TruthArchive.ai - Related Video Feed

The Global Engagement Center, established by Rick Stengel, aimed to synchronize government narratives with mainstream media. Stengel, who previously argued against the First Amendment, initiated this center to combat perceived threats like ISIS by collaborating with tech platforms to censor content. Following Trump's election, State Department officials pushed for censorship laws in Europe, leading to automated censorship mechanisms in the U.S. The Atlantic Council, with ties to the CIA and government funding, played a key role in promoting these laws. They developed AI tools to monitor and censor online speech, particularly around controversial topics like COVID-19 and the 2020 election, effectively suppressing dissenting narratives.

The discussion centers on the evolution of internet censorship, particularly since 2014, when the U.S. government began collaborating with tech companies and NGOs to combat perceived misinformation. The conversation highlights the intertwining of foreign policy and domestic censorship, especially after the 2016 election, which prompted a significant shift in how the government approached free speech. The role of organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and the Atlantic Council in shaping censorship policies is emphasized, as well as the influence of figures like Hunter Biden in this landscape. The dialogue also touches on the implications of these actions for democracy and the challenges faced by those attempting to reform these systems. The speakers express concern over the potential for censorship to undermine free speech and the integrity of democratic processes.

In 2016, the US saw a shift towards mass censorship following events like the Ukraine coup. NATO and the Pentagon adopted a "from tanks to tweets" approach, focusing on controlling information online. This led to the development of AI censorship tools and the establishment of connections between government agencies and tech platforms. The narrative of Russian influence was used to justify censorship efforts, which intensified after Trump's election. However, the collapse of Russiagate in 2019 left the censorship infrastructure without a clear justification.

The defining characteristic of the United States is freedom of speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment. However, this fundamental right is rapidly eroding due to censorship disguised as combating disinformation and malinformation. This censorship, directed by the US government, is not limited to the private sector. Mike Benz, an expert on this issue, explains how the foreign policy establishment and defense contractors manipulate this. Internet freedom, initially used for supporting dissident groups globally, has become a tool for censorship since 2014. NATO now views controlling media as crucial for political influence, targeting even domestic groups. This shift accelerated after the 2016 election, with Russiagate providing cover for domestic censorship. The 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic saw massive censorship, with government agencies and private entities working together to suppress dissenting voices. This system uses AI-powered tools to identify and remove content deemed harmful to "democratic institutions," effectively creating military rule disguised as democracy. The fight to preserve free speech is now centered on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), which are facing immense pressure from both governmental and international entities.

The discussion centers on the Smith-Mont Act (referred to as the Smithmont Act) and its modernization, arguing it enabled U.S. influence operations abroad while constraining them at home. The claim is that, after World War II, winning elections and shaping law in foreign countries required an apparatus to influence hearts and minds, which shifted warfare from military occupation to political subversion. In this view, the 1948 act authorized a covert, permanent department of “dirty tricks” to infiltrate and co-opt universities, unions, media, politicians, judges, and the broader “swarm army” of influence, effectively creating a global propaganda machinery controlled by the State Department, CIA, and later USAID. A key figure cited is Frank Wisner, associated with the so-called Wissner’s Wurlitzer, described as a “church organ” that could play the international media like a symphony to cause any media narrative to go viral worldwide. The assertion is that the United States and United Kingdom dominated early robust radio, film, TV, and print, enabling foreign propaganda operations. The Smith-Mont framework supposedly allowed the U.S. to plant fake news abroad—“propaganda abroad”—but prohibited such activities from affecting domestic audiences, shielding Americans from comparable interference. The speaker argues the rationale for this separation was economic: if foreign governments resisted resource access, military basing, or U.S. multinational operations, Americans would bear economic costs (lower living standards, fewer imports, higher prices). Thus, foreign influence operations were designed to be accessible abroad and barred from coming home. This protection lasted about seventy years but is claimed to have eroded in the last decade, with reference to a broader “Smithmont problem” now affecting funding and operations. The claimed evolution is that the foreign policy establishment can fund groups that operate domestically in a dual-use fashion—providing foreign grants for media propaganda abroad while also operating within the U.S.—and can influence social media censorship to coerce foreign governments into enacting censorship laws that affect U.S. peer-to-peer speech. The speaker warns that, to preserve the foreign influence function, there must be a hard firewall and severe penalties for any violations, implying the importance of maintaining a clear boundary between foreign propaganda activities and domestic communications. Overall, the transcript asserts that the Smith-Mont framework created a permanent, cloaked apparatus for influencing foreign audiences, with a historical showcase of Wisner’s organization and its reach, while stressing the need to reinstate stringent firewalls and penalties to prevent domestic misuse of such operations.

America's exceptionalism stems from its free speech, enshrined in the First Amendment. However, this fundamental right is rapidly eroding due to censorship disguised as combating disinformation and malinformation. This censorship, directed by the US government, isn't about truth but about silencing inconvenient voices. Mike Benz, an expert on this, reveals how the military-industrial complex and foreign policy establishment weaponized internet freedom, initially using it for regime change, then turning it inward to control narratives and elections. This involved using social media companies and government-funded organizations to censor dissent, framing it as a national security threat. This has fundamentally altered American governance, potentially leading to military rule. The future of free platforms like X is precarious, facing pressure from the US government and the EU's Digital Services Act.

Freedom of speech is under attack, with a censorship industrial complex choking expression and debate. Federal and state governments fund censorship technology, directing big tech to censor speech. Academic institutions research disinformation for the censorship regime, and think tanks groom journalists to promote pro-censorship propaganda. Nonprofit censorship groups produce blacklists to favor left-wing media and silence dissenting voices. The Federalist has been targeted for critiquing corporate media coverage of Black Lives Matter riots, which caused over $2 billion in damages. A House report documented Stanford's collusion with government entities to censor information, including political reporting. 70% of Americans distrust corporate media. Blacklists from groups like NewsGuard rate left-wing outlets higher than those challenging orthodoxies, impacting advertising revenue. The Federalist exposed the Russia collusion hoax and media lies against Justice Kavanaugh, even suing the State Department for promoting censorship tools. Despite facing censorship, The Federalist will continue reporting the truth.

NewsGuard, an organization that claims to guard against false narratives online, is actually a tool used by the national security state to control information and suppress alternative news sources. It was created in 2017 by a defense diplomacy intelligence axis to combat the rise of alternative news after the 2016 election. NewsGuard operates similarly to a system implemented in Eastern European countries, where news sources are categorized as blacklisted, whitelisted, or gray listed based on their alignment with NATO propaganda. NewsGuard's board of advisors includes former heads of NATO, CIA, NSA, DHS, and the State Department's Global Engagement Center. They have blacklisted thousands of web pages, including those questioning COVID origins or spreading conspiracy theories. This reveals a concerning level of censorship by the national security establishment.

Before the 2020 election, a group involving never-Trump Republicans, DHS, NATO, and DNC planned a mass censorship campaign using Stanford University, University of Washington, Graphica, and the Atlantic Council. These institutions, linked to the Pentagon, aimed to control social media to prevent questioning of mail-in ballots' legitimacy. The campaign involved threats to tech companies, resulting in a new censorship policy called delegitimization. This pre-censorship effort targeted 22 million pro-Trump posts on 15 platforms to ensure public acceptance of a potential Biden victory. The goal was to avoid election crisis due to mail-in ballot discrepancies.

Speaker 0: I began my journey into chronicling the censorship industrial complex. Speaker 1: Some of the most terrifying conversations I've had with some of my dear friends who work inside CIA, and their jobs is to go to other countries, get involved in elections, protests that will help overthrow a regime. It's no secret at this point. The CIA has been doing that for years, for decades. But the most terrifying conversations I've had are the ones where they would look to me and say, my god. Like, the twenty twenty election? We're doing to our people what we do to others. Speaker 2: CIA, the other intelligence agencies were exposed with projects like Operation Mockingbird. Speaker 0: The State Department, USAID, the Central Intelligence Agency went from free speech diplomacy to promoting censorship. Speaker 2: They created, purchased, controlled assets at the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of these top down media structures that used to control the information that Americans got. Speaker 3: I pulled into the driveway, opened up my garage door, these two gentlemen come out of a blue sedan with government license plates. And they came up to me and said, you're mister Solomon? And I said, yes. And they said, you're at the tip of a very large and dangerous iceberg. Speaker 4: Oh, yeah. The the FBI sent agents over to my home to serve a subpoena. They're questioning me about my tweets. How is that not chilling? Speaker 2: Our whole page on Facebook for the world Seventh day Adventist World Church was removed. Speaker 5: The level of censorship that we experienced from publishing this documentary was beyond anything I could have imagined, and we really didn't even understand why. Speaker 3: We are going to win back the White House. The Russian collusion started broken '16. That's where the big lie first erupted. Speaker 6: Russian operatives used social media to rile up the American electorate and boost the candidacy of Donald Trump. Speaker 0: That's why they went after Trump with the Russia gate and with the FBI probes and with the CIA impeachments and things like that. Speaker 3: My FBI sources told me there's nothing there. And I kept wondering to myself, how could it be that something that's not true be taken so seriously and be portrayed as true? Speaker 7: How do you expand sort of top down control in this society? How do we flip? How do we invert America? Speaker 6: The evidence that the Supreme Court recounts is bone chilling. The federal government would call a private media company and say, cancel this speaker or take down this post. Speaker 3: I mean, just think about this. A sitting president of The United States had his Twitter and Facebook accounts frozen. Our founding fathers could not possibly have imagined that. Is there a chance that this documentary will be censored? Speaker 1: I think there's a huge chance this documentary gets censored. Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's interesting when you look at so many of the big censorship cases in The United States involving COVID, Hunter Biden's laptop. They all go back to a common thread. What is that thread? National security. Speaker 0: Google Jigsaw produced world's first AI censorship product. Things the model were trained on, support for Donald Trump, Brexit referendum that the State Department tried very desperately to stop. These are all these sort Speaker 5: of component pieces of what you called the censorship industrial complex. Speaker 3: Censorship Industrial Complex. Censorship Speaker 2: Industrial Complex. Speaker 7: Censorship Industrial Complex. Censorship Industrial Complex. Speaker 1: I've long felt that it was a bubbling god complex.

On January 7, 2017, the head of the Department of Homeland Security declared the electoral infrastructure of the United States as critical infrastructure, giving the federal government control over it. This move faced resistance from local electoral officials. Later, under the pretext of foreign disinformation, a small group of political officials gained unilateral power over the entire US political system. They seized control of the electoral system and social media platforms, using intelligence agencies to monitor and censor content. With the arrival of COVID, these measures were applied to combat what was called the "infodemic" of COVID disinformation. Government-led efforts to censor COVID disinformation were supported by companies like Facebook, who claimed to have censored millions of posts related to COVID disinformation.

The speaker discusses how the US Department of Defense censored Americans during the 2020 election cycle. They explain that a group within the Atlantic Council and the foreign policy establishment pushed for a permanent domestic censorship government office to counter misinformation and disinformation. This office was eventually established within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through an obscure cybersecurity agency called CISA. The speaker details how this agency, with the combined powers of the CIA and FBI, classified online misinformation as a cybersecurity attack on democracy. They further explain how Stanford University, the University of Washington, Graphica, and the Atlantic Council, all Pentagon-associated institutions, were involved in a coordinated mass censorship campaign to pre-censor any disputes about the legitimacy of mail-in ballots. This campaign involved pressuring tech companies to adopt new terms of service speech violation bans. The speaker suggests that this censorship operation was orchestrated to ensure the perceived legitimacy of a Biden victory in the case of a red mirage blue shift event. They also mention the connection between this operation and the impeachment of Trump in late 2019.

Before the 2020 election, a group involving DHS, NATO, and the DNC planned a mass censorship campaign on social media to prevent disputing mail-in ballot legitimacy. They partnered with Stanford, University of Washington, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council, all linked to the Pentagon. Using threats and pressure, they forced tech companies to ban content questioning mail-in ballots. This was done to ensure public acceptance of a potential Biden victory due to mail-in ballots. The group aimed to control the narrative and prevent election crisis.

To protect social media companies from government pressure to censor content, an incoming administration could issue an executive order on day one. This order would prohibit government grants and contracts to any private company or nonprofit involved in domestic disinformation. This approach addresses the issue of government-funded censorship, allowing for the elimination of grants and contracts that support censorship activities. Currently, there are tens of thousands of individuals in the U.S. whose livelihoods depend on censorship work, a field that emerged in response to the 2016 election.

The CIA has the power to censor media institutions abroad and plans to expand this censorship industry worldwide to control political systems and elections. The American empire is disseminating this industry and assisting other countries in setting it up. It is a government-funded and society-coordinated effort, turning censorship into an industry. This paints a dark future.

Mike Benz, a former State Department official and cybersecurity expert, discusses how the US government has weaponized its power to control media and censor citizens. He explains that the foreign policy establishment, including the State Department, CIA, and Pentagon, has historically used these tactics against foreign governments but has now turned them on the American people. Benz outlines the chronology of how the government established censorship centers within agencies like the Global Engagement Center and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to control social media and suppress populist political movements. He also raises questions about the government's role in COVID-19 censorship and the origins of the virus.

To protect social media companies from government pressure to censor content, an incoming administration could issue an executive order on day one. This order would prohibit government grants and contracts to any private company or nonprofit involved in domestic disinformation. It effectively addresses the issue of government-funded censorship. By targeting grants and contracts across various agencies, this approach could dismantle the censorship industry, which has grown significantly since the 2016 election. Today, many individuals rely on this industry for their livelihoods, a situation that emerged in response to the political landscape following Trump's victory.

The government's involvement in censorship began in 2014 during the Ukraine crisis, following a coup that led to increased efforts to promote free speech. This initiative stemmed from a long history of U.S. diplomacy supporting free speech globally since 1948, utilizing media outlets like Voice of America. After the U.S. supported the ousting of Ukraine's government, they invested $5 billion in media institutions, but struggled to influence Eastern Ukraine. In response, they developed a censorship framework, initially termed the Gerasimov doctrine, which emphasized controlling media as a means of warfare. By 2016, NATO formally recognized hybrid warfare, integrating social media control into military strategy, which eventually redirected these efforts domestically following the 2016 U.S. election.

The speaker outlines a framework for understanding current information control by the US and its allies, arguing that the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Central Intelligence Agency operate together to shape information in society. They describe three roles: the State Department conducts overt information control through funding media institutions (which are presented as “free and independent” but labeled government-backed); the Pentagon engages in information control through psychological operations; and the CIA operates covert information control, influence campaigns, propaganda, and censorship work. Between the State Department and the CIA sits a vast network of soft power institutions that implement this influence. Soft power is defined as the alternative to hard power, enabling a country to win “hearts and minds” and influence other countries’ governments by manipulating populations. The speaker connects this framework to the Brazil situation, stating at the top level the involvement of three or more organizations: the State Department, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). USAID and the NED are described as intermediaries between the State Department and the CIA, with the NED characterized as a CIA cutout established after the Church Committee era to fund dissident groups in a publicly firewalled way, though the speaker asserts there is no real divide between the NED and the CIA. The NED’s founders explicitly noted it would do what the CIA used to do, but via a private, publicly named entity. The speaker cites Christopher Walker (NED) as a participant in this ecosystem. The narrative then moves to a 2017 GlobSec video, described as the origin of today’s censorship industry’s consensus. The video’s description is read, highlighting concerns about traditional media being challenged by internet news and social networks, the spread of “unfiltered” alternative media, and the problem of algorithms that personalize content and reinforce confirmation bias. It identifies populist and extremist right-wing groups as exploiting these algorithms, and asks how to protect users from fake news and propaganda without censorship. It questions the role of information technology companies and the responsibility of social platforms for content, while debating how to fight extremism without undermining free speech. The panel includes figures tied to the CIA, DHS, and private security and consulting groups. Key participants highlighted include Michael Chertoff (Executive Chairman of the Chertoff Group, former DHS Secretary, linked to censorship governance), and Christopher Walker (Vice President of NED), among others. The speaker emphasizes Chertoff’s connections to BAE Systems and to the broader military–intelligence–policy network, noting Chertoff’s role in shaping how platforms were to police “unfiltered” content in 2017. The speaker also references Nina Janković, who was connected to the disinformation governance board and the Integrity Initiative, asserting a lineage from Chertoff to the broader censorship apparatus. The speaker then broadens the geopolitical frame to Russia’s resource wealth (citing a claim of $75 trillion in resources vs. the US’s $45 trillion), noting that the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) theater is the battleground for Eurasian influence. The montage in the video is described as starting with 1917 and Woodrow Wilson, portraying the blob’s view of democracy as a vector for hegemonic influence, and linking it to propaganda, censorship, and the need to control online discourse. The montage proceeds through references to 1936, Goebbels and the 1936 Olympics, Hitler, 1943, Elvis, 1960s–70s conspiracy theories about the CIA and JFK, and 1990s declassification of Northwoods-era plans, culminating in the framing of Internet propaganda as a modern battlefield. The session transitions to a live moderator, with a check on audio levels and an introduction to the next segment, announced as taking place in Bratislava for a global audience.

Before the 2020 election, a coordinated censorship campaign was launched. This involved the Department of Homeland Security, NATO, and the DNC, leveraging institutions like Stanford University, the University of Washington, Graphica, and the Atlantic Council—many with ties to the Pentagon. These groups, many staffed by former intelligence officials, worked together to suppress discussion questioning the legitimacy of mail-in ballots. They used a multi-step plan to pressure social media companies into adopting a new policy banning content undermining public confidence in the election process. This involved threats of government action and leveraging media allies. Millions of posts across multiple platforms were censored or suppressed. The goal was to prevent questions about the election outcome, anticipating a potential crisis if initial results appeared to favor Trump before shifting to Biden.

Two main strategies will emerge for censorship in a post-Trump era: state and global. The state strategy involves new laws in blue states like California and New York, aimed at restricting social media content and creating market disruptions. This will push compliant tech companies to the forefront while limiting access to platforms that support free speech. The global strategy mirrors the post-2016 election response, where former officials will leverage their connections to influence foreign governments into imposing censorship on American companies hosting pro-Trump content. This will lead to a battle between the Trump administration's diplomatic efforts and the censorship initiatives from civil society groups aligned with the previous administration.

The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), funded by the US government, has been using taxpayer dollars to secretly censor conservative and heterodox opinions online. They conducted a social science censorship experiment using 23 million tweets labeled as misinformation from the 2020 election. EIP developed four censorship techniques, resulting in a 63% censorship rate without users knowing they were being censored. These techniques included covert follower loss for medium to large-sized influencers. The study, published in Nature Magazine, aimed to find ways to censor people without causing outrage or blowback for tech platforms. EIP received $1 million in taxpayer funding from the Biden administration.