trump term 2.0.

02:20:03 Speaker_02
So if you pull up like an image graph of it, it'll make it a little bit I think more Or just maybe the fifth one, if you see, or the fourth one, or the fifth. Yeah, any one of those. Right.

02:20:16 Speaker_02
So Russia has the most exploitable natural resources of any country on Earth by far. By far. By far. I mean, it's almost double. And that was why you may have heard this term from Francis Fukuyama, the end of history in the 1990s.

02:20:33 Speaker_02
This was like the, you know, the, the, the moment that America was the unipolar power. There is this long range plan to pursue at least the political annexation of Eurasia. This is the,

02:20:48 Speaker_02
This goes back to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the grand chessboard, the idea that he who controls Eurasia controls the world, because this is where two-thirds of the world's resources are, and so there's this big stretch, basically, from Central Europe all the way out into the far reaches of Russia, where

02:21:06 Speaker_02
So many of these minerals and oil and gas and Reese exploitable resources are concentrated if you remember Lindsey Graham Finally threw up the white flag about four months ago when he said listen, even if you don't care about Ukraine They've got twelve point four trillion dollars worth of minerals and resources.

02:21:22 Speaker_10
So, you know do it for that He just said the other day he admitted this wars about money. I

02:21:28 Speaker_02
It is it is so but this is This is so fascinating to me.

02:21:36 Speaker_02
I almost have to take a self-indulgent moment if you'll allow me I Had initially started working on this with a book in a movie that was just about the AI censorship side it was weapons of mass deletion and it was in at the time I was

02:21:50 Speaker_02
In 2016 early 2017 I was I was focused on the domestic side Like I think everybody is when they see this, you know, a lot of this was woke stuff.

02:21:58 Speaker_02
So you see, you know some pink-haired You know feminist person with an outrageous Outrageous Twitter account who's a trust and safety person at Twitter.

02:22:07 Speaker_02
You say ah, okay this is a culture war right and then as I started tracing this and just completely obsessing every day in the on the research side of this I

02:22:19 Speaker_02
You'd see these censorship planning conferences with high-ranking military and intelligence officials, and on the panel with them would be Eurasian-focused energy investors and energy companies.

02:22:31 Speaker_02
And you'd say, well, what are they doing at a censorship conference? Why is Chevron here? Why is Royal Dutch Shell here? Why are representatives from Naftogaz at this conference about disinformation on the internet?

02:22:46 Speaker_02
And to me, that was one of the early breakthroughs in being able to trace the larger networks and history of it was the close conjoined nature

02:22:57 Speaker_02
of censorship in geopolitics, and in particular around the energy world, because, you know, going back to this Milton Friedman sort of argument around free markets versus does the government secure the markets, Milton Friedman was once sort of given a sort of Millet-style list of entities to afuera, you know, to sort of, you know, knock out.

02:23:20 Speaker_02
And when it got to the Department of Energy, he said, keep that one, but fold it under the Department of Defense. Because our energy work is basically a subset of our military work. Because the military is effectively who secures energy markets.

02:23:35 Speaker_02
The military and the State Department. The military using kinetic force or the threats of doing so. The State Department on economic sanctions and economic inducements to secure the energy resources. So this is where it gets really interesting.

02:23:50 Speaker_02
So we were just talking about Boris Yeltsin in the 90s. Putin rises to power in 1999. The Russian economy is totally destroyed.

02:24:01 Speaker_02
He is, you know, he's got only two assets of the Russian remnant that he can leverage to try to turn Russia back into a world power.

02:24:12 Speaker_02
One of them is their sort of military export economy Russia provides Small arms munitions to rebel groups around the world to oppose the US Pentagon Such as in Africa.

02:24:24 Speaker_02
There's a big battle going on right now between the US and France on the one hand and Russia on the other hand in the Sahel this is why a lot of these French run governments are

02:24:35 Speaker_02
Have have had their have been toppled in the past year chad niger Cote d'Ivoire This is one of the reasons that it's very curious that france arrested pavel duroff the telegram founder When the cia's on media channels like radio free europe radio liberty and voice of america were effectively calling for telegram to be reined in because it may be a

02:24:58 Speaker_02
Russian spy in every Ukrainians pocket and we need to stop the ability for Russians have free speech on telegram and You know a lot of this is because of the he's arrested in France is curious because France is involved in a proxy war against Russia And and that's only made possible because Russian Russia exports those arms

02:25:16 Speaker_02
Russia is also the only reason we were not able to successfully topple Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Folks remember the S-300, S-400 anti-aircraft, you know, air defense systems.

02:25:27 Speaker_02
Basically, if we can get rid of Russia's military machine, there's very, very little resistance to the Pentagon around the world, from Venezuela to Africa to Central Asia to, you know, to Syria.

02:25:40 Speaker_02
And Russia's other big economic export, the main one, is that they have the largest energy resources in the world, and exporting that can make them very wealthy if they are able to export that freely.

02:25:55 Speaker_02
It's sort of a similar issue with Iran and Iranian sanctions. So almost 100% of Russian gas used to be, of European gas used to come from Russia. These pipelines have been around for many, many, many, many decades.

02:26:10 Speaker_02
And it was the motor engine of Russia's economy, oil and gas, Rosneft and Gazprom.

02:26:17 Speaker_02
And when Putin did something to reassert Russia's political influence over Central and Eastern Europe, after NATO already thought these were NATO-acquired territories, places like Georgia and Moldova, Ukraine, Putin began shutting off the gas in 2005, 2006, or threatening to do so, to leave a sort of dark, cold winter to these European countries that were thought to be under US-NATO control.

02:26:48 Speaker_02
These countries began to acquiesce to Russian influence on gas and Their politics started shifting to be more pro-russian their civil society organizations got deeper Russian penetration their media organizations began to you know spout more pro-russian affinity lines and so our State Department intelligence services flew into a panic like oh my god, we're going to

02:27:11 Speaker_02
We're going to lose the Cold War late in the game if we do not embark on a quest to destroy Russia's energy diplomacy. This is what they were calling it, energy diplomacy, their energy soft power influence over Central and Eastern Europe.

02:27:27 Speaker_02
Germany with the Nord Stream One pipeline, Ukraine with the direct gas pipelines that then go all the way out into Western Europe. And we could not compete with Russia strictly. On because gas is a commodity.

02:27:44 Speaker_02
It's it's not like, you know an iPhone or it's not like it's like a phone where it comes in a you know Different flavors based on quality.

02:27:53 Speaker_02
It's just strictly about the price you sell it at and the only way that I'm that you can Get gas into Europe effectively other than natural cheap natural gas pipelines are expensive liquefied natural gas

02:28:07 Speaker_02
you know, where you, you know, you basically harvest it in the Permian Basin in Houston, you freeze it, you ship it, you know, 6,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean through the Baltic Strait, you unfreeze it, you then, you know, ship it to Ukraine.

02:28:21 Speaker_02
It's like orders of magnitude more expensive than the Russian alternative. So European countries wanted cheap Russian gas. the U.S. and the U.K.

02:28:32 Speaker_02
and NATO wanted the EU member states to sanction Russian gas, both because it would cripple Russia's economy and also so there's a national security element here. Now we get to take over Africa.

02:28:45 Speaker_02
Now we get to take over Central Asia because there's no Russian resistance from the military because they're bankrupt. Now we can beat back Russian influence into Central and Eastern Europe because they're bankrupt.

02:28:54 Speaker_02
It's the same way we won the Cold War. The Soviet Union collapsed because it was bankrupt. So they embarked on a diplomatic quest to get all these countries to pass sanctions on Russia, but they couldn't do the full sanctions in 2006.

02:29:06 Speaker_02
So they embarked on what they called energy diversification. Then the 2014 fiasco pops off in Ukraine and this becomes existential because now half of Ukraine is effectively militarily backstopped by Russia.

02:29:21 Speaker_02
So they have to get Europe to pass these sanctions on Russia. But the issue is, is a lot of these EU member states did not want to have to buy super expensive Western LNG.

02:29:32 Speaker_02
It would be ideal if you could simply harvest the endogenous gas supplies in Ukraine. Ukraine happens to sit on Europe's third largest unexploited natural gas resources, or the, you know, the shale that can be converted

02:29:47 Speaker_02
And so they, so Burisma was a tool to be able to supplement the Western LNG with an endogenous, an at-home Ukrainian alternative gas supply so that the sanctions could go through in Europe and so that Ukraine would not be reliant on Russia to have cheap natural gas.

02:30:12 Speaker_02
But this required

02:30:14 Speaker_02
NAFTA gas the state-owned Ukrainian gas company which George Soros has been locked in a power struggle with Putin to over privatization with for decades and It and Burisma was the largest of the private for-profit Firms that had the rights the gas rights for exploitation of Eastern Ukraine and the you know the the surrounding

02:30:38 Speaker_02
Crimea offshore offshore gas supplies and so Burisma was was seen as an instrument of statecraft by the US State Department to economically bankrupt Russia and to militarily shut down Russia's war machine as part of the larger play for NAFTA gas and to build up

02:30:58 Speaker_02
Ukraine's innate gas supplies which were which were underexploited in part because of a military tension over who actually controls that territory That's why the Donbass is so important That's why after the counter coup the u.s.

02:31:12 Speaker_02
Was sponsoring the this is what the military aid impeach the military assistance impeachment of trump was about in 2019. We weren't at war with Russia then, right? This is 2019, this is three years before the outbreak. Uh-uh.

02:31:25 Speaker_02
We were sponsoring the military reconquest of that region because that's where the energy resources are. The population's mostly in the West, the resources are mostly in the East, so same thing with China and Xinjiang. terms of that dichotomy.

02:31:41 Speaker_02
And so this is when Hunter Biden said when he was asked what he was doing on Burisma and whether he felt shame about it, he said he was doing a patriotic duty for his country. Burisma was an instrument of statecraft for the State Department.

02:31:54 Speaker_02
What they were doing is they were building that up. That's why they had funding from USAID. Again, the CIA funding conduit was working with the Atlantic Council with seven CIA directors on its board.

02:32:08 Speaker_02
Hunter Biden's on the Chairman's Advisory Board of the NDI. Hunter Biden's law firm even has, this just broke four months ago, Hunter Biden's law firm actually had a

02:32:18 Speaker_02
wrote a pitch to the US State Department for how for how Burisma could serve as a You know, it's basically a vassal for US State Department interests in the region.

02:32:30 Speaker_02
You had the you had Burisma's back channeling with Was at the US ambassador in Rome for on similar grounds in terms of the the Italy Greece supplies but What you have here is a private sector for-profit company.

02:32:47 Speaker_02
Many such cases, by the way, because not only was Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma as chairman's advisory board of the CIA's DNC cutout, but who else was on the board of directors right next to Hunter Biden? Kofor Black.

02:33:02 Speaker_02
Kofor Black, who spent 30 years in the CIA, won CIA Distinguished Medals Awards.

02:33:07 Speaker_02
You can read the Daily Beast article where Kofor Black is described as Mitt Romney's sherpa to the intelligence community to get the CIA's blessing to back him against Barack Obama. What is this CIA luminary doing on the board of Burisma?

02:33:22 Speaker_02
What is Hunter Biden, who the CIA personally calls the Justice Department off investigating his funding sources, and is on the Chairman's Advisory Board of the CIA, cut out?

02:33:34 Speaker_02
It's because just like we have done since the 1940s, it is a private, it is a dual-use entity.

02:33:42 Speaker_02
It's a for, it's a for-profit standalone private sector firm, but it's also an instrument of statecraft because every dollar that Burisma generates is one less dollar that Gazprom generates.

02:33:52 Speaker_02
And so it's the, it's the best job in the world if you can get it. It is, it's, it's you get to keep all the profits, And you are getting the backing of the battering ram of the blob And remember we personally intervened.

02:34:07 Speaker_02
It was joe biden at the council on foreign relations who bragged about About forcing using the diplomatic carrots and sticks of the u.s empire That if ukraine wanted their billion dollars in in assistance, they had to fire the prosecutor who is investigating barisma nobody nobody in in in our in our congress

02:34:28 Speaker_02
I think is prepared if there was a total declassification of all CIA and State Department cables, and documents, and meeting minutes, and emails, and communications, if you had, for all intelligence work related to Burisma, the treasure map that would break open, I think, would be, would frankly be a diplomatic scandal, because this gets to the larger play around the IMF and its play to privatize NAFTA gas, because there's something very nasty here.

02:34:56 Speaker_02
which is that we have been trying to get, just like we put Russia through shock therapy when we won the Cold War, and then it was the Harvard endowment, and the Soros crew, and the U.S.

02:35:08 Speaker_02
State Department who privatized trillions of dollars of state-owned wealth by the Soviet Union so that it could become a capitalist society, but then the assets are held by Wall Street and London, This has been the play with Ukraine.

02:35:23 Speaker_02
They know the potential of the entire European energy market running through Ukraine if they can just get it up and running.

02:35:31 Speaker_02
So this grand Ukraine energy play has been to privatize NAFTA gas, the feeder that Burisma feeds into, so that you have Western stakeholders who make the money by capturing that market.

02:35:44 Speaker_02
have the blob of the State Department, the CIA, and the DOD impose enough pressure to carve Russia out of the market, now you've got private sector stakeholders who are basically early stage equity holders in a totally protected, because it's protected by the bayonet of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the IC to make sure that the profits run through there so that Russia doesn't get it.

02:36:11 Speaker_02
So it's a great job if you can get it. Jesus Christ.

02:36:16 Speaker_10
And all this stuff that was on the laptop, what was the whole thing about 10% to the big guy? And so what evidence is there?

02:36:30 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, you know, the 10% of the big guy and in another text, you know, he I think he had said, you know, to one of his family members that, you know, half the paycheck goes to what you have here is, is, is almost, is almost a tale as old as time since 1948 in terms of this relationship between private sector profit and foreign policy.

02:36:53 Speaker_02
I mean, I call it foreign policy for personal profit, which is this idea that if you have a senior level job in Blobcraft in defense diplomacy or intelligence You don't make your money as a w-2 employee of the US government.

02:37:10 Speaker_02
So for example Mark Milley, you know, the the CIA director only makes about a little over $200,000 a year You make I mean more as a third-year corporate associate than the than the central intelligence agency director.

02:37:24 Speaker_02
That's You get your money from serving the stakeholders afterwards like mark milley was, you know Joint head of the joint chiefs of staff. What's he doing now?

02:37:33 Speaker_02
You know, he's at he's at jp morgan, you know doing the macroeconomic forecasting Uh, so, you know so that they basically have the insider trading

02:37:43 Speaker_02
vision of the guy who's tapped into everyone at the pentagon so they know what markets are about to open up because where the pentagon's about to exert its influence they know whether to invest in natural gas in you know in companies in germany or ukraine because they have the head of the joint chiefs of staff as uh to make phone calls to the people in the pentagon about what's going to happen to that country in six months

02:38:05 Speaker_02
look up look you want to see a great example of this look up the donilon brothers look up look up uh look up tom donilon's black rock investment institute profile tom donilon is the brother of mike donilon mike donilon is the the closest advisor to joe biden and has been for 40 years

02:38:24 Speaker_02
Mike Donilon is, you know, I think began working with Biden in 1982. He's literally what they call the inner kitchen cabinet of the West Wing of the White House.

02:38:36 Speaker_02
Now, that's a great job to have if you are Mike Donilon's brother, Tom Donilon, who's currently the chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute. So while his brother is the closest advisor to the President of the United States,

02:38:51 Speaker_02
BlackRock, which has $10 trillion of assets under management and portfolio companies in every industry in every region on earth,

02:39:00 Speaker_02
Tom Donilon, in theory, only needs to make a phone call to his brother Mike Donilon to know exactly what to invest in, because he knows what billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditure of State Department and Pentagon and intelligence work is going to do to the industries in the region.

02:39:17 Speaker_02
This is basically like Pelosi tracker, but for like military intelligence. It's all legal. Tom Donilon, again, Tom Donilon didn't start out as a banker. He was the National Security Advisor in charge of military intelligence and statecraft for the U.S.

02:39:33 Speaker_02
Empire. He was at the State Department. He was in IC. He was at DOD. He went straight from the blob

02:39:43 Speaker_02
to black rocks banker many such cases i mentioned mark milley another one is jared colin if you know who uh... was the policy planning staff whiz kid at the state department who introduced the c i a s yeah you know the c i a two effectively to using social media for regime change work he was the you know he was the guy who is known as condi's party starter uh... into for how the how condoleezza rice as secretary of state uh... could get

02:40:10 Speaker_02
could get this could could stop running uh regime change operations uh out of u.s embassies and consulates and uh and ci station houses they could simply use social media to organize these and that's what resulted in the arab spring and the facebook and twitter revolutions that toppled tunisia and egypt and then jared cohen then goes on to start google jigsaw which is the you know which which set in motion the entire world of ai censorship we now live under

02:40:40 Speaker_02
Where did he just left Google jigsaw? What's he doing now?

02:40:42 Speaker_02
Well, he's yeah now he's at Goldman Sachs and he's doing their geopolitical, you know forecasting for for Goldman friggin Sachs so blob to banker pipeline every time it you know, and this is how these people go from

02:40:58 Speaker_02
you know, making two, $300,000 a year to being able to live like the people who they used to have to answer to when they were in government. So they are using the assets of the American empire. They're adjusting U.S.

02:41:14 Speaker_02
foreign policy in a way that maximizes their own personal gain. They're not necessarily doing the calculus about, well, should we be spending all this money on you?

02:41:22 Speaker_02
If that's what the stakeholders want, and this is what Biden was doing, and this is what the 10% of the big guy thing comes back to. I mean, you just look at the overwhelming, just unbelievable scope of it all.

02:41:34 Speaker_02
So first of all, Joe Biden was known as Mr. Foreign Policy by the Council on Foreign Relations for 40 years. That is, he was the Blob's inside guy.

02:41:44 Speaker_02
And the Blob is the foreign policy establishment, which now has substantial control over our domestic politics.

02:41:49 Speaker_02
It's supposed to face outward to manage the American empire, but when homeland politics interfere with the empire's plans, they sick it against us. And so for 40 years, he was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

02:42:00 Speaker_02
For 15 of those years, he was either the chairman or the ranking member. So the top dog for oversight of the U.S. State Department. So he's got these international connections. People are constantly pitching him for 40 years. There's a great video.

02:42:19 Speaker_02
I think you can look it up. Have you ever seen Joe Biden bragging about being a prostitute for the biggest donor? And that when he turns 40, he was told that what?

02:42:32 Speaker_02
at one meeting that for the real big money, he should come back to them when he turns 40. Have you ever seen this? It's a great clip. I think if you just look up the word prostitute, Biden prostitute, on my ex account, you can find this.

02:42:46 Speaker_02
But basically, Biden Incorporated was running a foreign policy for personal profit operation. I mean, here's a crazy example. Joe Biden, I'm sorry, Hunter Biden, I believe was, oh yeah, this is great.

02:43:07 Speaker_15
Well, I'm not sure you should assume I'm not corrupt, but I thank you for that.

02:43:11 Speaker_15
The system does produce corruption, and I think implicit in the system is corruption, when in fact, whether or not you can run for public office, and it costs a great deal of money to run for the United States Senate in a small state like Delaware,

02:43:25 Speaker_15
You have to go to those people who have money, and they always want something. We were told that we politicians, as the young kids say, rip off the American public.

02:43:33 Speaker_15
I think the American public, in a way, rips off we politicians by forcing us to run the way they do. To raise $300,000 is no mean feat.

02:43:42 Speaker_15
And unless you happen to be some sort of anomaly, like myself, being a 29-year-old candidate, and can attract some attention beyond your own state, it's very difficult to raise that money from a large group of people. I'm a 29-year-old oddball.

02:43:54 Speaker_15
The only reason I was able to raise the money is I was able to have a national constituency to run for office. Because I was 29, I'm like the token black or the token woman. I was the token young person. I went to the big guys for the money.

02:44:06 Speaker_15
I was ready to prostitute myself in the manner in which I talk about it. But what happened was they said, come back when you're 40-some.

02:44:14 Speaker_10
And he's 80. Amazing how good he talked back then. Yeah, right. So smooth. Right. Mike, you gave us a lot to think about, man.

02:44:22 Speaker_10
I'm gonna have to listen to this one three or four times just to try to begin to absorb it, but if it wasn't for you, we wouldn't know this.

02:44:29 Speaker_10
I mean, it takes someone who has done exhausting deep dives into this shit, and to be able to express it the way you do, I think is incredibly important.

02:44:39 Speaker_10
I think most people, including me, were not aware of the scope of it until you came out with all this.

02:44:47 Speaker_02
Well, you're the man, the arena, and you know, been a personal inspiration for me for a long time. And what you've had to take on just to be able to do this show is something for the history books. So thanks for having me on.

02:45:00 Speaker_10
My pleasure. Thank you.