BONUS EPISODE | Mike Benz on the Tucker Carlson Podcast | The Tucker Carlson Podcast

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In this episode, Tucker Carlson spoke with Mike Benz about the national security state being the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. “What I’m describing is military rule,” says Mike Benz. “It’s the inversion of democracy.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Jesse Kelly, listen, nurse. It's Tucker Carlson. I'm actually
a friend, a close personal friend of Jesse Kelly's, not
to brag and more now that we're both in independent media,
and in fact, there's really no media in America apart
from independent media. The other guys are just political operatives,
the praetorian guard of the ruling class. They're not only

(00:20):
lying to you, they hate you. If you want to
know what's actually happening, if you want to know what's true,
if you're going to have any hope of being informed,
you have to get out of NBC, CNN, New York Times,
Washington Post World and get into independent media. And that's
where we are now. We've been doing a show on
x for the past few months, and a bunch of
people have asked if they could listen to the show

(00:40):
as a podcast. Well, you can check out this sample episode.
Subscribe now to the Tucker Carlson Podcast. The defining fact
of the United States is freedom of speech. The extent

(01:01):
this country is actually exceptional. It's because we have the
First Amendment to the Bill of Rights. We have freedom
of conscience. We can say what we really think. There's
no hate speech. Exception to that is, because you hate
what somebody else thinks, you cannot force that person to
be quiet, because we're citizens, not slaves. But that right,
that foundational right that makes this country what it is,

(01:24):
that right from which all other rights flow, is going
away at high speed in the face of censorship, now
modern censorship. There's no resemblance to previous censorship regimes in
previous countries, in previous eras. Our censorship is affected on
the basis of fights against disinformation and malinformation. And the

(01:45):
key thing to know about these is they're everywhere, and
of course they have no reference at all to whether
what you're saying is true or not. In other words,
you can say something that is factually accurate and consistent
with your own com unence, and in previous versions of
America you wo had an absolute right to say those things.

(02:05):
But because someone doesn't like them, or because they're inconvenient
to whatever plan the people in power have, they can
be denounced as disinformation and you could be stripped of
your right to express them, either in person or online.
In fact, expressing these things can become a criminal act
and is, and it's important to know. By the way,
that this is not just the private sector doing this.

(02:26):
These efforts are being directed by the US government, which
you pay for and at least theoretically own. It's your government,
but they're stripping your rights at very high speed. Most
people understand this intuitively, but they don't know how it happens.
How does censorship happen, What are the mechanics of it.
Mike Ben's is, we can say, with some confidence, the

(02:47):
expert in the world on how this happens. Mike Ben's
had the cyber portfolio at the State Department. He's now
executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, and we're going
to have a conversation with him about a very specific
kind of censorship. By the way, you can't recommend strongly
enough if you want to know how this happens, Mike
Bens b n Z is the man to read. But

(03:09):
today we just want to talk about a specific kind
of censorship, and that censorship that emanates from the fabled
military industrial complex, from our defense industry and the foreign
policy establishment in Washington. That's significant now because we're on
the cusp of a global war, and so you can
expect censorship to increase dramatically, and so with that. Here's
Mike Ben's, executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online to Mike,

(03:31):
thanks so much for joining us. And I just can't
overstate to our audience how exhaustive and comprehensive your knowledge
is on this topic. It's almost it's almost unbelievable. And
so if you could just walk us through how the
Foreign Policy Establishment and the defense contractors and the DoD
and just the whole cluster, the constellation of defense related

(03:53):
publicly funded institutions stripped from us our freedom of speech.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Sure you know, one of the easiest ways to actually
start the story is really with the story of Internet freedom,
and it switched from Internet freedom to Internet censorship because
free speech on the Internet was an instrument of state
craft almost from the outset of the privatization of the
Internet in nineteen ninety one, we quickly discovered, through the

(04:19):
efforts of the Defense Department, the State Department, and our
intelligence services that people were using the Internet to congregate
on blogs and forums, and free speech was championed more
than anybody by the Pentagon, the State Department, and our
sort of CIA cutout NGO blob architecture as a way

(04:41):
to support dissident groups around the world in order to
help them overthrow authoritarian governments as they were sort of build. Essentially,
the Internet free speech allowed kind of insta regime change
operations to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishments
State Department agenda.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
Google is a great example of this.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Google began as a DARPA grant by Larry Page and
Sergey Brinn when they were Stanford PhDs, and they got
their funding as part of a joint CIA NSA program
to chart how quote birds of a feather flocked together
online through search engine aggregation. And then one year later

(05:25):
they launched Google and then became a military contractor. Quickly
thereafter they got Google Maps by purchasing a CIA satellite software. Essentially,
and the ability to track to use free speech on
the Internet is a way to circumvent state control over
media over in places like Central Asia or all around

(05:47):
the world was seen as a way to be able
to do what used to be done out of CIA
station houses or out of embassies or consulates in a
way that was totally urbo charged. And all of the
Internet free speech technology was initially created by our national
security state VPN's virtual private networks to hide your IP

(06:09):
address tour the dark web, to be able to buy
and trail sell goods anonymously, and to end encrypted chats.
All these things were created initially as DARPA projects or
as joint CIA NSA projects to be able to help
intelligence backed groups to overthrow governments that were causing a
problem to the Clinton administration or the Bush administration of

(06:32):
the Obama administration. And this plan worked magically from about
nineteen ninety one until about twenty fourteen, when there began
to be an about face on Internet freedom and its utility. Now,
the high water mark of the sort of Internet free
speech moment was the Arab Spring in twenty eleven twenty twelve,
when you had this one by one, all of the

(06:53):
adversary governments of the Obama administration, Egypt, Tunisia all began
to be toppled in Facebook.

Speaker 3 (06:59):
Revolution and Twitter revolutions.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
And you had the State Department working very closely with
the social media companies to be able to keep social
media online.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
During those periods.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
There was a famous phone call from Google's Jared Cohen
to Twitter to not do their scheduled maintenance so that
so that the preferred opposition group in Iran would be
able to use Twitter to win that election. So it
was an free speech was an instrument of state craft
from the national security state. To begin with, all of
that architecture, all the NGOs, the relationships between the tech

(07:33):
companies and the national security state had been long established
for freedom. In twenty fourteen, after the coup in Ukraine,
there was an unexpected counter coup where Crimea and the
don Bass broke away, and they broke away with essentially
a military backstop that NATA was highly unprepared for at
the time. They had one last Hail Mary chance, which

(07:55):
was the Crimea annexation vote in twenty fourteen, and when
the hearts and minds of the people of Crimea voted
to join the Russian Federation, that was the last straw
for the concept of free speech on the internet in
the eyes of NATO.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
Is they saw it.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
The fundamental nature of war changed at that moment, and
NATO at that point declared something that they first called
the Jirosimuff doctrine, which is named after this Russian military
general who they claimed made a speech that the fundamental
nature of war has changed. You don't need to win
military skirmishes to take over Central and Eastern Europe. All
you need to do is control the media and the

(08:35):
social media ecosystem, because that's what controls elections. And if
you simply get the right administration into power, they control
the military. So it's infinitely cheaper than conducting a military
war to simply conduct an organized political influence operation over
social media and legacy media. An industry had been created
that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense, and

(08:59):
Brussels into a organized.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
Political warfare outfit.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Essentially infrastructure that was created, initially stationed in Germany and
in central and Eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones,
basically to create the ability to have the military work
with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda or
to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who

(09:25):
were rising in political power at the time because of
the migrant crisis. So you had the systematic targeting by
our State Department, by our ic by the Pentagon of
groups like Germany's AfD, the Alternative for deutsch Land there
and for groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Now, when bregsit
happened in twenty sixteen, that was this crisis moment where

(09:48):
suddenly they didn't have to worry just about central Eastern
Europe anymore.

Speaker 3 (09:51):
It was coming westward, this idea.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Of Russian control over hearts and minds and so breggs.

Speaker 3 (09:59):
It was June twenty sixteen.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
The very next month, at the Warsaw Conference, NATO formally
amended its charter to.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
Expressly commit to.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Hybrid warfare as this new NATO capacity. So they went
from basically seventy years of tanks to this explicit capacity
building for censoring tweets that they were deemed to be
Russian proxies. And again it's not just Russian propaganda. These
were now Brexit groups or groups like Matteo Salvini in

(10:31):
Italy or in Greece, or in Germany or in Spain
with the Vox Party. And now at the time NATO
was publishing white papers saying that the biggest threat to
NATO fasis is not actually a military invasion from Russia,
it's losing domestic elections across Europe to all these right
wing populist groups who, because they were mostly working class movements,

(10:53):
were campaigning on cheap Russian energy at a time when
the US was pressuring this energy diversification policy, and so
they made the argument after Brexit, now the entire rules
based international order would collapse unless the military took control
over media, because Brexit would give rise to Frexit in
France with marine leapen, just Bexit in Spain with a

(11:13):
box party to itall Exit in Italy, to Grexit in Germany,
to Gregxit and Greece.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
The EU would come apart.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
So NATO would be killed without a single bullet being fired.
And then not only that, now that NATO's gone, now
there's no enforcement arm for the International Monetary Fund, the IMF,
for the World Bank.

Speaker 3 (11:33):
So now the financial.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
Stakeholders who depend on the battering ram of the national
security state would basically be helpless against governments around the world. So,
from their perspective, if the military did not begin to
censor the Internet, all of the democratic institutions in infrastructure
that gave rise to the modern world after World War
Two would collapse.

Speaker 3 (11:53):
So you can imagine that some one of the twenty
sixteen election.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
So you just told a remarkable story or that I've
never heard anybody explain as lucidly and crisply as you
just did. But did anyone at NATO or anyone at
the State Department, pause Rome and say, wait a second,
we've just identified our new enemy as democracy within our
own countries. I think that's what you're saying. They feared
that the people, the citizens of their own countries would

(12:19):
get their way, and they went to war against that.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
Yes, now, you know, there's a rich history of this
dating back to the Cold War. You know, the Cold
War in Europe was essentially a similar, a similar struggle
for hearts and minds of people, especially in Central and
Eastern Europe, you know, in these sort of you know,
Soviet buffer zones. And starting in nineteen forty eight, the
National Security state was really established. Then you had the

(12:44):
nineteen forty seven Act, which established the Central Intelligence Agency.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
You had, you know, this new world order.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
That had been created with all these international institutions, and
you had the nineteen forty eight UN Declaration on Human Rights,
which forbid the territorial acquisition by military force. So you
can no longer run a traditional military occupation government in
the way that we could in eighteen ninety eight, for example,
when we took the Philippines, everything had to be done

(13:13):
through a sort of political legitimization process, whereby there's some
ratification from the hearts and minds of people within the country. Now,
often that involves simply puppet politicians who are groomed as
emerging leaders by our State Department. But the battle for
hearts and minds had been something that we had been
giving ourselves a long moral license leash if you will,

(13:37):
since nineteen forty eight. One of the godfathers of the CIA,
George Kennan, twelve days after we rigged the Italian election
in nineteen forty eight by stuffing ballot boxes and working
with the mob, we published a memo called the Inauguration
of Organized Political Warfare, where he said, listen, it's a
mean old world out there. We at the CIA just
rigged the Italian election. We had to do it because

(13:59):
the Communist one maybe there'd never be another election in
Italy again.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
But it's really effective. Guys.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
We need a department of dirty tricks to be able
to do this around the world. And it's essentially a
new social contract we're constructing with the American people, because
this is not the way we've conducted diplomacy before. But
we are now forbidden from using the War Department. In
nineteen forty eight, they also renamed the War Department to
the Defense Department.

Speaker 3 (14:23):
So again as part of.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
This diplomatic onslaught for political control rather than it looking
like it's overt military control. But essentially what ended up
happening there is we created this foreign domestic firewall. We
said that we have a department of dirty tricks, to
be able to rig elections, to be able to control media,
to be able to meddle in the internal affairs of
every other plot of dirt in the country. But this

(14:47):
sort of sacred dirt on which the American homeland sits.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
They are not allowed to operate there.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
The State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA are
all expressly forbidden from operating on US soil.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
This is so far from the case, it's not even funny.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
But that's because of a number of laundering tricks that
they've developed over seventy years of doing this. But essentially,
there was no moral quandary at first with respect to
the creation of the censorship industry when it started out
in Germany and in Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia, and
in Sweden and Finland. There began to be a more

(15:25):
diplomatic debate about it after Brexit, and then it became
full throttle when Trump was elected, and what little resistance
there was was washed over by the rise and saturation
of Russia Gate, which basically allowed them to not have
to deal with the moral ambiguities of censoring your own people,

(15:48):
because if Trump was a Russian asset, you no longer
really had a traditional free speech issue. It was a
national security issue. It was only after Russia Gate died
in July twenty nineteen, when Robert m Are basically choked
on the stand for three hours and revealed he had
absolutely nothing after two and a half years of investigation,
that the foreign to domestic switcheroo took place, where they

(16:10):
took all of this censorship architecture spanning DHS, the FBI,
the CIA, the DoD, the DOJ, and then the thousands
of government funded NGO and private sector mercenary firms were
all basically transited from a foreign focus, from a foreign predicate,
a Russian disinformation predicate, to a democracy predicate by saying

(16:33):
that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes
from the Russians, it's actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself,
and so by that they were able to wander the
entire democracy promotion regime change toolkit just in time for
the twenty twenty election.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
I mean, it's almost beyond belief that this has happened.
I mean, my own father worked for the US government
in this business, in the information war against the Soviet
Union and was a big part of that. And the
idea that any of those tools would be turned against
American citizens by the US government was I think, I

(17:10):
want to think was absolutely unthinkable in say nineteen eighty eight.
And you're saying that it's there really hasn't been anyone
who's raised objections, and it's just it's absolutely turned inward
to manipulate and rig our own elections as we would
in say Latvia.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yeah, Well, as soon as the democracy predicate was established,
you had this professional class of professional regime change artists
and operatives. That is the same people who argued that,
you know, we need to bring democracy to Yugoslavia to
get and that's the predicate for getting rid of you know,
Melosovich or any any other country around the world where
we basically overthrow governments in order to preserve democracy.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
Well, if the democracy threat.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
Is homegrown now, then that becomes you know, then suddenly
these people all have new jobs moving on the on
the US side. And I can go through a million
examples of that. But one thing on what you just mentioned,
which is that you know, from their perspective, they just
weren't ready for the Internet. Twenty sixteen was really the

(18:12):
first time that social media had reached such maturity that
it began to eclipse legacy media. I mean, this was
a long time coming. I think folks saw this building
from two thousand and six through twenty sixteen. Internet one
point zero didn't even have social media. From nineteen ninety
one to two thousand and four, there was no social

(18:33):
media at all. Two thousand and four, Facebook came out,
two thousand and five, Twitter, two thousand and six, YouTube
two thousand and seven, the smartphone and so and in
that initial period of social media, nobody was getting subscriberships
at the level where they actually competed with legacy news media.
But over the course of being you know, so initially,

(18:53):
even these dissonant voices within the US, even though they
may have been loud in moments, they never reached thirty
million followers. They never reached a billion impressions a year
type thing, as a uncensored, mature ecosystem allowed citizen journalists

(19:14):
and independent voices to be able to outcompete legacy news media.
This induced a massive crisis both in our military and
in our.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
State Department and intelligence services.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
I get a great example of this in twenty nineteen
meeting of the German Marshal Fund, which is, you know,
an institution that goes back to the US basically, I
don't want to say bribe, but the essentially the soft
power economic soft power projection in Europe as part of
the reconstruction of European governments after World War Two to

(19:47):
be able to essentially pay them with Marshal Fund dollars
and then in return they basically were under our thumb
in terms of how they reconstructed. But the German Marshall
Fund held a meeting in twent nineteen. They held a
million of these frankly, but where they were A four
star general got up on the panel and said that

(20:11):
the what happens He posed the question what happens to
the US military, what happens to the national security state
when The New York Times is reduced to a medium
sized Facebook page? And he posed this thought experiment as
an example of we've had these gatekeepers, We've had these

(20:31):
bumper cars on democracy in.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
The form of a.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
Century old relationship with legacy media institutions. I mean, our
mainstream media is not in any shape or form, even
from its outset, independent from the National Security State, from
the State.

Speaker 3 (20:48):
Department, from the War Department. You know, you had the.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
Initial all of the initial broadcast news companies NBC, ABC,
and CBS were all created by Office of War Information
bet from the War Department's effort in World War Two.
You had these Operation Mockingbird relationships from the nineteen fifties
to the nineteen seventies. Those continued through the use of

(21:11):
the National Endama for Democracy and the privatization of intelligence
capacities in the nineteen eighties under Reagan. There's all sorts
of CIA reading room memos you can read even on
CIA dot gov about those continued media relations throughout the
nineteen nineties. And so you always had this backdoor relationship
between the Washington Posts, the New York Times, and all

(21:32):
of the major broadcast media corporations. By the way, you know,
Rupert Murdoch and Fox are part of this as well.
You know, Rupert Murdoch was actually part of the National
Endowment for Democracy coalition in nineteen eighty three, when it
was formed as a way to do CIA operations in
an above board way after the Democrats were so ticked
off at the CIA for manipulating student movements in the

(21:54):
nineteen seventies. But essentially, there was no CIA intermediary to
random citizen journalist accounts. There was no Pentagon backstop. You
couldn't get a story killed, you couldn't have this favors
for favors relationship. You couldn't promise access to some random
person with seven hundred thousand followers who's got an opinion

(22:14):
on Syrian gas. And so this induced and this was
not a problem for the initial period of social media
from twenty sixty to twenty fourteen, because there were never
dissioning groups that were big enough to be able to
have a mature ecosystem on their own, and all of
the victories on social media had gone in the way

(22:35):
of where the money was, which was from the State Department,
in the Defense Department and the intelligence services. But then
as that maturity happened, you now had this situation after
the twenty sixteen election where they said, okay, now the
entire international order might come Undone. Seventy years of unified
foreign policy from Truman until Trump are now about to

(22:56):
be broken, and we need the same analog control systems.
We had to be able to put bumper cars on
bad stories or bad political movements through legacy media relationships
and contacts. We now need to establish and consolidate within
the social media companies. And the initial predicate for that
was Russiagate. But then after Russiagate died and they used

(23:18):
a simple democracy promotion predicate, then it gave rise to
this multi billion dollar censorship industry that joins together the
military industrial complex, the government, the private sector, the civil
society organizations, and then this vast cobweb of media allies
and professional fact checker groups that serve as this sort

(23:39):
of sentinel class that surveys everywhere on the Internet.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
So, can you give us and thank you again for
this almost unbelievable explanation of why this is happening. Can
you give us an example of how it happens how
just and just pick one among I know countless examples
of how the national security state lies to the population,
censors the truth in real life.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah, so you know, we have this State Department outfit
called the Global Engagement Center, which was created by a
guy named Rick Stengele, who described himself as Obama's propagandistan chief.
He was the under Secretary for Public Affairs, which is
essentially the relation, which is the liaison office role between
the State Department and the mainstream media. So this is

(24:34):
basically the exact nexus where government talking points about war
or about diplomacy or state craft get synchronized with mainstream media.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
And mean, I add somebody to that as someone I know,
Rick Stengel. He was at one pointed journalist. And Rick
Stengel has made public arguments against the First Amendment and
against free speech and.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
Somebody, Yeah, wrote a whole book Country and he published
an op ed in twenty nineteen. He wrote a whole
book on it. And you know, he made the argu
meant that that we just you know, went over here
that essentially the Constitution was not prepared for the Internet,
and we need to get rid of the First Amendment accordingly.
And you know, he described himself as a free speech

(25:14):
absolutist when he was the managing editor of Time magazine
and even when he was in the State Department. Under Obama,
he started something called the Global Engagement Center, which was
the first government censorship operation within the federal government. But
it was foreign facing, so it was okay. Now the time,
they used the homegrown ISIS predicate threat for this, and

(25:38):
so it was very hard to argue against the idea
of the State Department having this formal coordination partnership with
every major tech platform in the US because at the
time there were these ISIS attacks that were and we
were told that ISIS was recruiting on Twitter and Facebook,
and so the Global Engagement Center was a stab essentially

(26:00):
to be a State department entanglement with the social media
companies to basically put bumper cars on their ability to
platform accounts. And one of the things they did is
they created a new technology which is it's called natural
language processing. It is an artificial intelligence machine learning ability

(26:23):
to create meaning out of words in order to map
everything that everyone says on the Internet and create this
vast topography topography of how communities are organized online, who
the major influences are, what they're talking about, what narratives
are emerging or trending, and to be able to create
this sort of network graph in order to know who

(26:44):
to target and how information moves through an ecosystem, and
so they began plotting the language, the prefixes, the suffixes,
the popular terms, the slogans that isis folks were talking
about on Twitter when Trump won the election in twenty sixteen,
everyone who worked at the State Department was expecting these

(27:06):
promotions to the White House National Security Council under Hilly Clinton,
who I should remind viewers was also Secretary of State
under Obama, actually ran the State Department. But these folks
were all expecting promotions on November eighteenth, No eight, twenty sixteen,
and were unceremoniously put out of jobs by a guy
who was a twenty to one underdog according to The

(27:28):
New York Times the day of the election. And when
that happened, these State Department folks took their special set
of skills coercing governments.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
For sanctions.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
The State Department led the effort to sanction Russia over
the Crimea annexation in twenty fourteen.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
These State Department.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Diplomats did an international road show to pressure European governments
to pass censorship laws to censor the right wing populist
groups in Europe, and as a boomerang impact to censor
populist groups who were affiliated in the US. So you
had folks, You had folks who went from the State
Department directly, for example, to the Atlantic Council, which was

(28:09):
which is this major facilitator between the government, between government
to government censorship. The Atlantic Council is a group that
was one of Biden's biggest political backers. They build themselves
as NATO's think tank, so they represent the political census
of NATO and in many respects, when NATO has civil

(28:31):
society actions that they want to be coordinated to synchronize
with military action or region, the Atlantic Council essentially is
deployed to consensus build and make that political action happen
within a region of interest to NATO. Now, the Atlantic
Council is seven CIA directors on its board. A lot
of people don't even know that seven CIA directors are
still alive, let alone all concentrated on the board of

(28:54):
a single organization that's kind of the heavyweight in the
censorship industry. They get annual funding from the Department of Defense,
the State Department, and CIA cut outs like the National
down for Democracy. The Atlantic Council in January twenty seventeen,
moved immediately to pressure European governments to pass censorship laws
to create a transatlantic flank attank on free speech in

(29:14):
exactly the way that Rick Stengel essentially called for to
have US mimic European censorship laws.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
One of the ways they did this.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
Was by getting Germany to pass something called next DG
in August twenty seventeen, which was essentially kicked off the
era of automated.

Speaker 3 (29:33):
Censorship in the US.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
What next GG required was unless social media platforms wanted
to pay a fifty four million dollar fine for each
instance of speech each post left up on their platform
for more than forty eight hours that had been identified
as hate speech, they would be fined basically into bankruptcy
when you aggregate fifty four million over tens of thousands

(29:55):
of posts per day.

Speaker 3 (29:56):
And the safe.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
Haven around that was if they deployed artificial intelligence based
censorship technologies, which have been again created by DARPA to
take on isis to be able to scan and ban
speech automatically. And this gave you know, I call these
weapons of mass deletion. These are essentially the ability to
censor tens of millions of posts with just a few

(30:20):
lines of code. And the way this is done is
by aggregating. Basically, the field of censorship science fuses together
two disparate groups of study, if you will. There's this
sort of political and social scientists who are these sort
of thought leaders of what should be censored. And then
there are the sort of quants, if you will. These
are the programmers, the computational data scientists, computational linguistics. Every university,

(30:45):
there's over sixty universities now who get federal government grants
to do this censorship, the censorship work and the censorship
preparation work. Where what they do is they create these
codebooks of the language that people use. The same way
they did for isis they did this, for example with COVID,
created these COVID lexicons of what dissident groups were saying
about mandates, about masks, about vaccines, about high profile individuals

(31:08):
like Tony Fauci or Peter Dashik or any of these
others protected VIP and individuals whose reputations had to be
protected online, and they created these code books. They broke
things down into narratives. The Atlanta Council, for example, was
a part of this government funded consortium something called the
Virality Project, which mapped sixty six different narratives that dissidents

(31:33):
were talking about around COVID, everything from COVID origins to
vaccine efficacy, and then they broke down these sixty six
claims into all the different factual subclaims, and then they
plugged these into these essentially machine learning models to be
able to have a constant world heat map of what
everybody was saying about COVID. And whenever something started a

(31:54):
trend that was bad for what the Pentagon wanted or
was bad for what Tony Fauci wanted, they were able
to take down tens of millions of posts. They did
this in the twenty twenty election with mail in ballots.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
It was this wescute I'm sorry, I just gotta have
There's so much here and it's so shocking. So you're
saying the Pentagon, our Pentagon, the US Department of Defense
censored Americans during the twenty twenty election cycle.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
Yes, they did this.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Oh, they did this through the So there's the two
most censored events in human history, I would argue to
date are the twenty twenty election and the COVID nineteen pandemic,
and I'll explain how I arrived there. So the twenty
twenty election was determined by mail in ballots, and I'm

(32:44):
not weighing into the substance of whether mal in ballots
were or were not a legitimate or safe and reliable
form of voting. That's a completely independent topic from my perspective,
and the censorship issue one. But the censorship of mail
in ballots is really one of the most extraordinary stories
in our American history. I would argue what happened was

(33:05):
is you had this plot within the Department of Homeland Security.
Now this gets back to what we were talking about
with the State Department's Global Engagement Center. You had this
group within the Atlanta Council and the Foreign Policy Establishment
which began arguing in twenty seventeen for the need for
a permanent domestic censorship government office to serve as a
quarterback for what they called a whole of society counter Misinformation,

(33:29):
counter Disinformation Alliance. That just means censorship the counter missdisinfo,
but their whole society model explicitly proposed that we need
every single asset within society to be mobilized in a
whole of society effort to stop misinformation online.

Speaker 3 (33:47):
It was that much of an existential threat to democracy, and.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
So they fixated in twenty seventeen that it had to
be centered within the government because only the government would
have the clout and the coercive threat powers and the
perceived authority to be able to tell the social media
companies what to do, to be able to summon an
a government funded ngosworm, to create that media surround sound,

(34:11):
to be able to arm an astroturfed army of fact checkers,
and to be able to liaise and connect all these
different censorship industry actors into a cohesive, unified hole. And
the Atlantic Council initially proposed with this blueprint called forward Defense.
It's not offense, it's forward defense.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Guys.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
They initially proposed that running this out of the State
Department's Global Engagement Center because they had so many assets
there who were so effective at censorship under Rick Stengelsteed
and under the Obama administration. But they said, oh, we
were not going to be able to get away with
that because we don't really have a national security predicate
and it's supposed to be feign facing. We can't really
use that hook unless we have a sort of national
security one. Then they contemplated parking at the CIA, and

(34:53):
they said, well, actually, there's two reasons we can't do that.
The CIA is foreign facing and we can't really establish
a counter intelligence threat to bring it home domestically. Also,
we're going to need essentially tens of thousands of people
involved in this operation, spanning this whole society model. You
can't really run a clandestine operation that way. So they said, okay,
well what about the FBI. They said, well, the FBI
would be great, it's domestic. But the problem is that

(35:13):
the FBI is supposed to be the intelligence arm of
the Justice Department, and what we're dealing with here are
not acts of law breaking. It's basically support for Trump.
Or if left wing populace had risen to power, like
Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, I have no doubt they
would have done in the UK, they would have done
the same thing to him.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
There.

Speaker 2 (35:32):
They targeted Jeremy Corbyn and other left wing populist NATO
skeptical groups in Europe, but in the US it was
all Trump. And so essentially what they said is, well,
the only other domestic intelligence equity we have in the
US besides the FBI is the DHS. So we are
going to essentially take the CIA's power to rig and
bribe foreign media organizations, which is the power they've had

(35:55):
since the day they were born in nineteen forty seven,
and we're going to combine that with the power with
the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI by putting it at DHS.
So DHS was basically deputized. It was empowered through this
obscure little cybersecurity agency to have the combined powers that
the CIA has abroad with the jurisdiction of the FBI

(36:17):
at home. And the way they did this, how did
ay and an obscure little cybersecurity agency get this power
was they did a funny little series of switcher rus
So this little thing called SISA. They didn't call it
the Disinformation Governance Board, they didn't call it the Censorship Agency.
They gave it an obscure little name that no one
would notice, called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who

(36:40):
its founder said, we just security. We care about security
so much, it's in our name. Twice everybody sort of
closed their eyes and pretended, you know, that's what it was.
But It was created by active Congress in twenty eighteen
because of the perceived threat that Russia had hacked the
twenty sixteen election, had physically hacked it, and so we
need we needed this cyber security power to be able

(37:02):
to be able to deal with that, and essentially on
the heels of a CIA memo on January sixth, twenty seventeen,
in a same day DHS executive order on January sixth,
twenty seventeen, arguing that Russia had interfered in the twenty
sixteen election, and a DHS mandate saying that elections are
now critical infrastructure. You had this new power within DHS

(37:23):
to say that cybersecurity attacks on elections are now our purview.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
And then they did two cute things.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
One they said they said miss dis and malinformation online
are a form of cyber security attack. They are a
cyber attack because they are happening online. And they said, well, actually,
Russian disinformation is we're actually protecting democracy and elections.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
We don't need a Russian predicate.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
After Russia Gate died, So just like that, you had
this cybersecurity agency be able to legally make the argument
that your wheats about mail in ballots if you undermine
public faith and confidence in them as a legitimate form
of voting. Was now you were now conducting a cyber
attack on US critical infrastructure by articulating misinformation on Twitter,

(38:15):
and just like that.

Speaker 3 (38:16):
Now what they did then, is they.

Speaker 1 (38:17):
In other words, to see it complaining about election fraud
is the same as taking down our paragrid.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
Yes, you could literally be on your toilet seat at
nine point thirty on a Thursday night and tweet I
think that mail in ballots are illegitimate, and you were
essentially then caught up in the crosshairs of the Department
of Homeland Security classifying you as conducting a cyber attack
on US critical infrastructure because you were doing misinformation online

(38:47):
in the cyber realm, and misinformation is a cyber attack
on democracy when it undermines public faith and confidence in
our democratic elections, in our democratic institutions.

Speaker 3 (38:59):
They end up going far beyond that.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
They would actually define democratic institutions as being another thing
that was a cyber security attack to undermine and lo
and behold, the mainstream media is considered a democratic institution
that would come later.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
What ended up happening.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
Was in the dance of the twenty twenty election and
starting in April of twenty twenty, although this goes back
before you had this essentially never Trump neocon Republican DHS
working with essentially NATO on the national security side and
essentially the DNC.

Speaker 3 (39:31):
If you will, to use DHS as.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
The launching point for a government coordinated mass censorship campaign
spanning every single social media platform on Earth in order
to pre censor the ability to dispute the legitimacy of
mail in ballots.

Speaker 3 (39:49):
And here's how they did this.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
They aggregated four different institutions, Stanford University, the University of Washington,
a company called Graphica, and the Atlanta and a Council. Now,
all four of these institutions, the centers within them were
essentially Pentagon cutouts. You had at the Stanford Airnet Observatory.
It was actually run by Michael McFall. If you know

(40:13):
Michael McFall, he was the US Ambassador.

Speaker 3 (40:15):
To Russia.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
Under the Obama administration, and he personally authored a seven
step playbook for how to successfully orchestrate a color revolution,
that is, and part of that involved maintaining total control
over media and social media, juicing up the civil society outfits,
calling elections illegitimate in order to remind you all of

(40:39):
these people were professional Russia gators and professional election delegitimizers
in twenty sixteen.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
And then I'll get that.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
And second, so Stanford University of the nominally the Stanford
Air Observatory under Michael mcmcfall was run by Alex Damos,
who was formerly a Facebook executive who coordinated with OD
and I and with respect to Russia Gate, you know,
taking down Russian propaganda at Facebook. So this is another

(41:07):
liaison essentially to the National Security State. And under Alex
Damus at Sanford Air Observatory was Renee Aresta, who started
her career in the CIA and wrote the Senate Intelligence
Committee report on Russian disinformation. And there's a lot more
there that I'll I'll get to another time. But the
next institution was the University of Washington, which is essentially

(41:28):
the Bill Gates University in Seattle, who is headed by
Kate Starboard, who is basically three generations of military brass
who got our PhD in crisis informatics, essentially doing social
media surveillance for the Pentagon and getting DARPA funding and
working essentially with the National Security State. Then repurposed to

(41:49):
take on mail in ballots. The third firm, Graphica, got
seven million dollars in Pentagon grants and got their start
as part of the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative. Nerve Initiative is
the Psychological Warfare Research Center of the Pentagon. This group
was doing social media spying and narrative mapping for the

(42:11):
Pentagon until the twenty sixteen election happened.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
And then we're repurposed into a partnership with the.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
Department of Homeland Security to censor twenty two million Trump
tweets pro Trump tweets about mail in ballots. And then
the fourth institution, as I mentioned, was the Atlantic Council,
who's got seven CIA directors on the board. So one
after another, it is exactly what Ben Rhodes described during
the Obama era as the blob the foreign policy establishment.

(42:36):
It's the Defense Department of the State Department or the
CIA every single time. And of course this was because
they were threatened by Trump's foreign policy. And so while
much of the censorship looks like it's coming domestically, it's
actually by our foreign facing Department of Dirty Trick's Color
Revolution Blob, who are professional government toddlers who were then

(42:58):
basically descended on the twenty election.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
Now they did this.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
They explicitly said the head of this Election Integrity Partnership
on tape and my foundation clipped them and it's been
played before Congress and it's a.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
Part of the Missouri the Biden lawsuit now. But they
explicitly said on.

Speaker 2 (43:16):
Tape that they were set up to do what the
government was banned from doing itself. And then they articulated
a multi step framework in order to coerce all the
tech companies to take censorship actions they set on tape
the tech companies would not have done but for their pressure,
which involved using threats of government force. Because they were
the deputized arm of the government, they had a formal

(43:39):
partnership with the DHS, they were able to use DHS's
proprietary domestic disinformation switchboard to immediately talk to top brass
at all.

Speaker 3 (43:47):
The tech companies for takedowns.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
And they bragged on tape about how they got the
tech companies to all systematically adopt a new terms of
service speech violation band called delegitimization, which meant any tweet,
YouTube video, any Facebook post, any TikTok video, any discord posts,
any Twitch video, anything on the Internet that undermined public

(44:10):
faith and confidence in the use of mail in ballots
or early voting drop boxes or ballot tabulation issues on
election day was a prime of fascia terms of service
violation policy under this new delegitimization policy that they only
adopted because of pass through government pressure from the Election
Integrity Partnership, which they bragged about on tape, including the

(44:33):
grid that they used to do this, and simultaneously invoking
threats of government breaking them up or government stopping doing
favors for the tech companies unless they did this, as
well as inducing crisis pr by working with their media allies.
And they said the government DHS could not do that themselves,
and so they set up this basically constellation of State Department, Pentagon,

(44:55):
and IC Networks to run this pre censorship campaign, which
by their own math had twenty two million tweets on
Twitter alone, and mind you, they just on fifteen platforms.
This is hundreds of millions of posts which were all
scanned and banned or throttled so that they could not
be amplified, or they existed in a sort of limited
state purgatory or had these frictions affixed to them in

(45:17):
the form of fact checking labels, where you couldn't actually
click through the thing, or you had to it was
an inconvenience to be.

Speaker 3 (45:23):
Able to share it. Now.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
They did this seven months before the election because at
the time they were worried about the perceived legitimacy of
a Biden victory in the case of a so called
red mirage blue shift event. They knew the only way
that Biden would be able to would win mathematically was
through the disproportionate Democrat use of mail in ballots. They

(45:44):
knew there would be a crisis because it was going
to look extremely weird if Trump looked like he won
by seven states and then three days later it comes
out actually the election switch. I mean, that would put
the election crisis of the Bush Gore election on a
level of steroids that the national security state said, well,
the public will not be prepared for. So what we

(46:06):
need to do is we need to in advance, we
need to presensor the ability to even question the legitimacy
this took out.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
Wait wait, ma, ask you a pause right there, the influences,
So what you're saying is what you're suggesting is they
knew the outcome of the election seven months before it
was held.

Speaker 3 (46:31):
It looks very bad, certainly, what's it?

Speaker 1 (46:34):
Yes, Mike, it does look very bad.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
You know, and especially when you combine this with the
fact that this is right on the heels of the impeachment,
the Pentagon led CIA led impeachment.

Speaker 3 (46:47):
You know, it was Eric.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
Cimorella from the CIA, and it was the Vinments from
the Pentagon who led the impeachment of Trump in late
twenty nineteen over you know, an alleged phone call around
withholding Ukraine aid. This same network, which came straight out
of the Pentagon Hybrid Warfare military censorship network created after

(47:11):
the first Ukraine Crisis in twenty fourteen, were the lead
architects of the Ukraine impeachment in twenty nineteen and then
essentially came back on steroids as part of the twenty twenty.

Speaker 3 (47:23):
Election censorship operation.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
But from their perspective, I mean, it certainly looks like
the perfect crime. These were the people DHS at the
time had actually federalized much of the national election.

Speaker 3 (47:38):
Administration.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
Through this January sixth, twenty seventeen executive order from outgoing Obama,
DHS had jed Johnson, which essentially wrapped all fifty states
up into a formal DHS partnership. So DHS was simultaneously
in charge of the administration of the election in many
respects and the censorship of anyone who challenged the administration

(48:01):
of the election. This is like, you know, putting essentially
the defendant of a trial as the judge and jury
of the trial.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
But you're not describing democracy. I mean, you're describing a
country in which democracy is impossible.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
What I'm essentially describing as military rule. I mean, this
is I mean, what's happened with the rise of the
censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of
democracy itself. You know, the democracy sort of draws its
legitimacy from the idea that it is rule by consent
of the people of the people being ruled. That is,

(48:36):
it's not really being ruled by an overlord, because the
government is actually just our will expressed by our consent
with who we vote for. The whole push after the
twenty sixteen election, and after bregsit and after a couple
of other you know, social media run elections that went
the wrong way from what the State Department wanted, Like
the twenty sixteen Philippines election was to completely invert every

(49:00):
thing that we described as being the underpinnings of a
democratic society in order to deal with the threat of
free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said
is we need to redefine democracy from being about the
will of the voters to being about the sanctity of
democratic institutions.

Speaker 3 (49:16):
And who are the democratic institutions.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
Oh, it's US, you know, it's the military, It's NATO,
it's the IMF and the World Bank, it's the mainstream media.
Who it is the NGOs, And of course these NGOs
are largely state department funded or IC funded. It's essentially
all of the elite establishments that were under threat from

(49:40):
the rise of domestic populism that declared their own consensus
to be the new definition of democracy. Because if you
define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather
than a focus on the will of the voters, then
what you're left with is essentially democracy is just the
consensus building architecture with in the within the democratic institutions themselves,

(50:03):
and from their perspective, that takes a lot of work.
I mean, I mean the amount of work these people
do I mean. For example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council,
which is one of these big coordinating mechanisms for the
oil and gas industry in a region, for the for
the finance and the JP Morgans, and the Black Rocks
in a region, for the NGOs in the region, for
the media in the region, all of these need to

(50:25):
reach a consensus, and that process takes a lot of time.
It takes a lot of work and a lot of negotiation.
From their perspective, that's democracy. Democracy is getting the NGOs
to agree with Black Rock, to agree with the with
the Wall Street journal you know, to agree with the
community and activist groups who are onboarded with respect to
a particular initiative. That is the difficult vote building process.

(50:48):
From their perspective, at the end of the day, a
bunch of you know, populist groups decide that they like
a truck driver who's popular on TikTok more than the
you know, carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass Well,
then from their perspective, you know, that is now an
attack on democracy.

Speaker 3 (51:07):
And this is what this whole branding effort was.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
And of course democracy again has that magic regime change
predicate where democracy is our magic watchword, to be able
to overthrow governments from the ground up in a sort
of color Revolution style whole of society effort to topple
a democratically elected government from the inside.

Speaker 3 (51:28):
For example, as we did in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
Victor Yanikovich was democratically elected by the Ukrainian people. Like
him or hate them, I'm not even issuing opinion there.
But the fact is we color revolution am ount of office.
We January sixthem out of office. Actually, to be frank,
I mean with respect of the you had a state
department funded right sector thugs and you know, five billion

(51:50):
dollars worth of civil society money pumped into this to
overthrow a democratically elected government in the name of democracy.

Speaker 3 (51:56):
And they took that special set of skills.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
Home and now it's here, perhaps potentially to stay. And
this has fundamentally changed the nature of American governance because
of the threat of one small voice becoming popular on
social media.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
And me ask a question, So, into that group of
institutions that you say now define democracy, the NGO's foreign policies, typics,
et cetera. You included the mainstream media. Now in twenty
twenty one, the NSA broke into my private text apps
and read them and then leaked them to the New

(52:36):
York Times against me. That just happened again to me
last week, and I'm wondering how common that is for
the Intel agencies to work with so called mainstream media
like the New York Times to hurt their opponents.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
Well, that is the function of these interstitial government funded
non governmental organizations and tanks like For example, we mentioned
the Atlantic Council, which is you know, NATO's think tank,
but other groups like the Aspen Institute, which draws the
lion's share of its funding from the State Department and.

Speaker 3 (53:10):
Other government agencies.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
You know, the Aspen Institute was busted doing the same
thing with the Hunter Biden laptop censorship. You know, you
had this strange situation where the FBI had advanced knowledge
of the pending publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story,
and then magically, the Aspen Institute, which is run by
essentially former CIA, former NSA, former FBI, and then a

(53:33):
bunch of sort of civil society organizations all hold a
mass stakeholder simulation censorship simulation, a three day conference.

Speaker 3 (53:44):
You know, this came out and your roth was there.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
This is a big part of the Twitter file leagues,
and it's been mentioned in multiple congressional investigations. But somehow
the Aspen Institute, which is basically an addendum of the
National Security State, got the exact same information that the
National Security State spied on journalists and political figures to obtain,

(54:09):
and not only leaked it, but then basically did a
joint coordinated censorship simulator in September, two months before the election,
in order, just like with the censorship of mail in ballots,
to be in ready position to presensor anyone online, amplifying Wait,
a second story.

Speaker 1 (54:27):
That had not even broken yet, the Aspen Institute. So,
I mean, which is, by the way, I've spent my
life in Washington's kind of a I mean, Walter Isaacson,
formally of Time magazine, ran it, former president of CNN.
I had no idea it was part of the National
Security State, had no idea it's funding came from the
US government. This is the first time I ever heard that.

(54:48):
But given assuming what you're saying is true, it's a
little weird that Walter Isaacson left Aspens to write a
biography of Elon Musk strange or yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:58):
I'm you know, I don't know. I haven't read that book.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
I from what I've heard from people, it's a relatively
fair treatment. I just total speculation, But I suspect that
Walter Isaacson has struggled with this issue and may not
even firmly fall in one particular place in the sense
that you know, Walter Eisensen did a series of interviews
of Rick Stangele actually with the Atlantic Council in in

(55:25):
other settings, where he interviewed Rick Stangle specifically on the
issue of the need to get rid of the First
Amendment and the threat that free speech on social media
poses to democracy. Now, at the time, I was very concerned.
This was between twenty seventeen and twenty nineteen, when he
did these Rick Stangle interviews. I was very concerned because

(55:46):
Isaacson expressed what seemed to me to be a highly
sympathetic view about the Rick Stangele, you know, perspective on
killing the First Amendment. Now, he didn't formally endorse that position,
but it left me very skittish Isaacson. But what I
should say is, at the time, I don't think very
many people, In fact, I know virtually nobody in the

(56:07):
country had any idea how deep the rabbit hole went
when it came to the construction of the censorship industry,
and how deep the tentacles had grown within the military
and the national security state in order to booy and
consolidate it. Much of that, frankly did not even come
to public light until even last year. Frankly, some of

(56:30):
that was galvanized by Elon Musk's acquisition and the Twitter
files and the Republican turnover in the House that allowed
these multiple investigations, the lawsuits like Missouri bu Biden, the
discovery process there, and multiple other things like the Disinformation
Governance Board, who, by the way, the interim head of that,
the head of that, Nina Jankovitz, got her start in

(56:51):
the censorship industry from this exact same clandestine intelligence community
censorship network created after the twenty fourteen PRIMEA situation.

Speaker 3 (57:00):
Nina Jenkovitz. When when her name came up in twenty twenty.

Speaker 2 (57:03):
Two as part of the Disinformation Disinformation Governance Board, I
almost fell out of my chair because I had been
tracking Nina's network for almost five years at that point.

Speaker 3 (57:13):
When her when her.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
Name came up as part of the UK intercluster cell
of a busted clandestine operation to sense of the Internet
called the Integrity Initiative, which was created by the UK
Foreign Office and was backed by NATO's Political Affairs Unit
in order to create to carry out this thing that
we talked about at the beginning of this of this dialogue,

(57:36):
the NATO's sort of psychological inoculation and the ability to
kill so called Russian propaganda or rising political groups who
wanted to maintain energy relations with Russia at a time
when the US was trying to kill the nord stream
and other pipeline relationships. Well they did that marine the Peninfrint.

(57:57):
Nina Jenkovits was a part of this. And then who
is who is the head of it after Nina Jakovitz
went down, It was Michael Chertoff, And Michael Chertoff was
running the Aspen Institute cyber group, and then this and
the Aspen then goes on to be the censorship simulator
for the Hunter Biden laptop story. And then two years
later Chertoff is then the head of the Disinformation Governance

(58:18):
Board after Nina.

Speaker 3 (58:19):
Is forced to step down.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
Yeah, close friends, of.

Speaker 2 (58:22):
Course, Michael Chertoff was the chairman at Bay. Sorry, of course,
Michael Chertoff was the chairman of the the largest military
contractor in Europe be a Military.

Speaker 1 (58:33):
So, Sue, you've blown my mind so many times in
this conversation that I'm going to need a nap directly
after it's done. So I've just got two more questions
for you. One short one a little longer. Short one
is for people who've made it this far an hour
in and want to know more about this topic. And
by the way, I hope you will come back whenever
you have the time to explore different threads of this story.

(58:55):
But for people who want to do research on their own,
how can your research on this be found on the internet?

Speaker 3 (59:03):
Sure so.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
Our foundation is Foundation for Freedom Online dot com. We
publish all manner of reports on every aspect of the
censorship industry, from what we talked about with the role
of the military industrial complex and the national security state
to what the universities are doing to you know I sometimes.

Speaker 3 (59:22):
Refer to as digital mk ultra. There's just the field of.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
Basically the science of censorship and how and the funding
of these psychological manipulation methods in order to nudge people
into different belief systems. As they did with COVID, as
they did with energy, and every sensitive policy issue is
what they essentially had an ambition for. But so my
Foundation for Freedom Online dot com website is one way.
The other way is just on X. My handle is

(59:48):
at Mike ben Cyber. I'm very active there and publish
a lot of long form video and written content on
all of this. I think it's one of the most
important issues in the world today.

Speaker 1 (59:58):
So it certainly is. And so that leads to directly
and seamlessly to my final question, which is about X.
And I'm not just saying this because I post content there,
but I think objectively it's the last big platform that's
free or sort of free or more free. You post
there too. But you know, we're at the very beginning
of an election year with a couple of different wars

(01:00:21):
unfolding simultaneously in twenty twenty four. So do you expect
that that platform can stay free for the duration of
this year.

Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
It's under an extraordinary an extraordinary amount of pressure, and
that pressure is going to continue to mount as the
election approaches. Elon Musk is a very unique individual and
he has a unique buffer, perhaps when it comes to
the national Security State, because the National security State is
actually quite reliant on Elon Musk properties, whether that's for

(01:00:53):
the the electrical you know, the sort of the the
green revolution when it comes to Tesla and the battery
technology there. When it comes to SpaceX, the State Department
is hugely dependent on SpaceX because of its unbelievable sort
of pioneering and saturating presence in the field of low

(01:01:15):
Earth orbit satellites that are basically how our telecom system runs,
to things like Starlink. There are dependencies that the National
security State has on Elon Musk. I'm not sure he'd
have as much room to negotiate if he had become
the world's richest man selling, you know, at a lemonade stand.
So there's and if the National security State goes too

(01:01:37):
hard on him by invoking something like Scyphius to sort
of nationalize some of these properties, I think the shockwave
that it would send to the international investor community would
be irrecoverable. At a time when we're engaging in great
power competition, so they're trying to kill, you know, they're
trying to sort of induce a I think a sort
of corporate regime change through a series of things involving

(01:01:58):
a sort of death by a thousand paper cuts. I
think there are seven or eight different Justice Department or
SEC or FTC investigations into Elon Musk properties that all
started after his acquisition of X. But then what they're
trying to do right now is what I call the
Transatlantic flank attack two point zero. You know, we talked

(01:02:18):
in this dialogue about how the censorship industry really got
its start when a bunch of State Department exiles who
are expecting promotions took their special set of skills in
coercing European countries to pass sanctions on themselves, to cut
off their own leg despite themselves in order to pass
sanctions on Russia. They ran back that same playbook with

(01:02:38):
doing a road show for censorship instead for sanctions.

Speaker 3 (01:02:41):
We are now witnessing Transatlantic flank.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Attack two point zero, if you will, which is because
they have lost a lot of their federal government powers
to do this same censorship operation they've been doing from
twenty eighteen to twenty twenty two, in part because the
House has totally turned on them, in part because of
the media, in part because Missouri Iden, which won a
slam Dunk case. Actually banning government censorship at the trial

(01:03:04):
court and apellate court levels is now between this before
the Supreme Court. They've now moved into two strategies. One
of them is state level censorship laws. California just passed
a new law which the censorship industry totally drove from
start to finish around required They call it Transform Platform
Accountability and Transparency, which is basically forcing you Elon Musk

(01:03:29):
to give over the kind of narrative mapping data that
these CIA conduits and Pentagon cutouts were using to create
these weapons of mass deletion, these abilities to just censor
everything at scale because they had all the internal platform data.
Elon Musk took that away. They're using state laws like
this new California law to crack that open. But the
major threat right now is the threat from Europe with

(01:03:52):
something called the EU Digital Services Act, which was cooked
up in tandem with folks like NewsGuard, which is run
by which has a board of Michael Hayden, head of
the CIA. NSA four star General Rick Stangele is on
that board, you know, from the State Department's propaganda office.
Tom Ridge is on that board from the Department of

(01:04:12):
Homeland Security.

Speaker 3 (01:04:12):
Oh and Anders faux Grassmusen is on that board.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
He was the General Secretary of NATO under the Obama
administration see of NATO, the CIA, the NSA four star
general DHS in the State Department, working with the EU
to craft the censorship laws that now are the largest
existential threat to X other than potentially X advertiser boycotts,
because there is now disinformation is now banned as a

(01:04:35):
matter of law in the EU, and the EU is
a bigger market for X than the US. There's only
three hundred million some people in the US, there's four
hundred fifty million in Europe. X is now forced to
comply with this brand new law that just got ratified
this year where they either need to forfeit six percent
of their global annual revenue to the EU to maintain
operations there, or put in place essentially the kind of

(01:04:59):
you know, c I a bumper cars if you will,
that I've been describing over the course of this in
order to have an internal mechanism to censor anything that
the EU, which is just a proxy for NATO, deems
to be disinformation. And you can bet with sixty five
elections around the around the Globe this year. You can
you can predict every single time what they're going to

(01:05:19):
define disinformation as.

Speaker 3 (01:05:21):
So that's the main The main fight.

Speaker 2 (01:05:22):
Right now is dealing with the transatlantic flank attack from Europe.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
I've said this five times, but that's just one of
the most remarkable stories I've ever heard, and I'm grateful
to you for bringing it to us. Mike Ben's executive
director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and hope we
see you again.

Speaker 3 (01:05:38):
Thanks Tucker,