#132 Mike Benz - Inside the Censorship Industrial Complex
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Mike Benz, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Man, I have been looking forward to this for a long time. I first saw you, I think, on Glenn Beck. Is that correct? May have been. Yeah, I think I first, you first popped up on my radar on Glenn Beck, and then I saw you on Tucker a couple times, and I've been trying to get in contact with you, and finally...

We got you. So thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. You have the most epic studio I've ever seen. Well, that means a hell of a lot. Thank you. You've been around at some really cool studios, so I appreciate that. I don't know if you ever pan it, but everyone who's watching this, you have to see this. It's a museum here. Only the guests get to see it.

classified then yeah well we'll we'll start throwing some of this stuff out for the masses to see because there's some pretty historic stuff in here but but well I'm

Dying to talk to you about the stuff that's going on in Brazil right now and all the censorship stuff. You're the guy to talk to. And so before we get into the weeds, everybody gets an introduction and a gift. So here we go. Mike Benz.

previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Technology at the U.S. State Department from fall of 2020 through 2021.

served as White House speechwriter for President Trump and advised on tech matters, served as a speechwriter to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson, and was a policy advisor on economic development. You're the author of the unpublished Montrosity, Weapons of Mass Deletion,

Today, you seek to provide nonpartisan insights and assistance to all peoples taking a stand for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the free exchange of ideas online through FFO Foundation for Freedom Online, which you founded in 2022. Why did you found that? What prompted that? Well, I think it was a natural continuation of the spirit of what...

you know, I felt our federal government needed to do while I was in it, which was bring to light and try to educate people around what's really driving internet censorship, the forces behind it, the abuses of government. The fact is, is several years ago, it was

a sort of unsubstantiated thing in many people's minds that the US government was putting pressure on the tech platforms to censor speech, all these open First Amendment questions about it. And I felt like there needed to be a venue to provide nonpartisan insights to educate people so that they had the language, they had the background, they had the stories, they had the ability to understand

the world around them as it pertains to internet censorship. Interesting. Well, I'm glad you're doing that. So I have a Patreon. It's a subscription account. They've been with us since the beginning. It's grown into quite the community, and they're the reason that I get to sit here and you. And so one of the things that they get the opportunity to do is ask each guest a question. And so this is from Stephanie Jordan.

The First Amendment is quickly dying. How much time do we as Americans have in comparison to countries like the UK and Brazil?

Well, the story of what's happening in the UK and Brazil is very tightly connected to our own. And we'll get to this when we talk about some of the international issues happening right now. But the US State Department is actually putting pressure on foreign countries to enact their own censorship laws. So I don't really see what's happening in the UK or Brazil as being distinct from the US. But in terms of how much time we have left, this is one of these spaces where there's a lot of two steps forward, one step back, three steps back, one step forward. You can lose...

and lose badly even for a number of years and then begin to make inroads again. There was, for the first six years of me doing this, I've been involved in this space for eight years now, just dedicated my whole life to it. And for the first six years, there was no traction at all. It was one loss after another.

And, you know, that does make you feel hopeless, but you just keep putting one foot in front of the other until you start to get victories. And then we've had a lot of victories on the free speech space in the past 18 months. And go through them if folks are interested. I think it would be good to go through them just for the positivity aspect. Totally, totally. So coming into the year 2022,

you had the censorship industry was completely invincible. And what I mean by the censorship industry is this whole of society framework that our government uses for its counter misinformation work, which ties together

four different stakeholder institutions: government agencies, private sector companies, civil society institutions, so like universities, NGOs, researchers, and then media institutions. And all four of them, government, private sector, civil society, and media, all work together to achieve a common censorship outcome. So they can each pull their own levers in order to achieve the censorship of a narrative or of an account or kill someone's advertising revenue, whatever needs to be done in any particular case.

And from 2016, when this was all really getting established in the U.S., until 2022, there was never any piercing of any one of those four quadrants. No government agencies were under scrutiny. Most people didn't even know there was a government role. All the social media companies were completely under this pressure, and there was no one willing to break the alliance. You know, you had

Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, who was being threatened by the federal government in terms of Facebook's bottom line. Jack Dorsey was totally pliant to these. YouTube was an avid censor in that regard. And so...

In 2022, a number of things happened that began to really change the turf of this. So first, there was this scandal with the Disinformation Governance Board. I don't know if folks remember this. This was this Ministry of Truth, is what people were calling it, at the Department of Homeland Security. They made the mistake for once in their lives of publicly calling it what it actually was.

When the Disinformation Governance Board happened in April 2022, it was the first time that Republicans in Congress leapt to life and said, oh my God, there's a government censorship agency. It's the Ministry of Truth. What they didn't know is that the Ministry of Truth had already existed within DHS for three years before that. It was just given a much more boring, mundane name. It was called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. But what they did is they said that

because their mission is critical infrastructure security,

and elections are critical infrastructure, and COVID deals with public health, and public health is critical infrastructure, any tweets that contain misinformation about elections or about COVID or about any number of sensitive policy issues were a cyber threat actor, were a cyber attack on critical infrastructure. And so DHS had this giant web apparatus to censor First Amendment protected speech using a cybersecurity predicate. But at the time,

That was almost too fantastical for people to believe. It wasn't until DHS's censorship operations became so sprawling and so massive and had so many touch points that they needed this dull, boring, bureaucratic management layer, the disinformation governance board, to manage what DHS, CISA, and the intelligence wing of DHS, DHS, INA, was doing.

And so it was only then that you had Chuck Grassley and Josh Hawley and all these different Republican members of Congress say, holy, wait a second, we've heard rumors about internet censorship being directed by the U.S. government. Maybe they're true because, look, they have this Disseparation Governance Board. In that same month, Elon Musk announced his intended acquisition of X and that he was spending $44 billion to...

to set the bird free, to get rid of the censorship policies that had existed essentially from 2016 until 2022.

In November of 2022, the Republicans took control over Congress. In October of 2022, Elon Musk completed his acquisition. And Republicans in Congress began to break much of this open, as did Elon Musk through the Twitter files. And so there began to be all these public hearings on government pressure on Facebook, on Amazon, on YouTube, on Twitter. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Weaponization Subcommittee,

got us the Facebook files, which showed that Facebook was only censoring COVID-19 because they felt beholden to the Biden administration and folded under that pressure in order to be receptive to their calls to censorship because they have bigger fish to fry on multiple policy fronts, meaning they needed the Biden State Department's help to defend their rights in Europe. They needed the Biden administration's protection of their data rights and their advertising revenues.

And so when Elon kicked the door open with the Twitter files and there began to be congressional support in Congress, many of these federal agencies started to clam up

and I won't say closed down, but they had to reorganize in ways that added a lot of friction to what they did. And they became a lot less powerful because now the public awareness had grown. And anytime they did something, they would be hit with subpoenas. People would be brought in for transcribed interviews. There'd be public hearings. There'd be lawsuits. There've been many private sector lawsuits. We've had this major Supreme Court case that just sort of

in my view, was wrongly decided, but it's still a preliminary decision. So that may still play out favorably in the future. But there's been legal pressure. There's been congressional pressure. There has been the prying open of Twitter, which is the X. It's the largest political thought incubator of all the social media platforms because everyone's a content producer on there, unlike YouTube, as soon as you hit the retweet button.

And that has also given cover to folks like Mark Zuckerberg to lessen censorship at Facebook and on Instagram. And this is one of the things the censorship industry has been apoplectic about, is that they accused Mark Zuckerberg of riding Elon Musk's

free speech coattails and removing a lot of the liaison tentacles that previously were back channeled by US intelligence or by political operatives involved in the censorship industry. And so the internet now is much freer than it was several years ago in the US. So the blob has a new strategy involving bringing international pressure on the platforms as well as state pressure within individual states in the US.

Wow. So we did get some wins. We're winning at the level the battle was being fought from 2016 to 2020. If we had now what we... If we had then what we have now...

we'd be in a totally different world. The issue is, as we're winning at the current level, they've moved the battle upstream to things that are existentially much more terrifying. Just straight up international laws banning First Amendment speech. We're seeing this with this new EU censorship law, the Digital Services Act, which adds a disinformation compliance component, and that forces X to censor anything NATO wants to censor,

or else they lose their European market, which is a larger market than their US market. And so they have a whole bag of tricks that are the new frontier for fighting this. But if they hadn't escalated that, we would be winning quite dramatically right now. Interesting. Interesting. Let's get into the weeds on all of this. I just wanted the wins to start with, but everybody gets a gift. All right. Can I open it now? You can open it right now.

A little something for the flight home. Beautiful. I'm actually a sucker for gummy bears. Nice. You'll love those. You'll love those. So let's do the... You had a couple of topics you wanted to cover and that I want to hear about very much. So let's talk about the big picture roadmap of censorship and free speech. The main thing for people to understand is that free speech is caught in this proxy war between...

what I call the blob, and I didn't coin this term, I'll go over it, the blob versus populism. So it's not Democrats versus Republicans. It's not right versus left or liberals versus conservatives. It is the blob. And what I mean by that is the foreign policy establishment of the US, the UK, and NATO. This was a term that was coined by

President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, when the Obama administration in its final years was frustrated with this entrenched, immutable, alien-like, all-powerful form within Washington that appeared to be more powerful than the White House itself. So this term, "the blob," again came from the Obama White House to describe forces that the White House felt it couldn't take on.

And I find it to be a more useful term than something like deep state because it really encompasses this whole society concept that what the government does stretches its tentacles into the private sector and into civil society and into media organizations. So the...

So the blob really has its sort of central locus within the diplomacy, defense, and intelligence worlds. So it's the State Department, it's the Pentagon, it's the CIA and the IC, and then sort of spandrels out from there into all of the different political actors on both sides of the aisle, into all the different universities and NGOs and allied media institutions.

And it's transatlantic. It's the sort of conjoined foreign policy of the US, the UK, and NATO. And we have empowered this blob apparatus to be able to do dirty tricks on the world stage to protect national interests. So since World War II ended and we set up this rules-based international order,

We have needed a capacity to influence the course of events in foreign countries to make them more suitable to U.S. interests. In 1948, we had the UN Declaration on Human Rights, made every country a sovereign territory. It was forbidden by international law to do war by military means. You can just militarily, I'm sorry, to do territorial acquisition of

in a straight military conquest. You couldn't just march into Canada, take it over. That would be just as a purely military, you know, Empire 1.0 type thing that was done from the medieval period through the Industrial Revolution all the way up until World War II. We had this concept of democratic sovereignty. So the lust for empire never ended. After 1948,

we needed a new mechanism to maintain empire, not by military means, but by political vassalage. Now, this is often supported by military means or it's accomplished at its outset by military means. Oftentimes, we'll create a predicate for military activity and then we will set up our political vassal state from there. But what I'm driving at is I'm not anti-blob and I want to make this totally clear at the outset.

Even though the blob, this foreign policy establishment, is the antagonist, it's sort of the villain in the internet censorship story, we do perhaps need it. That is, we can't make pencils in the United States without getting...

the gum from trees in Malaysia without getting graphite from mines in South America. What happens if Malaysia nationalizes the gum trees or the unions go on strike or the national government of Bolivia decides to box out U.S. corporations? Well, then Americans don't have pencils.

So we have this Department of Dirty Tricks capacity, which spans this interagency foreign policy establishment to influence the course of foreign events, to support a particular political leader, to change or get past certain laws within foreign countries. And this is why it was often called in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, the Department of Dirty Tricks, because we had this ability to do things to foreigners, to foreign countries, to foreign governments,

that the Constitution forbade from doing to U.S. citizens because it was supposed to redound to our national interest, even if it's not a national security threat. If it supports U.S. national champions on the corporate side or it allows Americans to have cheap gas so they can afford middle-class homes and middle-class lifestyle,

It's possible that our whole 20th century magic of the American dream was only made possible because we have this capacity through our foreign policy establishment, the blob, to do these dirty tricks abroad. The issue is with the advent of populism.

Really starting in 2016 with the events of the Philippines election in 2016, the events of Brexit, and the events of Donald Trump's election, followed in short succession by Bolsonaro in Brazil, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Marine Le Pen's rise in France, the Vox Party's rise in Spain, AFD's rise in Germany.

You had these foreign policy establishment institutions who felt threatened that the entire rules-based international order would collapse because everyone's pursuing their own nationalism. And so all of these international entanglements, these international financial relationships, this international influence over national events would all fall away, and it was only happening because of free speech on the internet.

So they brought to bear this very powerful censorship apparatus, really starting in 2014. And it started with the military and the intelligence and the diplomatic corps. These same blob institutions created this architecture, initially to stop Russian propaganda after Crimea in 2014. NATO developed this doctrine called From Tanks to Tweets that said,

NATO was no longer primarily about tank warfare. It was about controlling tweets because tweets are how people get elected. And at the time, NATO was saying that the biggest threat to NATO was that people would vote their way out of NATO or would vote to not give funds for foreign wars. That was a bigger threat than Russian aggression. So what they did is they said anyone who supports Russia

Russia or is NATO critical or is against the foreign policy establishment at the domestic level is effectively operating, they're helping Russia. And so even if they're not doing Russian disinformation, we can still use our national security powers, our national interest powers to get them censored because they are

helping an adversary state. And once that apparatus was put in place, they began to apply it to everything, to COVID, to election disinformation, to climate disinformation. And it grew to be this very all-powerful tool until, you know, as I mentioned, two years ago, the tide started to turn, both within the U.S. government through Congress and the U.S. private sector through

new freedoms on Twitter and YouTube and the rise of, I'm sorry, on Twitter and Facebook and even the rise of a somewhat robust YouTube alternative ecosystem like Rumble. So now they've escalated that and they're putting pressure on countries like Brazil and regions like the EU. And all over, 140 countries now, we have these

counter-disinformation programs which are purely designed to stop the rise of domestic populists who might challenge the foreign policy establishment. How many countries are falling in line with this so far? I mean, it's hard to give a rough estimate. Certainly, all of the countries in the EU, probably about half the countries in Latin and South America,

I don't have full vision into much of Africa. I know that the disinformation programs are there and robust, and they're crying for more funding. But I would say at least one to two dozen have fallen under this. Another one or two dozen they're frustrated by. I'll give you an example. So thanks to U.S. government funding, many of these organizations

spun out, cut out civil society institutions who receive funding from the Pentagon or the National Science Foundation, the sort of DARPA civilian arm, or through the State Department or USAID, do these stakeholder conferences where they will bring together their assets in the censorship industry in all the different countries. And

A few months ago, they did a public Zoom call that I happened to capture where they talked about how they brought together their Brazil ecosystem and their Philippines ecosystem. And they were frustrated that the folks in the Philippines were not willing to go as far as the folks in Brazil in terms of the counter disinformation laws that they were lobbying for, the different techniques that they were willing to apply. But they brought together these multi-stakeholder groups

from a dozen different countries' censorship ecosystems, all back-channeled essentially through USAID funding or through a sort of university front, where they will literally get everyone on the same page like a magnet so that they apply these censorship best practices to stop the rise of populist political candidates in their region.

And this started in 2014, you said? 2014 is when NATO began this in Central and Eastern Europe. That was really, if you will, the sort of agent zero. That was sort of the, you know, if this was a sort of Ebola outbreak, that was sort of the lab in which it was incubated or the monkey, you know, that first bit a human. And this was, you know, from their perspective,

The State Department, USAID, the military pumped $5 billion into Ukrainian civil society to topple the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014. This is Viktor Yanukovych's government. And I'm not even weighing in normatively about whether that's a good or a bad thing. But the plain fact is, is we did overthrow that government, which was democratically elected by the Ukrainian people. We did it through the same means that

were done on January 6th. This was just a straight up riot to take to the main parliament building square and overrun it through violence.

and seize control over government. It's everything that was accused of January 6th protesters, but our U.S. Embassy did it. Victoria Nuland was handing out cookies and water bottles to the militias that the State Department and USAID and all these different CIA-backed channels had been funding with billions of dollars. But they were not expecting what came next, which was this countercoup. The entire eastern side of the country declared itself to be a secessionist breakaway state.

militarily backstopped by Russia. Crimea voted in an independent referendum to join the Russian Federation. And so the State Department, the Pentagon, NATO threw up their hands and said, we pumped $5 billion into Ukraine, and we still couldn't budge anyone living in the eastern flank, anyone in Crimea, to side with our propaganda over Russian propaganda. And so,

We needed, this is part of the issue with winning through propaganda. At a certain point, you can't, it starts to backfire. You can only turn your knob up so much on your own propaganda before people go, ah, that hurts my ears. I don't trust this.

So this new tool had to be developed to turn down the opposition. So there was no way to create a sort of robust political thought leadership to spread narratives, to circulate potentially damning or humiliating diplomatic incidents that can be exploited for political purposes. We needed a censorship mechanism at the technological level, and we needed a censorship mechanism

ecosystem of personnel who could back channel between the tech companies and the blob, you know, the diplomatic defense intelligence apparatus. And so these were both developed effectively in tandem in 2014.

The Pentagon was already working on these AI censorship super weapons to stop ISIS. This was a technique called natural language processing, which is this ability to basically scan the entire internet, all tweets, all Facebook posts, all YouTube videos, because everything we say on YouTube

since 2009 or whatnot, has gone into closed captioning at YouTube. So there's a transcript where the AI can read that transcript and it can scan for keywords and they can do sentiment analysis to evaluate through essentially AI pre-crime analysis whether or not you support or oppose the thing you're talking about and/or whether you're talking about something that's sensitive from NATO's perspective.

Some Ukrainian oligarch who's on CIA payroll does something embarrassing. And Russian...

Russian YouTube videos or Facebook posts or tweets are amplifying that. Well, that can all be turned down so that nobody knows about the story because the AI is now reading it. They developed that in the counterterrorism space because if you recall, beginning in 2014 in the U.S., there was this threat of homegrown ISIS threats. There began to be these terrorist attacks like the Garland attack in Texas, which is

It turned out to have its own quite peculiar elements. But there was this threat that Americans may be being recruited on Facebook and on YouTube and on Twitter by ISIS propagandists. So we needed a technique to be able to scan the Internet for all pro-ISIS phraseology, the terms they use, the prefixes, the suffixes, the slang, the hashtags.

And so that began to be coordinated out of our, something called a newly set up wing of the US State Department, really its first ever formal censorship subdivision. It was called the Global Engagement Center. And I bring this up 'cause it plays into the story later on here.

And this was set up by a guy named Rick Stengel, who was the Undersecretary for Public Affairs, bragged that he was Obama's chief propagandist. It's basically the interstitial between state propaganda from the U.S. State Department and the media. And they began to use these technologies to scan and ban ISIS. But then after the Crimea incident, this began to be all sort of Russian propaganda. But then any time a populist candidate began to win or gain popularity in Europe,

They said Marine Le Pen is advantaging Russia with the plank she's running on. She wants to get rid of the U.S. sanctions on Russian energy so we can scan and ban for all sentiment that supports Marine Le Pen, as well as any U.S. citizens who amplify Marine Le Pen in the U.S. and give her political support there. So everyone got caught in the crossfire of this

you know, effectively military complex that was bent on achieving its goals. You've got only a few months until the 2024 election takes place and who knows where the country's going to be. What will the national debt be? How many more political tricks will there be?

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to jump on board with this? A number of means. Do they know that we're influencing them? Well, certainly the connective touchpoints certainly do because I'll give you an example, Brazil. So Brazil has this tyrant judge, de Mores, right? This is the current war between Elon and this, you know, the head of Brazil's censorship court. It's called the TSE. It's a subcourt of Brazil's Supreme Court, the STF.

And so a lot of people see the actions of this one tyrant judge who basically has this ability to issue an edict and then anything posted online becomes instantly criminal. Sitting parliamentarians in Brazil call the current president Lula a thief. And the judge says, "You're not allowed to say that." The person faces a criminal judgment for demeaning the current president.

going after journalists, going after politicians, going after ordinary civilians by any edict. But there's a whole censorship substructure to what de Mores is involved in. There's advisory councils. There's a whole coterie of flaggers who propose the things to be flagged, who do the technical work

of the sort of AI scanning, who do the narrative network mapping. If they want to say anyone who challenges the results of Brazil's 2022 election, well, they need these outside institutions to create this whole narrative network map.

These are U.S.-funded and U.S.-backed channel institutions who provide the entire substructure to the head of the snake. You know, the analogy that I've been giving on this is it's a Brazilian spider, but the spider web was laid by the U.S. State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy – I can go through all their roles –

And the fangs of it are star-spangled spangs. This is the U.S. State Department trying to take out its political opposition in Brazil. They went to war with Bolsonaro. They called him Trump of the tropics. They're waging the same campaign against Bolsonaro that they did through their own intermediaries to take out Trump.

during his term to censor him on the internet there and that they're using to censor Trump today through their work with the EU. They're just doing that in Brazil to stop Bolsonaro. This story goes back at least six years to the US State Department's involvement in censoring Brazil. So almost all Bolsonaro supporters in the run-up to the 2018 Brazilian election were

deemed to be populous by the U.S. State Department. Populism, again, is this watchword where

This Department of Dirty Tricks power that I laid out all hinges on this word democracy. We have this concept that democracy is this set of democratic institutions and that if the popular will opposes these democratic institutions, we call that an attack on democracy because even if the people want it, it still violates these safeguards that are held in place. This is how we say we don't let another Adolf Hitler rise to power. It's because we don't allow demagogues

appealing to the masses to take democracy outside of the bumper cars of the bowling lane. And so this is our sort of special set of skills the blob has. If we can't get them on terrorism grounds or military grounds, this is part of how we wage the Cold War. You know, communism, even if a country was minding its own business, we said that, well, it's a communist structure that's depriving the people of their yearnings for democracy. And so we get to

play God, we get to use our CIA and our State Department and our USAID and our paramilitary-backed channels to do a top-down military coup, as we did in Brazil in 1964, or a bottom-up color revolution, as we did in Ukraine in 2014 and dozens of other countries. But populism is the new communism. Populism is the new counterterrorism. This is something I think that a lot of conservatives who may be listening really need to process.

Because this CIA State Department USAID military apparatus had the support of the Republican Party throughout the entire 20th century as it was toppling left-wing socialist, left-wing communist governments. It was not until Trump won in 2016 or Brexit four or five months before that and then the rise around the world of these right-wing populist governments

politicians from Abe in Japan to Modi in India to Bolsonaro in Brazil to that whole European axis I laid out that stretches all the way from France into the Baltics, that there became this flip. The CIA, the State Department, they still oppose left-wing socialism and communism, but the biggest threat that they see is right-wing populism. Neoliberalism

The blob's sort of, you know, financial motto can be flanked from either side, from its left-wing socialist flank or from its right-wing nationalist flank. And so this is why they went after Bolsonaro and tried to stop him from winning in 2018. Bolsonaro supporters were censored on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, all the major platforms between 2017 and 2018. So they started to take to end-to-end encrypted chats in order to circumvent that censorship.

So that's WhatsApp and Telegram are the main players there. And also, for folks who are familiar with this alternative social media platform, Gab, which was one of the sort of early pre-parlor social media alternatives, one of their first early demographic bases, other than people in the U.S., were Brazilians because they had nowhere to go because they were censored everywhere.

because of all this government pressure on them in Brazil. But they took to WhatsApp and Telegram, and I did a report on this two and a half years ago, my foundation published it, about this strange web in 2018 that was established, funded to the tune of millions of dollars, jointly by three government and quasi-government agencies, the U.S. State Department, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy. The State Department is responsible

formally sets U.S. foreign policy for the region. You have USAID, which is supposed to be this independent agency, but it's essentially logistical support for the State Department. It's sort of plausibly deniable support for either the State Department, the Pentagon, or the CIA. Many times USAID has been busted as a CIA front, and we can go through that. If your audience is curious, it's kind of an incredible tale of how much

I'm actually curious if you in your time, either in the SEALs or as a contractor, ever ran into USAID as a strange player in some of the side stories. But the fact is, is these institutions pump millions of dollars into, in the U.S., into

Brazilian institutions. So they pump the money into Brazilian university centers who do thought leadership on countering disinformation, into legal scholars in Brazil who formulate policy and help develop the legislative anti-misinformation laws or anti-fake news laws, who serve on the advisory councils, who...

essentially helped make this consensus decision about who should be censored by the Brazilian TSE. And even many of the partnered flaggers to actually target who should be censored in Brazil are U.S. State Department and USAID-funded institutions, or

U.S. National Endowment for Democracy funded institutions like the Atlantic Council, for example, which actually serves as one of the trusted flaggers of the Brazilian TSE court. De Mores, his court has about 70 of these trusted flaggers in his program. And one of them is the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its board. It receives annual funding every year from the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines.

annual funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a CIA cutout. It receives millions of dollars from U.S.

U.S. taxpayers. It was also partnered with Burisma, by the way, this NATO think tank. It has seven CIA directors on its board. And lo and behold, it is serving as the deputy arm of de Mores in Brazil, even creating network maps of who to be censored.

Same thing with institutions like the Wilson Center. Same thing with institutions like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which, by the way, is the institution that was run from 2014 to 2021 by a man named Bill Burns. You may be familiar with that name. Bill Burns is the current director of the CIA. He left the Carnegie Endowment to run the CIA.

And the Carnegie Endowment has its fingerprints all over this Brazil censorship situation. And it gets worse than that. We have formal government programs now that are essentially coordinated, quarterbacked by the State Department,

but are sort of run at the operational level and funded by the State Department, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy, which is this CIA cutout, you know, basically created in 1983 when our then CIA director was complaining that the CIA had lost too many powers after the Church Committee hearings in 1976. So we needed to do CIA work through a non-CIA entity called the National Endowment for Democracy.

Hunter Biden was on the Chairman's Advisory Board, by the way, of the DNC branch of that. It's called the NDI, which plays a major role in the Brazil censorship situation. They created this network called the D4D, Design for Democracy in Brazil, where they sprawled into a spider web dozens of these high-level censorship thought leaders, advocates, activists, legal scholars. Again, this is back-channeled by a CIA cutout. In order to

to get these censorship laws passed and provide the political and media support for them to take the heavy-handed action that they did. And again, just to put a button on some of this, because we can go a lot deeper into this, but if folks recall, just ahead of the 2022 election, where Bolsonaro lost in a razor-close, nail-biter election, very similar to our own in the previous, in the 2020 cycle,

All three, all three wings of the blob, the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon, all went down to Brazil to intermediate that election. The State Department pulled strings to Taiwan Semiconductor to stop giving semiconductor supplies, stop prioritizing the United States, and give those supplies to Brazil so that

so that essentially Brazilian election officials could use three to four times more voting machines than they'd ever used. Bolsonaro said, I don't trust these voting machines. The State Department had just spent U.S. taxpayer dollars and deprioritized our access to semiconductors during a semiconductor crisis shortfall.

to give it to a foreign country so that they could have electronic voting machines for their election? Why is that in U.S. national interest? Why should truck drivers making 50k a year have to pay their income tax for electronic voting machines that the Brazilians didn't even ask for?

Then Bill Burns, the CIA director, went down and personally threatened Bolsonaro not to, quote, cast doubt on the electronic voting machines that the State Department had just rammed down their throat. And then Lloyd Austin, the head of the Pentagon, went down to Brazil to talk to the Brazilian military to say if there's a disputed election result, don't you dare side with Bolsonaro because there'll be military repercussions. Much of your Brazilian military supplies and infrastructure and training comes from the U.S.,

So that was just at the technical level of the election. What I'm describing is all the censorship that went into that and that happened in the aftermath as part of this transitional justice campaign to stop Bolsonaro's reemergence. Who is the head of all of this?

Where does this all come from? Well, there's a peculiar government program that's called the – again, this is all intermediate through the interagency, right? So there's going to be some National Security Council vision for what to do in the Western Hemisphere, right?

and what to do in Brazil in particular, because you have all these different elements. You have the Pentagon elements, you have the State Department elements, you have the USAID elements. All these are different permanent seats on the National Security Council. They need to be coordinated through the NSC process. So technically, I would say it's the NSC Western Hemisphere folks. But to make this sort of really simple, there's a formal government program. It's called the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening.

The Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening. How nice, how quaint, how understated. And this has been a U.S. government State Department program, which is co-funded and largely funded by USAID, in order to help foreign countries develop more robust election infrastructure.

and to make sure their own internal political systems are strengthened democratically, which effectively means to make sure they're more

of a vassal of the U.S. State Department so that anything that happens in that country's internal politics do not undermine the State Department's vision for the development of that region. Now, starting in 2021, CEPS, the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, began to really, really add this censorship disinformation component to its international diplomacy toolkit. This idea that where we previously said

Democracy and political process strengthening meant providing voice to minority factions in that country's government who were underrepresented by the will of the majority or protections for the press. Now, of course, all these things are quite cynical. Oftentimes, the State Department will be working with those particular identity faction groups or it will be

funding, you know, USAID-funded media or U.S. Agency for Global Development-funded media to influence that. So we make sure there are press protections, there are civil society protections. Again, all of this is to protect our own control over that country. But they began to say that as part of this political process strengthening, you have to have robust counter-disinformation, counter-misinformation measures in your country in order to be in line with best practices for democracy. And so CEPS has this sprawling Brazil program

which coordinates with the National Endowment for Democracy, you know, this NDI, where Hunter Biden was the chairman's advisory committee, this Design for Democracy Coalition that I was just talking about. All these different university centers, all these different government-funded media ecosystem players, all these different fact-checkers, all these different AI scan and banners, all these different disinformation flaggers, all these different legal scholars are all in this umbrella network under CEPs,

And this is playing out as the House Foreign Affairs Committee has done absolutely nothing. They just took out a U.S. national champion, X. The State Department's job is to protect the welfare of U.S. citizen interests, U.S. corporate interests, and U.S. national interests in the region. They just see Starlink's assets. That's a major component of our military, frankly, in terms of its interface with telecoms.

They just banned our soft power projection of X into the country, but that is because X is caught in a proxy war between the State Department and Bolsonaro. You can bet...

If Bolsonaro had banned Twitter 1.0 because too many Lula supporters were using Twitter and were outflanking Bolsonaro on Twitter 1.0 in 2021, if he had banned X, how fast Brazil would have been kicked off the dollar. How fast international sanctions, blockades to their trade supplies,

trade embargoes, private sector retrenchment of investments. The whole litany of our Department of Dirty Tricks toolkit would have been crammed down Bolsonaro so fast if he had done that. But that's because they wanted him to lose. They wanted Lula to win. It's as simple as that. What's happening in Brazil has really much less to do with free speech as it has to do with the State Department and the blobs

designs for who needs to win that election, and they also need to do it cheaply. It's very expensive to constantly manage each new election.

And so they have this policy of transitional justice and stabilization so that after the State Department overthrows a country or runs tens of millions of dollars to a political opposition and they barely win an election, we have this new policy of transitional justice where we arrest all the opposition leaders. Bolsonaro right now is under countless indictments, just as Trump is here.

and they censor all the forces around that, so they prevent the mobilization and the coordination of that party's resurgence. They can't get their messaging out, their media is all banned.

And so that way it's cheap to manage. You might need to spend $50 million, $100 million to rig it in 2018, but in 2020, because after the stabilization process plays out, you might only need $10 million because they're polling so low because all their media is banned and all their politicians are arrested. So it's a very nasty playbook. Do you think the U.S. is more concerned with the censorship of other countries at this particular point in time than it is on the U.S. itself?

No, but both are happening in tandem. We're doing this with foreign countries in order to contort the economics of the US platforms to force them to put the pre-22 censorship mechanisms back in place. And so, you know, I call this the boomerang tactic. There's two ways that the blob can get you. One is with a knife. They are foreign policy institutions. State Department's not allowed to operate at home.

CIA is not allowed to operate at home. USAID is not allowed to operate at home. The Pentagon is not allowed to operate at home. They are intelligence, they're national security, they're supposed to project outwards for the benefit of US citizens. But they can knife you in a couple of ways. For example, you can totally invert this intelligence restriction on doing intelligence work against your own citizens simply by putting the word counter in front of it. You say, "It's counterintelligence."

This is what they did to Trump. This is the whole, you know, Peter Strzok, the head of counterintelligence at the FBI, and all the indictments and tens of millions of dollars in legal fees that that incurred, is they say, well...

we're not allowed to go after you for what you say, but if you are connected to Russians, or we think or suspect you might be, we can open a counterintelligence probe into you so we can spy on you, just like the CIA spies on foreign citizens, just to see if you're working with foreign spies. And there's several other of these sort of knife tactics where they can get you directly at home, but the other weapon they have is they can fashion a boomerang.

A boomerang is a toy, but it's also a weapon. You can put the blade on it, and you can send it out and then bring it back. And this is what they're doing in all these foreign countries to bring X weapons.

to heal and to put pressure on Facebook to make sure they continue their censorship work. Which is that in order to, because we're restricted by the First Amendment here, and there's only so much that you can do politically, there's only so much leverage that you can actually apply given the economics of the social media ecosystem. And this is why, by the way, they started at this right away, right away after the 2016 election.

And I've gone over some of these lectures in my own subscriber lectures that I've done where I've gone into these 2017 consensus-building meetings that were being done in early 2017 about how to stop Trump's – how to kneecap Trump politically and stop him from getting reelected by changing the economics of the news industry.

by making sure that advertising revenue can't flow to unfiltered alternative news websites, and that tech platforms are held accountable for misinformation so that they themselves get hit with billions of dollars in boycotts or advertiser withdrawals or regulatory pressure or crisis PR.

in order to ban Trump's representation in the US on social media. Because their whole autopsy was that Trump only won because of social media. He didn't get a single print media endorsement. He was 97 to 3, disfavorable coverage on TV. But David Brock and Cher Blue published this January 2017 autopsy that they only lost the election because of unfiltered alternative news on the internet.

And so very quickly after that, you started to have these major blob figures. You know, some of them, you know, like one of the conferences I went over was a conference that was held in Bratislava.

It was held in Slovakia at the Globsec, Global Security Conference, and it involved Michael Chertoff and a guy named Christopher Walker. At the time, Walker was at the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the CIA cutout, and is currently at USAID, which is CIA funding conduit and State Department funding conduit. And Michael Chertoff, he was the first head of DHS in

DHS was the first government agency to establish this censorship infrastructure, as I mentioned at the start of this, through CISA and then the Disinformation Governance Board. And they played the quarterback of everything from the State Department to the FBI to the Pentagon. There was this whole of government, whole of society thing that DHS quarterbacked. But you had the first full-term head of DHS. By the way, Michael Chertoff was also the head of Freedom House, this major State Department agency.

sort of CIA free speech NGO, which was doing, I think, noble work up until it switched to censorship because it would try to pry open foreign countries so that U.S.-funded media or U.S.-supportive media could flourish there. But Michael Chertoff was also the chairman of BAE Systems, the largest military contractor in NATO. This is a major, major, major node of the military-industrial complex.

teamed up with the soft power arm of the CIA, and they bring into the room with them the heads of public policy, so those are the censorship policies, for Central and Eastern Europe from Google and Facebook. And they basically threaten them in this, in so many words, in sort of veiled cloak terms, that effectively USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy and DHS and the military complex, and this is the pedigree they're bringing to this,

that these companies better start censoring unfiltered alternative news. That was the literal descriptor they used because it was giving rise to populism, both in the US with Donald Trump, in the UK with Brexit, and with the rise of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe, and most especially at the time in Eastern Europe, where NATO feared that everything from Ukraine to Georgia to Moldova to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia were all falling under Russian influence.

and Russia was secretly or not secretly supporting or it redounded to their interest to have these populist parties rise to power who didn't want to give the money to NATO or who wanted to have cheap energy from Russian gas instead of expensive LNG from North America. And so you have this US government plot right out the gate explicitly to contort the economics of the American news ecosystem

to make it inhospitable, to make it bankrupting to the bottom line for Facebook not to play ball, for Twitter 1.0 not to play ball, for YouTube not to play ball, lest the full force of the US government, either directly or through these cloak and dagger back channels that they represented, would make it economically impossible for them to avoid falling under the government boot heel. And lo and behold, in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg tried to reverse a lot of this.

Facebook did a lot of censorship in 2017 and 2018. In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg starts giving public speeches that he thought censorship on Facebook was going too far. But then he got hit with a $60 billion advertiser boycott

That is, Facebook lost $60 billion in market cap in 48 hours from this boycott. So then he folded like a lawn chair and gave them everything they wanted. That was five years before his letter just weeks ago to Chairman Jordan that he regretted folding to government pressure. That's how long he had misgivings about this.

Real quick, how is the government controlling the ad spend, the advertisers? Well, part of this is known and part of this can be, the full answer can be easily obtained by our representatives in Congress. I'll give you one example of this.

In 2021, I believe it was February 2021, about a month into Biden's term, literally brand new, seat barely warm at the State Department USA desks there, USAID put out this report.

97-page disinformation primer about how to coordinate their whole-of-society counter disinformation assets, their censorship tentacles into the whole of society. Again, the government tentacles into the tech platform personnel, their tentacles into the civil society organizations, their tentacles into the media. And 31 times in this 97-page document,

They cite advertisers and external engagement to advertising companies and advertiser revenue spend pools and advertising exchanges in order to cut off the money flow to social media platforms and independent websites who don't take the best practices, counter disinformation codes that they lay out. So you have a...

That was obtained through a lawsuit from America First Legal. That's a formal U.S. government program dedicated to killing news websites, to killing their advertiser revenue.

And it's all there in black and white that you have the U.S. government contorting the private sector flow of dollars between independent, arm's-length parties, news websites and tech platforms, and advertisers. And by the way, all these advertisers are almost wholly dependent, I shouldn't say wholly dependent, but they are hugely dependent on U.S. government contracts. Four of the... How so? Well, take, for example, there are

four major advertising agency conglomerates. These are places like Publicis and Omnicron. And

They all have billions of dollars in government contracts for their advertising spend. So one of them has a $4 billion Pentagon contract to do all the different advertising spend for U.S. Army recruiting. They have billions of dollars in contracts for HHS to do the government. They have billions of dollars in programming for the Department of Education. If they don't play ball with the government demands on one side of government,

they can potentially lose to a competitor advertising agency for those contracts. And we know that these agencies are concerned about this because, and thank Jim Jordan for this. Jim Jordan, a few months ago, got the Facebook files, the sort of Congress subpoenaed equivalent of the Twitter files that Elon Musk disclosed beginning in 2022. And in the Facebook files, Nick Clegg, who is the head of public policy at Facebook,

His internal communications with the lieutenants at Facebook were concerned about these Biden administration demands to censor all Facebook speech about COVID origins or COVID orthodoxy or COVID, you know, rollout, you know, enforcement rollout.

And Nick Clegg, the head of censorship policies, is telling his censorship policy team, listen, I know we don't want to do this. I know it's ugly, but we need to be receptive. We need to think creatively about ways to be receptive to the Biden administration censorship pressure here because we have bigger fish to fry with the Biden administration on multiple policy fronts.

Meaning, and as I mentioned, this is because they need the State Department's help. I got these calls when I was running the Cyber Desk at State. I got a call one day from nine Google lobbyists who told me, nine of them on a call with me, telling me that the EU Digital Service Act and Digital Markets Act is the number one existential threat to Google's business model over the next five years. And so to represent U.S. national interests, the State Department should consider

you know, reformulating U.S. negotiating posture or policy asks to our EU counterparts in order to protect Google's business model. This happens in every region all over the world, and it is mission critical. Again, Google said that was the number one existential threat to their business model, and they needed Big Daddy government's help to protect them. So Facebook,

is quelling the internal rebellion about losing sovereignty of their own free speech policies to the US government, despite our First Amendment. And the head of the team is telling them, listen, we gotta do it.

because we need their help on multiple policy fronts that have nothing to do with COVID. And those are bigger fish to fry. So we will censor this in order to get that. Now, I don't have, for example, the USAID communications. They actually attach as an appendix in this primer examples of external engagement to the advertising companies. We don't have that as a public document.

Hey, Jim Jordan, if you're listening. Hey, James Comer at Oversight, if you're listening. Hey, House Foreign Affairs Committee who oversees USAID, if you're listening. Representative Michael McCaul.

Get those documents. Subpoena them. Bring these people in for transcribed interviews. Hold hearings. The American people have a right to know about how their own news is being controlled by their own U.S. federal government, despite what we are supposed to be told is the protection of the First Amendment. Do these representatives know this is all happening? Certainly some of them know some of it. Who knows what? Well, there have been...

I think about three hearings in house weaponization on government's role in censorship. There have been, I believe, two or so hearings in house oversight. There have been two or three hearings in house homeland security. Those are all domestic facing. Those are about what DHS is doing on censorship, what FBI is doing on censorship, to some extent what the National Science Foundation is doing on censorship, because that's a major funding artery of this.

But no one has yet touched the State Department or USAID or the National Endowment for Democracy or this censorship mercenary army of soft power NGOs, our swarm army of the blob, in order to influence the course of domestic politics in foreign countries, doing it to our own.

All right, Mike. You're going a little too fast for me to comprehend. I want to go back to the advertisers, the advertising agencies. I believe you said there's about four of them. And so I understand government contracting. So they bid on the government contract to advertise for the Army or the Navy or whoever, whatever recruiting is.

What about all the other advertisers that are in there? What kind of advertisers are we talking? Are we talking about major corporations like Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe's, like these kind of advertisers? Well, it's unclear the extent to which individual advertisers are

back-channeling or are beholden, because these are things for the House Foreign Affairs Committee to turn up. What we know is that many of these blue-chip corporations play a significant part in the private sector quadrant of the whole society. So again, getting back to this whole society framework, that's not my framework, by the way. That is the U.S. federal government framework.

Two years ago, I posted, everyone can see this on my ex-account, it's @MikeBenzCyber, simply run a search for my name and the phrase "whole society." I did like a two and a half minute supercut of just government officials citing the whole society doctrine. Sometimes they cite it so often they apologize at the conference because everyone's so sick of hearing this. But what it means is government, private sector, civil society, and media. So they get private sector partners to help the government censorship goal.

They get the universities to help the censorship go. And so, for example— So all these advertisers are on board with what's happening. Because my question is, is the pool of—how do I frame this? As the pool of content, or whatever you want to call it, platforms, content, voices that they can advertise on,

it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller, correct? Right. And so you would think that some of these private sector advertisers, like some of the companies that I just called out, would be, they got to be tired of this shit because they're losing places to advertise. Well, this is, yes, well, this is one of the open questions is,

How many of these are willing participants and enthusiastic? How many are completely against it and only doing it because they feel economically beholden? And how many are sort of neutral and don't know? But I'll give you some examples to sort of fill in the gaps here. So the State Department works with these entities like the Global Disinformation Index, who folks may have heard of, which basically does ratings of all the different independent news sites.

and gets them blacklisted from the advertisers. NewsGuard is a major player in this space. NewsGuard developed news nutrition labels to sort of do for websites what nutrition labels on milk cartons do. They give you the breakdown of how much

fat and carbs and protein is. And they said that they set themselves up to do news nutrition labels for food nutrition labels for news so that advertisers would be able to have a sense of

how high information integrity this news site was, and if it was a misinformation website or a misinformation social media account. So that, and they announced this before they even launched their first commercial product, is that the intent of this was to deprive advertising revenue. They literally created a for-profit censorship product of vast databases,

over 10,000 websites, might even be 20,000 at this point, websites all ranked by whether or not they are misinformation or not.

you can guess where that falls, literally spin the globe. And I can tell you who in that country, which country's media, you know, is going to be, have a low, you know, a low rating by NewsGuard simply by who the State Department wins the election. Literally run a Google search for threat to democracy, you know, with the name Bolivia, Denmark, you name it, and you can see who will be censored. And NewsGuard,

Its whole business model is selling censorship whitelist labels to the advertising conglomerates

to stop advertising revenue from flowing to websites like Breitbart or OAN or any number of pro-Trump websites here in the U.S. or pro-Brexit websites in the U.K. or pro-Vox party websites in Spain or pro-Matteo Salvini websites in Italy. The AFD party, you can go through the list. It is as predictable as a clock.

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Go right now to hillsdale.edu slash SRS to enroll. There's no cost, and it's easy to get started. That's hillsdale.edu slash SRS to register. Hillsdale.edu slash SRS. Now, but who's on NewsGuard's board of advisors? Let me give you a list. General Michael V. Hayden, former head of the CIA, former head of the NSA, former four-star general,

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former head of NATO from 2009 until Crimea in 2014 during the Obama administration. Rick Stengel, the guy who founded the Global Engagement Center at the State Department that I just mentioned.

that I just mentioned earlier, this start of the censorship spider web at the State Department, and Tom Ridge, the former head of DHS. So on the board of advisors of this key institution who is doing the white label censorship database so that advertisers can't provide advertising revenue to you or to anyone who they deign effectively a populist,

It's being back-channeled by the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, a four-star general, the head of NATO, the head of DHS, and the head of the State Department censorship web. Back in the day, we used to call this Operation Mockingbird. And by the way, a few years ago, they got a $750,000 Pentagon grant. Now, nominally, that was for foreign-facing work. They're a Pentagon contractor. They have the apex predators of the CIA, the NSA, the State Department, DHS, and NATO itself.

And they are determining whether or not Breitbart or Gateway Pundit can get access to an arm's-length independent transaction with a random advertiser.

But again, if you understand it through the lens of the blob, and again, just go back to what I just said about 2017, when representatives from USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, DHS, NATO military contractors were all lining this up and saying, this has to be done to preserve the liberal rules-based international order. Because of populist rise in the EU, we're going to have

Brexit's going to give rise to Frexit and Grexit and Italexit and Spexit. So the EU's going to come undone. So NATO's going to come undone. And as I've said, they described it like unless this CIA, Pentagon, State Department back-channeled sprawling censorship apparatus is set up, it would be like the ending scene in Fight Club where the credit card companies all come crashing down and everything's reset to zero because none of the international institutions are supported by any of the countries who were formerly a party to it.

How far along are we here? We're in the late adolescent stage. When I started crying about this in late 2016, early 2017, it was the infant stage. And there were things that could have been done now to stop this that would prevent it from having taken the maturity that it did.

And it grew from that infant stage into this sprawling network as it became funded by the Pentagon, as it became funded more and more by NATO and by the State Department and USAID and by all the different domestic government agencies. And it grew to this adolescent size

And now it's getting pushback. There's a little bit of arrested development domestically right now since Elon acquired it, since there's been congressional pressure, since there's been civil legal pressure, and since there's been media pressure with more and more people being educated about some of these drivers. But as I said, they have these, they're trying to

usher it along to full maturity by going beyond the four bounds of the continental United States. They are now bringing in their global

pressure ecosystem in order to stop these global social media platforms from being able to operate internationally unless they bend the knee. Give an example, this EU Digital Services Act, which NATO has been the main thought leader behind because NATO thought the biggest threat to NATO was the wrong people winning elections within NATO countries. And so they pushed the EU to pass this through. They have this, they have this

sort of safe harbor, if you will, to get out of the existential punishment to X and Facebook and YouTube and TikTok and any large social media platform that operates there. Because the punishment is, if you do not go through with our stipulated disinformation compliance, you either are forced out of the EU, we will ban your app from the, people won't be able to use it there,

Or you have to pay 6% of your global revenue to the EU. Global? Global revenue. Global revenue. Yes. Now, most S&P companies don't operate at a 6% profit. You can imagine what a, or barely operated that. So you can imagine what a 6% tax on global revenue does. It's bankrupting. And so you either have to pay the bankruptcy, the fee that bankrupts you,

Or you have to do disinformation compliance. Well, what does the disinformation compliance component look like? Well, one of the safe harbors is by providing, essentially delegating it to these independent experts, independent researchers, you know, who are all counter disinformation experts and academics.

I probably don't need to tell you if folks have been following, you know, to this point, who those people are and who they are connected to and whose interests they represent. This is why you see so many CIA analysts, when they leave the agency, there's now a brand new career track for them. You know, they used to go on to be university professors or maybe they'd, you know, maybe they... Well, let's go through for the people that haven't been following. Well...

this field of disinformation studies is what they call it. Because the main point that I'm driving at here is Elon fired, you know, everyone said, Elon, you fired 85% of the company. How is it still working just as well, in fact, even better than it worked? How can any major company fire 85% of its workforce and actually do better than it was doing before, let alone not suffer any setbacks or hiccups?

Well, the answer is because so much of the ranks of Twitter 1.0 were all of these back channels, all of these trust and safety filter mechanisms, all these different touch points to all these different stakeholder interests for influencing the algorithm. And it turns out if you're just a free speech company, you don't need them. But the problem is, and in their own words, and my foundation, FFO, published a huge report on this a few months ago,

where five of the major censorship industry insiders were on a Zoom call, and they complained that when Elon took over X, and then Zuckerberg followed to some extent with some of the changes he made at Facebook and IG, that they lost the relationships it took years for them to develop. They lost the hooks into those companies to make sure that this narrative about

mail-in ballots get censored. This narrative about COVID gets censored. This narrative about climate gets censored. This narrative about the Ukraine war gets censored. Personnel is policy. Whatever a social media company says its policy is, it doesn't matter if they don't have the personnel to enforce it. In fact, even the policies themselves are set by the personnel. And so this is why you see so many former CIA agents or analysts

in the ranks of these content moderation teams. Because part of what the CIA does is counter disinformation. Part of what the special forces, why you see so many former military people or former State Department people, is controlling the information environment. And again, that used to be primarily through propaganda, turning up the knob. But since this Eldorado goldmine of soft power influence through censorship

as opened up to the IC and to the State Department, to the military. This is now where the game is because you win by default. You don't need to worry about whether you're win or lose because the other side can't even print a media story, let alone get a million people to see it. So...

This is why you have folks like, you know, Aaron Berman at Facebook, you know, huge CIA figure. This is why you have, you know, so much of this all across. And, you know, even all the way down to Reddit, you have the content moderation teams being run by Atlantic Council people, which again, seven CIA directors on its board. DHS is disinformation flagger for both

the 2020 election and COVID-19 was the Atlantic Council, one of these core four. The Atlantic Council, again, with seven CIA directors and annual funding from the State Department and Pentagon. Grafica is a huge player in this space, was also partnered with DHS, $7 million in Pentagon funding. It's actually incubated in the Minerva Initiative, which is the Psychological Operations Research Center of the Pentagon. So you have this whole back channel of

that took years between 2016, 2014, 2016, and 2022 for the Pentagon, for the CIA, for the State Department to all get in place so that the right people could be trusted to censor the right narratives or to adjust the algorithm in the right way. And bit by bit in the past 18 months, they have been losing all that. But the EU is their savior here. And this is why, again, my foundation published this several months ago,

They said they'd be in full-blown panic for what's happening right now between Congress and the legal pressure and Elon Musk. But they can panic responsibly because they have a trick up their sleeve, which is that the EU Digital Services Act will force the restaffing of those fired representatives. It will make sure that the back channel stays in place unless the whole company gets bankrupted and shut down. And this is what they're doing in Brazil.

The State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, they don't want to kill X. This is not like WikiLeaks. They don't want to just shut down the operation. Twitter, X, is an essential instrument of U.S. statecraft for U.S. government, U.S. aid, U.S. State Department-funded proxy groups or political groups to mobilize across the world. But they need to destabilize it because Elon is not playing ball.

They need to existentially threaten its business model. They need to balkanize the world. And so it loses its place as this world, multinational company. It gets confined to the tiny island that stretches between California and Florida, whereas all the other platforms are international who play ball. So they lose market share. And the whole thing goes into crisis. The whole thing goes into bankruptcy.

Elon is a triple-digit billionaire, at least for now, and so he's been able to sustain more vicissitudes than Mark Zuckerberg, who folded as soon as the first $60 billion advertiser boycott hit him. But they are doing this death by a thousand paper cuts, this same destabilization strategy they do when they want to financially bankrupt an authoritarian government while pumping up the assets that will take its place. So they want a corporate regime change, Musk.

They want to regionalize the conflict by going after Starlink assets in Brazil and potentially going after Tesla assets in Germany. I would not be surprised if something like that comes next. Until Elon's will is broken or until they can regime change him and put someone else on the platform, and then just like that, the advertisers will come rushing back.

Brazil will let X back into the country. The EU will stop sending threatening nasty grams because the back channel will have been reestablished and all is well now in the world of the blob. How are the people of Brazil reacting to this? Well, I think that much of this still needs to be

articulated. You know, I have had some reticence about publishing some of this and doing some of the video details with the technical information because, you know, there's about, this is something that the House Foreign Affairs Committee should be taking lead on. And I've been trying to popularize this, drop as much as I can without sort of showing everything because I'm afraid that, I mean, imagine if the FBI announced six months before they, you know,

see someone's electronic devices, whose devices they were going to seize. I have had this happen multiple times where DHS and the National Science Foundation will delete evidence, they'll take down videos, now I've archived all of it, but

This is something that should be pried open by House Foreign Affairs. And there's a process, I think, right now, and it could be weaponization, it could be any number of members of Congress. This is really something Congress needs to take the lead on. And so I have been, you know, I flashed these network maps all over social media. I have been describing it in general terms. I've been naming these agencies. And I've been sort of hoping that this would be

popularized through that. But I think to date, a lot of people in Brazil don't know that this is happening because the media and the legal and the congressional investigation has not yet been robust. But I believe that that will change in the month after this episode airs. Have you been in touch with the House of Forward Affairs Committee? I have not. Do you need contact?

I've been hoping. I mentioned Elizabeth Bagley, the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, on the Tucker Carlson interview that I did. And I did 200 tweets naming the U.S. embassy in Brazil and all this as it was breaking out. But this should not be on the civilian class to carry this torch. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, the House Intelligence Committee,

committee, frankly, needs to understand this because this is soft power. A lot of this is State Department, USAID, but I have no doubt, I don't have a security clearance, I can't prove this, but I know the CIA cut out outlets who are all doing this, and I know that they have

purview to coordinate with the IC. But a lot of this is control over the information environment. It is, you know, it is this counter disinformation work that is bread and butter of the CIA. House Intelligence should have ongoing investigations into the role of this blowback on American free speech on American platforms. House Appropriations needs to get involved. The fact is, is the censorship industry would be shut down in a day.

If the hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding subsidizing this, the government funding from the Pentagon, the government funding from the National Science Foundation, the government funding from DHS, the government funding from the Justice Department, the government funding from the State Department, the government funding from USAID, and about a dozen others collectively are providing hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize a censorship mercenary army.

And if you don't have those mercenaries, you don't have those operations, which means you don't have that censorship. The American people are subsidizing their silence. And this goes away the moment our Congress or a court, should the Supreme Court case go up and all this is adequately explained to nine justices,

that so much of what we're seeing is really not ideological. It's just, it's operational. And it's operated through money. Because since, this is why I always call it the censorship industry. It is a censorship industrial complex. That's true, and you can understand it as such. Or just call it the whole society. The whole society counter disinformation, the whole society censorship framework. But more than emphasizing the complex side of it, I emphasize the industry side of it.

Before 2016, you could not get a full-time job getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to censor what other people say on the internet. The content moderation jobs were about getting rid of spam and child porn and a little bit of compliance for other countries that had like hate speech laws. But it has become an industry. It has become a career track. And it is supplanting other career tracks that used to be soft power influence jobs.

If you wanted to work at the heart of the action a generation ago, you'd go to Georgetown and you would study political science or international relations, and you'd get a job on the Hill and you'd work your way up through NGOs or civil society institutions, or you'd tag your star to a member of the House or the Senate, and you'd quietly work your way up the ladder until 10 years later you're in the action.

Well, with this new advent of disinformation studies, and it's folded under so many different programs, it'll make your head spin. The communications departments have this. The applied physics departments have this for the AI censorship software component. The sociology departments have this. The psychology departments have this. The computer science programs at universities have this. The linguistics programs have this.

This broad field of disinformation studies is now an advanced track golden ticket to be at the heart of the action in terms of high-level, high-impact foreign policy blob positions because it doesn't just put you at the heart of Washington and in its own secular interests. It puts you right at the heart of a big government organization

Big, big business and big tech. Big tech is a, is surpassed big oil a decade ago in terms of the most moneyed lobbying interests in Washington. Google is the largest lobbying firm. The wealthiest companies in the world are all what Trump called MAGA. Something I had to fight against when I was in the, in the Trump White House. I was saying these,

They're censoring the people who voted for this government. How can this government continue to support these private sector companies with all these contracts and, you know, just no accountability? Well, at the time, Trump was calling, and I'm not knocking this, could have just been not knowing what's going on, but MAGA was Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon.

because that was driving the stock market. That was a lot of what Trump, I think, was reelecting on. I don't know. I'm just sort of saying this from the outside that I suspect maybe that was one of the reasons there was less pressure on them.

But the fact is, is you get fast-tracked right at the heart of this, right at the heart of the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the Washington, D.C., Beltway Insider, and Google, and Facebook, which is number five or seven by market cap, and YouTube, second most trafficked website on the entire internet, and Twitter, and Amazon, and

Twitch, you get fast-tracked right at the heart of it. So this is now something that is a career track, and you invest your career in it, which means it's unique. You want it to be an expanding pie. You want more and more power to counter disinformation work, more and more funding, because, hey, how are you going to afford a mortgage?

You want to advocate for more funding. You want to advocate for more delegated functions of these outside civil society institutions. You want to advocate for more of these CIA cutouts and State Department grantees and Pentagon contractors doing counter disinformation work to do it. You hitch your star to the future of the field. And so a message has to be sent now. It should have been sent six or seven years ago.

Because if this field reaches full maturity, it will become a lobbying arm as powerful as the military-industrial complex itself, where you need war, or else how are you going to afford private school? Wow. Have you had any headway on this in Congress? Yes, yes, on many aspects of it. Who's helping you? Who are the good guys? You know, what I would say is...

places like House Weaponization and House Oversight and House Homeland Security have done very good, honest efforts within their own secular fiefdoms about abuses from DHS or the National Science Foundation or whatnot. They've done... Now, weaponization is a very, very noble committee. You know, it was set up to...

from what I've heard, is sort of a church committee 2.0, you know, abuses by the government. But, you know, that was the church committee in 1975, 1976, went after the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the IRS. Those are the four main. But it was, you know, it was mostly set up because the CIA was busted doing things like infiltrating left-wing student movements to stop the domestic anti-war movement.

That's exactly what's happening right now on the other side of the political aisle. It was left-wing populists who the CIA and the Pentagon and the State Department wanted to quell because they were undermining Vietnam War funding. They were changing the minds of representatives who were getting skittish on the Vietnam War. And so in order to avoid losing the political domain of war, we...

are those political populist factions from the left wing who undermined that war effort. And now this is just happening from the other side of the equation. It's not political. I mean,

I mean, you can bet if Donald Trump gave him everything they wanted on foreign policy, how quickly so much of this would dry up. And this is why I think, for example, Ron DeSantis does not get tarred with the same icy Pentagon dirty diplomat fervor that Donald Trump does because even though Ron DeSantis goes hard on it,

harder than Trump in many ways on certain domestic left-wing issues, you know, going after wokeness and DEI and all these sort of somewhat partisan issues, his foreign policy vision, as he's articulated, is much more in line with the blob. So it really does come down to that, but this is where I'm getting at with

weaponization has its hands somewhat full, I think, with everything it's taking on with the Justice Department, which, by the way, there's this whole Justice Department element to this blob activity, if we have time for, can touch on. But what I'm getting at is, you know, weaponization is taking on, you know, everything from, you know, this ongoing COVID inquiry to abuses by the FBI, to abuses by the Justice Department, to abuses by a dozen different government agencies.

And they all have to be educated on the layout, the constellation architecture of the dark heart of it all, which is the foreign policy establishment. So this is really something that we should have had a dedicated committee on six years ago. But the issue is, you know, I do think that there could be an element of capture here. If you've seen the movie Big Short, you're familiar with that scene. Mm-hmm.

where the person is talking at the pool to someone from Moody's or S&P, the bond rating agencies, and the person's saying, "Hey, have you looked at these AAA ratings being given by the banks on these mortgage-backed securities?" And the person who's tasked with oversight and accountability, I guess at the SEC, of those debt instruments

is saying, "We don't really look at those anymore. Actually, I'm floating my resume to these banks." And the person says, "Shouldn't this be illegal? You're supposed to be oversight and accountability of the banks." So it's sort of, are you rubber stamping these garbage mortgage-backed securities and giving them a perfect AAA rating because your own financial future is hitched to the star of this financial network?

I have concerns about that relationship between the people who are supposed to be overseeing the blob and the people who are funded by the blob and who are invited to the blob cocktail parties and who do their Aspen ski retreats with fellow blob compatriots. I understand it is a delicate tango dance because what you're talking about is something that has potential huge diplomatic blowback.

So much of US diplomacy hinges on free speech, because this is our cudgel to pry other countries

countries open with. This is our open society doctrine. One of the reasons that George Soros and the Open Society Foundation is such an active and effective co-sponsor of State Department or USAID activity, this notion of open society is what allows our U.S. national interests to penetrate the region and influence the internal politics. And I'm not even saying, I don't

There's different schools of thought on that. I'm not weighing in on whether that's good or bad. I want free speech on the internet. And I want Americans to be able to determine our own elections and our own social and cultural and political discourse. And I don't want to be caught in a proxy war any longer between this foreign-facing department of dirty tricks and our domestic speech at home. But what I'm getting at here is,

I think what needs to be offered to people who are, who meanwhile on both sides of the political aisle, I'm not just talking about Republicans, although they happen to be predominantly the ones who have taken this issue up, is you have to be able to articulate a firewall between the capacity to do this in other countries and democracy.

It's blowback on American citizens here and American platforms that are used internationally. Because I don't think you can get the political will to do heavy surgery to this, at least in the beginning, because we have this Moody's, S&P, Goldman Sachs problem, where the people who are tasked with accountability and oversight are

are all in good standing with these institutions. They don't want to embarrass their friends. They don't want to cause a diplomatic incident that prevents us from overthrowing a dictator in Belarus or stopping infringements on women's rights in Iran or Afghanistan. I'm not trying to have the elephant trample the whole wheat field here. Yeah.

But this specific network has to be stopped. This specific aspect, I mean, isn't propaganda enough? What really changed in 2016? Brexit happened. Trump won the election. What else called for such a dramatic change in our diplomatic toolkit to tack on censorship as an entire subfield of democracy promotion?

That can be taken out now without too much structural damage to our soft power work. That's not going to dramatically undercut, for the time being, what Special Forces is doing. Dramatically undercut, you know, what Voice of America is doing or, you know, or Internews or any of these other giant spider webs of U.S. propaganda.

But it is getting to that point as these censorship institutions develop the tree root of linkages with all the different university centers. We have over 60 U.S. university centers getting $100 million from the U.S. government funding their disinformation studies programs. So already this tree root is vast. You cut off the National Science Foundation funding,

60 universities are going to have people saying, "Oh my God, what am I going to do about my mortgage? Oh my God, what about my college fund for my kids? I've hitched my career to this." And it's tied into our computer science program and our applied physics program, our communications and our sociology programs.

And this is going to make it difficult for judges to want to rule in favor of the First Amendment because they're going to be peripherally aware of the collateral damage they're doing economically. I saw this, again, when I was at state, and I remember seeing a stakeholder memo arguing. At the time, Trump was not even really peripherally aware of all this censorship industry ecosystem, but he was aware of censorship generally, and he was trying to

pass through reforms to Section 230. If you remember this, this is this liability safe harbor for tech platforms, where if you are a neutral platform, instead of a publisher like the New York Times, you're not subject to defamation or libel lawsuits. So you're not responsible for what every person does. You know, basically the thing that Pavel Durov, the Telegram founder, got arrested for. They said he's liable for everything on the platform. This Section 230 protection

has protected Facebook and YouTube. It's what allows us to have social media. And Trump was trying to, changes done through that, you know, he would do these all caps tweets, repeal section 230. And I remember seeing a stakeholder memo arguing that there were about 100,000 jobs in content moderation at that time in 2020 in the content moderation space. And

The economic impact of repealing Section 230 or doing dramatic changes to the content moderation industry ecosystem would be like shutting down a coal mine in West Virginia. Even if you're trying to switch to green energy, look what you're going to do to Appalachia. That's the argument they were making in 2020, four years ago, about the censorship industry. So it's a lot worse now.

And so, but you have to sunset these programs. Fine. You want to pass something that say, all right, it's already so vast. We already have so many in-process regulations. Okay. You got 18 months. Find a new career in 18 months. We're phasing it out. There's any number of solutions that can be pitched, but this education process has to start. And I'm grateful to be able to talk to you and your audience to help advance that because

This is going to take a long time for those interests to all be represented within the Republican Party, within the elements of the Democrat Party that are amenable to this. I think Robert F. Kennedy and the Democrat faction he represents is very much on board with this.

But they all are going to have, you know, one faction is going to say, well, listen, my donors are primarily coming from military contractors. And, you know, we love our military. We do. We don't want the military to be handcuffed because the counter disinformation work it does there is essential to shaping the information environment. Okay, so there might be some concessions you need to make there around the sunset period or the funding or the firewalls.

State Department, the IC, the private sector companies are all going to have their own stakeholder input. But these talks, the strategic imperative has to be airtight agreed to in the process that may take months or a year and a half or something for it to finally get ironed out because it's everywhere now. The roots are in all these government agencies, all these civil society institutions.

So it's a huge task that we have before us. But if I can offer a sort of white pill, a sort of good news on this is I remember so vividly in early 2017 when this tone that I have now is the tone that they had when they set this up.

When you had these USAID administrators and these National Endowment for Democracy folks and these major NATO military contractors and these US ambassadors and all their private sector and financial stakeholders all in rooms saying, "How are we going to put this censorship apparatus in place? What we're up against is so big. These tech companies are so powerful.

They're, you know, they're practically their own private empire. They have this culture of free speech. You know, they have this culture of libertarianism. We're helpless. And you would have the U.S., you know, these U.S. ambassadors talking to people in Greece and in Spain and in Germany. And these German regulators and these Greek regulators are saying, oh.

Google's bigger than us. We can't stop them. The US ambassadors are reassuring them to say, "Listen, it's going to be a long road. It's not going to happen overnight, but we need to begin to take the steps. We're building our consensus. We're doing it multi-stakeholder. It's whole society.

We don't need to win the war in a day, but everyone can do their part, pull their lever, secure the buy-in, and we can bring these tech companies to heel. They will fold to us with our powers combined. We just need to start the process of combining them, and the rest will fall into place or we will call an audible as we go.

And I watched that process, they were doing that in 2017, talking about how they might not be able to, and we really need to make this urgent, we need to pour all our effort into it. And it did take years. It did take three years for them to put in place between 2017 and 2020, the apparatus they would use for the 2020 election. And it didn't all happen at once.

A little bit in 2017, a lot of it in 2018. The 2019 stuff was built on that architecture from 2018. It's the same process for dismembering it. We need to do the same thing they did to put it in drive to put it in reverse. And it can be done, but it will be slow and painful. Do you have any idea who you need to talk to? I've never seen anybody unveil it like this before. I do. Who do you need to talk to? I can perhaps...

Let's go for a beer after this and I'll give you the full list of names. Perfect. Let's take a quick break. Thank you for listening to The Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes, and leave The Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

All right, Mike, we're back from the break. I can't even remember where we left off. Man, it was like drinking from a fire hose here. But what I do want to ask, how many people are going to lose internet in Brazil due to this attack on free speech and censorship? Well, Brazil has 200 million people, and X is the most popular news app in the country. Even now, after the ban came down because of how many people are...

using a VPN despite the threat of fines if you speak misinformation while using the VPN. Well, the reason I'm asking is because, I mean, part of the problem that Starlink was trying to solve was all the people that live in rural communities throughout the world that don't have internet, correct? Mm-hmm. Well, so what's going to happen when all these people lose internet and there's no other provider? Well...

There's a very strange, ominous case scenario, which I've talked about a little bit just on my ex-account, which is that China has just launched this new SpaceX competitor that just recently put its first constellation of its satellite megaproject in play. And this Starlink competitor

competitor, Starlink market killer, is something that I would not be surprised if Brazil pursues as a Starlink substitute. Lula hitched his star to China. Bolsonaro was very hostile to Chinese soft power and Chinese investment in Brazil.

And Lula, who again was backed by the U.S. State Department, they wanted him to win. They sicked the State Department, the CIA, and the DOD on Bolsonaro to warn him against questioning the election. They didn't do that to Lula. And again, this whole censorship apparatus was set up by the State Department and USA to kill Bolsonaro's political support.

So they wanted Lula to win, and Lula has reversed decades of China hostilities. And immediately, as soon as he got into office, declared that effectively China is the linchpin of Brazil's new economic development plan, that they're going to be a long-distance part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, and they're

So they are now hitching their star to China, which means they're going to need China's – they're going to need to do favors for China for China to do favors in kind. I would not be surprised if part of what's happening right now with taking out Starlink is an attempt to do –

either a favor directly or indirectly for their new Chinese partners or to supplant Starlink altogether with this new Chinese competitor who is looking to get market reach and capturing

you know, the 10th largest economy in the world would be incredible as a beachhead, not just in Brazil, but also in all of South America. But this also begs very strange questions about why it is the U.S. State Department so vociferously backed Lula when Lula so vociferously backs China. I mean, this is, wow, that's even...

That makes this even more alarming than it already is with China and all the data collection that they're doing. So do you think we're going to start to see this, the Chinese? What's the name of the company?

I forget. Everyone can look it up. If you just literally Google China Starlink competitor, you'll see. I don't want to butcher it, but I think it actually even sounds similar to Starlink. So if they get more countries to do this, they're all going to start using Chinese internet? Yeah, it's the Huawei strategy, which with capturing the IT and the 5G market,

So that's how bad the US wants to censor us, is our number... They would rather have the entire world on Chinese internet, our number one adversary, rather than let people have free speech and use Starlink and X. It's very strange at a moment when Tim Walz was just selected as the vice presidential candidate of our current vice president running for office, meaning...

if Kamala were to win and something were to happen to her, Tim Waltz would be the president of the United States, the commander in chief. And Tim Waltz has been to China over 30 times. He's been giving, you know, there's an article from him in college where he said he brought so many gifts home from China. He couldn't, couldn't carry them all. You know, he frequently speaking at these friends of China events and, you know, his whole, his whole since college has, has been tied to these Chinese networks and,

seven ways from Sunday, and then you have the State Department literally sicking the CIA, the State Department, USAID, the Pentagon, and a hundred U.S. government-funded soft power swarm army influence institutions in order to pull the strings to soft rig the election for Lula. When Lula

pre-announced how China was going to be the linchpin of the strategy, has completely reversed Brazil's diplomatic posture and giving them everything, and is now kicking out Starlink at the exact moment that Starlink's Chinese competitor comes online. It makes you wonder if the blob's diplomatic apparatus that we use both to influence foreign countries

And also, as a department of dirty tricks against our own citizens, if there's an element of it not being just organic evil. Very interesting. Let's talk about the Atlantic Council Cooperative Agreement. Yeah, so this institution we've now mentioned a couple times. The Atlantic Council is NATO's think tank, is what it's known as. But that's really the best way to understand it, is it's sort of the...

plausibly deniable civilian consensus-building apparatus for NATO's geopolitical agenda. So if the U.S. military and the U.K. Foreign Office and Brussels and the CIA want to do something in a certain region, but the civilians there need to pass laws to make that happen, or it would help the effort, or the...

different civil society players can help in some way. It's intermediated by the Atlantic Council. This is why the Atlantic Council gets annual funding every year from 11 different U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Department of State, the Department of Defense, including separate allocations from the Army, the Marines, and the Navy.

CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy, and it has seven CIA directors currently, as we speak, on its board of directors. I say this a lot, but a lot of people don't even know that seven former number one heads of the CIA are still alive, let alone all clustered on the board of a single entity that also happens to be this primary coordinator of internet censorship all over the world, effectively, from the U.S. to Brazil to the E.U.,

But another strange aspect of this is you have to understand how this diplomatic defense intelligence apparatus interacts with Chamber of Commerce companies and energy companies in particular. Energy companies are highly dependent on the battering ram of the Pentagon to secure and protect energy.

gas pipelines or oil resources, wars for oil. Folks may be familiar with that sort of theme song that Democrats complained about during the Bush era. So the Pentagon often is this sort of battering ram of oil and gas companies. The State Department often has to play a role in negotiating or brokering energy deals.

And the CIA plays a highly active role in order to do the sort of political subversive work or the soft power and plausibly deniable soft power influence work that goes into shaping those political outcomes in terms of conceding to the State Department's demands.

or potentially destabilizing a country so that the military can secure those energy resources. And so it's not unusual for the Atlantic Council to have these relationships with energy companies. In fact, they are funded by many energy companies. But what you're referring to here is on January 19th, 2017, one day before Donald Trump took the oath of office in 2017, there was a very peculiar event

partnership inked between the Atlantic Council and an energy company. Because that energy company was Burisma, the famous private, largest private gas company in Ukraine.

And I've been making the point now for many years that the reason Hunter Biden is untouchable and the Burisma scandal could not be brought to light and the FBI interfered in the 2020 election and told Mark Zuckerberg not to publish anything about a leaked story about Hunter Biden and Burisma. Remember, the FBI specifically mentioned Burisma.

to Mark Zuckerberg in the context of that laptop story, is because Burisma is at the dark heart of the grand Ukraine energy play. I mean, we could go really deep on this. I mean, the short version of it is it has been a central plank of U.S. statecraft in seizing Eurasia, which has trillions of dollars in natural resource. Russia alone, it sits on $75 trillion worth of natural resources.

For context, the US only sits on 45 trillion gross. And then you have Uzbekistan, you have the whole Caspian Sea, you have the whole Central and Eastern Europe arc of Eurasia. It is where most of the world's resources are. And so that has been the long-range plan since the Cold War of politically acquiring those countries.

And the expansion of NATO has solidified that since 1990 and the early 90s when we told Gorbachev NATO wouldn't expand one inch to the east. But we've acquired all those territories over time. So I'm going with the long version now just because we're just going to do it. But stop me at any time.

In the 1990s, Russia was basically a U.S. vassal state. It was like greater Alaska. Boris Yeltsin was our puppet. He was literally giving real-time updates to the National Endowment for Democracy, our big CIA cutout, in 1993 when he was bombing his own parliament building, who were filled with nationalists who were opposing Yeltsin for going through with the shock therapy privatization to Western stakeholders.

you had $2 trillion worth of wealth held by the government of the Soviet Union when they turned into a capitalist state, when they transitioned from the communist government to a democratic one with elections of Yeltsin and then Putin. As part of that becoming a democracy,

the State Department, the Harvard Endowment, Wall Street banks, the George Soros financial firms, the Bill Browder financial firms, all of these different

whole of society, international financiers and business interests descended on Russia to buy up at fire sale prices all of these previously state-owned assets. This is a big part of our diplomatic toolkit. When we transition an authoritarian government, we will privatize their gas companies, their oil companies, their diamond mines, their copper, whatever it is that's being held in trust for the people so that

whatever grows out of their soil, whatever flows from their Nile, whatever is in their caves and mountains, it's no longer for those people, it belongs to Exxon Mobil, it belongs to De Beers, it belongs to Monsanto.

And so those companies work with the State Department. They are part of these stakeholder negotiations within the blob. And so privatization is always, always, always on the table whenever we topple the government. And we work with many back channels to accomplish that.

might be a little bit outside the scope unless you're super interested, but effectively in the 1990s, Russia was our vassal. In fact, we even, you can watch a movie called Spinning Boris. It's a Hollywood movie with Jeff Goldblum, you know, from Jurassic Park, but it was

This movie was about basically the U.S. efforts and the U.S. government efforts to rig the 1996 election for Boris Yeltsin because his own people hated him so much for giving their country to the United States and selling them out and handing it all over to George Soros and the Harvard endowment.

and Wall Street and London banks that they wanted him out. So the U.S. had to send in a Hollywood team, had to send in political consultants, had to send in, you know, TV advertisements, had to fund all these civil society institutions to astroturf some sort of political semblance for their puppet. This is a problem we ran into in Afghanistan, for example, with people upset at Hamid Karzai. This is a very common thing is we

you know, invade a country or we take over political control, the people have nothing and they're unhappy. That's why we want people to have nothing but be happy. When they're unhappy, they go against us and they might depose us from power. But effectively, when the Russian stock market crashed and finally there was no gas left in Yeltsin, Putin rose to power. And the big way that he reasserted Russia's emergence

on the world stage was through what our State Department called energy diplomacy, or basically soft power influence using Europe's dependency on Russian oil and gas, particularly the gas. Because a couple decades ago, 100% of Europe's natural gas, practically 100% of it almost, came from Russia. And this is just the natural gas

result of the economics of gas. Natural gas is very cheap. You take it out of the ground, you put it in a pipeline, you take it to the other point, and the other country is gas. The only real alternative to that is something called liquefied natural gas, LNG, something folks may have heard a lot about because it's a major, major part

It's this much more new technique than simply gas pipelines, but essentially what it involves is you can do it over much longer distances. You can do pipelines over whole oceans because, or not pipelines, because it doesn't require a pipeline. You liquefy the gas when it comes out of the ground, you store it in a container, you ship it to any point on Earth or to Mars hypothetically, and then you deliquefy it, but that's very expensive.

it's much, much more expensive. And so countries naturally wanted to buy Russian gas rather than much more expensive North American LNG. And because of their dependency on Russia for that, when Putin took power and began to wrest himself off of the sort of Yeltsinite, sort of NATO-friendly relations,

He used Europe's dependence on Russian gas to trade that for favors to get more Russian political influence over Central and Eastern Europe, to increase trade ties, to increase political ties, to create this sort of Russian soft power influence over the internal politics of countries stretching from Germany all the way into the Baltics.

And around 2005, 2006, this begins to be a problem for the State Department because at that point, Russia was using a lot of hardball tactics. In Georgia, they turned off the gas. It was going to be a cold winter in these Central and European countries unless they gave Russia what it wanted on its trade terms and its security terms and its political influence terms because they were dependent on Russia for gas.

And so when this started happening time and again, the State Department developed a counter strategy. Again, this is 16 years ago. The State Department, with assistance from CIA and the Pentagon and the whole diplomatic toolkit of energy NGOs and things like this, in order to get Europe to get off primarily hydrocarbons, at the time that was the main advantage that Europe had, is sort of

before the fracking revolution really took off, but also to go through what it called energy diversification, which meant that as part of America's security guarantees for Europe, as part of our diplomatic and financial support and guarantees for Europe, they would have to buy more expensive gas from the West

than gas from the east. Now, you can only do so much before a country goes broke, unless they have an alternative gas supplier, and this is where Burisma will come back into the picture.

But so these countries went through about a decade of diversification milestoneing. They went from 100% to 80% to 70% to 60% Russian gas as the State Department continually applied pressure for them to give their taxpayer dollars to Americans and British companies like Shell,

instead of from the Russian Federation via Gazprom. So the State Department has seen Gazprom as an instrument of statecraft for Russia, again, for 16 years now. And there was a time when Gazprom was the largest company in the world in the early 2000s, just to give perspective for how influential this was before this energy diversification program cut back on a lot of their profits.

But the key to this was Ukraine, because all of this gas pipeline architecture is already pre-existing. There's the natural gas pipelines that go directly from Russia into Ukraine and then on into Europe, and then there's an alternate pathway that was established

years ago called Nord Stream 1, which was directly into Germany. And then Germany, you know, as folks know the tale, tried to develop Nord Stream 2 with Russia. And what happened to that happened to that. But this State Department, CIA, Pentagon strategy of killing Gazprom and replacing the gas market with Americans, Canadians,

Brits, has been this long-range plan that has been the bane of American statecraft because their inability to get it down to zero, their inability, you know, it's two steps forward, one step back, three steps back, as different rising politicians in Central and Eastern Europe want what's best for their people.

They are responsible to their constituents. Their people want cheaper energy. Russia's offering the cheaper energy. So absent the ability to provide a cheaper commodity product, the people organically have wanted that Russian gas, and so they had to constantly suppress populist political groups in Central and Eastern Europe who might run on a platform or who are running on a platform of buying energy from Russia as fuel.

you know, countless of these have. And so this has been part of the State Department manipulation of all these different elections in order to kill the right-wing populist party who's running on buying Russian energy. Now, where Burisma comes into the picture is, actually, if I can lay out one quick thing first, which is you have to also understand

What was the John McCain quote about how Russia is just a gas station with a standing army or just a gas station with a military? It's this famous quote that Russia doesn't have a robust technology sector or retail sector or they're basically just a giant economy built on the fact that the world's number two and three respectively resource for oil and gas.

They export that for profit, and they use that profit to build up a giant military that can rival NATO. And so they're a gas station with a military. Well, what happens if you kill the gas? There's no military, which means all of Eurasia falls bit by bit. Take Ukraine. Take the whole Caspian Sea. Take the whole Black Sea. Take Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. Take...

Take Africa. I mean, Russia and the United States, as well as France, are locked in this proxy war. China's also a player over Africa. This is a point that I made on Tucker Carlson recently, is that you have, just in the past year, you've had the Ivory Coast, Mali, Chad, Nigeria, all of these countries

francophone countries that have been split the baby between US interests and French interests in those colonial regions have all been toppled in coups, military coups backed by the Russian army, where they are burning French flags and raising Russian flags.

and Russia is providing the small arms munitions. If you remember, Obama tried to invade Syria. Why did he get repelled? Because Russia militarily backstopped Assad and gave them the anti-aircraft missile defense systems that prevented us from doing a bombs over Baghdad strategy. So all over the world, Russia is militarily backstopping

the folks in the crosshairs of the Pentagon, and all of that comes crumbling down if you kill Gazprom and Rosneft, the oil company. But all of this can be done by simply killing the Nord Stream pipelines in Germany and killing Russia's control over two regions in Ukraine, the Donbass and the Crimea Black Sea region. And this is what they were doing in the years before the 2014 coup attempt.

that our embassy did in Ukraine. Between 2011 and 2013, Chevron signed a $10 billion deal with the other major player in this with Burisma. And apologies for the long version, but I think it'll all make sense at the end. Burisma is the largest private sector gas company in Ukraine. NAFTA gas is the big state-owned one. And NAFTA gas collects all the transits from all the Russian gas that goes through into the rest of Europe.

So, NAFTA gas has this spider-like gas pipe architecture that goes all into Europe. And Burisma essentially feeds then into NAFTA gas, is the easiest simplified way of thinking about it. Now, Burisma held these mining rights in the Donbass and these mining rights in the Black Sea Crimea region. This is important because those are the precise two places that fell to Russian control in the post-2014 coup. But in the run-up to that,

All of these NATO energy stakeholders bet the farm on this grand Ukraine energy play of kicking Russia out. That was part of what the coup in 2014 was because Yanukovych was dragging his feet on privatizing Naftogaz and dragging his feet over signing this trade deal with the U.S. and the IMF, and he went with this Russian customs deal. And

You had all of these US and British energy companies in the two, three-year span before that, sign multi-billion dollar deals with the, with NAFTA gas, Burisma's, what Burisma feeds into, because they were skating to where the puck was going. Chevron signed a $10 billion deal with NAFTA gas.

Shell, which used to be Royal Dutch Shell, but now it's just London based. So it's Shell signed a matching $10 billion deal with Nafta Gas. Halliburton, Dick Cheney's company, where he was the chairman and CEO, owns the refining rights to it all. And if all of these major stakeholders were set to make huge windfall profits, the moment Nafta Gas was privatized, so they got all the profits coming through, and to extract,

all of the shale that was sitting in the mountains of the Donbass and offshore in the Black Sea. So we overthrew the government of Ukraine, but then in the countercoup, all of those assets were lost. So these billions of dollars of investments

We're now sitting in Russian territory. So the only way to get them back is to have U.S. taxpayers pay the CIA and the Pentagon and Ukrainian paramilitaries to take that military territory back by force. And if I can just say one more thing on this is,

Burisma was part of this. One of the reasons Hunter described what he was doing with Burisma as a patriotic, you know, he was serving his country by making, what, 50 grand, 60 grand a month on the board of a Ukrainian private gas company is because he was pitching. We now know, as of a few months ago, this came out in documents that were publicly published,

That Hunter Biden's own law firm was pitching to the State Department that Burisma was an essential instrument of U.S. statecraft, and so the State Department should take action to secure its licenses, to protect it from prosecutors, to basically bulk it up because it was a beachhead against Russian gas.

And we know that Hunter Biden was putting pressure or that he, the State Department actually published this a few weeks ago, was having conversations with the U.S. ambassador in Italy so that the U.S. ambassador in Italy could put pressure on the Italian government for rights that are shared between Italy and Greece. What I'm saying is, is

was this Pentagon CIA plan to kill Gazprom and put the substitute supply of the gas supply coming from two different sources: LNG from

from North America and from Britain. So like, you know, Houston is one of the reasons that the Dick Cheney, George Bush mafia hated Trump. You know, part of this was this Houston LNG was going to ship out and it was going to be a NAFTA gas. You know, it was going to basically be the new supply chain for Europe as we're seeing it now is in the past few years. It was just why they've all made record profits as this war has gone on.

But Donald Trump's neutrality and threatening to withhold military support, remember that's what he was impeached over in 2019, threatened to throw a monkey wrench in this private profit cabal.

So there are only two ways to get that gas supply to where Europe needed it. One is LNG coming from North America, but the other one is building up Ukraine's endogenous gas supply because Ukraine sits on Europe's third largest unexploited volume of shale. And then add to that all that in the Black Sea. So Ukraine could have a very robust, independent, sort of Ukrainian version of Gazprom,

if they could simply be weaned off of it and the expensive investments were all made by the companies to get it off the ground and rolling. But that means you need to make sure the Ukrainian government does not do this. This is a hard process that's much more expensive than simply going with Russia because you have to set up this new infrastructure, you have to transfer all the ownership. Ukrainians don't make money from it. These are not going to be held by Ukrainian companies. They're held by

American stakeholders and Wall Street and London. So they're the ones mining the gas, but their people are not the ones who are getting the profits. I mean, this is like, you know, if you, I mean, this was the problem people had in the Panama Canal in the 90s, you know, the Panamanians. We have this Panama Canal, but, you know, it's owned by, this is just a common problem people have. Is it good? This makes a lot of sense.

Well, so the goal was to build up Burisma and at the same time you're privatizing Nafta gas because that alleviates the otherwise diplomatic torture you need to do to countries from buying all this expensive LNG from North America. You have an endogenous cheap gas supply

that you can just take out of the Donbass and Crimea. And so it's a very elegant solution to the diplomatic problem. But the problem is, is you need a diplomatic department of dirty tricks to kick Russia out, to make half of Ukraine's population, which are Russian ethnics and Russian speaking, go along with it. So you need to overthrow the Ukrainian government if Yanukovych equivocates, which he did and which they did.

And when Russia backstops it with little green men, you need the Pentagon, you need NATO, you need British special forces, you need Canadian special forces to take the country back. And if Russia then doubles down by militarily invading, well, now you need basically a full-scale proxy war. And the problem is, this is a trillion-dollar market. And these are companies that have already made multibillion-dollar investments in neutrality with Russia, as Trump was talking about,

throws a monkey wrench in all of it. It's already a fragile, sensitive operation that only has a 50% chance of working. Trump could ruin the Bush dynasty. This makes a lot more sense than it did. And the Soros dynasty. Soros is an investor in Halliburton and a major part of this, this NAFTA gas privatization effort. This is one of the reasons that foreign policy synchronized in 2014 with, um,

on Russia after the Crimea annexation. So I just want to, for the audience, so basically the portion that everybody's fighting over is the big gas. Yeah, that's the main, that's the main already. Now look, there's, you know, trillions of dollars in other sort of critical minerals. There's a whole sort of wheat agriculture element of it. The main... But it disrupts

It disrupts Russia's pipeline into Europe because now we're coming from- We can retake Chad and Nigeria. We can invade Syria. The world is ours if you simply- Now, of course, this is part of where China comes back into this because everyone expected Russia to die when we did this. When we started this process of kicking them out and sanctioning everything, but they're evading the sanctions by going through India. And now they just set up this giant power of Siberia pipeline with China.

So they're rerouting from Europe to China, so it doesn't solve this military objective. But, you know, which again gets back to the strange question of why are they not trying to stop the power of Siberia pipeline?

Are they beholden to the... Are there other conversations being had with the Chinese? Why is China not being threatened with sanctions if they really mean what they say about sanctions evasions on Russia? Well, why do you think? I mean, probably because...

We can go after Ukraine or China. What's the easier target? Well, that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that there are financial interlinkages between our political class and the incredible economic lever that China has that is influencing policy. But I do want to say a few more things about Burisma because I'd feel remiss if I didn't.

It's important to keep in mind that Hunter Biden, as I mentioned, was on the Chairman's Advisory Board of the NDI, the National Democratic Institute, which is the DNC branch of this prolific CIA cutout, the National Endowment for Democracy, which again was created in 1983 because the CIA wanted an NGO constellation to do the kinds of work

soft power influence work that it used to do as a clandestine operation. But by doing it as a public-facing democracy promotion operation, you can scale it much better. It doesn't seem like it's a big infraction on civil liberties. It's not a diplomatic incident if someone gets caught because the US just straight up announces, "We are promoting democracy in the region." And that may mean funding the political opposition. That may mean funding media that goes against one candidate for another.

So this is a CIA cutout that Hunter Biden was on the chairman's advisory board while he was doing this barisma work. You don't get on the chairman's advisory board of NDI unless you have some sort of at least informal relationship with or linkages to intelligence because you are doing intelligence work through this barisma.

intelligence back-channeled NGO. And literally both the founders of the National Now for Democracy have outright come and said that they formally do now what the CIA used to do and lost its license to do. Then you have the fact that we have the CIA interfering in Hunter Biden's IRS case. If you remember when the DOJ tried to talk to the guy who paid Hunter Biden's taxes for the past five years, the entertainment lawyer in L.A.,

At least according to the congressional whistleblower, you know, with a formal sworn affidavit, the CIA intervened and told the Justice Department not to question Hunter Biden's chief financier.

So you have these CIA interlinkages directly with that affiliation. You have the CIA waving the Justice Department off of who's funding Hunter Biden, who was on the board of directors at Burisma right next to Hunter Biden. If you recall, there was another person from the United States. It was Kofor Black.

Kofor Black spent 30 years in the CIA and also on a State Department Distinguished Medal Award. But he was 30 years in the CIA, and in fact, you can read all about this, he was Mitt Romney's Sherpa to the CIA, to the intelligence community, when Mitt Romney ran for president against Barack Obama in 2012. So he was the guy that the presidential nominee in 2012 turned to to get the support of the CIA from the inside. And by the way,

Who's Mitt Romney on the board of directors of? The IRI, the International Republican Institute, the GOP branch of the National Endowment for Democracy, the GOP branch of the CIA. So you have this one-two punch of the Democrat wing of the CIA and the Republican wing of the CIA, both represented on this tiny little board of directors of the exact same

private gas company that is literally being pitched to the State Department as an instrument of statecraft against Russia. Well, by the way, what is the CIA's job? It's to do plausibly deniable soft power influence work that advances the State Department agenda. So the moment the State Department agrees, yeah, it is an instrument of statecraft, you bless all of these CIA activities to do the corporate espionage, to broker deals, to do money laundering in order to make these things happen.

CIA calling people off of the Justice Department to avoid looking into the sources of those funding.

This is why Hunter has been protected, at least until now. He was a where's Waldo figure in this web of intrigues around the perception of Russia as an instrument of statecraft and the serendipitous windfall profits that comes from using the battering ram of our Pentagon and CIA and State Department to secure lucrative energy deals for Chamber of Commerce energy companies.

on the atlantic council signed a deal with them the day before trump was sworn into office so you can imagine how those seven cia directors felt you know when uh donald trump was uh making that phone call to zielinski about potentially holding up military aid and of course they played a very active role in uh in setting up the censorship industry in the first place it was actually atlantic council meetings where many of the very first global disinformation conferences were run out of

It was the Eurasia Center out of the Atlantic Council specifically, and the Brent Scowcroft Center, as well as what was called the Digital Forensics Research Lab. The Digital Forensics Research Lab at the Atlantic Council was actually one of the first movers in the whole censorship industry, before the 2016 election even. It was NATO's sort of one of their first spawn of architecture censorship institutions after Crimea in 2014. I think they were set up in like 2015 essentially and began

sort of doing this network mapping of pro-Russia political movements and these sorts of things, and then all this was added on. But again, what is an institution getting Pentagon funding and State Department funding with seven CIA directors doing, intermediating this whole network? I do have a question, and this could obviously go really bad and take us into World War III, which we'll get into in just a second, but I'm trying to think this through, but I've...

I got to be honest, with the way it's messed up as it is, it seems like if that plan would have actually worked, it would have been in our best interest. Because we're selling, what was it? Liquid natural gas? Liquified natural gas. Liquified natural gas. We would be exporting it to Europe in conjunction with Europe no longer getting their gas from Russia. Yep. Which...

If I remember correctly, Trump actually warned Europe about getting all of their gas from Russia, which would potentially maybe not destabilize, but it would be a major punch to Russia's bottom line. And so why is this a bad thing? I don't get into the question of whether it's a good or a bad thing because I can see both sides. I can see people saying, well, this is great for U.S. interests,

in theory, our major oil and gas companies, you know, make these big profits, you know, that's going to spill into our economy. It's going to this trickle down, you know, economy impact so that people will be able to buy more homes and afford, make college more affordable and have, you know, 401ks and pensions and,

That's one argument. The other argument is you are, the sort of left-wing anti-imperialist argument is this is NATO playing God over the democratic sovereign states in Central and Eastern Europe. You're not achieving this plan because you're offering a better gas product. You're not offering to sell Europe the energy, the commodity energy, meaning it doesn't matter really the quality of the product, gas is gas.

You're not offering it at a cheaper price. These companies aren't taking a haircut on the profit margins they're selling to them. In fact, if they're forcing Russia off, they can hike the price way up, which they've done, because now they're completely dependent. So their argument is this is basically U.S. imperialism, and it renders American democracy promotion a total –

hypocritical joke because you don't believe in democracy if anyone challenges you in enacting the grand Ukraine energy play. You coup them out of office just like you did to Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014 and just like you're threatening to do in Slovakia and Serbia and all these other countries. Well, then on top of that, you also have all of Europe because you had mentioned that it would be under U.S. companies' control. Right. Crimea.

So then you have all of Europe beholden to U.S. companies' natural gas on top of our own exports. Right. So I avoid the question of whether it's a good or a bad thing to pursue the grand Ukraine energy play because I can see both sides of it, and that's not my fight.

My mission is free speech on the internet. And the problem is, is they believed, because of how sensitive this was, because of how much money was at stake, because of how much was at stake geopolitically and militarily and diplomatically and in terms of intelligence work, and how it impacted reconstruction banks and major chamber of commerce companies,

And because there was already so much resistance from these Central and European countries and from Russia, it was already a plan that did not have a guaranteed certainty of success. So you have to stack the deck in its favor as much as possible. And they believed, beginning in 2016, and you can go back and listen to Anders Fogh, Rasputin, the former head of NATO, or Michael Chertoff, or any of these other folks who were involved in this whole thing,

And the way they were talking about in 2016, just go back and run a Boolean search to Timebox this, to the contemporaneous YouTube searches or Google results from this time. And they were complaining that the problem was is people were not believing NATO propaganda. They were believing Russian propaganda all over from Germany to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Moldova,

The whole region was falling under the ambit of Russian propaganda. They weren't believing NATO. And also, it's not just Russian propaganda. Anyone who supports the political party in power or opposition party who wanted Russian gas could also be contextualized as being a Russian puppet. So...

Free speech got caught in this proxy war because in order to stack the deck, to increase the odds of this thing being able to be pulled off, they had to censor the internet. They had to censor the internet first in Central and Eastern Europe, which...

If it had been confined to there, you may have never heard my name. When this started off, you know, in Riga, Latvia, you know, with these centers, NATO Stratcom Centers of Excellence and these NATO censorship centers that sprawled out from there and into Lithuania and Germany, I would have been state a corporate lawyer. But the fact is, is when Brexit happened in 2016, they said, oh my God, it's hit Western Europe.

We need to, the State Department has to start funding London-based censorship firms. We have to start funding a sprawling web of London NGOs and London universities from Oxford and Sheffield and Cambridge. We need to start funding these censorship mercenary firms in London. We need to start working with London members of Parliament in order to censor misinformation, anything that supports the Brexit Party or supports any sort of detente with Russia after the sanctions push.

in the UK and then the Trump election happened in the US in November 2016, a few months later, and the idea that this was just a sort of military operation confined to controlling the information environment all the way out in central-eastern Europe, everything dropped out. US citizens, US news companies, US social media platforms,

We all got caught in the crossfire. And now how much is the grand Ukraine energy play worth? Is it worth the First Amendment? Is it worth having the government control the art? Why weren't they just honest? Honest to who? You're the only one I've heard talk about this. Oh, you should go to their YouTube channel. They talk about it more plainly than I do.

This is one of the things that was so funny when I was getting involved in this in 2016, 2017, is I'd be watching eight hours' worth of these censorship industry conferences. No, no, no. And they'd be laced between energy conferences. I'm not talking about the censorship. I'm talking about the gas. I'm talking about the reason we're there. I've not heard this. Everybody... It's never discussed. Well, if you spend a minute in their world, in their own conferences...

at their own meetings, I mean, you can go to their YouTube page right now. Go to the Atlantic Council's YouTube page. Go to Globsec's YouTube page. You know, go to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's YouTube page. Go to the Wilson Center's YouTube page. I don't think he's on any of, even in Putin's statements, he's not talking about the gas, is he? He was. He's talking about the U.S. taking Crimea for gas. He talks about that stuff, I mean, he talks about this play of

them trying to go through with this energy diversification somewhat frequently, I feel. They said that we were the ones who blew up

the Nord Stream pipelines. But then, you know, I believe he told Tucker Carlson, well, because Tucker Carlson asked, hey, why don't you talk about the Nord Stream pipeline if you think we blew it up? Why don't you make your case on the world stage? And if you remember what he said is, he said the U.S. owns the propaganda apparatus. It's basically feudal. You know, we have diplomatic communications and everyone knows what's up, but we can't compete with the media. So, you know, what can we say? You know, the U.S. did it.

We said that. With what infrastructure can we amplify that message other than Russia today, which is under sanctions and has to register in FARA and all this? And so they do. But part of the issue is there's less hollering about it from Russia than you might expect because Russia

Russia has actually recently, and this is another bane of the blob's existence, is that Russia has actually gotten around these sanctions and some of these cloak and dagger moves by our foreign policy establishment.

by rerouting the gas into Europe through places like India. This is one of the reasons the State Department has such a big censorship operation against Modi in India. If you may remember from the Twitter files, why it was that the Atlantic Council was flagging like 35,000 accounts of pro-Modi accounts on Twitter. What was that about? They want to get rid of Modi. They consider Modi to be, you know, a sort of economic lifeline to Russia, among a few other reasons involving nationalism, populism. But

But so Russia is still, in fact, I don't know if this is still the case, but as of a couple months ago, they actually retook the U.S. as the largest natural gas exporter to Europe.

Because all these different countries that were rerouting the gas and that the sanctions weren't being enforced about. That's why there's this constant sanctions whack-a-mole against countries. But the problem is they're doing it with large countries like India and China, who we don't have the kind of sanctions clout we do against a country like Iran or Venezuela, because these are large, huge economy countries.

Huge population, huge forces on the world stage alongside us. So part of the reason that you may not have heard as much about it from Russia's side is because it hasn't hurt them all that much. They had to pay a markup when they go to China. They had to pay a markup having to go to India because you're rerouting it. But they've been offered a deal that they can live with. And it's mostly the countries that are getting hurt are actually the ones –

Now that our NATO countries who are funding Russia's war, this play to kill Nord Stream and to kill cheap Russian gas to Germany has killed Germany's economy, has killed Germany's industrial sector, has killed their ability to even fund the war. But remember, a lot of this started before the invasion. This has been in play now for a long time. So...

Yeah, if that's helpful. Wow, you put a lot of things into a new perspective for me. But what do you think the probability of this is going to turn into World War III? It's hard to say because I think we may flirt with World War III ever more in a deliberate attempt to avoid World War III. And what I mean by that is we have this technique called destabilization when we're trying to negotiate with the foreign government and they're being uncooperative with

or we sense they're willing to make a deal, but we don't have leverage. And so you can only get leverage through carrots or through sticks, offering them something or hurting them with something and threatening to make the pain go away. And I suspect that what's happening right now with Ukraine's escalation against Russia is

you know, this new incursion into Russian territory and long-range missile attacks against targets hundreds of miles into Russia proper is...

One way to look at it is it puts us on the path to World War III. I actually suspect there's something a little bit more moderate happening in the background, which is that my sense of it, and I don't have any insider knowledge whatsoever, this is just my speculation based on public things I read, is that

The NATO senses that Ukraine is losing more and more by the day inside of Ukraine, and the political frailties around sustaining the funding level are very difficult. But the problem is they don't want to strike a peace deal that includes giving the Donbass or Crimea back to Russia. They would be okay if the war ended and we simply reset back to early 2014.

and just wound back the clock. But the problem is, is Russia will not agree to that given how much they are winning by on the battlefield and the perception that in the long run, time is on their side when it comes to consolidating that political control over Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

And so in order to bring Russia to the negotiating table to have a peace, I call it a peace fire. It's sort of a combination of a peace deal and a ceasefire, but the emphasis is on fire because I believe that even after the State Department strikes this hypothetical deal, we will continue to do CIA or plausibly deniable special operations work to take Eastern Ukraine back and take Crimea back just by having Russia

rogue paramilitaries do it who happen to be trained by Pentagon advisors. The same thing we were doing from 2014 onward where it was Ukrainian paramilitaries from Kiev who were going into eastern Ukraine and taking back these shale regions, but they were funded by the U.S., they were trained by the Canadians. It's a face. Right, but we want to reset it to that, to this sort of Minsk peace period, but Russia won't agree to it, so...

We are trying to present the threat that World War III might happen, that the daughters of your high-level officials may be assassinated as they're riding in their car. We will be striking at your infrastructure inside Russia. If 100,000 Russians die in Moscow or St. Petersburg...

That could foment an anti-war movement within Russia to strike that peace deal on favorable terms to U.S. interests. And so I think they have felt that simply playing defense and grinding down Russia's economy has not worked as Russia has done the sanctions evasion that we just talked about. So now they are trying to do it the other way, which is by causing enough Russian casualties that

that this steadying back to 2014 will happen because Russia will want to make the blood flow stop. Wow. I could talk to you all day, Mike. I'm having fun. Me too. Well, I hate to close it out, but you've got a flight to catch. We've got about eight minutes before you've got to jet. So do you have any closing remarks or anything that you want to get out there?

I would just encourage people to be optimistic in this in a lot of ways, because as much as it feels like we're up against the weight of the world, and some of these forces are so dark and powerful and nefarious in so many ways, this was the world before you could read about it. You know, this was the United States in the 20th century, too. You just...

you know, didn't have access to Twitter accounts or Facebook posts or YouTube videos to learn about it. And we have a level of freedom currently because of Elon Musk and X, because of, you know, what the folks over at Rumble are doing, because of, you know, some of our champions in Congress and in the legal world and, you know, the new sort of media architecture who's able to

amplify all of this, there is a moment to truly have the will of the people respected in this. So don't get depressed when you read about this. If you're new to this, you will go through your five stages of grief.

You will have your denial and your anger and your bargaining and then your depression and then you will finally get to the point of acceptance and things might still piss you off, but you can sort of see this as our inheritance. You pointed this out when you said, well,

Maybe some of this is a good thing. Maybe it's the reason we had cheap gas and affordable homes because this is our inheritance. So it's more like getting to know an uncle than it is about trying to vanquish

some arch enemy but you can follow my work uh online i'm on x at mike ben cyber my foundation is foundation for freedom online it's the same name foundation for freedom online.com and uh sean you're doing the lord's work and i appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today thank you brother all those links will be below and uh one last thing if you had three recommendations for the show who would they be oh man have you talked to chris pavlowski from rumble no

I would say Chris Pervosky from Rumble. Linda Yaccarino would be really interesting from X. And I would say...

A member of Congress like Dan Bishop or Jim Jordan, if you haven't had him on, from my perspective, all three of those people would be really interesting for their take on what they're doing against and about censorship issues, you know, from the independent platform side, from the sort of, you know, ex-leadership side and from the congressional side, you know.

Because we need these stakeholder conversations on the side of freedom. They can't just be on the censorship side. We'll reach out. Mike, that was a fascinating interview and a ton of information. And I really hope to see you again here. Likewise. Thank you. I'll come back to the museum anytime. All right. Cheers. Check out the podcast that inspired Taylor Sheridan's latest series.

There's a stretch of road in a real rich region of West Texas. This region of West Texas, known as the Permian Basin, is in the midst of the biggest oil boom in history. This is a story of roughnecks, billionaire wildcatters, and wannabe dreamers. My name is Christian Wallace. From Texas Monthly and Imperative Entertainment, this is Boomtown. Boomtown. Wherever you listen.