TruthArchive.ai - Tweets Saved By @NewFounding
@NewFounding - New Founding
> The Censorship Industrial Complex > “Elections” as critical infrastructure > Those who join The Blob vs who fight > The winning condition for the censorship empire > @elonmusk vs the censors—can he win? @MikeBenzCyber joins us for one of our most important episodes yet. https://t.co/45gkn3h1wh
Video Transcript AI Summary
This video explores the history and development of internet censorship, highlighting how the internet initially promoted free speech but eventually became a tool for controlling information. The speaker discusses the involvement of government agencies, NGOs, and private companies in shaping online discourse, as well as the use of cutouts to carry out indirect actions. Recent developments, such as Elon Musk's involvement in Twitter and the growing resistance against censorship, are also mentioned. The speaker suggests that the battle over internet censorship will continue, emphasizing the organized effort to challenge it. Additionally, the video delves into the intersection of censorship technology and institutional infrastructure, particularly in relation to election rigging. The role of AI and machine learning in censoring and manipulating information is highlighted, along with the involvement of tech companies and government agencies. The need for legal and regulatory actions, as well as institutional alternatives, to combat censorship is emphasized. Concerns are expressed about the potential impact of encirclement strategies on free speech platforms. The video concludes by emphasizing the importance of fighting against censorship and the various paths to victory in this ongoing battle.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: You get groomed in this business. You know, you go to a high end white shoe university, then you are either you take the tech path through Google or you take the, you know, you take the political path through the hill or you take the human rights path through a through a UN job or through a gongo, you know, government operated NGO. And then you get credentials through the think tanks. You get your fellowships at Carnegie or Atlantic Council or or Brookings. And then by that point, the woman you marry is probably you know, a blob creature.
The people you are you're hanging out with on weekends are blob creatures. Everything your news sources are all blob publications. And nary a hit piece will ever be written about you in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Every golden turd you lay on the sidewalk will be deified as being abstract art instead of an actual piece of crap. I can see why there is so little dissent within the blob.
Speaker 1: Jumping right into it, like, a I didn't realize it was this bad, but you're kind of the expert on this. So why don't you talk us through the history of censorship of the his censorship industrial complex and how it works?
Speaker 0: Yeah. So, you know, the easiest way to sorta understand the history of of censorship on the Internet is to first understand the history of freedom on the Internet. A lot of people, look at censorship as one of the reasons it's such a blasphemous anti American thing isn't just because of the First Amendment, but because the Internet itself was the beacon of American outsourcing of free speech values for 25 years. Internet free speech had a lot of money and power pumped behind it for the 25 years before Internet censorship came around. So, you know, the Internet started as this military project by DARPA, basically to help manage social science research and counterinsurgency to help run the American empire overseas during the Vietnam era, and, a way of digitizing that.
And then when the Cold War ended, 1991, it was privatized through the World Wide Web. The DARPA handed the Internet over to the National Science Foundation, who then basically, you know, spread this infrastructure across the universities, and then it was opened up to the Private Sector. But the private sector was given sort of a steroidal injection, you know, Super Mario Brothers mushroom boost from the National Security State in the form of the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA, and the NSA, all juicing the, Internet commerce and Internet tracking through basically government so I'll give you an example. We had something called Voice of America in 19 forties and fifties. Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia.
There were 100 of these CIA proprietary media stations that the national security state would pipe in after World War 2 ended for soft power influence over countries around the world, as radio was becoming a saturating medium of news. And so this helped get foreign populations around the world hooked on American news, American interests. We could seed stories there. True or false? You know, American cultural icons.
We could we could dominate culture, politics, economic policy, foreign policy, by basically getting a whole population to read our propaganda. There was a catch up period in radio and in TV, during the 20th century, and when the Internet came out, it was one of these new Voice of America type things. This is one of the reasons that the Pentagon spent 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars developing Internet free speech technology, VPNs, virtual private networks to hide your IP address. Tor, the dark net to be able to, you know, buy and sell goods, or trade, or do sort of commerce in the in the dark and avoiding government monitoring of what you're doing, end to end encrypted chats. All these things came out of the out of Pentagon funds to help the state department and the CIA, back dissident groups in foreign countries whose governments we were trying to overthrow.
So free speech was a meme, free speech online was a meme that was championed by our diplomacy, defense, intelligence nexus, state department, defense department, CIA, NSA. Mhmm. In order to maintain and advance the American empire from 1991 until 2016. Really, it's 2014. We can get into get into the weeds of of how this all started, I guess, now.
But
Speaker 2: so So so real quick, you're saying that things like VPNs and Tor that we tend to think of as, you know, hiding from the government or or anti government were actually developed by agents or by okay.
Speaker 1: To promote in other places open communications, ability to disseminate democracy and democratic Right. And all this stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Right. Now, you know, there are terms like Open Society, for example, that George Soros and Open Society Foundation. Now, these aren't just terms from influential, eccentric billionaires. These were ideologies embraced at the highest levels of the Federal Government and of our National Security State because an open society, it's media being open, it's cultural influences being open, it's markets being open, allows the United States, and I'm not even knocking this necessarily. Mhmm.
I need to be, I like to be sort of as careful as I can in this because I'm not sure that I had a problem with this until it all came home. But the fact is, is open societies are easy to pry open, closed ones are not. This is why the State Department is so quick to yell shrill insults about authoritarian societies when they box out Google or when they box out, Voice of America or some state department funded NGO. And we call it authoritarian, but if it were to if any other country were to do that here, they would be shipped out of the country on a cart so fast you couldn't blink first. I mean, we shut down the Internet, you know, on this Russiagate craziness, around just Russia today having a Twitter account.
And, and Sputnik, you know, having viral articles on Facebook. I mean, that was enough. It wasn't even NGOs filled with tens of 1,000,000 of dollars of, you know, Russian Federation money. So but but that's our game that we play abroad. And so, you know, the Internet censorship story is sort of the flip side of that.
It's it's what happens when rigging democratic outcomes through freedom goes wrong. The problem is is after 25 years of internet maturity, with social media, essentially allowing over time, ordinary civilians and citizen journalists, and post accounts, to grow in size unfettered over time, and the market essentially validating them over mainstream news, means that the traditional cutouts that the National Security State, the Federal Government, foreign policy establishment all have to be able to influence society, are actually pale in comparison. And you start having this weird situation as 4 star General John Allen said at a German Marshall Fund Conference in 2019, what happens when the New York Times is reduced to a medium sized Facebook page? I mean, he was arguing that the rules based international order will fall apart if, you know, Ricky Vaughn is able to have a larger Twitter account than, than the New York Times. In a sense, they're not totally wrong, but, you know, their solution is to destroy, every fiber of the social contract that we've had in this country for several centuries.
Speaker 1: Mhmm. Yeah. That's fascinating how that flip happens. And I wanna dig into it a little bit. You've talked about how you've talked about this sleight of hand is it's how I remember it.
Sleight of hand around, critical infrastructure. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it how that all develops?
Speaker 0: Oh, it's so dirty. So so this has to do with the federal government's entry into the censorship industry business. So after the 2016 election, you know, it's really basically, there was a Philippines election in 2016 that went wrong for the CIA, Brexit went wrong, and the Trump election went wrong, all in the same year. And all of the amazing firepower behind Internet freedom coming from the Arab Spring, when all of the Obama administration's adversaries in Middle East, North Africa all were toppled by Facebook and Twitter revolutions. When it went the opposite way through this Internet freedom thing, the foreign policy establishments spook set, essentially out of the State Department, now the intelligence agencies, went on this world tour, around setting up infrastructure to stop so called, you know, disinformation, Russian disinformation, was the initial predicate because that's how you crack open intelligence agency powers.
You need some sort of foreign predicate, a foreign national security threat. Then you set up the infrastructure and then you switch it, you know, once it's there, you can just, you know, you've developed the Death Star weapon, now you can just fire it at any plant, doesn't matter what the initial premise was. So there was a DHS sub agency called CISA, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. And this thing was initially set up during the height of Russiagate in November 2018 to be able to stop Russian hacking. You know, at the time, there were these allegations that Russia had hacked the DNC servers.
It wasn't Seth Rich. It wasn't anything like that. It was the Russians, and they had this firm called CrowdStrike, which was supposedly validating that. Although CrowdStrike ended up walking it back a year later, amazingly. But by that point, the agency was already set up.
And at the time, cybersecurity was the only offensive, term for the Federal Government to be able to to act in in in cyber, you know, cyber takedown activity. So cyber security at that time in 2018 meant things like malware, phishing, you know, various forms of hacking attacks. Yeah. But what happened was, after Russiagate fell apart in the summer of 2019, they were already teaming up to stop rushing disinformation because of basically a a CIA op, starting in January 2017 to paint the social media as being inundated with Russian bots and trolls. All of this, again, turned out to be dog water.
But what happened was, CISA, this DHS agency, set up all these relations with the with the social media companies, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, even even the minor ones like Twitch, Discord, all to have these government affairs folks and these content moderation teams work with CISA to stop, and to censor and to ban Russian narrative pro Russian narratives, anti NATO narratives, basically, right wing populist accounts, and a little bit of left wing populist accounts, like the Corbynites in in in the UK and some of the early Bernie Sanders, supporters before he, you know, turned to completely to the to the dark side, if you will. But but essentially what happened was, they did this multi front switcheroo. They said, okay, well, Russiagate fell apart, but really, Russian disinformation is pales in comparison to the threat of domestic disinformation at home. They went from a sort of national security predicate on the Russia side to a democracy predicate at home, and this was buoyed by nonstop media memery of the term democracy, democracy, democracy, and disinformation, disinformation, disinformation. They sort of blew up the gravity of this thing to where it sucked everything into it and it allowed it to be very easy for government agencies to say, oh, you know, we're we're advancing the principles that are so hot right now in the news.
And then the other thing they did is they said cybersecurity, actually includes cyber disinformation and misinformation threats. And this is the real the real dirty dirty one because this allowed them to say that cybersecurity does doesn't just mean hacking, it also means misinformation about critical infrastructure. Because DHS has a license to take on threats to critical infrastructure. So they declared elections to be critical infrastructure, and they declared public health to be critical infrastructure. So by declaring elections to be critical infrastructure, if you as a civilian say that you think there's election fraud with mail in ballots.
That was deemed to be delegitimization, which was, which was said to be a cyber attack on the critical infrastructure of elections because you are undermining the perceived legitimacy of of elections, and this is essentially an attack on democracy, and it's attack on on elections themselves. And so, literally, you know, DHS set up this cutout called the election integrity partnership, which got 22,000,000 tweets labeled as misinformation, and they were working in coordination with DHS. They were set up by DHS. So you have this situation where DHS basically banned 22 that's just on Twitter alone. They did this for 15 different platforms.
That's 100 of millions of pieces of content at the height of a highly contested US election, completely banned. And now I let the accounts often get banned along with it. So you've rigged the entire information ecosystem by doing this switcheroo around cybersecurity.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's crazy. It's like they set up the both the the object, you know, essentially making somebody, like, you go to a power plant. You plant a bomb. You blow that up.
You're doing the same thing if you say something about elections being the power plant and the bomb is just maybe you asking a question online.
Speaker 0: And they knew this too. You know, one of the main guys behind this, a guy named Alex Stamos, who's the head of something called the Stanford Internet Observatory, which is basically a giant CIA cutout. I mean, the whole thing is mobbed up with spoofs like you like you wouldn't believe. And, you know, he's he's on tape talking about how, you know, at the time, all we really had was the word cybersecurity to do all this stuff. So we had to really jam it in there.
But, you know, one day, these will probably, you know, formally be known as separate fields. You know, we just don't have the political cloud essentially to do it yet. So they they knew what they were doing. They knew what they were doing the whole time. As early as as 2017 when all this stuff was getting started, even before the infrastructure, the censorship infrastructure connecting the government to the private sector, to the civil society institutions, to NewsMe, and fact checking.
Before that whole whole of society quadrant was set up, they knew what they were doing. I mean, these people are all on tape at at Atlantic Council Conferences, which is a which is a big NATO cutout. It's got 7 CIA directors on its board. It had a formal partnership with Burisma. It's it's a whole nasty gram of sort of Biden intelligence world intrigue.
And, in February 2017, they were having these conferences talking about the need to establish a sort of Russia connection, that would eventually be used, you know, because the public wasn't ready. You boil the frog type stuff. Also, State Department people going to Europe and pressuring them to adopt, censorship regulations like NESTIG in Germany in August 2017, knowing that America couldn't do that yet. You know these diplomats saying this openly in these in these public conferences that that if if Europe leads, America will follow through norms and standards, the laws that are adopted in Europe, and also these European laws will compel these these norms and standards and practices on the censorship side that will have to be glommed on over to the US for market continuity. Things like AI censorship.
It's the things that were real game changers. Because before 2016, you couldn't even censor the Internet at the scale you do now because everything was human moderated other than child porn and spam. But there was no speech related, AI pre censorship. But now everything, every word you speak. If this goes up on YouTube, every single word we're saying right now is going into is going into thousands of trust and safety layers, parsing every word, parsing the proximity of words to one another to scan for terms and phrases that are deemed to be borderline content or that are basically proxies for, you know, populist political support.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So was the singular event that triggers this into overdrive the 26th or sorry, the 2020 election? Or, you mentioned 2014 earlier. What what dates do you see as critical kind of trigger thing?
Speaker 0: I would say, you know, it became a military thing in 2014. And what happened in 2016 was a follow on on the was a follow on of of the of the military lead from 2014. So, basically, in 2014, you had the the great failure of the Obama administration in Ukraine. You know, there was, there was this long range plan from the state department around bringing Ukraine into the NATO Euro Atlantic axis. There was a more or less unimpeded string of w's from the foreign policy establishment from 1991 to 2014, which came to a screeching halt when there was a counter coup from the Russian side to the coup from from the US, UK side.
You know, for folks who aren't familiar, you know, you had this democratically elected president of Ukraine, Yanukovych, who, you know, the state department sort of painted as this Russian agent Putin pawn, which is, I mean, frankly, that's nonsense. The Yanukovych was signing oil and gas deals with with US energy companies. Shell, Halliburton, Chevron, Exxon, all these had multibillion dollar deals with the Ukrainian government there. But, basically, NATO tried to twist their arm. The IMF tried to twist their arm.
They went with the Russian trade deal. Victoria Nuland, Jeff Pyatt swoop in. They, you know, summoned the the right sector. We pumped $5,000,000,000 of civil society cash into these rent riot mobs. They overthrow Yanukovych, install Yats in York.
I mean, literally install, no election. Just we just pick their president. And then, you know, a funny thing happened on the way to a color revolution. The Luhansk and Donetsk broke off, declared themselves independent, not subject to the new Kyiv government. And Crimea not only broke off, but then it independently voted to join the Russian Federation.
And this was something that neither NATO nor the State Department was prepared for for there to be a military backstop by Russia of a of basically splitting in half the crown jewel country of a multi decade NATO plan. And when when this happened, there was a panic that set in that that the NATO had lost its soft power projection magic that had existed basically from 1947 onward, which is to say that these people in Eastern Ukraine voluntarily broke off from from NATO because of their own internal beliefs, their own media influences. That is there was $5,000,000,000 of National Endowment For Democracy, USAID, state department, NGO's form money, pumped into Ukraine to control its media, to control its hearts and minds, but none of it worked. None of it worked in Eastern Ukraine, at least. Now a lot of that is because of the Russian ethnic, you know, disposition, over there.
But the fact is is this set in motion a doctrine. At the time it was called the Gerasimov doctrine, you can sort of get into some of the technical details if you want, but it eventually came to be called hybrid warfare, which is this idea that NATO needs to start looking at war less as about conventional weapons and more about control over people's minds. And they this eventually got codified in this in this term that would be bandied about, called from tanks to tweets, which was this doctrine that, Jens Stoltenberg did, like, a dozen speeches on. It was in the NATO 2030 blueprint. They paraded around this whole thing that NATO has to focus less on tanks.
Now again, this is all before 2022. This is from 2014 until you know, this was the critical period, by the way, where censorship was set up. I mean, the what happened after 2022 is an afterthought compared to in fact, 2022 was sort of the moment things turned in the other direction, from the house slipping, from Elon Musk taking over Twitter, from a bunch of lawsuits that we might get to. But, by that point, the this military focus on dominating hearts and minds had already had 1,000,000,000 of dollars pumped into it. It's, I mean, it's hilarious how this thing got promoted.
It's almost like how, you know, if if you're a zoologist and you wanna get government grant money to study squirrels, you know, you you just put a line in there about how, you know, climate change is like a sub subject of study for your squirrel mating habits. And you'll get you'll get approved because you said the magic word climate change. Well, the same thing started to happen all across the federal government with hybrid warfare. Whether you were in psychology or sociology or computer science, whether you were at RAND Corporation, or whether you were a DARPA researcher, or whether, you know, you were trying to get matching funds as a as a corporation for corporate social responsibility. If you just put in that term hybrid warfare, it got to the point where you had these NATO conferences where people would apologize for using the term because it was so played out.
But it had a very deadly double meaning, which was that you no longer had this presupposition of a civilian run media. You you had military top down control, military top down influence, doctrinally. I mean, you had as a first principle this idea that there was now a military need to control the media. And this started between 2014 2016 in Central and Eastern Europe. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, the whole Baltics, Ukraine, all the way up through Germany.
A massive investment in these things called centers of excellence, NATO centers of excellence, STRATCOM, strategic communications, all to build psychological resilience. And this basically involved just censoring the ever loving crap out of anyone who, who was spewing anti NATO talking points, or most nefariously, who was supporting the political candidates in those countries who were deemed to be populist, were not down with foreign policy establishment. The classic example of this is Germany. After the migrant crisis, 2013, 2015, in Germany, there was a huge explosion of popularity of a political party called the Alternative fur Deutschland or AFD. Now AFD was this sort of, you know, workers, you know, working class, you know, sort of lower middle class, you know, very similar to sort of MAGA, you know, types in the US or Brexiteers in the UK, similar in a lot of ways.
And they were basically running as a platform on cheap energy through through Russian gas pipelines. At the time, Nord Stream 2 was this big matching natural gas pipeline that was going to double the natural gas supply from gas from Russia, deepen the relations between Germany and Russia. NATO was going the 100% opposite way. They had this whole grand Ukraine energy play prying off Russia, nuking Russia's gas exports down to 0. And so there was this whole proxy war playing out in Germany around, essentially, the CIA, the state department, the NGOs, everything they could to subvert AFD and all of its political proxies, all of its pro AFD media news stations, pro AFD social media accounts.
I mean, you had US taxpayer funded NGOs having public conferences about how to stop domestic meddling in Germany's own elections. The people would have the temerity to influence their own elections. Yeah. This is what our own state department is saying. But, you know, this was when Brexit happened in 2016, it came to the it came to the UK, and when the Trump election happened in in the US, in short order, that was the final straw.
NATO had had enough. The US State Department had enough. The CIA had enough. The UK foreign office had enough. Brussels had had enough.
Enough of free speech, we need to shut this shut the Internet down, essentially. And so everything swung the opposite direction, and we're living in the aftermath of that.
Speaker 1: It's an insane time. I mean, there's a an article we'll link it in the show. It's it's called what happened in 2012, and it tracks the kind of cataclysmic chain of events that that come about after, smartphone adoption goes through the roof in 2012. So it goes from, like, 2010, it's like a smartphone adoption. It's like, I don't know, 20% of the population, maybe 8% of population.
2012, it reaches something like 80% of population. And then you have Brexit. You have, Ukraine issues. You have 2016 election. It seems like it's a time where the the powers that be, NATO and others, are having to reckon with the onslaught of these new technologies and the the consequences that you said earlier.
There's a panic. They don't know what the unintended effects of these of these things are gonna be.
Speaker 2: And there was a real sense the time, like, post 26, 16 on the especially on the left side of saying, we need to do whatever it takes to prevent these types of things from happening again. Like, whatever needs to happen, that's the work that we need to put in over the next few years. And they did, obviously, coming up to 2020. But what what's happened, you know, with the with suppression of, all the information around the election? But that seems to me like kind of the peak.
What's happened in the intervening years since that time?
Speaker 0: Well, the infrastructure was all set up. Do do you mean between 2014 and 2022?
Speaker 2: Between 2020 and present day.
Speaker 0: Oh, well, you know, there was a wave because right now, there's really the first successful counter offensive going on. I would say that, I mean, look, they're coming back. This is going to be a battle that will last well beyond the rest of our lives. There's, It's never over, and in certain respects, it's still getting worse. But there have been many things that have happened in the past 12 months.
I would say the high watermark to date of the censorship industry is, like, March, April 2022. From between 2020 and spring of 2022, it was the codification and the complete normalization of all the censorship infrastructure that was set up between 2018 and 2020. So a great example of this is is CISA, this DHS censorship agency we were talking about. They ran the censorship of the 2020 election out of a subunit called the countering foreign influence task force. Now, the countering foreign influence task force was specifically, explicitly directed around censoring US citizen lawful opinions about the 2020 election.
They targeted everyone from James O'Keefe to Mark Levin to Don Junior, to freaking Cat Turd. They had Cat Turd on a list, and and it was called the countering foreign influence task force. Now they knew at the time this was dirty business and and they they didn't have the predicate to do it. They actually talked about setting up this cutout EIP because they, quote, lacked the funding and the legal authorities to to do it directly out of DHS's Countering Foreign Influence Task Force. They knew they didn't have the legal authority.
Now the 1st week Biden takes office, Biden takes office on January 20, 2016 or 2020. The 1st week he changed DHS changes the name of that office from the office of countering foreign influence, the from the countering foreign influence task force to the office of mis, Dis, and Malinformation. So they retroactively paper over the fact that they didn't have a predicate to do this domestically. Even though in October 2020, 1 month before the 2020 election, at their own disinformation conference, they talked about how their focus was should be 80% domestic, 20% foreign. They said, right now we're focused on 80% foreign, 20% domestic, We need to flip that because the fire is coming from inside the house.
80% domestic. 80% domestic, and yet they were still calling it the the far countering foreign influence task force. But 1 month after 1 week after Biden takes office, they they correct that. They paper it over. So now, as the office of misdis and malinformation, generally, all things wrong or perceived to be wrong or just troublesome on the Internet are now at the jurisdiction of this ministry of truth within, you know, the ministry we set up to stop another 911.
And so, you know, that's that that happened in 2020. You had a lot of political predicate to stop extremism between 20, you know, between January 2021 and 2022 because of the January 6th stuff. So you had this whole sort of normalization of censorship of domestic voices, from the January 6th stuff. And then as that started to run out of steam a little bit, and as more things came to light about what was actually going on and how the sausage was being made, you had this turning of the tide. You know, you had in April 2022, you had the disinformation governance board attempt to be set up within DHS.
The fact that that was killed within a week because these sort of sleeping giant of Republican neurosis was somehow, you know, awakened. I mean, it's kinda hilarious if you think about it because the ministry of truth was already it was set up in November 2018. The the the disinformation governance board wasn't a ministry of truth. In a sense, the opponents of Jim Jordan and Chuck Grassley were sort of correct there. It was just this dull, boring bureaucratic layer to manage the sprawling ministry of truth that had already been set up, but because it wasn't given a boring name like cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, because they were dumb enough to call it a name vaguely echoing what it actually does, suddenly, everyone was aware.
Oh my god. There's a government role in censorship. Now I've been screaming my plastered face off about this for 5 years, and somehow it took an event like that to catalyze, you know, government awareness of of Internet censorship. But you had that, and then in short succession, Elon Musk, you know, does x macking up, you know, $44,000,000,000 falls out of the sky to to free the the largest social media platform. You have the the the Twitter files, exposes.
You have multiple lawsuits from the, State Attorney General's office in Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration, specifically on First Amendment grounds on censorship. You have this the America First, legal federal class action case on free speech. You have the Republicans winning the house in November 2022, which opens the floodgates 8 different congressional committees. House Judiciary, House Oversight, Weaponization, House Homeland Security Committee, Science, Space and Technology, House Foreign Affairs, Energy and Commerce, and and Senate Senate, Homeland Security. All of these have independently done their own investigations, pull people in for transcribed interviews, subpoenas, basically sunlight disinfecting many of these institutions that had operated, you know, not exaggerating, for 6 or 7 years with 0, 0 friction to their operations in terms of transparency.
While these people were were all, you know, parading in the media about the need for platform transparency. While themselves, they were shielding everything. Yep. They were having these direct cahoots, co censorship coordination with the federal government, and then arguing that they shouldn't have to turn those over in FOIA requests or even in subpoenas. So, you know, these are people who operate in a cloak and dagger fashion.
They're they're shrouded by Orwellian double speak words and that prevent the public from really piercing what they actually do. But the good thing is is now there is a really organized counter offensive to pry that open. The only question is is, you know, how much will they raise the stakes to subvert that? What they're doing with the justice department right now with these indictments and, you know, is has upped the level in a way that I don't think people anticipated a couple years ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's I mean, there's so much there. Part of it, that's something that that strikes me as you've been saying it is there's a there's a, department of you know, the state department, and then there's a subcommittee, and that has its own subcommittee or its own subsection or subsection. And then you have this sort of Russian nesting doll situation where, departments within departments within departments are the ones driving monstrous policy that, you know, affect just everybody's lives. Talk a little bit about that mechanism.
Like, how how does that how does that work? Why why is that mentality there of, like, let's start another subcommittee and subcommittee and subcommittee. Is it is is part of the goal there to cloak it, to to hide it?
Speaker 0: So if if we're talking about the structure of institutional consensus building, You know, there's a concept I come back to time and again called the the blob. This is a a term from Ben Rhodes, who is Obama's deputy national security advisor, and he used this to describe the foreign policy establishment. You know, this is this diplomacy, defense, intelligence, nexus, State Department, Pentagon, CIA, plus the, you know, all the NGOs and all their little funded cutouts and and and and shell, entities, essentially. Now this this apparatus, the blob, was was set up essentially in 1947, 1948, very early on as a, as a sort of conjoining of of the State Department, the the Pentagon, and the CIA to be able to coordinate our management of the American empire. So the American empire is much bigger than the American homeland.
You know, there's there's only 300,000,000 people here. The the the amount of citizens around the world who are subject, essentially, to the American empire even even during World War 2, our our our empire know, we became a global empire in 18/98. The Philippines and the Spanish American War and Cuba and Latin America was basically under our fold since the early 1800 with, the Monroe doctrine in 18/23, and and then when the when the Marshall Plan kicked off in, in in the 19 1948, basically Europe became part of the American empire. And so we we needed this coordinating apparatus within the federal government to manage the different levers of soft power control abroad. So, I like to think of them as being conjoined, and these people all rotate jobs.
If you've got a job in an intelligence agency or in a feeder to it, in an NGO feeder to intelligence agency, you're eligible for a job at the State Department or Pentagon's, you know, civil affairs type stuff, immediately. It's it's the same skill set, it's just a slightly different focus. So there is a consensus building architecture for getting Defense, diplomacy and intelligence all aligned. And that also includes their stakeholders in private industry, Chamber of Commerce, the energy sector, the military contractors, the the banking and finance, the Goldman Sachs type and and BlackRock type type investors. Those are all what I call the donors and drafters off of the National Security State.
So a great example of this is is George Soros. So you know Soros made his money basically being a partner of the State Department as we were prying open Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War in the 19 eighties, his Open Society Foundations were essentially the civil society arm of NATO and the state department and the UK foreign office to be able to get tens of thousands of people in a region on payroll, get these rental riots with student groups and and young people who would provide the muscle to be able to, you know, bum rush a parliament building to kick a president out, or to be able to shut down government buildings if an authoritarian, wasn't, you know, doing a trade deal that that the US government wanted. And so, but Soros was speculating. At the same time, he was running a New York hedge fund that speculated on the currencies of Central and Eastern European governments. So it's basically an insider trading operation where you have this big mega banker who's got an inside knowledge and has helped instrumentalizing the regime change of a foreign country while betting on that country's currency knowing the direction it will go 10 months before the market does.
Now you see the same phenomenon happen everywhere. In the natural gas, market, you know, the, Ukraine sits on on Europe's 2nd largest shale reserves, totally untapped. If you if you know that that Eastern Ukraine is going to basically free up that, and if you know that Ukraine's natural gas mega giant, Naftogas, which is the public company that's the dominating lion's share of the entire country's revenue. If you know that publicly held company is about to be privatized at gunpoint by the Pentagon and spun off to all these stakeholders, they're going to have their investments protected by the CIA, the state department, the defense department, NATO, Mi 6, the UK foreign office, and, you know, in in a in a pride open German government. If you know those are about to be brand new windfall investments protected at gunpoint by 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars of taxpayer revenue, that's an easy investment.
And that's why Chevron, and Shell, and Halliburton, and all of the Cheney and Bush Companies and all of the the the the London ones like Shell, they all rushed in with $10,000,000,000 investments with the Ukrainian government once it looked like the national security state was going to break the wind for them. So they so these these entities also contribute to the regime change operations. You know, the Chamber of Commerce will pour in money through this CIA cutout, you know, called the the Center For International Private Enterprise, run out of the National Endowment For Democracy. You know, you'll have these, we've been doing this by the way since the 1800s in a certain respect. Coca Cola, you know, was was helping, you know, you had these, you had these, you know and United Fruit was doing this too in the 1800.
Yeah. Where you have these sort of corporate donors to a national security state operation, but there's a mutual back scratching. They the the the corporate side will provide some assistance funding and provide some some, you know, some capital. It's almost like you're bringing in an investment with it. You have an anchor investor in the form of the US government, but then you bring in all these sort of follow on investors, and what they get in return is a captive market because now everybody in that country is eating McDonald's.
I mean, this is a funny thing about McDonald's and there's a there's a really funny ad that everybody who's watching this should look up, the Gorbachev Pizza Hut ad in the early nineties. The moment Russia fell into the US empire after the after the cold war ended, And the State Department and the CIA all descended on Russia. We did shock therapy. We privatized $2,000,000,000,000 in assets and went straight to the Harvard Endowment and to the to the Wall Street and London investors. And like the most iconic scene from that was is this ad that Gorbachev himself shot for Pizza Hut with, you know, about how now Pizza Hut had finally come to, you know, 200,000,000 Russians, you know, but think about that as a as a equity stakeholder in Pizza Hut.
You now have, at the barrel of a NATO gun, 200,000,000 new customers, And especially for high margin businesses in the energy sphere. So you have this consensus building, to bring this back, you have this consensus building process, and this is what they think democracy is. They we think of democracy as you and I voting. For them, it's a cumbersome enough process to get all the institutions into a democratic alignment. How do you get the energy companies?
How do you get the military contractors? How do you get the Chamber of Commerce countries companies? How do you get the State Department careers? How do you get the CIA operations division? How do you get the Pentagon and the National Security?
How do you get them all to vote on what you're doing in a region? What are you gonna do with Belarus? What do you how are you gonna handle Ukraine? What are you gonna do in the Baltics? To bring these people into alignment requires a a consensus building process both within the government agencies and then outside them through these white shoe think tanks, like Brookings or the Atlanta Council or CSIS.
Now these double as being places where people are put on payroll. These people get very cushy signicures. I'm a resident fellow at the at the Scowcroft Center of the Atlantic Council, and you just collect your paycheck to basically consensus build with your peers. You're basically paid to propagandize the NATO talking points to your peers so that they are brought into alignment. It's almost like the same way, you know, you you come to be a a paid, you know, political shill, to do your little Instagram posts promoting political candidate du jour.
These soft power NGOs, which are all funded by the federal government, do the same thing with recruiting essentially an institutional army to to make that happen.
Speaker 2: Can you talk more about so you mentioned cutouts before. I think a lot of people are not familiar with that term, but you talk about what are cutouts and how are those formed?
Speaker 0: Yeah. Cutout is when the government wants to do something, but for either legal or logistical reasons, it can't. And so it has to operate through a puppeteered non governmental organization. Now these can take the form of university centers, these can take the form of of nongovernmental organizations, you know, or, you know, what are sometimes called, Gongos instead of NGOs, government operated nongovernmental organizations. They can also take the form of private firms.
This is something that the State Department and the CIA have been doing, again, since the since the 19 forties. Part of this is because you need to move money through things in order to set these set these up. And so, there's a money laundering process for this, essentially. I I posted a video on this the other day of, I think a CBS special from the early 19 sixties, showing how sophisticated the shell game already was by the 19 sixties of the CIA and the state department, when they want to when they want to pump up, say, you know, a political group in Nicaragua or Belize, you know, first, the, you know, the the CIA or the state department money goes into an offshore bank in the Cayman Islands of Panama. And then from there, it goes into a nonprofit foundation from some affiliated, you know, from some friendly, but non affiliated group.
These are where your Souro's or your Omidyar's or your Craig Newmark's. This is where you're sort of, you know, oligarchic business owner or philanthropists who work arm in arm with the National Security State in this sort of donor and drafter class come from. And then from there, it will go to the NGO of choice. And so, this is something we've had, again, there's nothing new about this. It's it's now in 80 years, we've had this highly sophisticated process for creep for pumping up, they call it capacity building.
Pumping up the capacity of an organization that can do what you are not allowed, or you don't or would be logistically inappropriate to do. So, you know, when we wanna overthrow when the CIA wants to topple a foreign government, you know, we don't march in there with a bunch of w two tax forms and badges who say, hi. My name is Mike Benz. I don't clip that. But you're hi.
My you know, my my name is, you know, Sanjay. I I work for the Central Intelligence Agency. How are you?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: There's everything in this world operates through and by the way, even at the State Department level, we this this is why we operate through NGOs and university centers and sort of pop up private sector firms. Because it's a diplomatic incident when you are supporting or or interfacing with opposition groups within a country who are hostile to that country's government. I mean, this would I mean, you can imagine if the if the Russian Federation, you know, was literally calling itself the Russian Federation, you know, as it was, you know, working with Turning Point USA or something. Right? This would they wouldn't dare to do that.
Now now look, they don't even do proxy stuff, even that's an invention of our foreign policy blob to try to create a counterintelligence predicate to censor and abuse us. But the fact is is we do that left, right, and center on I don't think you could spin the globe and find a country where I can't point you to where we do these operations internationally, but we have to do it through cutouts. Because even if you were to do it through overt diplomacy, and we do a lot of this actually through overt diplomacy through our democracy promotion programs, but it's still unsightly. And so most of the swarm that surrounds sound where it looks like there's a consensus in the country. Because 200 different media outlets are all echoing the same talking points about, oh, there's authoritarian abuse by this by this government.
Or, you know, in Ukraine, we had something called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, where it was 56 different US State Department funded NGOs, all working in totally mockingbird fashion to amplify the exact same, you know, sort of talking points around around governance, around energy policy, around military policy. But that was I mean, that's that's basically just the State Department simultaneously playing 56 different string instruments at once. So you need cutouts to operate in this business, that's why there's so many of them.
Speaker 1: I was listening to the, Rogan Musk, interview that came out 2 days ago, and Musk talks about how Twitter it wasn't just being used, you know. They didn't just have a couple of FBI agents there, you know, giving them some pointers on what to what to censor, which knobs to turn. He said there was it was functionally a branch of the government. That's how bad it was. It said as a cutout in the beginning.
Speaker 2: Still is among other companies. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Among yeah. It said, like, Facebook and all the other ones that still are. It's only his own coming in and saying, nope. You're not a cutout anymore. This is this is not my cutout.
This
Speaker 2: is mine.
Speaker 1: Change the landscape. So on that on that on the Musk and and x, front, do you think he's do you think his buying Twitter and pumping the brakes and all that is having some meaningful actual change and effect on on the censorship industrial complex. We know
Speaker 0: it is. We know it is because, you know, don't don't take it from me. Take it from them. I I can't I've I've lost track of the, you know, the the wailing and lamentations, that have that have come out, not just in headlines, but in long form panel discussions and podcasts. These people in their own internal conversations are apoplectic about it.
You saw this when when when Elon got rid of Aaron Rogers and the election integrity election integrity election censorship team, which was which itself was basically a CIA cutout ring. Aaron Rodricks himself came out of this, National Endowment for Democracy incubator. The National Endowment for Democracy is the CIA's premier cutout in the democracy promotion place. Literally, its founder said that they do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. That's a direct quote from the from the National Endowment for Democracy's founder.
And so Aaron Rodgers came straight from there. He was recruiting these censorship positions, directly from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which was run for the past 7 years by Bill Burns, Biden's current director of the Central Intelligence Agency. So Biden's CIA NGO of choice, is, like, where this guy was recruiting from. This guy was openly backing CISA's intelligence apparatus on it on his own in his own tweets. He was he was calling Musk himself an effing dipshit on his own Twitter profile.
He is promoting blue sky and mastodon in his own Twitter bio. I mean, the guy was a was a was a was a total rogue agent, the head of but, you know, listen. Again, you have to understand is, like, when when the censorship technology was created at the a at the AI level, and the center censorship infrastructure was installed at the institutional level, these things both coincided in 2018. These people thought that they had found El Dorado. They thought they had found, you know, the land of gold to be able to rig every election on the planet.
It took, like, 2 years for 85 different countries all be wrapped into the National Endowment for Democracies counter disinformation program. Eighty 5 different countries in 2 just 2 years between 2016, 2018, all being targeted by this by the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency's top cutout for working with YouTube, working with Facebook, working with Twitter 1 point o, to be able to rig elections. I mean, again, spin the globe. This is like Tanzania, Madagascar, I mean, the most remote regions. I didn't see Antarctica on the list, but it's only a matter of time.
And every single one of these, you know, you had the election integrity team, and you can predict it. I mean, you could write an elementary script to be able to say to be able to predict exactly who they're going to rig in the election. It's whatever populous political group is, is is opposed to the US foreign policy blob. And they did this they did this everywhere. And they thought this was, you know, it's it's hard enough.
In the 20th century, we focused on on saturation rather than censorship. Now there was censorship that was done when the CIA or the state department would have a relationship with the editorial desk of, like, Le Monde in France or, you know, the Frankfurt algemeiner in Germany. Like, we did have intelligence relations with large distribution news outlets to be able to kill stories. But most of it was about saturating. It was about churning up the knob of US government propaganda.
Because we didn't have the capacity at the time to reach into the throat of 7,000,000,000 citizens and just turn their volume down to 0, you know, like freaking Ursula from Little Mermaid, you know, just stealing your voice if you express, you know, support for an, a candidate who the CIA didn't want to win. Now, again, these people have a license to do this under NSC 10 2 and 10 dash 2 and under the National Security Act of 1947. We have a license to rig elections. It's their it's their civic duty, you know, it's it's what they were put on this on this on this earth to do is to rig foreign elections. And when when the censorship technology through AI, through word embeddings, all you need to do is just, what's the name of the group you're trying to kill politically?
What are their memes? What are their slogans? What are their rallying calls? You know, what are you just do you create this linguistic taxonomy of what the people in that region. That's why we get all these people, on payroll to map, you know, what they're saying.
You know, we get the foreign language. What are they saying in Swahili to support their candidates in that region? What are they saying in Portuguese to this? So we bring in these, you know, these university centers to map the linguistic rhetoric, and then we plug those into AI algorithms. So you have this, you know, these sprawling reams of of keyword databases, and then you, you know, you you fine tune the sentiment analysis, you create this network map around who the key influences are.
And so, with that in tow, with a captive team that's liaison liaising with you in the tech companies, you have the perfect formula to be able to if all you're doing is saturating your own message, it usually works. But sometimes ideology is persistent. Sometimes people just effing hate you. You screwed them over. You stole all their gold.
You stole you stole all their oil. You stole their land. You stole you stole their sugar and agriculture crops. These people want you out. So sometimes no amount of propaganda will sway those hearts and minds.
But, if these people can't even articulate their philosophy, then how are they going to scale it? All the it's it's it's it's not just, you know, it's it's clockwork orange. There's no ability to even mobilize, you know, all you can see is the government propaganda if you have the censorship weapon. So they roll this out everywhere, and and this relies again on these two things, the technological capacity to do it, through the machine learning AI, and the institutional pass through of of of cut out teams. Again, you don't need the whole organization to do this.
Zuckerberg did not wanna do this. Dorsey did not wanna do this. And we can get into that, you know, Google did wanna do this. Okay? F f Google.
But most of the tech companies didn't, and they had to have various carrots and sticks. The State Department protected them against Europe between 2018 and 2022. This is a big part of it. The state they, you know, they were relying on this same they were part of this donor drafter class who relied on the battering ram of the National Security State to protect their monopolies abroad. And that's a big leverage point to be able to force them to simply capacity build within their or new just simply set up a new content moderation team that focuses on counterintelligence.
It'll interface, you know, with with Russian disinformation threats with the intelligence community, with the State Department. Or it'll focus on, you know, on content moderation or regulatory affairs. They have so many different ways to shoehorn getting 20 or 30 good people. Usually, who comes straight from the CIA or straight from the FBI or DHS or the State Department or the Pentagon, doing doing soft power influence jobs, you know, doing counterinsurgency work about molding the hearts and minds of Afghanis or Iraqis. And then they now they're suddenly at the Facebook equivalent, working with the state department or DHS on how to kill, you know, people who live in Idaho, their opinions on COVID or or Ukraine policy or energy policy or immigration policy or I mean, they they try to scale us to everything.
But, again, we we know that Musk is making a difference because all of the worst people have said it. The Washington Post, the Stanford Internet Observatory, the the the Biden White House, you know, the the y'all Roth, there's they are in a regrouping period right now, and they're relying in part on this on the dividends from what they had set up earlier of government censorship. Right now, a lot of the action is in Europe, in the EU, in this new Digital Services Act, in this panoply of surround sound censorship laws that will compel censorship when pressure through through government insinuation, or through ad boycotts or through NGOs forms is insufficient, they can bring in a rule of law predicate, which is sort of the final, you know, Pogo thing to throw on the card, the final sort of Trump card that you can't fight against. That is the thing that is most daunting right now and that they have the most momentum on that's just really, really hard to fight.
Speaker 1: Mike, I'm always astonished at just your your deep knowledge of the blob. You came from the state department. Right?
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: So talk to me about, like, what, let's get into the the building blocks of of all these institutions, the cutouts, all these things. They're ultimately staffed, built by by individual people. What, causes somebody at the state department to take the path you take you you you take against censorship against all this? On the flip side, what's the kind of person that goes deep into all of these all of the blah? Talk to me about that difference.
Speaker 0: Well, it's easier to talk about the second one because it's a very lonely road on the first one. Probably, you know, some combination of madness and not being hugged enough as I think I had a I had a teacher in high school, I think, who called it obstinate defiant syndrome. So, I think it's probably some combination of that and just, you know, it was a weird path. I was I was monitoring this stuff from very, very early on. You know, I I became, I had a chess background as a kid, and I lived through the period where Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, and how the idea of chess computers totally shattered the conception of of the romantic period of chess as we knew it.
And in late 2016, I became obsessive with the technological side of censorship because Google perspective, there there there's something called the called Jigsaw, which was set up essentially by by the it's basically the CIA wing of Google. And they, in late 2016, they rolled out this AI retail censorship product that worked just like chess computers. And you could go on to it, and you could plug in sentences, and it would spit out a toxicity score, and, you know, you could set confidence intervals for how, you know, in their own papers, they would describe how useful this tool would be to be able to set confidence levels to to automatically pre censor anything with a confidence level above a, you know, a 0.85. It's a 0 to 1 scale. It's the same way chess computers work, where the engine spits out a number and that tells you who's winning, you know, so negative 2.7 would say that the computer assesses black to be winning by 2.7 pawns, you know, it's basically.
And you can do the same thing with, you know, whether or not a sentence or paragraph or a podcast violates a terms of service policy around mail in ballots or COVID skepticism or glorification of anti, you know, Ukraine forces, or you can plug and play to be able to create a deep blue to kick the even the most eloquent Gary Kasparov of of, like, political populism eloquence. It's and when I saw this in in in late 2016, I immediately had a a panic attack that, like, changed the rest of my life because it was so evident, having lived through the chess world, that, you know, everybody thought at the time they were like, Ben, so no. Let's let's just change the word. If if they say, you know, you can't say Trump, we'll just spell Trump with 2 r's and an f at the end, and, oh, they'll never catch us. And it's like, that's that's the same thing everyone was saying in the in the chess thing.
Like, these you you are not going to be able to outrun an airplane. Like, this the money was rushing into it, you know, the Pentagon was rushing into it. The CIA was rushing into it. You know, Google was rushing into it. It was a gold mine, and you're sitting here, you know, as an as an edgy thinking that, you know, you're gonna be able to, like, you know, joke your way out.
And so, anyway, so I became very obsessive on the technological front, and that led me sort of hand in glove to the institutional sort of so I I was very well aware of all this by the time I got to the state department. I was screaming about it, you know, well well before, you know, I was, you know, I had I had the privilege to be there. But what I'll what I'll say is, because I did not have a traditional path into the state department, I did not base my career and my principles, and my friendships, and my network on that path out of the State Department. Most people come they are of the blob by the time they get to a position like that within the within the blob. You get groomed in this business.
You know, you get you go you work your way up. You know, you go to a a high end white shoe university, then you are either you take the tech path through Google, or you take the political path through the Hill, or you take the human rights path through a UN job or through a Gongo, you know, government operated NGO. And then you get credentialed through the think tanks. You get your fellowships at Carnegie or Atlanta Council or or Brookings. And then, you know, you have some sort of, you know, low level political job, or you become, you know, a career or foreign service, you know, you by that point, the woman you marry is probably, you know, a blob creature.
You know, what you're the the people you are you're hanging out with on weekends are blob creatures. Everything your your news sources are all blob publications, and the money just first of all, it's it's glitzier than everything else on the other side. The cocktail party invitations, everything, you know, you are nary a hit piece will ever be written about you in the New York Times or the Washington Post. You know, every golden turd you lay on the sidewalk will be deified as being, you know, abstract art instead of an actual piece of crap. Like, you it's it's it it it it's like what I imagine a manic high is, like, extended over over decades.
Because you're you think you're doing the Lord's work because everyone's telling you you are. And you think, you're being told it's patriotic because you are advancing the United States Federal Government's, you know, diplomacy apparatus or our national security or the CIA is our front first line of defense. I mean, this is what they say. It should be the last line, frankly, but they call it the first line. So some combination of money, social network, Clockwork Orange, you know, ideological saturation, and the fear of losing it all.
I mean, is I can see why there is so little dissent within the blob. And, you know, part of this is, it was the great struggle of the Trump administration around staffing. But part of this is also that for there to really be an alternative, there needs to be an institutional alternative. There needs to be some place you can go after the State Department if you go against an Atlantic Council consensus from your desk there. There needs to, you know, there needs to be a robust civil society sector within, you know, populist movements or, or independent movements.
There needs to be a robust sort of university center enclave. You know, a robust private sector commercial or even state government. There's this institutional capacity building that needs to happen to have a fighting chance. You know? And who knows?
Maybe with with people like Elon Musk and and a lot of new people who have who have come along, you know, into this in the past few years, that that might have a shot. But, you know, those those people are on a hit list, you know, between lawsuits and ad boycotts to try to cripple their capacities. So, you know, it's gonna be a 100 year war.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's that's fascinating. I think of, Thucydides talks about white nations go to war and it's because of fear, honor, or interest. In this case, it seems like these people go to war against their fellow countrymen for all those three reasons at the same time. You mentioned fear of losing it all, gaining honor within particularly on club, and then interest to that, you know, money, fame, whatever that case may be.
A shiny, you know, desk, you know, your name on a desk that's that's prestigious or whatever. It's it's kinda sickening. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 2: yeah. It seems like status is a huge piece of that. Yeah. What so now current present day landscape, what are you thinking about? I'm still we're coming up next year's an election year, but what's on your radar, in the censorship landscape right now?
Speaker 0: Well, everything. You know? It's it's a multi front, you know, offensive that's needed. So so you need, you know, you need legal. There's multiple lawsuits, you know, in the works.
So there's a Supreme Court case, which could frankly decide the entire architecture of how pieces on the chessboard can even move, next year, which is before the Supreme Court now. I have an amicus brief that I submitted on that, and, you know, the the the Missouri State Attorney General's office is doing a fantastic job. I'm I'm optimistic that Clarence Thomas will never be so unleashed on a nefarious government overreach than, than than this one. But, the extent you know, I don't doubt some positive resolution, but the extent of it is going to be where the magic is. You know, it's one thing to kill coordination at the government level.
It's a whole another thing to go after the pass throughs and cut outs in that relationship. And my fear is a Solomon splitting the baby, which will which could result in the censorship industry actually being more resilient because everything will be, you know, will move through these through these cutouts. And frankly, we have the best fact pattern in this case that we'll ever have. These people are never again going to make the mistake of saying direct quotes, like, we're, you know, like, we're not allowed by law to do this, so we set up this, you know, this separate thing to do it. And that thing goes on, you know, to to describe how the company now the tech companies themselves would not have adopted these censorship platforms without their pressure and without their threatening government pressure.
I mean, you you it's like, you know, if you've ever seen that that confession skit from Key and Peele where, you know, the
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: The the rap guy is sitting before the, you know, the the New York Police Department investigator, and they're they're playing back a rap tape of everything that's needed to convict this person all the way down to, you know, his alibi at Red Lobster being preannounced and everything like that. We we will never again have these people so, so dead to rights. So, good facts make, you know, good law, bad facts make bad law. And we we there's, I think, a majority on the court who should be sympathetic to this, It should be 9 o. But the fact if with this court, at this at this fact, pattern, with this much political momentum, if we can't notch a very, very significant victory here, then the strategy is gonna be very different going forward than if if we if if that can be leveraged.
But, look, you got legal you got regulatory, not just at congress itself. And it's not just a presidential election next year, it's a senate one as well. And in a in a senate victory would be very powerful to be able to actually have bills passed. Right now, there's things that you can do in appropriations, there's things you can do on funding, but you can't get bills passed around it, around censorship, because that the Senate is never gonna ratify that. With with turnover in the senate, these things become possible.
But then you also have regulatory stuff happening at the state level. You know, you have multiple anti censorship, state statutes being set up for sort of civilian freedom, you know, cyber bill of rights type stuff. You have this in Florida, you have this in Texas, there's 6 or 7 other states who are interested in this, creating private rights of action. I think there's a lot that can be done at the state government level. You have the you have the media level.
I mean, the fact is is as much as it's already been exposed, we're still at the tip of the iceberg level. And there's a ton of stuff that I'm gonna be doing in the next year that I'm hugely excited about, but I almost don't wanna talk about it just to not put it out there, you know, before it's out. But, no. This this thing is gonna blow up in the next year, and I think, you know, the question is is what happens when they raise the stakes? What hap Jim Jordan had a subpoena into the Stanford Air and Observatory for the gold mine of all federal censorship collusion documents between the Department of Homeland Security, the Intelligence Services, the top cutouts.
It's all being housed at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Jim Jordan's weaponization committee specifically subpoenaed it. Stanford said, you know what? We're not turning it over. Go f yourself.
Jim Jordan is, like, threatened to, like, subpoena enforcement, but, like, I don't know where that ends up. Is the just is the is this justice department, which is indicting the leading opposition candidate for, like, a 1000 years in prison in 4 different cases right now, and which has screwed over systematically. It's totally thrown off the yoke Mhmm. Of non partisanship. I mean, is this Justice Department going to enforce subpoenas or contempt orders for people who defy congressional?
I mean, this is the House Judiciary Committee. This was supposed to be the oversight of of the of the justice department.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: But, you know, Frankenstein's monster has now completely taken over. So they've escalated it to rule of law, which has completely broken every every tacit agreement we've all understood about how our own government works. But what do you do about that? This is a brand new world, you know, will they sustain it? Frankly, I think a critical mass of them are going to need to defect or will need to be wedged, you know, for for for them to put down that that weapon.
But this is the sort of stuff that that true authoritarian countries do, that the state department complains about. And the reason they complain is because it's unstoppable. If you really do have a closed society where, like, the military and the courts and, like, everything is so rigged against political opposition, you can't even start a political opposition movement. This is why the CIA hates them because they can't pop up their own opposition movements. But we have, like, a totally organic thing here, and they're basically doing what they accused Saddam Hussein, you know, Yanukovych, Gaddafi of.
But, you know, Merrick Garland is doing
Speaker 1: it. Yeah. Absolutely. And they're you you said right. I think the stakes they're raising the stakes on their end.
Biden just had this executive order against or about regulating AI and how, you know, basically there has to be equitable outcomes and certain there were other sub documents cutouts if you would, explaining how, you know, compute power at a certain threshold and above has to be I mean, just absolutely insane stuff. And I was and then I was reading an article, that Biden watched, the new Mission Impossible movie, which has a bad AI the the enemy is AI. And after watching that movie, he was even more scared of AI. And then he he he he drafted this, this executive order. You're like, this is clown work.
This is insane. What do you think their so you kinda described right now the path to, at least not victory, but the path over the next couple of years on our side. What do you think their winning condition is, their winning state? If if, you know, their ideal winning condition, what does that look like on that side?
Speaker 0: There's there's 3 ways. 1 is rule of law. That is, a great example right now is this Digital Services Act in the EU, which I personally worked on at state. This thing is is a monstrosity, but it it it compels censorship of disinformation all across the European Union. This is like 450,000,000 people who are gonna be subject you know, x might not be able to operate in the European Union.
I mean, think about what that will do to the platform if something like that happens. The entire global connectivity of x, which is, arguably, it's like top value proposition. Like, you get to go on on x and see what Imran Khan, you know, is I mean, he's got Imran Khan, the press the prime minister of Pakistan is one of the largest accounts. You know, you have, you know, you have, like, Hot Wars being semi negotiated with Twitter. You know, you had, you know, the Ayatollah and the, you know, UK, you know, or I'm sorry.
The Israeli ministries, you know, like, meaning, you know, in an actual hot meme war. But, you know, you have this big interlinkage between political parties across, on the transatlantic side. You know, there's a big overlap between Brexit, coalition, you know, the the Brexit coalition in the UK, and the MAGA coalition in the US. And a lot of that, you know, they would retweet each other, they would amplify each other. The reason you get 200,000 views on your YouTube video with Nigel Farage chewing out Herman Van Brunkoy as a low grade bank clerk well, like, a 150 of those 1,000 of those views may be coming from the US from people who just wanna, you know, see, you know, see a Bulgarian barbarian, you know, put his put his arm through the net in in a in a shack dunk on on international institutions, but you don't get that inner linkage if, like, you know, if x is not allowed to, you know Mhmm.
You can't you can't be on that platform. Now they they've got various leverage points there, for example, like, I something I've talked about a lot is this idea of middleware, which is this whole sort of intelligence backed, Pentagon backed, State Department backed, sweep sweeping set of censorship mercenary firms, like NewsGuard, and Global Disinformation Index, and Check My Ads, and all these all these technically non governmental, you know, credibility rating, and and disinformation tracking, private sector tools and firms, who are already billing themselves as as providing disinformation compliance services for government regulations in the EU. Having seen this movie play out in so in so many other sectors, I suspect that that the move they're going to play here is to say, listen, Elon, you don't wanna, you know, it you got a you got a great company, spent a lot of money on it. It'd be a shame if something happened to it where you got severed off from all of Europe. If you, you know, will allow you to simply, you know, comply with the comply with the Digital Services Act if you simply engage 1 of 6 or 7, you know, approved credentialing institutions who will do the you run your company, you know, add your premium services, add video audio play, and add payments and whatever.
But this one thing, disinformation compliance, you know, we're gonna need a firm, you know, or or a or a group within the company, like the Aaron Roderick's group, a cell that will simply just just outsource it to them and then go back to sleep. Sweet dreams. Run your $1,000,000,000 company. No. It's just disinformation.
You know? It's not a big deal. And then through that, they will reinstall the same apparatus to rig every election on the planet as they had in their their golden age from 2018 to 2022. I suspect that's what we're moving to. You see the same thing with UK harms, online harms bill, which is outside the EU, but it's it's UK's version of it.
Australia's got this new misinformation bill, Canada. They're doing this surround sound of of of, rule of law, censorship predicates that will, I think, that's the thing I'm most concerned about because there are other paths to victory. There's ways of fighting it at the political and at the persuasion level. I mentioned there were 3 at the at the top of this. One of them is a rule of law.
You're just a frigging authoritarian, you know, despot, and you just win because you control the army and the courts. And, you know, the 2 other ways are like institutional capture, if they can, you know, just get the companies to just go along willingly. Mhmm. And it's not just x, by the way, and Elon Musk who are pushing back on that now. I think when Elon took over, it actually emboldened some of the other tech companies.
Jack Dorsey made a public statement that he didn't want to kick Trump off Twitter. He did it because of business necessity. Because they were gonna bankrupt Twitter 1.0 through through ad boycotts if they didn't censor, you know, who they wanted. So civil society encirclement is is the other path to victory for them, where they if they surround free speech platforms like X or like Rumble, with enough civil society institutions, you know, they swarm them with, you know, the Biden administration is paying about $50,000,000 to 60 different US colleges and universities, all working on censorship. All for their own proprietary centers, which go into these feeders to pressure X to kill the accounts that they flagged, to kill the emerging narratives on all these issues.
So, you know, you're surrounded by 60 Universities there. You're surrounded by probably a 100 different State Department NGOs, all significantly influential in their own rank. You're surrounded by about 3 dozen, you know, Private Sector Censorship mercenary firms. You're surrounded by about, you know, a 70 70 or so different, you know, fact checking organizations who also provide pressure from that. And you're surrounded by 7 or 8 government agencies who are all, involved in censorship pressure coordination, funding, or outsourcing in some way.
So those are this is you're surrounding the whole corporate entity. And the winning condition for them is to simply bring the tech companies to heal via getting them to change their business model. I mean, if you can kill their ads and the company will go under, then you have a leveraging chip to say, okay, well, listen, you the ads will come rushing back the moment you put our people in for, you know, for censoring. You bring back the Aaron Rodricks team, you know, you bring in our computer science people who are gonna write your machine learning code on, you know, on, election integrity, You know, you you bring in these compliant disinformation compliance people, and all good. Suddenly, the global advert you know, the GARM and the World Advertisers Federation, and suddenly, you'll be back in their good graces, and you'll have a high NewsGuard credibility score, and and you'll be you'll be, you know, in good standing in the European Union.
All of your business problems will go away if you do what the government wants you to do. I mean, it's basically a destabilization strategy on par with how we do economic sanctions to destabilize Syria or Cuba or Venezuela or, you know, Libya. I mean, this is, you get a swarm of international institutions, You get the media on board, you get the private sector money flowing in to pump it up, and you you get sanctions to cut off all their little alliances. That's why Institutional Capacity Building is so important for us, because they know that that is the thing that inoculates you from that tactic. So right now, we're in the thick of trench warfare of of, you know, the capacities of the censorship industry and the capacities of institutions supporting free speech online.
Speaker 1: Mike, thank you so much. You've been super generous with your time. Where can people follow you and follow the fight?
Speaker 0: You can find me on Twitter at mikebencyber, and, our foundation is is foundation for freedom online.com. And, yeah, looking forward to talking soon.
Speaker 1: Awesome. Thanks, Mike. Thanks so much, Mike. Have a good one.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Newfounding podcast. Newfounding has become a rallying point for founders and investors who are taking serious bets in the face of a stagnant business culture. Our venture fund backs founders building dynamic companies powered by American ideals and a positive national vision. These are the kinds of founders that embody the optimism and competence of the people who come on this podcast. If you're interested in investing in our fund, check out newfounding.com/venturefund, and follow the link to apply.