Mike Benz: The Real Reason for Pavel Durov’s Arrest, and the Deep State’s Plan to Control Our Speech
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You know, there are a lot of arrests in the last few years, including of a number of people I know, you know, get arrested for political reasons. But the jailing of the founder and owner of Telegram feels like a pivot point. It feels like a moment in history and probably a harbinger of, you know, the next few years or decades. I hope I'm wrong.

So the question is like, what is this? How did this happen? France arrests him on a fuel stop. He's a French citizen, by the way, but he lives in Dubai. Arrests him. That's a big step.

very hard for a bystander without direct knowledge, being me, to believe that Macron could or would have done that without the encouragement or at least agreement of the Biden administration. You were the first person I thought of. Got you here as fast as we could. So I'm going to just stand back and I would very much like to hear you explain what you think happened in this arrest, how it happened, what it means, who was involved. Well, we don't know yet.

And part of what I've been talking about, which is the suspected role of the U.S. embassy in the arrest, or as you put it, I think perfectly, we don't know if it was participation or approval or nothing. And I'll play devil's advocate against my own

my own argument here, but I feel compelled to make this argument because we're not getting the answer from the Congress who should be getting it for us, which is to say that an entity like the House Foreign Affairs Committee, if it was committed to free speech, would be interrogating whether or not there was a U.S. Embassy back channel to French law enforcement or French intelligence or the French government in terms of doing this, because this is a pattern of practice that the U.S. Embassy has pursued all over the world and particularly in Europe

through, you know, brands, branding like anti-corruption or whatnot. You know, this is something that,

even dating back to Norm Eisen when he was the ambassador to the Czech Republic, championing these sort of anti-corruption reforms from the Czech government to arrest the politicians who essentially opposed the State Department agenda there. This is very common. If you go to places like the Journal of Democracy, which is the academic journal for the National Endowment for Democracy, which is probably the most notorious CIA cutout in the whole arsenal,

They have whole academic journals on how to push the Poland government to arrest the politicians from the PIS party, from the Law and Order party, especially in the judicial system. To arrest them? Yes, yes, to mass arrest the... We have a concept in American statecraft called transitional justice,

which is this idea that essentially after the U.S. overthrows a country, we make we arrest all of the opposition politicians, opposition judges, opposition journalists, propaganda spreaders in order to stop the reemergence of threats to democracy. Well, no, I'm not sure you make it a one party state. So it can be a democracy. Right. Well, this is this China pushing this or the United just to be clear, or the United States, the United States.

And we do that to stabilize the democratic institutions and effectively make it cheaper for the United States to manage because you don't need to manage the constant recurring threat of the party you just vanquished. So this was something that the U.S. State Department was spearheading

before Trump got into office. And it was so effective that the same cast of characters are back for Trump. Norm Eisen was the one who spearheaded, you know, the impeachment. He drafted articles of impeachment before Trump was even, even took the oath of office and also led the, you know, L.A.

elements of the 2019 Ukraine impeachment, the lawfare that's currently being done with the 90 plus felonies against Trump. So this is a instrument of statecraft, the use of prosecutions in order to bring leverage against and to get rid of pesky people who oppose the State Department's priorities. But in the specific case of Telegram, there's a lot going on here. Let's ask you to pause really quick.

We could know a lot more about the Biden administration's involvement through the U.S. embassy in Paris if a single House committee controlled by Republicans would just jump on it. Yes. I think that's what you said earlier. Yes. Yes, absolutely. And the problem is, is

Our Congress is not sticking up for us as this is happening all over the world. Just this year, you know, the drama around Brazil has been a huge issue for Elon Musk and X. And, you know, the House held a hearing on it, and then the House Foreign Affairs Committee titled the hearing was Brazil, a crisis of democracy, rule of law, and governance, question mark.

but they did not interrogate the the u.s state department's role in censorship in brazil it was actually the u.s state department who capacity built spending tens of millions of dollars the entire censorship ecosystem in brazil they spent

Tens of millions of dollars paying Brazilian journalists, Brazilian censors, Brazilian fact checkers, even members of the legal scholarship associated with Brazil's censorship court and effectively pressured through that censorship.

NGO soft power swarm Brazil to set up the entire censorship architecture it now has. They set that up. Why would the U.S. government, which represents the U.S. Constitution and democracy, be trying to end democracy? You can't have democracy with censorship by definition. So why would we be trying to end democracy in country after country? What is the point of that?

Well, this is one of the great ironies of American statecraft in the post-2016 era. Free speech has been an instrument of statecraft for U.S. diplomacy, military and intelligence purposes since the 1940s. Free speech around the world has been something we've championed in part because we believe it, but

in part, in large part, I should note, because this is how you can capacity build resistance movements or political movements or paramilitary movements

in countries that the U.S. State Department seeks to attain political control over. If there's no free speech, then there's no political movement that you can capacity build to regime change the government or to maintain elements of control over the existing government. And so this is why the State Department capacity built all these NGOs. The USA does it as well, like Freedom House and the whole wing of

For example, the 26 NGOs who condemned Russia for attempting to ban Telegram in 2018. Why would 26 U.S. government-funded NGOs all say that Russia was attacking free speech in Russia by threatening to block Telegram? What was because the U.S. State Department was using Telegram through the power of its encrypted chat and all the functionality and the fact that so much of Russia was using it to foment

protests and riots within Russia, just as they did in Belarus, just as they did in Iran, just as they did in Hong Kong, just as they attempted to do in China. So Telegram is this very, very powerful vehicle for the U.S. State Department to be able to mobilize protests, to be able to galvanize political support against authoritarian countries. This is why the U.S. government loved Telegram so much from 2014 to 2020.

because it was this powerful way to evade state control over media or state surveillance over private chats because of the private functions and anonymous forwarding, all these unique features of Telegram allow it to have U.S.-funded telegrams

political groups or political dissidents get tens of thousands of people to their cause with relative impunity it's it's it's effectively unstoppable by a regime like lukashenko in the summer of 2020 when when the u.s government was you know effectively orchestrating a color revolution in belarus and let me just take a sip for a second telegram was the main channel for that the national endowment for democracy was actually paying the main administrators of the telegram channels

who were orchestrating those riots, those protests. Not employees of Telegram, but people by the channel administrators. Okay. So people are using it or organizing others to use it. Right. Right. People, you know, you would get a Telegram channel with, you know, a million people in it and the administrator of it would be on national endowment for democracy payroll and

And the National Endowment for Democracy, you know, even the head of it, which is, it's a CIA cutout. It was basically created when, you know, in a letter from the CIA director, William Casey in 1983, as a means for the CIA to get control, get functions back that it had lost after the scandals of the church committee hearing in 1975, 1976. The Reagan administration wanted to be able to get back the powers that the Democrats in the late 1970s

uh, considered to be human rights abuses and too much cloak and dagger stuff. So they put it under the banner of the national endowment for democracy as a public facing NGO with a CIA back channel. Again, the CIA called for this and the founders of, uh, of the national endowment for democracy, even openly, you know, even openly say that they do what they do now at the CIA used to do, but they have a, it was literally scrubbed from the, from the legislative, uh,

from the original bill that the CIA would not coordinate it. I mean, it's one of the most prolific CIA cutouts in the arsenal. And they were the ones who were paying the Telegram channel administrators who were organizing these

you know, the attempt to overthrow the Belarusian government. And I'm not even weighing in on, you know, the normative question about whether or not that's a good or bad thing. I will. It's terrible. All I care about is freedom of speech on the internet. But what people have to understand, and this is the point I've been screaming into the wind for eight years now, is that internet censorship is not some domestic event done by domestic actors and

you know, intermediated by a domestic government and domestic tech platform policies. Internet censorship came to the United States and has been exported around the world because free speech is a casualty of a proxy war of the blob against populism. And what I mean by the blob is our foreign policy establishment, which is primarily concentrated within the U.S. State Department, the U.S. intelligence services like the CIA, the Pentagon,

USAID, and the soft power swarm army that we have through our NGOs and State Department, CIA, USAID-funded civil society institutions. And what happened was is we've had this long-range plan to seize Eurasia. Russia has $75 trillion worth of natural resources in it. The United States only has $45 trillion. I mean, just to put in perspective how bountiful the region that we're so preoccupied with is.

And if you recall, no less than Lindsey Graham, frustrated at the lack of Republican political support for Ukraine aid, finally implored, sort of took the mask off a few months ago and said, listen, even if you don't believe in democracy, Ukraine's got $14 trillion worth of natural resources. So,

Even if it's just for cynical self-serving purposes, the U.S. should support the war in Ukraine in order to control $14 trillion worth of mineral wealth and oil and gas wealth. And this is the story of Eurasia after 1990.

the u.s the uk and partners in nato set on set on a quest to take political control over the territories of the former soviet union and were very successful until vladimir putin rose to power and began to assert energy diplomacy as a means for russia to reassert political influence over central and eastern europe this is one of the reasons that the nordstrom pipeline was

you know the absolute ire of uh of the blob of our foreign policy establishment because those financial interlinkages to europe were allowing russian influence over its politics over its economy it fostering diplomatic ties all these things which which are fly in the face of this long-range plan to seize eurasia and so you know with the nordstrom case you had

you know sanctions on it prior prior to it being blown up uh you know it came out in essentially leaked documents from something called the integrity initiative that uh that the uk foreign office had been you know basically orchestrating orchestrating pr campaigns to get the nordstrom pipeline killed in 2015 uh and so you know it being blown up uh is is no surprise uh you know and but but understand

It's because of Russia's energy diplomacy with Europe, which is what gave rise to this whole need to kill Russia's energy connections. And if I can just flesh this out a little bit.

If you can get rid of Russian energy relations with Europe, this was what the theory was, then you bankrupt Russia. You also strip them of their military industrial complex. Russia is the military enemy of the United States, not just in Europe now. But if you recall, the Obama administration tried to invade Syria. And the only reason they were unable to do so is because Russia militarily backstopped the Assad government.

And it's the same thing in Africa. You know, Africa is one third of the world's natural resource wealth. There's a mad scramble for the natural resources in Africa. And Russia is the bane of both the US and French military forces there. If you can bankrupt Russia through getting, you know, taking out Gazprom and its oil exports, then you get rid of Russia's ability to be an arms supplier to the rebel groups there. Now, getting back to the Telegram case,

Telegram is an instrument of statecraft, and it's also an instrument of military and intelligence projection. So on the statecraft side, we just talked about how Telegram has been the darling of the CIA, the State Department, USAID for operations, security.

stretching from Belarus to inside of Moscow to Iran to Hong Kong to China and all over the world because it's got a billion users. And so it's very easy to get all the native population who you're trying to recruit to your political cause onto the channels they're already using. And then also give them the anonymity and the encryption safety to be able to organize and express their political support safely, relatively safely.

but the pro so the problem is because telegram is also an open playing field because pavel has not relinquished either to the united states or to russia it has also allowed russian propaganda to propagate and this is a problem right now in ukraine uh

Just two weeks after your interview with Pavel, Radio Free Europe, which is an institution that was created by the CIA and it was run directly for its first 20 years by the CIA, just two weeks after your interview with Pavel, called Telegram

a spy in every Ukrainian's pocket, and made the argument that Ukraine needs to wrest control over Telegram. And it laid out the following reasons for doing so. It said that 75% of Ukrainians currently use Telegram. And they have been using Telegram, this is up from 20% just a few years ago, because of Pavel's

with the concept of free speech. It's been highly trusted for many years, but they're not sure if there's a Russian back channel now. And they cite several reasons around Pavel's

uh, potential financing, uh, from a, from a bond raise several years ago that may have had Russian investors in it. They cite the fact that Russian internal documents, uh, promote, promote the use of telegram for its own military. The fact that, uh, over 50% of Russia itself uses telegram. The fact that, uh, the fact, so the fact that the Russian military uses it safely and has no problem with it. And the fact that, uh,

There may be Russian financing of Pavel. This is the argument that they make, that perhaps it was compromised. Perhaps the reason Russia dropped its attempt to ban Pavel

Telegram after the 2018 affair may have been because an agreement was secretly reached. And if that is the case, then that would essentially make all of the military operations and all of the statecraft and secret channels that Ukraine is currently using be destroyed.

We hear a lot from viewers about big tech censorship and those reports are more frequent than ever right now. Censorship meaning shutting down your access to information, not lies or misinformation, but true things. It's only the truth that they censor.

facts that get in the way of the lies they're trying to tell you. The net effect of this, of course, is interfering in the 2024 presidential elections. That's why they're censoring more than ever now because the stakes are even higher. You're probably not shocked by this, but the specific examples of it do throw you back a little bit. We've seen screenshots and videos showing how a Google search to learn more about the attempted assassination on Donald Trump instead push users to information on Harry Truman or Bob Marley or the Pope

anything other than the relevant truth, which is that they just shot Trump in the face. They don't want you to know that because it might help Trump. We've seen examples where Facebook marked true photos of a bloodied and defiant Trump as misleading. Somehow those pictures were a lie and then limited their visibility.

Its AI assistant explicitly denied the shooting ever took place. This is insanity, but it's at the core of big text editorial policy, which is denying the truth to you in order to control the outcome of this presidential election. That's not democracy. We've seen examples where a generic search for information about Donald Trump was automatically rephrased to show positive stories about Kamala Harris instead. Is there any clear example of election interference?

So what do you do about it? Well, Parler has been down this road. Parler was pulled right off the internet for telling the truth. But it's back and it's reaffirmed its lifelong unwavering commitment to free speech. On Parler, the Bill of Rights lives. The First Amendment is real. You can say what you think because you're a human being and an American citizen and not a slave.

On Parler, users can freely express themselves, tell the truth, express their conscience, and connect with others who are doing the same. And they will not be interfered with. They will not be censored. Designed to support a wide range of viewpoints, everyone is welcome on Parler. Parler is committed to ensuring that everybody is heard. And so it's become a place where independent journalism is protected and respected. It's protected because it's respected.

So as this censorship by big tech intensifies, standing up for your God-given right as an American to say what you think is essential. We're on Parler. That's why we're on Parler. Our handle is at Tucker Carlson, and we encourage you to join us there. You have the right to say what you believe. So does every American, and you can do it on Parler. Get the Parler app today.

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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at mid mobile dot com slash save whenever you're ready. Forty five dollars up from payment equivalent to fifteen dollars per month. New customers on first three month plan only taxes and fees extra speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. I just can't get over the fact that the Biden administration, the U.S. government, which you and I pay for, which is supposed to be defending the freedom of speech above all other freedoms.

is encouraging its proxy government, the Ukrainian government, to seize or take over a media outlet. I mean, that's so... Why is that not illegal? Well, I mean, this has been part and parcel of our diplomacy for decades. But it's just criminal. Well, if you recall, when NATO...

you know, NATO's first use of military hard power in its entire history. You know, it was created in 1949. The first time it ever fired an offensive bullet was in 1995 and 1999 in Yugoslavia. I remember it well.

Well, one of the things we did when we bombed Yugoslavia was we took out its state media propaganda organ, its state media channel, state TV, its state radio broadcaster. We bombed the headquarters of the media building

and killed dozens of people in the process. Journalists. Yes, and said that that was fair game because they were a keynote in Yugoslavia's war effort. And so we killed their journalists in order to slow down their military. So the whole idea that there's like a free exchange of information or a battle of ideas and may the best idea win, which is really kind of the...

of American civil society. I mean, that's what this whole project is based on. Yes. They don't mean it at all. In fact, they're moving in exactly the opposite direction. It's something... Sorry to sound so shocked, but I am shocked. I hate this. It's something for 50, 60 years was very useful to us when other countries did not have robust processes

propaganda or communications infrastructure themselves. And one of the reasons that Voice of America and Radio for Europe and Radio Liberty and all those were so effective at the time was because other countries didn't really have their own developed native programming in radio or TV or print. And so the ability to project that

you know, with limited options allowed saturation of the CIA narrative in those regions. Well, I just, I mean, this is, I don't really any desire to talk about it, but I can't even control myself since my father was the director of the Voice of America and I grew up hearing about this, you know, every day at the dinner table. You know, the whole idea was, at least the public facing idea, the publicly articulated idea was we're disseminating, you know,

News and news, you know, ideas, information, facts, and allowing the populations of these countries access to this. And they can make up their own mind. I mean, it really was part of at least publicly. And I'm very aware, you know, I know it was more complicated than that, but I really believed that this was part of the battle of ideas. And we were winning because we had better ideas. Well, we allowed freedom of speech because we were winning. And fair. And this is this is the issue now, which is.

Everything changed in 2014 in terms of our free speech diplomacy toolkit. We set up a swarm army of pro-free speech NGOs, civil society institutions, university centers, journalists, legal groups in order to pressure and lobby all foreign countries around the world to create an open society for journalists so that those could be penetrated by U.S. statecraft and intelligence. And until...

The free and open Internet started to backfire on the State Department. That was the unequivocal position of the State Department. Because their ideas suck, and nobody wants trans kids, is the truth. And they don't want any more freaking rainbow flags. And maybe if you sold a product people liked, like Marlboros or Big Macs or Levi jeans or freedom, that's

or like hot blonde girls or whatever you're selling, maybe it's something that people actually want. But if you're selling trannyism and, you know, gay race communism, nobody actually wants that. Nobody wants that. Right. Well, sorry. Right. Well, well, if support is not earned, it has to be installed in this. Exactly. Nicely put. And this is one of the

This is one of the great issues here, which is that it's these very free speech institutions that were capacity built by the State Department that have all incorporated this censorship element. So we still do have a lot of free speech diplomacy. Just two years ago, we sanctioned the government Iran

the government of Iran for having the temerity to censor its own internet. This is so funny because, you know, our own Department of Homeland Security was doing the exact same thing to censor Americans. To us. To us. You know, so, I mean, technically, the United States should be kicked off the dollar for...

you know, for doing, you know, exactly what we accuse foreign countries of doing. But we selectively promote either free speech or censorship depending on what's most advantageous for political control in any particular country. So, for example, if Bolsonaro were to have rose, you know, rose back to power in Brazil, I have no doubt about it, you know, free speech would be back on the menu and Bolsonaro would be accused of censorship, you know, over, you know,

jaywalking on a random street corner. And we would be pumping up through NGOs and university centers and

journalists on payroll, we'd be pumping $100 million into Brazil's free speech economy in order to create anti-Bolsonaro sentiment. That's right. But, you know, one of the things beginning, and I come back to this Brazil case. Can I just ask you a pause one last time? One of the things I've learned from you over the past couple of years, I've learned a lot from you, but one big picture idea that I didn't fully appreciate until I listened to you carefully was that our foreign policy drives our domestic policy.

There's no such thing as domestic policy. Exactly. Every country. I didn't understand. I grew up in a world where there was the foreign policy and like you overthrow Mossadegh or whatever. Maybe that's good for America. You don't even think about it. We're fighting the Soviets. It's not a problem because we are an island of freedom here in the United States. And your reporting and analysis suggests exactly what you just said. There is no domestic policy. Everything that happens in this country is an outgrowth, a function of democracy.

our management of the world. - Yes, there's no such thing as domestic policy because every country's domestic policy is another country's foreign policy. Whatever you do in the United States or whatever, any foreign country, a foreign country wants to change its labor laws. Well, guess what? That impacts the bottom line of US corporations who employ labor pools there. A foreign country wants to nationalize its graphite industry. Well, guess what? Now America can't make pencils.

Everything that, every internal policy of every other country on earth impacts the bottom line of some U.S. national champion. Now, how the State Department defines national interest is essentially the college of corporations and financial firms

that are US national champions. So for example, if something happens, if Georgia or Azerbaijan does something that impacts the bottom line of ExxonMobil or Chevron or Halliburton, that becomes a State Department priority in order to protect US national interests against this nationalization law that's happening in Georgia or Azerbaijan. And it's the same thing with every industry.

I do want to get back to this sort of exporting the First Amendment concept that was such a big part of American statecraft. I think almost no one, there's almost no better example of this than what happened with the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which is the main censorship artery of the U.S. State Department. It also works with a lot of, a million of these censorship NGOs and USAID and this whole network. It was set up by Rick Stengel,

Rick Stengel, you say that his job was to export the First Amendment, former managing editor of Time Magazine.

When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the guy whose job was to export the First Amendment wrote an op-ed, I believe in the Washington Post, effectively calling for an end to the First Amendment, that it needs to mirror what Europe and other countries have. And then he wrote a book making the same case. Right, right. But again, this is the guy who was the Undersecretary of Public Affairs. This is a very evil man, Rick Stengel. Well, the point that I'm trying to make here is,

The free speech absolutist who was in charge of U.S. government projection of free speech, all it took was one election for the entire diplomacy architecture that this principle of free speech was based on.

to get completely bottomed out. All it took was Donald Trump getting elected for arguably 200 years of a First Amendment principle and 70 years of this principle of exporting the First Amendment to be entirely discarded because it was leading to the wrong kinds of people being elected.

Free speech on the internet was blamed for the loss of the Philippines election by the State Department in 2016. It was blamed for the events of Brexit. This is why the U.S. State Department funds so many London-based NGOs and university centers and influence operations to stop Nigel Farage and the Brexit movement. It was blamed for the rise of Trump in 2016. It was blamed for the rise of Bolsonaro. It was blamed for the rise of Modi in India.

In country after country, the free and open internet, unfiltered alternative news, the rise of citizen journalists, the rise of journalists

Citizens in those countries who have larger voices than CIA-backed media, than USAID-funded media, than State Department-funded media has meant that the State Department has lost control of those countries. And what happened was after 2016, the technology and the networks were established to be able to add a new toolkit to American diplomacy, which is diplomacy by censorship.

And we have formal government programs at the State Department dedicated to getting foreign countries to pass domestic censorship laws to stop the rise of right-wing populist parties in those countries. I'm going to say that again. We have formal government programs at the State Department whose job is to lobby foreign countries and pressure foreign countries to pass censorship laws to stop the rise of domestic populist groups. So you have...

truckers in America whose income tax is going to pay foreign governments to censor their citizens. This is the sort of schizophrenia right now of American diplomacy. We're becoming the Soviet Union, which exported poison around the world for all those years. I really felt like the United States was the bork against that. But whether that's true or not, I don't know. I'm trying to reassess.

What is true now is we're doing what they did. We're sowing chaos and tyranny around the world. It's like I am so heartbroken to see this. Well, it's amazing you say that because as someone who is sort of present at creation in terms of watching this all get established and spending my whole life monitoring it and chronicling it.

They were very aware of that when they were setting this up. And when I say they, I mean NATO, the U.S. State Department, the U.K. Foreign Office. After the 2016 election and after Brexit, and they began this whole consensus-building quest about how to get all the relevant stakeholders involved.

from the government from the private sector from civil society and from the media to all come together and create this whole society censorship coalition whole society counter misinformation coalition technically they call it but

They were very aware of that what they were doing was exactly what they accused Russia and China of doing, intensely aware. And there was much, much hand-wringing in the beginning of this, in late 2016, early 2017, that we need to be extremely careful as we are establishing this infrastructure that it does not appear to be what Russia and China are doing. That Russia and China have a, what they said was effectively,

Russia and China don't have the problem that we have. They don't have rising populist movements in their countries that are opposed to the state institutions, that are opposed to the state priorities, that are winning political power. How do Russia and China solve this problem of domestic populist insurgency? Well, they use... I'm not joking when I say this. Giving their citizens political power, in other words? Yes, yes. Do they ever stop and just ask like...

Since when is it okay for the people in charge of a government to ban populism?

I don't understand. Like, when did we all agree that populism is bad? I thought the whole system was fundamentally a populist system. The country belongs to its citizens. I thought that was the whole deal. Oh, I can answer that because it's basically doctrine. There's been a redefinition of democracy from meaning the consensus of individuals to meaning the consensus of institutions. And this is a very clever, sleight of hand, reframing trick that they played after the 2016 election in the U.S. and they were setting this up. So just to

Just to get there, they're playing with revolution here. I mean, they could they've lost their legitimacy. So I'm not going to try to overthrow the US government. I'm 55. I'm not going to do that. But at some point, you know, someone's going to try to do that. And it's going to be kind of hard to see why they're not justified in doing that because it's not legitimate. Their legitimacy comes from the consent of the government. That's our system. And when they no longer have the consent of the government, they're not legitimate, period.

So all I care about is freedom of speech on the Internet. But if you have no freedom of speech, it's not a legitimate country. So there's a lot to get to on all of this that I think is maybe actually picking up where what we were talking about with when they were setting this all up. I think it actually kind of elegantly dovetails with the point that you just made.

When they were setting this up, they said, Russia and China don't have this problem. We will have a PR nightmare, a crisis of legitimacy if we simulate exactly what Russia and China do, which is top-down government control.

So what they did is they came up with a concept called the whole society framework that would, in order to astroturf a, you know, the, the appearance of a kind of bottom up organic censorship industry that the government would simply fund and intermediate and direct and pressure.

So this whole society concept is that the government is not the censor. It is simply the quarterback of the censorship ecosystem. So it is not like Russia and China in the sense that the Russian Federation says this media channel is banned. Instead, it would be the American government paying

to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars all the different censorship ecosystem players and exploiting that leverage to have that outcome arrive semi-organically and they and they were very careful in establishing it you know according to this to this idea that what we will do is we we will be able to essentially have plausible deniability but even though we're funding it and we're directing it and we are pressuring everyone to join this censorship coalition and

So this is how you had tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. State Department funding the private sector pop-up censorship mercenary firms, funding the civil society institutions, the universities, the censorship activists, the NGOs, the nonprofits, the researchers.

And also on the media side and all these U.S.-funded, USAID-funded media outlets all pushing for censorship. And there's an elegant structure to it, which is that the government pays the civil society institutions to do whatever.

essentially CIA work against our own citizens. This is why there's so many CIA analysts at these censorship universities, the censorship labs, they'll call them disinfo labs, you know, at 60 plus U.S. universities all funded by the U.S. government. They do... And I assume on cable television too, they're everywhere on all the channels. Yes.

DHS actually, you know, on boards, you know, media organizations into its, into its counter disinformation work. And again, because media is the fourth quadrant in the whole society framework and it's government, private sector, civil society, media, all aligned like a magnet to create the censorship outcomes so that the, so there's no holes in the Titanic. No one can resist it. No one can stop it. This is the prop. This is, and it was so effective until Elon Musk essentially burst that bubble and until they went a little bit too far with the disinformation governance board. And finally a

a certain faction within the republican party woke up and was able to exert some pressure through through the house and jim jordan in november 2022 but getting back to this point about about populism and what this whole counter you know disinformation the censorship whole society network does is they did a clever reframing if you and this is really cute if you run a boolean search on google right now and you look at what place

But places like the Atlanta Council and Brookings and the National Endowment for Democracy were all saying in the months after Trump's election in 2016, they were making the argument that maybe democracy was a mistake because it leads to outcomes like... Before they doubled down on it, there was a brief window where they said, you know what? Actually, democracy leads to outcomes like Donald Trump and Brexit. And at the time, NATO, its biggest fear was free speech on the internet.

In early 2017, NATO periodicals were saying the biggest threat to NATO is not a hostile foreign attack from Russia. They would come to eat these words five years later. They would argue, they argued conventional warfare is over. The biggest threat to NATO is free speech on the internet because it's allowing the rise of Marine Le Pen in France.

It's allowing the rise of Matteo Salvini in Italy. It's allowing the rise of the Vox party in Spain, AFD in Germany. So we would have Frexit, Grexit, Italexit, Spexit. The entire EU would come undone, which meant NATO's commercial arm comes undone, which means NATO comes undone, which means there's no enforcement arm for the IMF and the World Bank. So it would be like the ending scene from Fight Club where the credit card companies all crash down just because you're allowed to speak English.

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So they had this sort of crisis of, well, what do we do about it? Democracy is the problem. And then they said, well, the problem is our entire diplomatic toolkit. Everything that the CIA does, everything the State Department does, everything USAID does, everything that the Pentagon Civil Affairs does is all under this rubric of promoting democracy. This is how we topple foreign governments. We only have two predicates for toppling a government. One of them is

one is aggression. The other one is repression. So if they are aggressing against a foreign country, we get to be the world's policemen. We get to, you know, topple them for, you know, their military activity. But if we can't nail them on that, we can always get them on repression. We can say they're repressing their own people. So we need to bring democracy there. And this is the lion's share of, you know, this is what we did in Belarus. This is what we did, you know, in Moscow from

2010 to 2020. This is what we did in all these other countries. And I'm not even arguing normatively about whether that's right or wrong, but you have to understand that free speech on the internet is the collateral damage of this proxy war. But here's how they rescued democracy.

They said, "We can't, okay, we need to stick with democracy, "even though we don't like its outcomes, "because we take too long to turn the Titanic. "All of our cloak and dagger, black ops, "plausibly deniable,

toppling of governments worldwide, all in the name of democracy. All the NGOs we fund, all the civil society activists, all the media institutions, it's all democracy, democracy, democracy. So we need to simply, instead of getting rid of this concept of championing democracy, we need to redefine what democracy is.

We need to make it not about the consensus of individuals, how people vote, but make it about the consensus of institutions. And we will simply define democratic institutions as anyone who supports the U.S. foreign policy establishment and its transatlantic partners in the U.K. So in the United States, that would mean redefining the system of government from one in which a majority of 350 million people believe something to

To one in which a group of, what would it be, 100,000 people? Yeah, about that. Yeah, maybe 100,000 people, probably a third of whom I know. In other words, it's like, it just takes, they just took all the power from the American population and awarded it to themselves. Yes, and this clever rhetorical sleight of hand allows unspeakable powers that

Americans have no idea about. I'll give you one example. So I said it's all about institutions now. And, you know, if you want to watch a funny clip, I posted this on my ex account recently, the Bergeron Institute, where Reid Hoffman is a board member, and they were involved in this whole transition integrity project, domestic color revolution blueprint from for stopping racism.

Trump from getting, uh, from being installed as president, even if he won the electoral college and they contemplating using black lives matter is a street muscle. And the whole thing was run by a senior Pentagon official with a CIA blue badge. And they have, you know, that conference in 2019, the title of it was how elections, how elections erode the democratic process, how elections are a threat to democracy. And because they were moving to this concept that it, that

that the blob's control over the political and commercial ecosystem of a country cannot be left to the people.

If we define democracy to be about democratic institutions, then the popular will of the people can still be categorized as a threat to democracy, which would therefore still allow the funding of the billions of dollars worldwide that we have deployed as capital for this. And I'll give you a great example of this. The National Science Foundation is prime.

probably the main funding artery for most of the censorship ecosystem in the United States. Now, this comes from a million places. Wait, the what? I know, it sounds crazy, but listen. The National Science Foundation is the civilian arm of DARPA.

It is and it has been. For those who aren't from D.C., will you explain what DARPA is? DARPA is the Pentagon's brain. DARPA is the reason that we have the Internet. You know, DARPA, the Internet started as a military technology to be able to send and receive information digitally because the Pentagon manages. It's the largest employer in the United States.

Pentagon manages the American empire. After World War II, we had this yawning empire stretching from here to Latin America, to Europe under the Marshall Plan, and all the way out to the Philippines and Asia. We had this worldwide empire. We had

to manage all these counterinsurgency threats all the domestic populations that were opposed to u.s hegemony over their own over their own lands and so the pentagon had to be extremely versed in all the regions understand what was happening politically what was happening culturally and so the pentagon farmed out to u.s universities this is a part of why so much of u.s universities

So much work is funded by the Defense Department and is funded by the National Science Foundation. It's civilian arm. In fact, the National Science Foundation is the leading subsidizer of all. It's the leading source of funding for all higher education funds. It's, I'm not even, like, people think we have a private, you know, higher education market. We don't. It's subsidized by the U.S. government, and that is a quid pro quo. But through DOD.

Well, through DoD and through the National Science Foundation, which is the civilian, you know, which is, you know, but the National Science Foundation and even the story of the internet, again, it was created by the U.S. military and it was turned over to the National Science Foundation. And that's where the dual use comes in. When the military, you know, the military developed the cell phone, the military developed GPS, you know, the military developed GPS.

most of the technology at the R&D level that we now live under. In fact, the military developed all the internet anonymity software in order to help Pentagon and CIA and State Department-backed political groups

be able to orchestrate regime change. VPNs, the Tor network, end-to-end encrypted chat, all these things were Pentagon projects before they became dual use, just like the internet became dual use. It was a military project, but then the civilian commercial architecture was built on top of it. But the National Science Foundation has two major domestic censorship programs.

And in the charter documents establishing one of them in 2021, when, you know, in February 2021, right when the month after Biden took office, this is a $40 million program. And in the charter document, it says that the purpose is to stop misinformation about democratic institutions. And one of the democratic institutions they define is the media. So understand this. This is the Pentagon civilian arm.

funding $40 million worth of censorship, explicitly, exclusively, censorship institutions to stop Americans from delegitimizing the media, to stop Americans from undermining trust in media. If North Korea did this, we would pass sanctions on them. If Iran did this, we would pass sanctions on them.

This is because establishment media, and again, politically aligned media with the blob, has to be propped up as a buffer to drown out the voices of populists. So the strategy here is twofold, turning up the knobs of the blob's propaganda channels and turning down the knobs of anyone who opposes that. Because you can win two ways. You can win, well, three ways. You can win in a fair fight, or you can win by super saturating your own media voice,

Or you can win by default because the opposition political party, the opposition political movement is not allowed. This is why the U.S. State Department, after 2016, established in like 140 countries now, these censorship programs in the name of countering disinformation, in the name of media literacy, in the name of digital resilience. They have all these branding terms for it because they perceive this Eldorado gold mine of people

of a new method for total political control over a region, which is winning by default by winning by censorship. A lot of times people don't believe State Department propaganda. They don't believe CIA propaganda.

And so no matter how much money you pump in to the region, no matter $5 billion, Victoria Nuland bragged about being pumped into Ukrainian civil society ahead of the Maidan protests, it still did not penetrate Eastern Ukraine, which broke away within the Donbass. It still did not penetrate Crimea who, uh, you know, voted shortly after to, to join the Russian Federation in, in a, in a democratic vote. So they, from their perspective, uh,

Funding propaganda was not enough. We need to kill the ability to surface alternative ideas because then they can't even make a counter argument. Even if they don't believe the propaganda, there's simply no other choice in the room. You don't get access to the other ideas. You don't get access to the other data points or news events that might undermine public trust

in the State Department's preferred narrative. This is where malinformation came from. Misdis and malinformation, you may have heard that phrase. Misinformation is something that is false, but it was an innocent mistake. Disinformation is it's wrong, but you did it on purpose. Malinformation is it's right, but it still undermines public faith and confidence in something that's more important. This is why, for example, you had the censorship of COVID in the name of mal-- - You're banning people from telling the truth.

Yes. So how are you not like just full blown on Satan's team at that point? You're not allowing your own citizens to tell the truth. You're forcing lies at the point of a gun. This is literally what the federal government's partners pressured, exploiting government pressure and threatening them with crisis PR if they allowed true information.

statements about COVID-19 to be articulated. If they, you know, and this came out in the Twitter files, for example, you know, where you had entities like the Virality Project who were telling Yul Roth and Vijay Ghandi, you know, the former Twitter 1.0 censorship team that you need to censor, you know, self-reported, you know, vaccine adverse events because even if these things are true, they still undermine public faith and confidence in the efficacy of vaccines. They might increase vaccine hesitancy.

Once people realize it can hurt them, like they don't want to take it. Right. And part of the issue is, is their, their initial solution to this was fact checkers. But the problem is in, and trying to get legitimacy for censorship because fact checkers identify something is wrong. But the problem is fact checkers are slow. Fact checkers have limited influence on certain platforms. And so you can't hire enough fact checkers. And also a lot of times the fact checkers can't prove something's wrong.

You're citing CDC data. You know, you're citing a widely reported mainstream media event, but you can still get it banned under the category of malinformation because it still undermines public faith and trust in a critical narrative. So it's sort of this

censorship mercenary ecosystem created to protect noble lies, but noble lies at home and also noble lies abroad. So this is why I come back to the U.S. State Department, and maybe this is a good time to introduce the telegram issue here, which is that you had this strange situation where the government of France arrested Pavel.

And it took everyone by surprise. And this is a major, major act, which has major implications for U.S. platforms. The fact is, is if Pavel is liable for every act of speech, criminally liable, every act of speech on his platform, there's no reason that the head of Rumble, the head of X, the head of YouTube, everybody can't be hauled in for 20 years the moment they step foot in Paris as well. Yeah, they can all die in prison for letting people criticize their governments. Right. It is a major...

diplomatic event it impacts u.s national champions it impacts u.s citizens the u.s embassy in france its job the only reason it's there is to protect u.s national interests u.s citizens and u.s corporations from hostile foreign laws in france hostile foreign actions by france

And given how critical Telegram is to the U.S. militarily, to the U.S. on statecraft grounds, to the U.S. on intelligence grounds, again, as we speak, in dozens of countries, Telegram is the main artery of the CIA for cultivating political resistance movements. And so the impact on the United States is absolutely massive of doing this. And again, as we discussed, the United States is funded...

you know, Ukraine with about almost $300 billion. And Ukraine's military intelligence chiefs say that they need to get control over Telegram's backend to know whether or not the Russians are in control of it and to get control essentially over its front end content moderation policies to ban Russian propaganda channels. Now, mind you, this comes just two weeks after the FBI raided the homes of Scott Ritter and other journalists simply for appearing on Russia Today.

He had his hard drive seized, his phone seized. Other people had the paintings in their own houses seized by the FBI. Not arrested, by the way, no charges against them, simply for appearing on a Russian propaganda channel, a Russian state TV channel. So these are American citizens living in America who simply appeared on a channel from Russia that had their homes raided, their electronics seized, and even their paintings in

in their own home seized if they thought a Russian painter may have painted the picture here in the United States just two weeks ago. How is that legal? Well, technically they're not facing charges, but the idea was, is because they have overt ties to a Russian propaganda outlet, they may have covert ties. And so the, so the FBI now basically, you know, has them in the spider web, but understand this is what the U S makes me want to go on RT every single day.

of the year, just to make the point, not because I, for any other reason than to make the point I'm an American citizen, I can have any political opinion I want and I can speak to anyone I want. But does anyone, any other media outlet see this as kind of the end of America when people are rated by the FBI for having political opinions? Well, it's funny you say that because I, this is really what started my own journey, which was that

I'm not a foreign policy zealot. If the gun were taken off of my head and an apology and restitution made for the destruction of the free and open internet, I might consider whether or not it is in U.S. interest to fund the war in Ukraine, to pursue the seizure of Asia, to do these things. I don't know. I don't know. I see the arguments on both sides of it. But the problem is

The fact that they have destroyed so many lives, the fact that so much pursuing

pursuing this in my own free speech rights has cost me so much. But I have the same response that you do, which is that, well, because you told me that I can't talk about this, I will not stop talking about this until the internet is free.

But they really hardened my resolve beyond like any point of reason. Like I was going period. And I think that's the healthy response. You can, I'm an American citizen. I was born here. You cannot, you are not allowed. It's illegal for you.

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sign and forward. Redeclare your independence today. Well, this is the actual crux of our counterinsurgency paradox, which is that, you know, we have two things that we do for political control in a region. You know, one of them is counterterrorism. If we, you know, the military sets in on a country, if we say there's terrorists there, but if we, if there's no counterterrorism, we still have a doctrine called counterinsurgency, which is managing the rise of

opposition political parties in a country and the and uh using you know potentially sometimes kinetic or you know hard power or drone striking people meaning violence yes yes and you know the problem with counterinsurgency doctrine is a critical component of the country does not believe the government the us installed government is legitimate so they are you know organizing a political movement to rise to power instead

We call that a political insurgency. And the issue is, we want to get them stabilized. We want to have

have them, make them have nothing and be happy. When people have grievances, you know, this is what gives rise to this whole, you know, insurgent problem. But the problem is in counterinsurgency is in order to get legitimacy in the government, you need to take out the insurgents. But every time you take out an insurgent, you create 10 new ones because all the bystanders who didn't have a dog in the fight, who maybe, you know, believed what the U.S. government propaganda was saying, just saw their cousin get taken out at the wedding and said, you know,

So this is the problem, but this is also where the whole of society framework comes from. The whole society framework comes from COIN. It comes from counterintelligence. We have a doctrine within counterinsurgency called whole of government, whole of society.

which is, which means every agency within the U S government and then every institution in society. Again, coming back to this watchword institution, because this is the watchword of censor speak. This is, we are propping up our institutions and censoring anyone who opposes the consensus of institutions. But, but this whole society framework is how you stop the counterinsurgency paradox, which is that you take one, one out 10, 10 new, you know, you create 10 new ones and

If the pressure is coming not just from the US military, it's coming from how you get a job in the country. So we onboard the private sector companies. They'll work either through formal partnerships with the State Department or Pentagon, or they'll be funded, or it'll be informal, or it'll be back-channeled through something like the Center for International Private Enterprise, which is the Chamber of Commerce, or the National Endowment for Democracy.

And so we get the private sector companies, we get the, we get the, the universities, the NGOs, the, you know, the activists, we get all the cultural figures, you know, involved in the counterinsurgency effort and we get the media involved in it. This is where the censorship architecture was. This, this is the, what they agreed on. They literally borrowed it from the military doctrine for, you know, to solve this, exactly this physiological response that you're articulating right now.

But getting back to this issue around the State Department and Telegram, it is my contention that there's no way the French government would have done something so absolutely seismic in terms of its implications for the U.S. military, for U.S. intelligence, and the U.S. State Department without walking next door down the Champs-Élysées

and telling the US Embassy in France that they were going to do this. They had an ongoing investigation, criminal investigation into Pavel before this event took place. Macron even tweeted that this was part of an ongoing investigation.

It is stock common practice for the U.S. embassy, as we discussed in the Czech Republic and Poland. Of course. It is stock common practice for the U.S. embassy in a region to coordinate, to be notified, to be essentially a stakeholder in that country's conversations about whether or not prosecutions in the name of anti-corruption, in the name of anything,

Will be done because the State Department effectively has a soft veto power. I mean, you can remember getting back to prosecutions and control of the prosecutors. This was a major scandal with Joe Biden. Joe Biden personally threatened the government of Ukraine. He said this at a Council on Foreign Relations Committee meeting. If folks recall, a famous tape, a billion dollars. You want either you get rid of your prosecutor.

or you lose a billion dollars in critical U.S. aid to the region. And by golly, they...

They fired the prosecutor. Control over the prosecutors is control over the politics. So the U.S. embassy in the region is constantly back channeling with the prosecutors. The idea that this event, which is exactly what the State Department has been soft calling for for months now since, you know, at least months, I should note, if not arguably a few years,

that this miraculous windfall, because they don't have leverage against Pavel otherwise. You know, he's living...

in the UAE and they don't have the attack surface on Telegram that they had on WhatsApp. They had this problem with WhatsApp a few years ago because WhatsApp is the other major end-to-end encrypted chat. There's only two games in town in the encrypted chat space, WhatsApp and Telegram. And I watched this happen with the Brazil story. The US State Department, again, capacity built by essentially bribing through tens of billions of dollars of flooded foreign assistance to all the censorship advocates in Brazil,

This plan to stop the use of WhatsApp and Telegram by Bolsonaro supporters in Brazil and Modi supporters in India

Places like the Atlantic Council, which has seven CIA directors on its board, gets annual funding every single year from the U.S. State Department, all four branches of the U.S. military, as well as CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy. They held a conference in the summer of 2019 about the need to stop the use of WhatsApp and Telegram in countries around the world, especially Brazil and India. Because we can't spy on them as effectively? Because the State Department had already censored social media, had already gotten social media censored in those countries.

Bolsonaro supporters were effectively booted from Twitter 1.0, Facebook, and YouTube.

after 2016. There was said to be this international movement of ideas between pro-Trump and pro-Bolsonaro. So they all, after the State Department set up this apparatus that got them censored from social media, they all ran to WhatsApp and Telegram. And so the State Department sort of created this encrypted chat problem. They could only talk in an uncensored way because the State Department already censored their other main communication artery. And so

So WhatsApp and Telegram were put in the crosshairs of this USAID State Department program to kill political support for Bolsonaro. And WhatsApp bent the knee within two and a half weeks because WhatsApp is very vulnerable. It is owned by Facebook, and Facebook is a major surface attack area for WhatsApp.

If you recall, Jim Jordan subpoenaed these emails from Facebook a few months ago, the Facebook files. And in the Facebook files, it came out that Nick Clegg, the head of public policy, the head of the censorship terms of service at Facebook, did not want to cooperate with the Biden administration's demands to censor COVID, but urged his team to do so anyway, because we have bigger fish to fry with the Biden administration. So we need to think creatively about ways to be receptive to their censorship demands.

because Facebook is totally dependent on the U.S. State Department, the intelligence services, and to some extent, the long-range threat of the Pentagon to protect Facebook's data monopolies, to protect its advertising revenue, to protect it from laws like the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, which is...

And this has come out as well. And I was at the State Department when I was called by nine Google lobbyists who told me that the number one threat to Google's business model over the next five years is the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.

They need the protection of Big Daddy State Department for favors for their profits. And so they play ball with the State Department censorship demands in order to preserve that. But they are under the barrel of it. And people like Mark Zuckerberg right now are feeling like they're at their wit's end because they gave

the State Department, and they gave the Biden administration everything they asked for in terms of censorship demands, and they're still being bullied by them. So just yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg wrote this letter to Chairman Jim Jordan, where he came out in the strongest statement yet that, you know, that the Biden administration forced

Facebook effectively to do the censorship that they that they pressure them strongly and that and that the only reason they did these censorship actions, whether that was the joke, the the Hunter Biden laptop or whether that was the the covid censorship, censoring covid origins, censoring, you know, all issues around the covid regime was because of pressure from the Biden administration. And not only that, he said that he regretted doing it.

And now has structures in place to stop Facebook from relenting from such government pressure in the first place. And while this is great to hear Zuckerberg say, it would have been a lot more useful four months ago when there was a Supreme Court decision

under deliberation where the Supreme Court effectively argued that there was an insufficient causal relationship between government pressure and platform censorship action. So having a, you know, having a direct letter from Mark Zuckerberg, uh,

unequivocally saying that there was, as the head of Facebook, would have been very useful to establish a Supreme Court precedent. Believing that aside and the sort of too little, too late nature of that, this is something that had been percolating for a while. Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said that he regretted the censorship actions five months ago on Joe Rogan. So it's no surprise that Zuckerberg expressed that

But the fact that he would do it to the Republican chairman of the House Weaponization Committee and the fact that he said he's no longer supporting Democrats in this election cycle signals to me that he fears the blob now and more.

and feels like the Harris administration's continuity of the Biden administration's pressure policies, that there's no amount of flesh that he can give up as a pound to satiate their bloodlust and that he's turning, if not towards Trump, then towards something that's against that and trying to provide whatever

moral support to that without making a direct contribution to the other side, sort of maintaining the sort of patina of neutrality on financial and messaging grounds. He's not doing what Elon is doing by voicing explicit support. He's not providing financial support, but he is

He's very strongly motioning there because I think he thinks that the neutrality of a Biden, of a Trump administration, because Trump was neutral. Trump was completely neutral, frankly, to the point where he should not have been. I mean, you had American platforms who were censoring the American people who had voted for that government and, and, you know, blasting away at our first amendment in doing so, you know, the fact is, is all of the government, you know, how can you protect government? How can the government protect government?

Platforms that are censoring the speech of Americans. This would be like the State Department supporting ExxonMobil and overthrowing governments to get oil and gas for ExxonMobil while ExxonMobil was cutting half of Americans off at the pipe, at the pump, at a gas station if they voted for Eisenhower. This is such an abuse of

It's honestly the end of this sort of idea that this favors or favors relationship between big government and big corporations has a trickle-down effect to help the welfare of the American people. This has always been the justification for the national champion policy at the State Department, that when

the big when big government when the pentagon and state department cia and usaid and the whole swarm of soft power institutions do favors for exxon mobil or microsoft or walmart or pepsi then that means cheaper retail products for us we have the export markets because we control that government we have the natural resources so we have cheap gas middle class living but this has completely inverted that because it's big government teaming up with big corporations specifically to deprive americans

of access to those platforms. But again, it's to protect the institutions against the individuals. It's to protect this constellation of cloistered foreign policy institutions and their international agenda installed at a regional level on every plot of dirt on earth from being opposed by people who might vote against them organically in a free and open information market. What happens to Pavlodurov?

it's unclear what kind of pressure may be mounted to set him free um there have been suggestions that potentially the uae may take some steps on unconfirmed the one player in the room who could exert enough pressure to set pavel free is unfortunately potentially one of the players who may be implicated in his arrest in the first place and again this comes back to the u.s embassy in france

uh and which is why i believe that questions need to be asked by the house foreign affairs committee to ambassador denise bauer were there previous communications previous emails previous meetings previous dialogue with french intelligence french law enforcement uh or members of the french government and when i say were there you know meetings or communications or dialogue i don't just mean directly by the u.s embassy i also mean through the u.s embassy's back channels which

which is that many times this is done directly by the U.S. Embassy, but many times it's done by a back channel, which is that instead of the U.S. Embassy talking with French law enforcement directly, a back channel, someone from a civil society institution funded by the State Department, like an Atlantic Council-type organization, or a, you know,

a former member of the state department has these conversations, does this lobbying, does this coordination and then reports to the state department for, you know, updates on the conversations about the, the anti-corruption prosecution and the state department provides guidance to the back channel and the back channel continues the negotiations or pressure. And so, you know, yet the sweep has to be total here because the implications of the

the u.s embassy either coordinating or at the very least approving this are are seismic because again telegram's critical military intelligence role in countering russia and statecraft role in everything that the state department does because again if russia does have a back-end access to telegram whether they cracked it through their cyber hackers or whether pavel had some secret agreement that means

Every rent-a-riot revolution that the CIA does using Telegram all over the world is also being secretly monitored by the Russians. And maybe that's why it was unsuccessful in Belarus. Maybe that's why it was unsuccessful with Alexei Navalny in Russia. And they do make points about the fact that the Russian military uses it freely. Over half of Russia uses it. And they point to questions around the funding in order to make that argument. So,

You do have these U.S. interests, but you also have French interests. Do they have evidence? I mean, the U.S. funded the creation of Signal. It doesn't mean... Right? And tons of people use Signal. Right. Do they have evidence of this? I mean...

paul duroff left russia in 2014 in his account and i think this is true he felt like he had to leave he didn't want to leave he's russian right but the putin administration was trying to control telegram and he famously gave the finger to putin on camera and left and took citizenship in other countries so like do they they as someone who's been accused of being a russian asset a million times when i don't speak russian and of course i'm not even that interested in russia

I'm sensitive to that, to that slander. And I just want to know, like, do they have actual evidence that Putin has a backdoor to telegram? It sounds like a lie to me, but... Well, they argue there would be no other reason for the Russian military to use it, you know, in such an unfettered fashion for, you know, official Russian military documents to, you know, to...

the use of telegram. Of course, there would be another reason, which is it's secure. Right. Well, if you read CIA media on this, again, pointing to what Radio Free Europe...

wrote two weeks after your interview with Pavel. It was that things may have, well, Telegram may have- Radio Free Europe is disgusting. Let me just say, having grown up around it, I'm just shocked by what it's become. It's disgusting and they should be ashamed of themselves. Well, Radio Free Europe was lauding, you know, Telegram from 2014 to 2020. What they argue is that something may have changed beginning in 2021 with a new round of funding. I believe a debt round, you know, a large dollar figure debt round that-

was raised and they argue that there may have been Russian investors in that and so there may have been some payoff and so because of that Russia only stopped because for two years they were pursuing banning Telegram from from Russia but then they they

They stopped it. And at the time, that was considered a major free speech victory by the United States and by the State Department. They applauded the NGO pressure on Russia and the threat of sanctions on Russia for if they went ahead and banned Telegram. But the fact that they relented and then ubiquitously used Telegram, actually Telegram usage in Russia massively surged after the ban happened.

There's only about 10% of Russians who used it before the ban and now it's over 50%. And so they argue between the funding, between the fact that they're losing in all these places where they use Telegram now, that Russia may be keen to it, and the fact that the attempted ban was dropped and then a massive surge in usage afterwards.

can only mean that Russia began to be pro-Telegram because of a secret deal between them. So in other words, Ukraine is losing a land war against a country with 100 million more people because...

because Pavel Durov has some secret arrangement with Putin. I mean, this is the kind of fantastical, childish thinking that makes empires fall, actually. I mean, the total inability to deal with reality, to assess your own shortcomings, to be honest about anything as it pertains to yourself, to be honest about yourself and how much you suck,

Those are fatal weaknesses in people and in countries. And I grieve to see the U.S. government fall into that kind of self-indulgent fantasy. Right. But think about the amazing windfall that just befell the CIA. They've had no leverage against Pavel.

this entire time, and yet the entire Russian military architecture is built on Telegram. All high level Russian military and political officials, the internal workings of Russian statecraft and deliberations,

all happen on Telegram. And there has been no window into that because of Pavel's belief in free speech. So now, if Pavel cracks under interrogation, if he cracks under pressure, suddenly all communications of all Russian citizens and all Russian military officials and all Russian diplomats that were taking place on Telegram for the past five years

are now in the hands of the CIA. So this is in a- Why don't we just torture them to death? I mean, like, why not just like, just drop the pretense and just like, we're North Korea now.

um, with slightly better infrastructure, slightly, um, and like stop pretending because that's what this is. They're like torturing a man, um, and in the process stripping us of our God-given speech rights and our right to privacy that they're always crowing about, but only when it pertains to abortion. I mean, this is so immoral.

what we're participating in. Does anybody, does like even occur to all the creeps on the internet, the Atlantic Council, Alexander Vindman, all the people who think this is great, does it occur to them that like

They're no better than North Korea in this situation. Well, I think from the Ukrainian perspective, they say our people are dying. We're being massacred by the Russians. And so, you know, free speech has to be a casualty of, you know, of this war and religious freedom and the Russian Orthodox Church and, you know, the freedom of like priests to celebrate the Eucharist like they're in jail now. So it's like but a certain point, like what?

Do you think anyone in Ukraine looks over to Washington and says, you know, you promised us this was a good idea where they've lost at least 600,000 Ukrainians. They've lost the right to their land. Their land can now be bought by foreign corporations. They just made that change and it will be. And like all of that is because they follow the advice of Washington. Do you think they think that? Well, it doesn't matter what the people of Ukraine think. They're not allowed to have elections. You're right. They can't vote their way out of it.

there's no there's no elections and mind you you know that you can look everyone listening right now can look up something called the red lines memo from from the ukraine crisis media uh group which is basically a conglomerate of you know all these u.s funded ngos and civil society institutions

in Ukraine, and they sent the so-called red lines memo to Zelensky when he took office, and they threatened Zelensky in that letter that if he took any of the below actions on security policy, on energy policy, on media policy, on cultural policy,

seven or eight different buckets of internal policies that Zelensky might pursue, that if he crossed any of the red lines in terms of restoring use of the Russian language on Ukrainian TV or interfering with the privatization of NAFTA gas and things like this, that if he crossed any of the red lines of the policy issues articulated by this U.S.,

constellation, this US NGO, which is an umbrella for all these other State Department NGOs, that Ukraine would face immediate political destabilization.

If if any of those policies were enacted, basically the same rent of riots that were that were deployed by the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency and to some extent the Pentagon in the 2014 Maidan protests would be redeployed against Zelensky if he decided to chart an independent course for the Ukrainian people.

that he would be run out of office the same way, you know, his predecessor Yanukovych was by the same forces if he did something that was in the will of the Ukrainian people, but opposed the U.S. State Department. This is so grotesque. I just want to pause now and ask you, anyone who's followed this conversation to this point,

finds it probably as compelling as I do. So for people who want, I never do this, but in your case, it's I want people to read what you write. Where's the best place to...

follow you much more closely than just your appearances here? On X, at Mike Benz Cyber. All one word, at Mike Benz Cyber. I'm prolific. I believe in this. I understand what is probably going to happen to me at some point. But again, my dog in this fight is not changing U.S. foreign policy to change U.S. foreign policy.

let others decide what to do in Ukraine, what to do all over the world. I did not, I could, I can understand both sides of the issue. I can understand the sort of anti-imperialist, these are human rights violations. You know, we should not be toppling democratically elected governments.

I can also understand that it's a big, bad world out there. And if we don't do it, somebody else will. And we need capacities in place to do that. It's a complicated issue. The problem is, is we don't have a democracy when our entire political structure is about hearts and minds of the people. That's what democracy is. Hearts and minds of the people are determined by the information ecosystem, freedom of speech ecosystem.

And so if you don't have the freedom of speech to be able to influence hearts and minds and the hearts and minds to be able to give rise to a free and fair election, well, then who's in who you don't have a democracy. You have you have a military junta effectively. And and it's the point that you made before that the legitimacy all falls out. And so all I care about is free speech on the Internet. And so.

Well, it sounds like what you care about is America. You care about the country that you live in. Yes. Right. And to that point, I want to make another sort of note here, which is that I'm not coming out making a facial allegation that it's that the United States was the driving force behind Pavel's arrest.

I believe that it is highly unlikely that they were not coordinating or encouraging it. And I believe that at the very least, there was approval. And approval is a sort of light standard that's a little bit less damning because all it means is that the U.S. did not was notified, but did not apply counterpressure. Well, sure. But I mean, you could also say and I would say, having seen it a million times in my long life, when a foreign country, particularly an ally like France,

does something we disagree with, we can issue a note of protest. The State Department could say, you know, we disapprove of that. We support human rights, including the right to speech and the right to privacy, et cetera, et cetera. And we didn't do that. Right. No, we can threaten to cut off aid. We can threaten to cut off contracts to French companies. Or just publicly disapprove. I mean, France is an ally. If the president is cut out or Tony Blinken or...

the U.S. ambassador to France and just said, we're against this. That would be a lot. And everyone right now, go to the Twitter page of the U.S. ambassador to France on X. There's no public statements about it. There's been no statement by the State Department, no statement by the U.S. embassy in France. When an American citizen called Gonzalo O'Leary was killed by the Ukrainian government, he died in prison for criticizing the Ukrainian government.

a government that we support and control in the name of democracy and freedom, the U.S. State Department said nothing. The Biden administration said nothing. They approved. Of course.

But again, they're behind this in so many cases that it seems highly unlikely, especially given how amazing a windfall this is to the United States foreign policy establishment on this. But there's sort of two related points I wanna make about France here, which is that France does have its own independent reasons for doing this, which is that France's whole financial empire is dependent on Africa. They have, you know, France still has a sort of semi-colonial empire

14 countries in Africa, you know, who basically, you know, use French currency and are... Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa, mostly. Yes. And France also derives the lion's share of its own energy resources. And...

They have had a big problem in the past few years. So the French, the famous French nuclear program. Yes. Nuclear energy program, which is, I think, the biggest in the world. Yes. 70, 75% of France's energy comes from nuclear. And that comes from Niger. That comes from a French speaking African country, the uranium. Exactly. Exactly. So three out of every four light bulbs in France are, you know, are turned on by the uranium, you know, effectively in Niger and a few other places. And the,

The French lost control of Niger to Russia just last year. You know, there was a military coup, as there was in Mali and several other places, where it was a military coup, if not orchestrated, backstopped by the Russian military. In these countries, one after another, you've had four or five French colonies effectively fall to Russian military activity in Africa.

And so they've lost control over their access. In Niger, for example, they had to close down their embassy. All the French troops, which had their largest presence in Africa, were all evicted. They lost all of the soft power influence over these countries. And in these countries, the...

The Africans are burning French flags and raising Russian flags. In fact, many of these African countries are now cutting off diplomatic ties with Ukraine because of how close their affiliation with Russia is.

Because of Russian military competence and activity in Africa, France is losing the ability to keep the lights on. Yeah. So and it should be noted, however, that Russia is doing this because under Macron, France has been jumping up and down about the Ukraine war and pretending to be a meaningful part of NATO, which they are not.

And just sort of pretending that they still have a meaningful empire. Everyone cares. Anyone cares at all what they think. And they've annoyed Russia to the point where I think this is payback. Right. But Russian, the Russian military is built on telegram. Everything they do. Now, it's not necessarily public telegram channels, but the private telegram

The private version with the end-to-end encryption and the anonymous forwarding, the ability to aggregate everybody in a Russian private military contractor into a common Telegram channel. Only Telegram has that capacity. They can't post this on Facebook.

uh and they're not going to use facebook owned cia intermediated whatsapp all they have is telegram for that so if if french intelligence is able to get pavel to sing under questioning or interrogation or threats of spending the rest of his life in prison france may be able to you know finally have a chance to to retake the colonies that were lost to russia okay let me just say though i would much rather be monitored

by the Russian military, by the Israelis, by any foreign government than I would by my own government because I live here. First of all, my government has no right as a, I think, a statutory matter to monitor me. But also the implications of being monitored by a foreign government as an American are not as big a deal as they are when I'm monitored by my government. Do you see what I'm saying? No, absolutely. Well, actually, there's a great point along this, which gets right to the France story and this intersection between U.S. and French interests

u.s and french shared military intelligence and diplomatic and economic interests in in arresting pavel and finally getting the leverage they've craved for so long to be able to both control telegram's content moderation practice to ban all russian propaganda channels which are infecting the minds of everyone from ukraine to belarus to you know to sub-saharan africa

But also, you know, the ability to get this back-end access to, you know, to read every Russian text message effectively. There's a great example of this in terms of blowback on Americans. So we've talked about this group, the Atlanta Council, which bills itself as NATO's think tank. It is, again, a lot of people don't even know seven CIA directors are still alive, let alone all clustered together on the board of directors of a, you know, of an organization

an ng a nato think tank uh but it gets annual funding from the pentagon the state department and cia cutouts like like the national down for democracy as well as usaid there are 11 different federal government agencies who all provide federal government funding every single year to what is effectively the civilian influence arm of nato now in march 2018

The Atlantic Council published a set of white papers called Democratic Defense Against Disinformation. And in the March 2018 version of it, the cover photo, again, this is funded by the United States Pentagon, United States State Department, United States Intelligence Service conduits.

the front page of this memo called Democrat Defense Against Disinformation, which called for this whole of society playbook about how the government could organize censorship from the civil society side, censorship from the private sector side, censorship advocacy in media organizations. The cover of the memo was a giant network map, a network narrative map of the French election because

At the time, there was some, WikiLeaks had published something called the Macron leaks, which were these sensitive, politically embarrassing emails involving Macron when he was neck and neck in the race against Marine Le Pen in 2018. And the front page of it had in red all these narrative network maps of French citizens and Russians.

But there were two big green network nodes that were highlighted at the front of the memo. And one of them was a big network node saying Wikileaks. The other one was a big network node saying Jack Posobiec. Just so you understand what's going on here.

WikiLeaks had published these Macron leaks and Jack Posobiec at the time was this large, you know, US-based, US citizen, social media influencer who was one of the first and most aggressive to popularize the distribution of these Macron leaks on social media.

And that was considered an attack on democracy by effectively the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, NATO. They were not targeting Russians. They were not targeting French. They were targeting a U.S. citizen for amplifying now publicly available documents that might undermine political support for NATO's preferred political puppet in France. By telling the truth. By publishing true documents.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So what I'm saying is there was no allegation. It wasn't like the Hunter Biden laptop in the first weeks where this isn't real. No one contested the fact these were real. These were real. We just weren't allowed to see him because you can't know the truth because it might make you harder to control. Well, this is the issue is these this is a U.S. citizen. This is a U.S. funded institution gets millions of dollars every year. It has seven CIA directors on its board. The Army funds it. The Navy funds it. The Air Force funds it.

USAID funds it, the State Department. And in the crosshairs of the cover page of the memo is a U.S. citizen for doing what? That wasn't even a U.S. event. It was an American citizen publishing about a election in a galaxy far, far away. How much is it going to take if we colonize Mars?

and there's an election on Mars, can the Central Intelligence Agency organize the censorship of an American citizen because the CIA's preferred puppet for the electoral race on Mars is being undermined because of a social media post from someone living in rural Montana? There's no end to this. There isn't. It's been ongoing much longer than I realized.

And I think that's part of the problem is that people who consider themselves non-liberal or opponents of the Democratic Party, I've certainly considered myself that, were the slowest to figure out that the DOD, the Pentagon, the military, and the intel agencies, particularly the CIA, also law enforcement, FBI, DHS,

that they were threats to the country and to us and they reflexively supported them and that's all a 49 year old hangover from the church committee hearings in 1975 where it was like all the conservatives were like oh shut up you're not patriotic but actually the left knew right away that what matters is the institutions that are armed guns matter guns matter more than anything and

And so you want to have the armed institutions on your side and use them to oppress your political opponents. And they did that. And it took Republicans. Well, they still haven't figured it out. They're like, you know, check in the box on funding DOD to like, you know, more than any military in the history of the world to lose war after war for 80 years. And they don't understand that they're signing their own death warrant and the death warrant of American democracy. It's like freaking infuriating. It must drive you crazy as a former federal employee. Yeah.

Well, I mean, you nailed it there. What they are doing to populism is what they used to do to communism. If you remember what actually, you know, started the church committee hearings, what gave it the political legitimacy to finally have its day in Congress was the fact that the CIA and the Pentagon and the FBI were all interfering in domestic politics. Yes. And the Democrats to stop the anti-war faction. In a big way.

domestic political support for anti-Vietnam is what was killing the funding legitimacy for the war in Vietnam, and it was killing the political mandate. And so we have this doctrine, the four theaters of war, the four domains of war. This is the U.S. Army doctrine, which is there's the strategic, the logistical, I'm sorry, the strategic, the tactical, the logistical, and the political, four ways you can win or lose a war. On the strategic side, it's the grand strategy of it,

On the tactical side, it's, you know, who are you going to attack? How, when? The logistics is how do you get the supplies there? How do you get the funding for it? And the political is, do you have political support at home to be able to fund the logistics, to be able to do these particular tactics? You know, if the war is not popular at home, you don't get the funding for all the logistics that you need. You don't get approval for certain tactics that would be deemed human rights violations or war crimes. And so you can, you know,

The U.S. military establishment believes that we lost Vietnam. This is famous called Vietnam syndrome because we lost in the political domain. This is why the U.S. State Department and the CIA fund anti-war movements domestically within countries that we go to war with. We pump up the anti-war voices in the country, the anti-war parliamentarians who might be in control of that country's budget in order to

undermine their own ability to capacity build the war.

And this is what's happened here. You know, this was this George H.W. Bush quote, you know, by God, we kicked Vietnam syndrome when he brought CNN, you know, onto military airplanes to, you know, to propagandize how great the war was. And this is why the media has been so intensely onboarded in all Pentagon operations, you know, since since. And yet they're still very unpopular. They're extremely unpopular. The Iraq war.

looking backward whatever the hell we tried to do in syria whatever we did in libya um the 20 years in afghanistan those are all seen as failures by a huge percentage of the american population despite the relentless propaganda so that should really matter if the majority of the public is against something we shouldn't do it because we we're supposed to be in charge of the government well this is where i come back to doctrine when when you are a part of this apparatus you

You are now taught that what democracy means is the institutions, the democratic institutions, the government institutions, the NGO institutions, the media institutions, and any private sector company who signs on board. It's a really deep and important insight. You said that about, what, a year ago you first said that? I heard you say it about a year ago, and it changed my thinking completely.

But this is also because, you know, I'm hearing you react to how evil it all is. Yeah, I'm sorry. No, no, no. Wait, actually. I control myself. No, I'm glad you did, because I think this is a useful point for the American public to understand, which is that.

When you're in this thing, it doesn't look like it does from the outside because the language of censor speak is a very unique one. In the same way that Marxism sort of rose to some level of cultural mainstream because of a decade of incubation in universities, developing this esoteric

jargon, this sort of Lego tower of abstractions and concepts that when it was finally rolled out to the public, the public could have a sort of set of frameworks to rationalize and support it. There is a thick lexicon of censorspeak that totally takes the human element out of it. So when you are a part of this censorship apparatus, you don't really feel like you are censoring people. I'll give you an example.

they don't refer to people who they censor as citizens or people. They refer to them as cyber threat actors, okay? So when you are censoring- When they kill them, they don't say they kill them, they liquidate them. Right, right, yes, or neutralize, yes. When you, they don't refer to your tweets or your Facebook posts or your YouTube video. They call those incidents. So-

So, you know, so because your opinions are a crime, right? When when you capacity build with tens of millions of dollars, US funded censorship mercenary firms, you are not funding censorship. You are building digital resilience.

You are engaging in a media literacy campaign. Is it all girls running this? Because this is, you're using the very feminine language here. It's quite egalitarian, I would say. There's...

It's an interesting blend in terms of the cast of characters, but the one commonality is they are all vetted. They are all financially dependent on the resources of the blob, of the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, and the related...

swarm army of NGOs who then trickle that down. As I get back to, for example, the National Science Foundation is who's funding all the universities. The Pentagon is funding, you know, countless censorship mercenary firms. USAID, again, has these entire programs with thousands of these

you know, censorship promoting media organizations, censorship, you know, post flagging, you know, disinformation experts. And so you, you enter this kind of cloistered world with its own language. And there's also a sort of moral justification because these people have un,

unbelievable amounts of power over a kind of godlike feeling over the political ebbs and flows of every country on earth. And yet,

They don't necessarily make very much to reflect what they do. I mean, think about the power that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency has and yet makes less than Tony Fauci, makes less than a six-year associate, junior, mid-level associate at a New York law firm. And yet this person determines the rise and fall of virtually every person

Every country on Earth, or at least has significant influence over it. So the money networks are very important because this has become a boon field. I call it the censorship industry because that's the most useful way to understand the glue that keeps everything together. It is a censorship industrial complex.

but it is the industry that keeps all the cogs in the wheel going. The private sectors make bank because they do government favors. This is why Microsoft, for example, is such a huge player in the censorship industry.

They're a huge private sector partner in the whole society network under the private sector banner because Microsoft is hugely dependent on foreign markets, hugely dependent on the U.S. State Department to negotiate on their behalf to be able to stop foreign laws that might undermine their profitability. They have almost 10% of their profits coming from China. Right.

So they will join these National Endowment for Democracy censorship ecosystems. In 2018, when all this was at its sort of adolescent stage of getting created and when the real concrete of the bricks was getting laid down,

While there's still some mortar that would be developed in 2019, 2020, Microsoft created this protecting democracy program, which became this major in-house censorship incubator. And they participate in all the DHS censorship meetings, all of the CIA cut out, you know, censorship meetings through the National Endowment for Democracy, because they're

Microsoft's financial interests are dependent on the government and they are putting a favor in the favor bank to the government by doing it. And the government will in turn reward them by telling that foreign government whose political prospects are now protected because all their opposition is censored to do favors for Microsoft.

And this is what you, this is why there's such a huge stakeholder apparatus in all of this. You know, one of the four, I've talked about the National Endowment for Democracy many times here. They have four cores that they call it. You know, the NDI, which is the DNC branch of, you know, this CIA cutout. Hunter Biden was on the chairman's advisory board. Nina Jankovic was a part of it. I mean, just so you can understand the pedigree of this.

The International Republican Institute is the RNC branch of it. Mitt Romney's on the board. IRI, John McCain's old group. Exactly. Started it and ran it for 25 years. And the third one is their union branch called the Solidarity Center. So this is basically the CIA intermediary, CIA back channeling with unions because unions play a major role in the rent-a-riots, you know, in Belarus, for example. It's a very, this is how you get workers without a lot to lose,

who, you know, a little bit of money goes a long way. These are the people who are in control of how the trains work. You can, part of this playbook for destabilizing a country is you shut down all the instruments the government could use. So you shut down the railroads, you block the highways, the hospital workers all

all walk out the teachers from the teachers unions all walk out and so the cia has to have a back channel to that so that's the this you know solidarity center among other links just there but the fourth one the fourth of the core four is called the center for international private enterprise and this is the u.s chamber of commerce commercial interests in the region that the cia is orchestrating a regime change operation in or is putting influence on the existing government and so

So this is a, it was a major event in the Republican party when the U S chamber of commerce turned against Trump. The only parody that the Republican party had against Democrats for the past hundred years has been the fact that, that the Republic, that while Democrats had the media, Hollywood, music and culture unions, uh, and to some extent finance, uh,

Republicans had the war industry, the energy industry, and the Chamber of Commerce because these Chamber of Commerce companies preferred republicanism for its free market, free enterprise, and low tax structure. The problem is Trump sort of

you know, stepped on a, on a rattlesnake with this idea of making America first and American nationalism to the extent that it cut back on American interventionalism, you know, American, you know, over constant democracy promotion abroad. He was the first president in 40 years not to, you know, declare a new war effectively. So you had all these chamber of commerce companies who's

The lion's share of the revenue is dependent on foreign markets or whose supply chains are sourced in foreign countries. And they need a big, bad CIA. They need a big, bad State Department. They need a big, bad USAID and a big, bad Pentagon, if necessary. And so Trumpism became a sort of threat to the bottom line of capitalism.

the u.s chamber of commerce and so the fact so i come back to this because the commercial interests here are sort of driving what's happening at the intelligence and military and diplomatic policy level if that makes sense you know for example take ukraine right ukraine it was not just you know the overthrow of the government in 2014 there yes it was a state department operation yes it was a you know usaid funded cia uh directed operation

as well as with the British government. But who were the financial stakeholders? Why did they do it? Well, the Ukrainian government had just rejected a U.S. Embassy IMF trade deal and sided with Russia. They were squeamish about privatizing NAFTA gas. And at the time, the...

U.S. College of Corporations, these chamber of commerce companies, the oil and gas companies had all made massive investments in the Ukrainian energy sphere because the long range plan was to bankrupt Gazprom and take the trillion dollar market that Gazprom has into Europe, cut them off and have NATO based energy companies take their market for them. So and the plan was beautiful.

If you kill Gazprom, first of all, you have a national security bracket for doing it, because if you kill Gazprom, there goes the Russian military. So now Russia's threat in Africa is neutralized. Russia can't oppose the Pentagon in Syria and in other places. So there's a lot of national security Pentagon reasons to pursue that. But then you had all these US companies ink all these deals between 2011 and 2013 with the Ukrainian energy sector.

Chevron spent, signed a $10 billion deal with NAFTA gas, which is the state owned Ukrainian gas company. Burisma was the largest private gas company. It was the feeder to, to NAFTA gas shell from, uh, from the United Kingdom, you know, it was Royal Dutch shell, but now it's basically headquartered in London. So shell shell also signed a matching $10 billion deal with NAFTA gas, the state owned gas company.

Halliburton, Dick Cheney's, where he used to be CEO and chairman of the board, and also George Soros had a large equity share in Halliburton. Halliburton owns the oil and gas processing rights in Ukraine. All of these companies were invested in resources that were solely situated in the Donbass and in Crimea, the Donbass in the mountains and Crimea offshore.

And then what happened after, so we overthrow the government in 2014 because the Ukrainian government was not giving everything that the State Department wanted. We thought we wrested total control of it. Now all these people, you know, who had made these, all these,

U.S. corporations who'd made these investments make bank. But then we don't expect this counter coup that happens, you know, the basically just a few months afterwards when the Donbass broke away and Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation and the whole thing was purportedly backstopped by the Russian military. So you have tens of billions of dollars of investments by U.S. oil and gas companies

whose investments all go to zero because now how does Burisma mine shale on the Donbass? How does Naftogaz get the profits from that mining if Russia controls the territory? How are you going to do offshore drill rigging in Crimea when Crimea belongs to Russia? So you have...

You have these commercial interests driving the State Department policy in the region. When Victoria Nuland in late 2013 gave that famous speech where she bragged about the $5 billion that the U.S. government had pumped into Ukrainian civil society, the very civil society that would go on to overthrow the government just months later, when she gave that speech, she was at a U.S. embassy event being sponsored by Chevron and Exxon.

Really? Yes. Yes. You go to my X feed. I got the picture and HD 4k blown up for everyone to see. So again, you have this relationship between the commercial. So it's not just that like you, we have a rogue state department. We have a revolving door between big government and big corporations. And the idea of putting American first America first in a world where those corporations are primarily multinational means that nationalism is

is a threat to multinational corporate interests. And so multinational corporate interests will sponsor the State Department activity and use the battering ram of the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, and NATO to achieve those corporate interests. So we have a much bigger problem here, which is why I call for reform because our whole financial ecosystem is actually bent on this.

And that's just the nature of globalization. I mean, that was always going to happen if you thought it through for me. I mean, why would, you know, Brexit be seen as a threat to U.S. interests? I mean, that's right. OK, we could go on for hours, but I want to end and we could actually do hours on this specific topic. I want to end on the question of Elon, who I think is, you know, one of the most significant figures in modern history. Obviously, he is.

But very much a current player a lot depends on what he's doing now on the question of speech with X. And, of course, he has an incredibly complex life where he's tied into all kinds of different things with all kinds of different companies that rely on government contracts, et cetera, et cetera. But he's holding the line in demonstrable ways. Everyone I know who watched the, you know, Dura Varest this weekend, first thought.

oh man, you know, who's next? Do you think that the blob you so vividly describe can tolerate Elon Musk allowing the world's population to say what it thinks through the election and beyond? And what implications does this arrest have for him? Well, it's a complicated issue because Elon is very unique. You know, I wrote about this

when he announced the acquisition before it even closed, I wrote an article where I described how Elon is actually quite unique in this relative to other billionaire owners of social media companies who folded to pressure. And I cited a few reasons. One is, again, the strategy on this, apart from prosecutions, is whole of society contortion of the economics. So what you do is, to get Facebook to do what you want, you...

you offer carrots and you threaten sticks. So if you do what we want, you'll get bribed, you'll get rewarded. If you don't do what we want, we'll bankrupt you. And so they fastidiously organize the whole society so that pressure is applied from the private sector, so advertiser boycotts. USAID has a formal disinformation program focused on getting advertisers to cut off revenue to misinformation sites and purveyors of misinformation. And

I have seen, I mean, they have this formally published. In fact, my organization, Foundation for Freedom Online, even published the formal disinformation primer in February 2021, one month after Biden took office, where in a 97-page USAID disinformation program memo, 31 times they mentioned the word advertisers as being necessary to kill the revenue to any social media site or any social media account or any independent webpage that exists.

that spreads misinformation. So USAID is contorting the economics of the entire news industry in order to get platforms

to censor lest they go economically bankrupt. And remember, this is the major threat to Elon still to this day, but particularly these advertiser boycotts which crushed the ability. This is why they had to turn to subscriptions and they had to make this $8 a month, $12 a month type thing because of all the ad boycotts. And again, USAID is a formal program to coordinate that in a whole society fashion.

Getting back to Elon's uniqueness. So for a couple of things, as a triple digit billionaire, he may be more insulated from these kinds of whole society encirclement economic pressure tactics that someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey had tolerance for. They were only double digit billionaires, you know, or Zuckerberg. Whereas as a triple digit billionaire, that actually may be robust enough to resist that.

Getting back to this Mark Zuckerberg letter, in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg was making public speeches saying that he thought censorship had gone too far on Facebook. That was 2019. I remember. But then he got hit with a...

very interesting boycott that was called hashtag change the terms. And it basically was economically coercing Facebook to change the terms of its terms of service effectively to ban Trump supporters and Brexit supporters and anyone in Europe who is supporting a right wing populist party there. And Facebook lost $60 billion in market cap in 48 hours under this boycott. And so Facebook folded like a lawn chair and gave them everything they asked for because 60 billion was enough to break Zuckerberg's back.

At the same time, there's... Who paid for Change the Terms? Oh, that's... I don't know how many hours you have. It's an interesting... How about 60 seconds? Just bottom line it for us. I mean, nominally, it was the ADL and Color of Change under this kind of hate speech idea. But it was joined by dozens of USAID-funded, U.S. State Department-funded NGOs, civil society institutions, who were all...

creating the base of that. So nominally you had these, you know, ADL color of change, and it's about hate speech on social media, but the, the, the buffering substructure for it were all these us government intermediaries. And you have this issue where, uh,

you know, what they said was hate speech, but they, as part of the change, uh, change the terms campaign, anyone who criticized open borders was considered to be doing, you know, hate speech against Hispanics because of, you know, the disproportionate impact on that. Anybody in, you know, Germany or France or anyone who, you know, uh, opposed anyone who was a part of this pro right-wing populist NATO skeptical faction. Again, this whole Frexit, Brexit, Spexit,

it'll exit domino you know this that that all started because of the migrant crisis after we assassinated qaddafi and there was a giant you know influx of of migrants you know into european countries and this gave rise to a right-wing populist political opposition force and they were the ones who were challenging all the nato preferred political candidates in those regions and so this was a this was a proxy attack on all the political enemies of the blob

But Elon is unique because the U.S. State Department needs Elon, or at least they need Elon's properties. You have a Pavel problem here, which is that they don't care about Pavel. They care about Telegram. But to break into Telegram, to get access to the back end, to be able to censor, you know, the sort of front-facing. And spy. Right. Right.

you need control of the personnel because the policies of the platforms are personnel as policy. With Elon, I don't think they want to take him out. What they want is corporate regime change or him to play ball. And I think they allowed the acquisition because they assumed that he would play ball as everybody else who opposed them in the past did. Jack Dorsey came out and said that it was a business decision, you know, why they censored Trump and that he was

squeamish about it, but they were under the gun of the financial pressure. That was the reason Mark Zuckerberg did all the censorship. Dorsey, I can say with some authority, I think really hated censoring Trump, not because he loves Trump, because I think Dorsey really was opposed to censorship on a philosophical level. Right. So I think they thought, oh, Elon's talking a big game now, but they all did. And everyone folded, and he'll be just like the rest of them because he has a wide surface of attack as well.

Elon has Tesla. Elon has SpaceX. These are critical, critical companies for U.S. statecraft. So the U.S. Pentagon Intelligence Services State Department is critical.

is hugely dependent on SpaceX for all low earth satellites, for all telecommunications. I was at the state department. Rescuing stranded astronauts. That's like actually. Yes, no. Yep. And Tesla is hugely important for a, to have a U S national champion in the green energy revolution. The renewable battery technology is, you know, a huge part of the, the, you know, of the U S of U S leadership in the,

climate change transition, one of the reasons that they viewed him as a huge hero up until he became a free speech advocate. And so, I mean, I don't think I can say any better than one of the writers from the National Endowment for Democracy, the very CIA cutout that we've talked about dozens of times now in this dialogue, which is that one of the writers from the National Endowment for Democracy

wrote just a few months ago that Elon Musk is a greater national security threat to the United States than Russia. This is a few months ago, not post outbreak of the war. This is in 2024. And that Elon is...

a greater threat to the United States and U.S. national security than Russia because his proximal impact on U.S. politics and allowing opposition political movements to rise will cause changes in U.S. government that are more likely to make us lose the war on Russia than Russia itself. It's the same thing NATO said in 2017. He said, though, we're in a pickle because the U.S. government is so dependent on Elon's properties. And so basically called

for a kind of death by a thousand paper cuts type strategy. And this is, this is what we're seeing. We wrote this in public. Yes. You can look it up. This is a, you know, this is national. You can, I believe the, the, uh, author of it was a man named Dean, Dean Jackson. Uh, as I've,

current or former National Endowment for Democracy fellow. He's a part of this whole censorship industry apparatus that I've talked about that is done through the whole society network. And I can actually post the article on my ex-account if folks are interested right after this. But yes, arguing that they get, but the National Endowment for Democracy gets its funding by

The U.S. government, it is not only it is accountable to Congress, but imagine a more anti-American belief than American citizens shouldn't be allowed to talk. American citizens shouldn't be allowed to vote or their votes shouldn't be allowed to count. The American citizens shouldn't be allowed to choose their own leaders.

I mean, imagine thinking something like that and imagining that you're an American. Right. But understand, as soon as you accept the frame that democracy is about the institutions. I know, but wake the fuck up, these people. I mean, come on. I mean, I get it. I understand. I used to drink too much. I'm very familiar with, you know, ways that we justify unjustifiable behavior to ourselves. But on some level, like, are you ever staying in the shower thinking, wait,

In the name of democracy, I'm preventing my fellow Americans from giving their opinions out loud or I don't think their vote should count. Like, is there no they have no souls, obviously. I'm sorry to get upset. It's just like so crazy. Well, the reason that I keep coming back to that is because I'm trying to arm everybody watching this and the language necessary to fight it.

Well, and you're spinning me into a frenzy, as you always do. I'm sorry. So let me just ask one last question, okay? Once again, do you think that X will stay open through the election? Stay open in the U.S., yes.

but the state department is coercing foreign governments to shut down x operations around the world until x censors everyone the state department wants censored uh take the eu digital services act which i've been screaming for years now uh has is the number one existential threat to elon and to x this is a this is a law this is a you know this new just came into effect in the eu

after years of pressure from NATO for the EU to advance this, which goes beyond the typical European hate speech laws and creates a new sort of category for disinformation, which requires all social media platforms to do disinformation compliance. And the US censorship industry, they did a conference. There was a big 150-page conference

sort of consensus memo that hundreds of these people all sort of co-signed. And then they did a launch event where they all talked about it on a live stream afterwards. And in that live stream, they said that they would be in a full-blown panic because of Elon Musk losing X and Elon's policies, getting rid of all the censorship provisions they had because 2024 has more elections than any year in world history. I think it's something like 65 elections or 80, happening all over the world. So the State Department,

its control is, you know, is at risk in 65 to 85 different countries in the calendar year 2024. And they said that we'd be in full-blown panic, but we can panic responsibly because we have basically a trick up our sleeve. And this is, these are U.S. censorship professionals, many of them paid by the U.S. government through grants. And what they are, State Department grants, and what they said is, you know, the trick up our sleeve is that we have the EU Digital Services Act,

And that will force Elon to rehire all of the fired censors. And it will force him to basically restaff the censorship apparatus unless he's, he's going to lose X's participation, all of the EU, because that imposes a 6% global revenue fine for anyone who doesn't comply. The EU has come out and said they're currently noncompliant and the EU has a larger market than the U S there's 500 million people in the EU. It's more than the U S if, if,

If X is kicked out of the EU, they are no longer a global platform. It's absolutely existential. And part of the requirements for that compliance is for the same disinformation experts and researchers to

vet the flow of information to spot disinformation, demand its takedown, and if X doesn't take it down, then they're kicked out of the EU. So this is a massive, massive lever of power over Elon. And the only question is, will the U.S. State Department, the only organ we have to defend U.S. interests against Europe, will they actually oppose it? The problem is, as you're hearing me say, they're the ones who have been organizing these censorship provisions

To begin with. So the very the only people that we have to be able to defend us from the threat were the people who organized it in the first place. So I don't I don't have time to ask you about the effect of all of this Biden administration censorship on presidential race. But let me just final question. If Trump wins, will you have any hand in helping the new administration roll back the censorship regime and returning us to some sort of constitutional foundation as a country?

My purpose in life is to do everything I can to promote freedom of speech on the internet. It's a very dear thing to me. It has been since, you know, since I was a kid. And

I don't consider myself a political person. I know I had a political appointee spot. I would be equally comfortable in an RFK style or a sense of Democrat type thing. You're a one-issue man. I am. I am. But you need to understand these other issues to know what you're up against and to... And this is, you know, I get a lot of pushback. Oh, you know, you're...

against the U.S. military, against the intelligence agency. I'm not. I'm not. I'm calling for reform so that this specific narrow new capacity that has become one of the biggest financial boon markets that government grants do in such a short period of time, it is newish. It's not a baby anymore, but it's still in its adolescent stage. This can be rooted out

It's not like you're rooting out the U.S. War Department. You're the FBI. Which has been around since 1789. So my purpose is to pursue that to the best ability possible in whatever that means. So I don't know what role might even be more useful within the government or if it's more useful for me to simply...

publish what I publish, provide the insights that I do and have my, you know, I have what I do simply be what I've been doing. I don't know, you know, and, and I'll, I can answer that question when the fog of war has, has lifted more, but you know, I, I'm not a political person. I'm a one issue. I'm a one issue guy on this and that touches political matters, but I'm going to be true to that purpose.

It would be nice to see a free speech czar since it is the first right enumerated in the Bill of Rights. A free speech ambassador. Yeah. Yeah. Mike Benz. Amazing conversation. And I'm sorry you got me so emotional about 11 times in the middle of it. But thank you. Thanks, Tucker. Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to TuckerCarlson.com to see everything that we have made. The complete library. TuckerCarlson.com.