Mike Benz

00:00Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. All right, we're up. Nice to meet you, Mike. Nice to meet you, Joe. I wish you didn't have to exist. Me too. You're one of those guys that when you talk, like, God, I wish what he's saying isn't true, but I know it is. But I'm happy you do. I don't remember where I first saw you speak, but, I mean, right away I was thinking, okay, this makes a lot of sense. When you're explaining, like, the Ministry of Truth or whatever it is. Is that what it's called? Ministry of Truth? Well, yeah. They tried to do that for a while. That was, I think, so just as a background, please tell people what you do and what positions you held. I do all things internet censorship. That's really my mission in life, my North Star.

01:00I started off as a corporate lawyer and then worked for the Trump White House. I was a speechwriter. I sort of advised on technology issues. And then I ran the cyber division for the State Department, basically the big tech portfolio that interfaces between sort of big government, international diplomacy issues on technology, and then the sort of private sector U.S. national champions in the tech space like Google and Facebook. So I was the guy that Google lobbyists would call when they wanted favors from big government. But, you know, my life took a huge sort of U-turn, you might say, when the 2016 election came around and I became obsessed with the early development of the censorship industry, This giant behemoth of government, private sector, civil society organizations and media all collabing to censor the Internet.

01:56It was kind of a weird path from there. When did it all start rolling? When did the government realize that they had to get actively involved in censorship and what steps did they initially take to get involved in this? It started in 2014 with the Ukraine fiasco. The coup and then the counter coup. The coup was great for Internet free speech. I mean, you really do need to start the story of Internet censorship with the story of Internet freedom because censorship is – promotion of censorship is sort of the flip side of promotion of free speech. And we've had this free speech government diplomatic role for 80 years now. When World War II ended, we embarked, we had the international rules-based order that was created in 1948. We had the UN, we had NATO, we had the IMF, the World Bank. We had this big global system now.

02:53There was a prohibition in 1948 under the UN Declaration of Human Rights that you can't acquire territory by military force anymore and have it be respected by international law. So everything had to move to soft power influence. And so the U.S. government took a very active role beginning in 1948 to promote free speech around the world. And this was done through all these, you know, initially CIA proprietaries like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. And then the whole Wisner's, Wurlitzer, State Department CIA apparatus, all the early partnerships with the media and the war machine around propaganda for World War II continued through the Cold War. And then that hit the gas with promotion of free speech on the Internet when the Internet was privatized. It was initially a military project.

03:39So it was a government operation from Jump Street. And then in 1991, the World Wide Web came out, civilian use. And right away, the State Department, the military, our intelligence sphere was promoting free speech so that we could have a basically government pressure on foreign countries to open up their Internet to allow basically groups that the U.S. government was supporting to be able to combat state control over media in those other countries. So we already had this sort of deep interplay between government, tech companies, universities, NGOs that dates back 80 years. You look at the evolution of NGOs like Freedom House or the Atlantic Council or Wilson Center and promoting these free speech things. But what happened was is in 2014, we had had about 25 years of successful free speech diplomacy.

04:33And then there was a, you know, we tried to overthrow the government of Ukraine. We successfully did. And I'm not even arguing whether that's a good or a bad thing. But the fact is, is the U.S. did effectively January 6th the Yanukovych government out of power in 2014. I mean, we literally had our assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs, Victoria Newland, handing out cookies and water bottles to violent street protesters as they surrounded the parliament building and ran the democratically elected government out of office. But then what happened is the eastern side of the state completely broke away. So we don't respect this new U.S. installed government. Crimea voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation.

05:14And that kicked off that sort of set in motion the events that would end the concept of free speech diplomacy is like a U.S. government unfettered good. Because what they argued is we pumped five billion dollars worth of U.S. government money into media institutions in Ukraine. That's the figure that's cited by Victoria Nuland in December 2013, right before the coup. Five billion dollars setting up independent media companies, basically sponsoring Mockingbird style our media assets in the region. And they still didn't penetrate eastern Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine was primarily ethnic Russian, didn't penetrate Crimea. So they said, we need something to stop them from being able to combat our media influence. And they initially called this the Jurasimov Doctrine, named after Valery Jurasimov, who was this Russian general.

06:05They took a quote from him saying, the new nature of war is no longer about military to military conflict. All we need to do is take over the media in these NATO countries, and that's primarily social media, get one of our pawns elected as the president, and that president will control the military. So it's much cheaper and more efficient to win a military war by simply winning civilian elections.

06:30So that was called the Jurasimov Doctrine. That's what set up the early censorship infrastructure in 2014. Three years later, the guy who coined that, Mark Gagliotti, would write a sort of mea culpa saying, oops, I'm sorry. Jurasimov was actually citing what the U.S. does. But by that point, they'd already renamed it hybrid warfare. NATO formally declared the tanks to tweets doctrine, saying that the new role of NATO is no longer just about tanks. It's about controlling tweets. And then Brexit happened in June 2016. In July 2016, the very next month in Warsaw, NATO added hybrid warfare to its formal charter, basically authorizing the military, the diplomatic sphere, and the intelligence world to take control over social media.

07:16And then five months later, Trump won the election being called a Russian asset. So all that infrastructure was redirected home to the U.S. Jesus. it was looking pretty bleak i would say um in terms of the direction internet censorship was headed it was it was it seemed like the censorship machine was winning up until around the time that elon purchased x that seems to me to be our fork in the road that's the alternative timeline you know mark entries and talked about that yesterday that we've had a couple of alternative timelines where things have shifted i think that was one of the big ones that's exactly it i mean he's he's sort of the the timeline where we miss the bullet is where there's a deus ex muskina you know it's sort of like a deus ex machina where it's this random plot thing that happens you know

08:14someone descends onto the stage and solves all the plots loopholes and magically saves the the you know, the plucky heroes that were otherwise in danger. There were events in the run-up. Well, it all sort of happened simultaneously, really, because the month that Elon announced his acquisition was the same month that the Disinformation Governance Board was announced at DHS, which was the first thing that really roused Republicans and, frankly, anyone with institutional power in D.C. to finally stare into the sun and recognize or at least begin to glimpse the size of what they were up against. The disinformation governance board set off a flurry of congressional activity from Chuck Grassley and other luminaries in Congress. There were a lot of whistleblower documents came out. And for years, the entire Republican Party and most of the

09:09Democrat Party had denied the existence of government censorship. And frankly, the Ministry of Truth was not the disinformation governance board. The Ministry of Truth had already existed three years earlier at DHS. They just called it a name that masked what it did. It was called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is a name that puts you half to sleep by the time you're finished saying it. Ministry of Truth scared the shit out of people just because of the Orwellian context of the term. You know, it just seemed like, what do you, what? Well, the funny thing is they were right. The Disinformation Governance Board was not the Ministry of Truth. It was a dull, boring, mundane, bureaucratic layer to manage the Ministry of Truth that was already created three years earlier.

09:57But the fact is nobody called them out on it because of the thick language of censor speak that um that that hides this whole thing from general public awareness i mean in my own path i've i've i've tried to self-reflect about how i ended up here spending my life on this and i used to think it was primarily about chess and you know my sort of early encounters with ai and then seeing the the censorship ai that really sparked my pursuit into this but the more i've thought about it, the more it's based, I think it's just kind of coming from a corporate law background where your job is to plant dirty tricks in the fine print of 150-page legal documents and to catch dirty tricks in that linguistic framing that's done by opposing lawyers. And that's really

10:50how they pulled this off. Nobody thought in 2019 that the cybersecurity agency in DHS would be the Ministry of Truth. They didn't appreciate the layers of censorspeak that were constructed on top of that to say that, well, DHS governs critical infrastructure and elections are critical infrastructure. Public health is critical infrastructure. Misinformation online is a cyber component. So it's a cyber attack on critical infrastructure. And so normally policymakers or people in the public think, oh, cybersecurity, that's hacking, that's phishing, you know, That's some that's that's for CIA, NSA people to stop Russians from hacking us. And they think critical infrastructure, they think things like dams or subsea cables or low earth satellites.

11:39They don't they don't think it means you sitting on the toilet at 930 p.m. on a Thursday saying, I don't know that I love mail in ballots. And then suddenly you're being flagged by DHS as a cyber threat actor for attacking the U.S. critical infrastructure of confidence in our elections. But that's how they scaled these definitions into this giant mission creep. And now it's metastasized into the entire U.S. federal government, the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, DHS, FBI, DOJ, HHS. And the task in front of this administration is just unbelievably enormous in deconstructing that. Is it possible? they're going to run into a lot of headwinds because once this power was discovered and funded to the tune of billions as it has been we we have this foreign policy establishment that

12:34manages the american empire that saw internet censorship as kind of an eldorado key to permanently winning the soft power influence game around around the world and what i mean by that is okay so you know how in a lot of people talk about the early cia activity in the media with things like operation mockingbird and and whatnot and the ability to sort of propagandize things in the media well you never had this capacity in the 1950s while that was going on if if you and i were at dinner Thanksgiving or something, and there's 12 people at the table, and I start talking to you about, I don't know, the COVID vaccines may have adverse side effects. There was never an ability to simply reach under the table as an intelligence agency or as the Department of Homeland Security

13:28or as the Pentagon or the State Department, just turn off the volume when we talk to each other peer to peer. But since the lion's share of all communication is digital, especially the politically impactful ones, that capacity now allows our blob, our foreign policy establishment to effectively control every election or at least tilt every election around the world. And they've sprawled this into 140 countries. And Trump is going to run into every single regional desk at the State Department. Every single equity at the Pentagon arguing that if you do not allow us to continue this censorship work, it will undermine national security because it will allow Russian-favored narratives to win the day in the Ivory Coast, in Chad, in Nigeria, and Brazil, and Venezuela, and Central and Eastern Europe. You're going to have the State

14:26department argue that if we don't have this counter misinformation capacity, then extremists will win elections around the world or populists will win the election around the world. And that will undermine the power of our democratic institutions, essentially our programming, our assets in the region. And they've built this enormous capacity. We use it because it works, because it wins and the fact is is trump probably only won this election because for the same reason he probably only won the 2016 election which was in both cases there was largely a free internet it was when trump got censored into oblivion in 2020 by the u.s government under his nose working with webs of of outside ngos and pentagon front groups to mass censor virtually every narrative that he was that he was putting out that that he lost so it does work to

15:23to win elections and every there's a regional desk at the state department covering every country on earth victoria newland you know at a desk that cover about 20 countries so every country the state department is a preferred winner of that election we work with all political parties and that's a that's a hugely powerful tool to lose it's just twisted and evil and it needs to And we need to win. I don't want to say fair fights, but dipping into this sort of dark sorcery power has not only does it crush the First Amendment entirely, but the diplomatic blowback is just absolutely enormous. I can go through examples of that if you're interested. Sure. Well, so we have this thing called the Global Engagement Center at the State Department.

16:09And it was set up initially to fight ISIS because in 2014, 2015, when the Obama administration was trying to put military boots on the ground in Syria, there was this sort of giant threat that was publicly talked about all over about ISIS recruiting on Facebook and Twitter. homegrown ISIS threats for example the Garland Texas fiasco where there was a shooting by a ISIS terrorist and the web of online intrigues around that three years later would come out that he had been effectively groomed by the FBI the FBI had paid someone over a hundred thousand dollars to become his best friend and text him to tear up Texas before that but never mind the the horse was out of the barn. So this idea that ISIS was recruiting on Facebook and Twitter gave a license to the State Department to create this thing called the Global Engagement Center,

17:04which was really the first official censorship capacity in the U.S. government. It predated the DHS stuff that would come along in the Trump era. And this gave the State Department the direct back channel, the direct coordinating capacity with all the social media companies to tell them about ISIS, ISIS accounts, ISIS narratives that were trending. The Pentagon poured hundreds of millions of dollars into developing a technique called natural language processing, which is a way to use AI to scan the entire internet for keywords. And you would have these academic researchers effectively constructing code books of language. What do ISIS advocates or supporters talk like? What words do they use? What prefixes and suffixes? This whole lexicon is then conjoined

17:59with the ingested sum of all of their tweets and transcribed YouTube videos and Facebook posts. And then suddenly the State Department is a real-time heat map of everyone who is likely to be or hits a certain confidence level being suspected to support ISIS. That was 2014 to 2016 set up by this guy, Rick Stengel, who described himself as Obama's propagandist in chief. He's now on the advisory board of NewsGuard, one of the largest censorship mercenary firms in the world. But he described himself as a free speech maximalist because before he started this, he was the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. He started this censorship center. He was the former managing editor of Time magazine. And so he's talked about how he used to be a free speech maximalist back when he was in the media and media companies benefited from that.

18:54But when Trump won the election in 2016, he became convinced that actually the First Amendment was a mistake. He actually openly advocated in The Washington Post in an op ed that we effectively end the First Amendment, that we copycat Europe's laws. And they wrote a whole book on it. This is the guy who started effectively the country's first censorship center. But then they did a really cute trick. They went from counterterrorism to counterpopulism. Now, we've always had this ability since the 1940s to interfere in the domestic affairs of foreign governments or foreign countries to topple communist countries. This was the whole Cold War counter communism work of the CIA and the State Department. But that was primarily targeting left wing, left wing communists or left wing socialists or left wing populist run countries.

19:49when trump won the election in 2016 this was this is one of the reasons i think republicans were so slow to move on all this they never experienced the brunt of the intelligence state against the mainline gop or at least the in power trump faction of the gop in the way that democrats did in the 1960s and 70s when the cia was actively interfering in democrat party politics to try to tilt them away from the anti-Vietnam movement and more into the sort of limousine liberal international interventionalist neoliberal camp. And so in 2016, the Global Engagement Center pivoted from being counterterrorism to counterpopulism, arguing that right-wing populist governments, it wasn't just right-wing, they were also against left-wing populists, but they simply never rose to power in the way that Trump did in the U.S., Bolsonaro did in Brazil,

20:45Matteo Salvini did in Italy. Marine Le Pen almost did in France. Nigel Farage was on his way to in the UK and the Brexit referendum. The AFD party in Germany, the Vox party in Spain. In 2016, they were afraid that social media rising all these right wing populist parties to power would effectively collapse the entire rules based international order unless there was international censorship. because Brexit would give rise to Frexit if Marine Le Pen won and she was massively overpowered on social media versus Macron. If, you know, as I mentioned, Italy, there was going to be not just Brexit, there's going to be Frexit, Spexit, Italyxit, Grexit, Grexit. So the entire EU would come undone, which would mean all of NATO would come undone, which would mean there's no enforcement

21:34arm for the IMF or the World Bank or international creditors, which would mean it would be like the scene of Fight Club where the credit card company buildings all collapse just because you're allowed to shitpost on the internet. And they talked about that quite openly in 2017 as they were creating this whole censorship infrastructure. So the 2016 elections, that was a counterpoint. That was like a turning point. That was a moment where they realized like this is actually dangerous, like allowing people to freely communicate online and say whatever they want completely undermines the propaganda that they have been distributing, completely undermines their ability to control who's the president, what policies get pursued, things along those lines. Yeah, it was the final straw because, you know, the 2014 Crimea situation is, I mean,

22:30the Pentagon was actively working with and funding these censorship operations through the entirety of Central and Eastern Europe starting in 2014. And then Brexit was it was a major event in that basically it was said to come to Western Europe at that point. But when Trump won, that was, I guess, both the final straw and then the massive anvil that collapsed any residual resistance that existed within the national security state that we didn't need to do this. And Russiagate really was the the the useful tool to drive that all through.

23:07The fact that Trump came into office under the barrel of a gun of a special prosecutor, openly alleging that he may be a Russian asset, effectively a Manchurian candidate of of Russia, who only rose to power because of social media operations being run by Russia, allowed that national security predicate to to carry forward this infrastructure and be massively funded by the Pentagon. the State Department, the IC, the NGO sphere in order to set this infrastructure. But then in July 2019, Russiagate died on the vine immediately as soon as Bob Mueller completely goofed his three hour testimony. And a lot of people were thinking before he took the stand that Trump was going to be in jail as a Russian asset because it was kept under such close hold for two and a half years. What was Bob Mueller doing?

24:04There's the SNL sort of fanfare around that. But then when it was revealed he had nothing, there was a moment in time between July 2019 and September 2019 when all of this could have been shut down. And we could have just called all that censorship work counterintelligence, you know, a national security state thing. But they did something really, really nasty at that point, which we now live in the permanent aftermath of, which is they switched from a sort of counterintelligence national security threat from Russian interference predicate, which is useful because that gives you a blank check to use the Pentagon and the State Department, the IC on this, to a domestic democracy predicate.

24:51Now, this is really, really nasty because it basically transitions censorship from being a strictly military thing that we're doing to stop Russia to being a total permeating apparatus over all civilian domestic affairs, regardless of whether there's a foreign threat. And when that was allowed to go unchallenged for effectively three years up until Elon announced the acquisition of X and that same month, the disinformation governance board spilled over and then Republicans won the House in November 2022, which then allowed congressional hearings on all this and the elevation of the Twitter files and the public awareness from that.

25:29But for three years, you had this handoff from Russiagate. I call this the foreign to domestic switcheroo. And if you're interested, you know, Jamie, if you look up, not asking to, but if you're curious, I have a whole super cut of what these people were saying from 2016 to 2018 while the Russiagate investigation was going on to 2019, 2020 after Russiagate. They do this foreign to domestic switcheroo. Those are the key terms if you're interested. There's a compilation. Yeah, I did a compilation of all these DHS officials, State Department officials, Pentagon officials, completely changing their justification for why we need Internet censorship before Russiagate and after Russiagate.

26:15And they switched from saying Russian disinformation is the threat. So that's why the Pentagon's involved. That's why the state and CIA and FBI is involved. Just saying, well, actually, domestic disinformation is a threat to democracy. So regardless of whether it's the Russians or not, we need to censor Americans to preserve democracy. And this happened in tandem. What examples were they using to justify this? Well, they pulled off a cute trick where they doctrinally redefined democracy to mean the consensus of institutions rather than individuals. They had when Trump won in 2016 and Brexit passed in 2016, they took this anti-authoritarian toolkit, which has for 80 years been the CIA's predicate for overthrowing governments.

27:01Really, since the 1910s, when Woodrow Wilson announced that America's role is to make the world safe for democracy, we've long had a habit of intervening in foreign countries in order to liberate people from authoritarian control and bring them the gift of democracy. And that has always meant in primarily that the government would represent the the mass of institutional of the mass of individuals in the form of voting. When Trump won in 2016, at the same time that all these right wing populist parties who were just like Trump also won between 2016 and 2018, primarily using free speech on social media and their popularity there. They argue that right wing populism was the same authoritarian threat that left wing socialism, left wing communism was.

27:54And so they said, well, populism is the people's ground up revolt against institutions, against against government, science, media, against the NGOs, the experts, the academics. So what they did is they argued that democracy has to be defended from demagoguery. Democracy needs guardrails. We need bumper cars on democracy that go beyond what people vote for because people voted for Hitler. People voted for Trump. And they were doing this at U.S. government conferences, by the way, in 2017. I can show you some funny ones if you're interested. But they they were arguing that we need these institutional guardrails against people voting for the wrong person. And those institutional guardrails are so-called democratic institutions, which is another cute rhetorical trick because that's the CIA State Department watchword for asset.

28:54When we when when USAID, for example, goes in and funds university centers, media outlets, parliamentarian groups, activist groups, legal scholars, you name it in a region. They are they are building up their assets to exert soft power influence on that society, on that government in order to influence the passage of laws, the you know, the the span of operations that they're doing that that touch the U.S. embassy in the region. And so what they argued is actually democracy is not about the will of individuals. It's about the consensus of institutions. So if if there's institutional consensus building between the military, the diplomatic sphere, the intelligence community, the NGOs, the the media outlets, the universities, that's really democracy.

29:51Those are the institutional guardrails, the people who know best. That's a difficult process, by the way. That's a process that takes months, years. That's why there are these major consensus building institutions like the Atlanta Council and the Council on Foreign Relations and Wilson Center and the Carnegie Endowment. We have a whole suite of consensus building institutions to bring together the banks, the corporations, the government officials, the outside interests. So they all get on the same page about a certain policy or initiative or or regional drive or industrial change.

30:26If at the end of that process, a bunch of people vote for a politician because he does funny TikTok videos or he's got a popular dance and throws a monkey wrench in that years of those years of consensus building that they began to view as a is an attack on democracy. And so they said democracy is really about institutions. And you can actually look up, for example, Reid Hoffman. In 2019, they were doing all of these conferences where they said elections are a threat to democracy. Elections corrupt democracy because we can't think of democracy as elections anymore.

31:03For example, Ukraine has banned elections. We still say we are providing $300 billion of military support to promote democracy in Ukraine, even though they don't have elections. What's because of the – it's controlled by U.S. institutions. You can look up something called the Red Lines Memo, by the way, on my account, if you're curious. So when you say that Ukraine no longer has democracy, essentially what happened is Zelensky was supposed to leave office and he did not. Is that what happened?

31:32Well, they've they've indefinitely canceled elections. So he is because of the war, because of the war is their argument. Now, we had elections during the during the Civil War here in the US. This is you. This is not uncommon for countries to be at war and still have elections. The issue is, is Zelensky is unpopular and not winning in those election polls. And we no longer define democracy as being about elections because elections allow populists to circumvent the consensus of institutions. And if you want to see a great example of this, you can look at the something called the Red Lines Memo, which is which is I think I have it near the top of my exit counter. You can look for just the phrase Red Lines Memo and you will see Zelensky's first month in office.

32:19He was given a threat letter effectively by the U.S. State Department where they had they had something like 70 U.S. funded NGOs who wrote a letter to Zelensky telling him, ordering him not to cross the below listed red lines or else there will be political instability in your country. Now, political instability in the country caused by the U.S. State Department is the reason Zelensky ultimately became president. The 2014 coup in Ukraine was U.S. and U.K. orchestrated political instability to have a January 6th style mob destabilize the government and literally run it out of the country. And they gave him red lines on every single aspect of what he could do as president. Security red lines, cultural red lines, energy policy. What were these red lines, like cultural red lines?

33:13So, for example, that he could not allow the use of Russian language to be aired on any of the major Ukrainian media channels. This is part of a drive by the U.S. State Department in tandem with the censorship work that started at that same time in order to prevent the sort of affinity, the sort of Russian affinity network that happens because of Russian propaganda spreading from Russian language news sources and to try to pry the country off of the Russian ethnic faction and have essentially the Ukrainian dialect. This is in response for what happened in Crimea? Yes, yes. And Crimea and the Donbass, the whole eastern side breakaway. But this is effectively the long arm of Langley, the long arm of the State Department and CIA telling Ukrainians that they can't, what kind of language they can use in their own country.

34:11Ukraine was effectively forced to transfer over its education ministry to an EU commissioning body so that Russian adjacent mythologies couldn't be taught in the country. They were told what industries they needed to privatize and to block any attempt to maintain sovereign control of those energy assets. This is ultimately what gave rise to the Burisma scandal, by the way, and the Hunter Biden State Department affairs that ran through all of that, which is a whole other fascinating topic, I should add. But the fact is— I'd love to get back to that. Yeah. Yeah. But this is every aspect of Ukrainian society effectively top-down controlled by democratic institutions funded by the U.S. government when it's stock standard that the only reason we do that, you know, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

35:11they're being funded to exert this soft power issue every this this soft power force on the ukrainian government and zelinski knows that force because the only reason he occupies the power that he does is because that force ushered him in through the sequence of events from yatsenyuk uh in 2014 uh through up to him and so the issue is is those are the institutions By the way, that whole thing was run through something called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, which is effectively a suite of media institutions in the area that are CIA conduits, like the Kiev Independent, which is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. The National Endowment for Democracy is one of the most pernicious forces in the entirety of the censorship industry.

36:02And, you know, you were talking with Marc Andreessen about NGOs and their role in Internet censorship. and you know he was i think fleshing out sort of the concept of a gongo a government organized non-governmental organization and so the national endowment for democracy is sort of posited as as an ngo but it's got a very curious history again this is what sponsors so much of ukrainian media the national endowment for democracy was created in 1983 because of a dilemma that the new ronald Reagan administration faced. The CIA at that point in the early 80s, its name was DIRT. There were the massive scandals in the 1960s to the 1970s, everything from Operation Mockingbird to MKUltra to Operation Chaos to effectively bribing student groups on college campuses,

36:52all sorts of things. The heart attack gun being held up in a public hearing at the church committee in 1975 about ways the CIA was assassinating world leaders and assassinating journalists and political figures using methods that included a gun that would make it look like they organically died of a heart attack. All of these things gave rise to Jimmy Carter being elected in 1976. He was not expected to win in 76, but he won on the back of Democrat mass outrage over the malfeasance of the national security state, the CIA. And so the following year, Carter does something called the Halloween massacre. He fires 30 percent of the CIA's operations division in a single night, and then he totally cripples the CIA's budget. Reagan gets the power after the Iran hostage situation, wants the CIA's powers back.

37:52But the Democrats were still hugely hostile to it. The public still had not fully forgiven the CIA. So they came up with a cute trick. And you can actually look at a September 1991 David Ignatius article called Spyless Coups. This is in the Washington Post. The article begins with a by saying that we don't even really need to have we don't really need to even need to nominate Robert Gates, the Senate, the new CIA director for. We don't even need to do a Senate confirmation hearing for a CIA director anymore because the CIA is effectively made obsolete by its by its new tactic that we use through NGOs spearheaded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

38:34And you'll find in that article a quote by the National Endowment for Democracy's founder, Carl Gershman, where he explicitly says that it would be a terrible thing for groups supported by the U.S. government to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We did that in the 1960s, and it worked out terribly for us when it turned out they were backed by the CIA. That's why the National Endowment for Democracy was created so that we could do the CIA could effectively subsidize the the groups without having CIA fingerprints on it. If you look at its legislative history, it passed effectively a bill through Congress that Ronald Reagan approved. The origins of it come from the CIA director William Casey in 1983, working directly with the U.S. Attorney General, as well as an entire USAID blueprint the previous year. The CIA requested this to be set up.

39:39It's funded entirely by the U.S. government. It's officially accountable to the House Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So it's funded by the government. It's it's literally accountable to Congress to a U.S. congressional committee. It was this the CIA director birthed it. The founder acknowledged that they were created to do what the CIA wants to do, but gets in trouble for doing. And we call this an NGO. I don't think so. And so the issue is, is the National Network for Democracy and the entire intelligence community was they were the ones who led this conversion from counter communism to counter populism.

40:22They're the ones who, when Trump rose to power and when Brexit and the whole NATO-EU country domino, started electing right-wing populists who were hostile to the foreign policy establishment's consensus. And a lot of this has to do with energy geopolitics and military interventionism. And we can get to those if you want to go there. But the NED has its octopus arms around the entirety of the censorship industry. If you want to see something really, really crazy, there's a video that we can watch. It's a two-minute video from one of Ned's global censorship programs where they explicitly work with foreign governments to get foreign governments to pass censorship laws to attack U.S. companies.

41:12So this is the U.S. government funding a CIA cutout to back channel with regulators and influencers and foreign countries to get those foreign countries to crush U.S. national champions in the tech space. This is the exact opposite of what the State Department was set up in 1789 to do. Where is this video? How can we see it? If you if you if you put it up. Disinformation has invaded online conversations on social media platforms, posing challenges to healthy information environments and threats to democracy. It bolsters authoritarians, weakens democratic voices and participation, exploits and exacerbates existing social cleavages, and silences opposition. Countering disinformation and promoting information integrity are necessary priorities for ensuring democracy can thrive.

42:07The SEPs Countering Disinformation Guide is a resource including nine thematic sections and a comprehensive database of interventions, highlighting various approaches for advancing information integrity and strengthening societal resilience to disinformation and other harmful online campaigns. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems, International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute developed this guide with support from USAID through the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening. Here are nine key takeaways from the guide. Addressing disinformation requires a whole-of-society approach. We need to create a sense of urgency to drive collective action for addressing disinformation. Institutions and platforms have the resources to address disinformation but lack credibility,

43:04whereas civil society has the credibility but is chronically under-resourced. Countering disinformation requires a mixed-methods approach, including fact-checking, monitoring, and other interventions. Focusing on major events like election outcomes alone will not achieve a healthy information environment. Developing norms and standards, legal and regulatory frameworks, and better social media content moderation is necessary for a healthy information ecosystem. It is important to establish frameworks to discourage political parties from engaging in disinformation. Not sure where to start? Click here to explore the Interventions database of organizations, projects, and donors working to counter disinformation around the world. they're in 140 countries it's entirely funded by the u.s government it's it's uh i can i can

44:03break this down in detail so so this seps program is basically in large part the reason that the brazil censorship state was was erected i mean this came a little bit later in the game but it's it's a spawn out of this ned censorship network this explicitly created by the cia director self-confessed effectively CIA cut out what what what CEPs does is they manage in an umbrella portfolio of all of the censorship institutions that they've capacity built in a region so capacity building is a is a is a phrase in statecraft that effectively means building up an asset so that has the capability to to be instrumentalized by the U.S. State Department So, for example, whenever we're trying to do something in a foreign country, the first thing we do is we look at the state of the chessboard. What assets are on our side there?

45:02What political groups? What demographic groups? What religious groups? What political parties? What universities? What media institutions? What capacities do they currently have? What capacities do they need but don't have? And that is where the flood of State Department and USAID and NED funding comes in to capacity build them so that they can be instruments of U.S. statecraft. Now, it doesn't mean they always use those capacities. Sometimes we create those capacities even if we don't intend to use them right away just in case we might need them later. And I can – that's a whole other fascinating field. But – so what CEPS does is it's a joint program by the U.S. State Department, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

45:49Now, USAID is, you know, a very notary, it's sort of a switch player. There's no aid in USAID, by the way. That's, your brain is being tricked when you see the phrase USAID. It's not an aid organization. The aid in USAID stands for agent, US Agency for International Development. It is developing internationally around the world all of the institutions that the State Department needs to use. So when they are capacity building activist groups in a foreign country, that's because the State Department wants those activists there. Now, USAID for the first time in its history was created in the early 1960s by JFK in 1961. It was it was created because you had all of this intelligence, statecraft and military support and logistical aid that was tripping over itself.

46:46Basically, the military would be funding, you know, would be running aid to certain groups in the region. The State Department would be running aid to certain groups in the region. The Intelligence Committee would. And there was no way there was no sort of central coordinator of those of those capacity building operations. So USAID, by the way, is a $50 billion budget. The entirety of the intelligence community is only $72 billion. So it is more than the CIA and more than the State Department. Wow. And aid is basically a USAID is effectively a switch player to to assist the Pentagon with with on the national security front to assist the State Department on the national interest front or to assist the intelligence community on a on a sort of clandestine operations.

47:29operations front. So you can look up funny moments, by the way, in USAID being a CIA front. If, for example, you want to pull up the Wikipedia of Zunzanillo, when USAID created basically a CIA Twitter in Cuba to try to convince the people of, basically to try to get a free speech internet, a free speech Twitter knockoff in Cuba at a time when Twitter in 2014 was restricted. And USA laundered money that was earmarked for Pakistan in order to create a identical version of Twitter, but just for Cuba, and to recruit them using messaging that at first involved music, sports and hurricane updates.

48:20And then in their own documents, once they had accumulated about 100,000 users, they would start to feed them in the algorithm messaging to make them want to overthrow their government and form smart mobs to to bring a Cuban spring to Cuba in the same way that the CIA, the State Department, USA pulled off the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, 2012. By the way, I'm not even opining on whether this is good or bad, but you can't bring that home and you can't target U.S. companies like they've done here. But so USAID provides most of the money. The State Department provides the policy vision for the CEPs censorship program. And NED does the technical implementation work. Now, you saw in that video there were two organizations that were listed.

49:10It didn't say they were the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, IRI and NDI. These are the two political branches of the National Down for Democracy. When this CIA cutout was set up in 1983, they set up their four core fours. One of them, the first two are the political cores, the IRI, the Republican, the GOP wing of the CIA, effectively, the NDI, the Democrat Party wing of the CIA. And then two others, one called the Center for International Private Enterprise, which is the Chamber of Commerce. It's basically the CIA liaising with multinational companies, with our big U.S. national champions. And then the fourth one is called the Solidarity Center, which is the CIA's work with unions, which has been a part and parcel of our CIA work since the 1940s.

50:03And so you have these two political branches of the National Endowment for Democracy are designed to basically gel to both sides of the political aisle to make sure they have support for CIA activity in a region. And so this, for example, there was a split on Russia between the GOP and the DNC up until Ukraine in 2014. You may recall in 2012, there was that debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama over Russia policy where Mitt Romney was flanking Obama from his sort of hawkish Russia right.

50:37He was saying, Obama, you're soft on Russia. You're letting Vladimir Putin get everything he wants in Eastern Europe. And Obama's response was the 1980s called. They want their foreign policy back. Because at the time, it was primarily the GOP economic stakeholders whose energy investments were being sabotaged by Russian activity in Georgia and Azerbaijan. It hadn't yet hit the NDI network, the DNC side of the economics until Ukraine in 2014. That was when there became a bipartisan consensus on the need to effectively go to war and launch this big energy sanctions operation against Russia. And so there's that. So that's who's running that SEPs program. It's it's both sides of the political aisle, but both of them hate Trump. Both of them hate populace, whether it's the U.S. in with Trump, Bolsonaro in Brazil.

51:37And again, the whole suite of EU countries that we just talked about. And they descended on Brazil just two weeks after Bolsonaro was elected in 2018. The Atlantic Council and NED held all these meetings about how Bolsonaro only won because of basically social media, social media and end to end encrypted chats like WhatsApp and Telegram. And that we need to basically stop Bolsonaro's presidency in its tracks and stop him from getting reelected by creating a censorship infrastructure in Brazil that is powerful and and institutionally as wide and deep as our other diplomatic work. So NDI, which I should note, Hunter Biden was on the chairman's advisory board of NDI, the DNC CIA wing.

52:24So if if anyone is a little curious as to why the CIA intervened on the Justice Department investigation, folks, remember, the IRS wanted to question Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's lawyer who paid his taxes for five years. And then the CIA intervened and told them, do not, you know, do not look into who is funding Hunter Biden. I find it curious that the CIA's DNC branch, Hunter Biden was on the chairman's advisory board. But so NDI sets up this this sprawl of coalitions called D4D, Design for Democracy and Design for Democracy in tandem with this SEPs program goes on to work with the censorship court, Demorias, the censorship Voldemort on their their TSE court. It's basically the election management and censorship body of their Supreme Court. This is the guy who has gone to war with Elon Musk.

53:25They help that that censorship courts set up a disinformation task force and their own institutional assets get put on the advisory committee of the of the Brazilian censorship court to direct the censorship policies of that of the same the same institution that banned X from Brazil that seized Starlink's assets. They worked with the universities, FGV DAP and other very significant Brazilian universities. They set up disinformation centers in there and got academic thought leadership published in Brazil about the need to pass anti-misinformation laws. Their own NDI fellows and operatives were publicly testifying to the Brazilian parliament on the need to pass these laws. They were publicly speaking to the prosecutors association groups in Brazil, telling them they need to prosecute misinformation on this.

54:29They were funding millions of dollars to Brazilian media institutions to promote Internet censorship and to and to promote the banning effectively of any pro Bolsonaro content on social media or on end to end encrypted chats. The USA then kicked in millions of dollars of funding to Internews, which is another U.S. government funded media projection arm to promote media literacy programs, information integrity programs, countering mis and disinformation programs in Brazil. So at every level, Brazilian media companies, they partner with Globo, for example, the largest media outlet in Brazil. The media institutions, the universities and thought leaders, the politicians, the judges, it was full spectrum. It was the same thing that we do when we try to regime change a country.

55:21By the way, this is in USAID's charter. This is one of the reasons they're able to get away with this. In USAID's charter, it allows USAID to capacity build assets to do so-called judiciary reform, which means influencing the laws and the structure of the judges and to be able to have our foreign aid money get laws passed or get structural changes made to the court system there. And this is what SEPs did. This State Department CIA front censorship organization, they developed a strategy they called EMBs, election management bodies, which is basically focusing in on the court system of different countries that are there in charge with adjudicating elections in order to get them to grow a censorship capacity to censor the ability for people to question their elections. and they had all these stakeholder meetings.

56:20Some of them are really funny. Some of them, they said, well, some of our EMB partners didn't want to actually, didn't think they could pull this off. They couldn't convince the other political stakeholders in their country to grow the censorship capacity. And they advised them about how they could cleverly use rhetoric to disguise the programs. Don't call it a counter disinformation program if you think that'll ruffle too many feathers. Instead, simply call it strategic communications. And because every listen, every every government agency has some sort of public affairs branch, some sort of communications capacity. Simply say that this is for monitoring and engaging in strategic communications. And then you can mass flag the accounts of the U.S. State Department's political opponents. They want to stop from winning the election.

57:08Jesus. this is why you know when you're saying it's going to be insanely difficult and trump's going to face so many headwinds trying to unravel all this stuff like it's the there's so many organizations and there's so many people involved and there's so many countries that are in lockstep because we waited too long we waited too long and now look it's it's not full-blown um this has not yet reached full maturity where where we are at complete 1984 on on all of this but it is no longer in its infant stage there was if if elon had a if if congress was aware of that's that cissa that cyber security branch at dhs was the real ministry of truth in 2019 instead of in 2022 um if people were aware of the state department's global engagement center and usaids democracy human rights and governance and the all this

58:09you know um in 2018 2019 when it was really getting its its feet down it may have been easy to have been pulled out at the roots then because they were skittish at the time about going through with this at first you heard in that in that video that we just watched a reference to this phrase called whole of society yeah this is another funny you know funny video if you if you want to just pull up though if you're interested jamie and if you think joe this is appropriate uh i could have made this a six-hour supercut but if you just i made a two-hour supercut of of if you just look up whole of society supercut on my on my x account you'll you'll see this um and this phrase is their get out jail free card so when these cia cutouts and state department emissaries and

58:58and uh you know the whole apparatus of the blob had this apparition moment in 2016 where the rules based international order would collapse and we have to stop populism we have to stop trump from you know ending our seize eurasia foreign policy when that when that happened they had a lot of self-reflection where they said China doesn't have this problem. Russia doesn't have this problem. Authoritarian countries don't have to deal with the threat of insurgent populist groups, you know, radically altering that country's foreign policy, that country's national security state. But they do it all top down. And we have our entire diplomatic apparatus is arrayed as a sort of dichotomy between democracy and autocracy, because that's what lets us go over, go and take

59:49over or overthrow or regime change foreign countries is they're autocracies and we're bringing democracy to them. So we can't be seen to look like the autocracies we're trying to overthrow. We want the, we want the autocratic outcome with a, but we don't, we can't be seen to use the autocratic process. So they came up with a really cute trick to prevent the top down perception. And they called this the whole of society counter misinformation framework, the whole society counter misinformation alliance. And the reason I thought it'd be funny to just play this clip before delving into a little bit more is because it actually starts with a clip from CISA, the cybersecurity turned cyber censorship DHS internal meeting, where the CISA censorship official leading the meeting apologizes for using the phrase

60:42whole society because by that point everyone is so sick of hearing it. It's like a mantra, like an incantation that has to be recited almost like a religious ritual because this is how you get this government, private sector, civil society, media alliance. This thing was completely orchestrated top down to avoid the appearance of top down in 2017. they borrowed this concept from their military counterinsurgency work and they simply grafted it onto censorship but i don't know do you want to just like watch this and i haven't found it yet i'm sorry if you just look for the phrase whole of society at mike ben cyber i did it you could also i found a lot of this to be talking about it well if you go to in my highlights tab in in scroll down i think you'll you'll see it there it's uh it's a supercut i use the phrase supercut

61:38if that's helpful to highlight it. But whole society is this concept that the government will fund allies to astroturf the appearance of a spontaneous democratic surround sound around the need to do the censorship work. So there are four quadrants in their whole society framework. Government meaning all the different government, they have a whole of government side of that, which is everything from the State Department, the DHS, HHS for COVID censorship work, you know, FBI, DOJ, National Science Foundation, all that. The private sector are the private sector companies, the social media tech platforms where the censorship actually takes place. The civil society quadrant means university censorship centers, disinformation studies is what they call it, misnomer of the century.

62:34But but so they've there's now about 100 U.S. universities. Every major U.S. university has a censorship center. Well, it's it'll be called disinformation studies. Sometimes it'll be tucked under their sociology department or their communications, even their applied physics when they do A.I. censorship. So you have the universe and the civil society layer. You have the universities, the NGOs, the activist groups, the the independent nonprofit foundations. And the fourth quadrant is media, which is the government working with media to promote censorship of U.S. citizens. And so by effectively wielding all these assets so that there's government funding and government coordination, but technically most of the pressure being put on the tech companies is coming from – yeah, here you go. You can just watch. It's like a funny supercut.

63:25We don't need to watch the whole thing, but you'll get the picture very quickly. And we hear this term all the time. a problem like disinformation and fighting disinformation really requires a whole of society response. And I know whole society is a little bit cliche and a term that gets thrown around a lot. Addressing disinformation requires a whole of society approach. This information is not going to be fixed by governments acting alone. I think we've seen that a whole society effort is really key to the solution. There are some countries, more so in Europe or up in other parts of North America, that are more progressive in recognizing that this is a whole-of-society challenge. A whole-of-society approach, what would be your wish list if you could implement anything?

64:17Or to be able to trust when somebody tells them it's fake. Is there anything that governments can do on that front? Absolutely. This is a whole-of-society problem. So there's things that governments can do, you know, individual national governments and multilateral institutions. This information challenges democracy require that we work together as a community to share our experiences and to hold governments, social media platforms and political leaders accountable for making sure that people are empowered with information that is real and accurate. Democracy depends on a healthy information space that can only be achieved through a whole of society effort. countering disinformation. We often talk about a whole of society response. Of course, we need that information, a whole of society approach. I want to get into the

65:06whole of society response, the whole of society network response, private sector, public sector, civil society. Means that we're circulating. And that to me is the whole of society approach. I think the solution has to be whole of society, which is the word that we throw around a lot, especially in venues like these, right? We need cooperation from the tech platforms, good faith cooperation and enforcement of terms of service. But we also need people in the government who are willing to say, yes, this is a problem. And it's not just about foreign actors. Okay, so a few things on that. If you remember the SEPs video, the CIA front NED program to get censorship laws in 140 countries. If you remember, there was this, one of those nine things they read off is that the U.S. government needs to capacity build these

65:55counter misinformation institutions in civil society because the government has the money and the resources, but not the credibility. Civil society organizations, the universities, the NGOs, they've got the credibility, but not the money. So that's part of what they're saying here with the role of this civil society is they can't be, the government can't be seen as telling everyone to do all of this censorship because that's authoritarian. That would look not credible. That would look authoritarian for the government to do. So we've got the muscle and the money, but not the credibility. Our cutout organizations have the credibility, but not the money and the muscle. So we're going to give them the money and the muscle. And so I can show you if you want to see what this looks like in action,

66:41I can show you some great videos that sort of show this. so if you if you just look up wise decks it's in my highlights it's also if you just do at mike ben cyber wise decks i'm going to show you a couple of of the things of how this um how this works so if when when jamie's able to pull that up uh so you're saying wise wise decks w-i-s-e-d-e-x and so trump did something really ambitious when he when he was president at the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation is the main funder of higher education in the United States. It's a $10 billion pool of money that goes to fund university centers. And it is sort of the civilian arm of DARPA. It's technically, you know, a sort of civilian, you know, foundation for science. But if you look at its history, it basically has a,

67:41it's when military technology becomes dual use for commercial and civilian purposes. So, for example, the Internet itself started off as DARPA in the 60s. Then it was transferred to the National Science Foundation for civilian effectively management. Then it made its way to the World Wide Web. That's why the National Science Foundation has a 15% quota on national security related projects. And that's and all the technical implementers of the censorship programs at the National Science Foundation come from DARPA, including this that I'm going to show here. But but so Trump created this thing in what in his first term at the National Science Foundation called the Convergence Accelerator Program.

68:29And the idea was is that we were going to converge scientists from different fields to solve these home run swing challenges like, you know, cold fusion and and, you know, all the quantum mechanics challenges that required physicists to talk to data scientists and network modelers and bringing them all together so that they all converge on a common problem. So he set up about five of these tracks in 2019. Biden gets into office. His first year in office, his National Science Foundation creates a new track. It's called Track F. And the whole thing is for countering misinformation, to converge scientists on developing censorship technology to censor the Internet at scale. So they have spent tens of millions of dollars. This one that we're about to watch was eligible for $5.7 million from the National Science Foundation.

69:27It received $750,000 from the National Science Foundation to create this. This is the promo video that they put up on YouTube in connection with their grant. So I'll just let it play and then I'll... Posts that go viral on social media can reach millions of people. Unfortunately, some posts are misleading. Social media platforms have policies about harmful misinformation. For example, Twitter has a policy against posts that say authorized COVID vaccines will make you sick. When something is mildly harmful, platforms attach warnings like this one that points readers to better information. Really bad things they remove. But before they can enforce, platforms have to identify the bad stuff and they miss some of it. Actually, they miss a lot, especially when the posts aren't in English.

70:21To understand why, let's consider how platforms usually identify bad posts. There are too many posts for a platform to review everything. So first, a platform flags a small fraction for review. Next, human reviewers act as judges, determining which flag posts violate policy guidelines. guidelines. If the policies are too abstract, both steps, flagging and judging, can be difficult. Wisetext helps by translating abstract policy guidelines into specific claims that are more actionable. For example, the misleading claim that the COVID-19 vaccine suppresses a person's immune response. Each claim includes keywords associated with the claim in multiple languages. For example, a Twitter search for negative efficacy yields tweets that promote the misleading claim. A search on eficacia negativa yields Spanish tweets promoting that same claim.

71:22The trust and safety team at a platform can use those keywords to automatically flag matching posts for human review. wisetech harnesses the wisdom of crowds as well as ai techniques to select keywords for each claim and provide other information in the claim profile for human reviewers a wisetech browser plugin identifies misinformation claims that might match the post the reviewer then decides which matches are correct a much easier task than deciding if posts violate abstract policies reviewer efficiency so so covid19 was essentially like a proof of concept of all this right like this is a this is something they could utilize and see how everything works because you have this sort of consensus among most people because of the media narrative that this is dangerous we're

72:16all going to die the thing that's fucking us up is these people who are vaccine deniers and these people who are believing things that are ridiculous like natural immunity and so we you have like a public support of this thing to go full scale, where they can try it out with COVID-19, where there was no real specific narratives that we thought of wholly as problematic as a society before COVID-19. COVID-19 became one that at least a large swath of society believed the narrative that's being given to you by corporate news, and this was a thing that they could combat on social media and have support for this type of censorship. They had already begun doing it for hate speech before COVID-19. It didn't hit the scale, though. But they were already using hate speech as a proxy for populism, both in the U.S. and across NATO.

73:08And they were conflating everything with hate speech, basically, if you opposed open borders in the U.S. or in Italy or in Germany or in the U.K. In fact, that's why the U.S. Justice Department funded Hate Lab. You want to see another crazy video from all this? I'm not saying we have to pull it up. Let's pull it up. Fuck it. Yep. Look up the Hate Lab, their video on their AI scan and band dashboard. And all of this is just a large scale implementation of censorship. Yes. They're just using all these different things to get people accustomed to it and to try to start using this full scale. Yes. Actually, before we go to the Hate Lab, I do want to dwell on this COVID thing for a second because that's exactly right.

73:54On what we just watched with Wise Decks, just coming back to this whole society concept. So this is the National Science Foundation. The administrators for this are both DARPA guys. It is funding the University of Michigan to create an AI censorship claims database so that the censorship policies that the Biden administration strong armed onto these social media companies, as we know from Mark Zuckerberg and others, to adopt in the first place. So there's no escape. There's every claim that a covid vaccine skeptic says will be mapped out in a sort of, you know, lexicon codebook of terms and claims that will then be automatically flagged. And the National Science Foundation does not want to be seen as having the government tell the private sector companies to do it.

74:48So it is capacity building a civil society nonprofit, the University of Michigan disinformation lab to create this A.I. censorship technology to then sell to the social media platforms to make sure there's no escape to for in terms of the ability to criticize government policy on covid without getting censored. But just to drive home that point on COVID censorship, this is something that I think is really terrifying that people should be aware of. There's a company called Graphica, which figures very heavily in all of the censorship industry. If you pull up Graphica's April 2020 report on COVID and COVID conspiracy theories, it's also on my timeline.

75:36If you look up the word Grafica, it's G-R-A-P-H-I-K-A. Grafica is a longtime military contractor that did social media monitoring, surveillance, and analytics work for the U.S. military and intelligence in order to see what narratives opposition, you know, various political movements or insurgent groups are saying on social media. They were formerly a part of the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative. The Minerva Initiative is the psychological operations research center of the Pentagon. When the Pentagon is trying to do information shaping operations and they solicit propositions and ideas and thought leadership from outside organizations to help the military achieve psychological operations outcomes that are favorable to the intended military policy. So Grafica has gotten over seven million dollars in Pentagon grants.

76:31It was formerly a part of the Pentagon's Psychological Operations Research Center. And Grafica was one of the very first entities to begin the censorship around the world of COVID-19. given the strange unresolved role of the pentagon in potentially giving rise to covid19 or the you know the strangeness of the darpa grants uh around there in the military networks around the biosecurity state grafica began their work in before covid19 even got its name they started in their own source documents they say they started december 16th uh the the pneumonia like symptoms did not begin until we're december 12th 2019 so just four days after now they've said later that actually we started in january 2020 but we backdated our data our ai you know ingestion of all the tweets and facebook posts in january 2020 so even if you accept that that is still

77:35just one month after COVID broke out. And if you pull this, if you pull up their April 2020 report, you will see that they've literally scanned. Yeah, this is the one. And I have a highlighted version of it, by the way, on my X account as well. So if you scroll up, so if you start on page one, I'll sort of walk you through this. So again, this is a Pentagon-funded psychological operations research arm of the Pentagon. And you'll see, like, you know, it's called the COVID-19 infodemic. So they published this in April 2020 after COVID got its name, but they started this before it did. And if you scroll down to, I think, page five here, you'll see. So this is, by the way, an AI-generated network map of all people expressing skepticism about the origins of COVID and different conspiracy theories.

78:30So if you scroll down to page five, it says a key analytical highlights of these maps. OK, so you'll see that they so similarly large mega clusters of U.S. right wing accounts were diminishing the mainstreaming of the coronavirus conversation. If you scroll down to the next one, you'll see they've dedicated coronavirus misinformation map seated on disinformation specific hashtags. Reels that conservative groups had a larger total presence of covid heterodox opinions. This is right at the outbreak. One month into it, a Pentagon funded psyops firm is doing political mapping, not in the U.S., in the U.K., in Italy. So they found that disproportionately it's conservatives who need to be censored more. If you just scroll down through this, I'll show you some highlights.

79:22What was this in regard? This was disinformation in regard to the origin at this point? Yes. And you can run a control app. Which is wild that they were already countering when the origin was not really disclosed yet. It was still being debated. Right. And you'll see they even, so again, this is the Pentagon creating network maps. We're paying for this effectively to protect the political, the online reputation of Bill Gates and George Soros. You'll see they have a whole section on, if you just run a control F for Gates or Soros, you'll see this as well. But you'll see that they map these different conspiracy.

79:57How much would Bill Gates or George Soros need to pay a cloak and dagger public relations shop to scour the entire Internet and create targetable, censorable demographic communities that social media should censor in order to protect their reputation? This is us paying the Pentagon to pay a psyops firm to protect the reputation of Bill Gates and George Soros from conspiracy theories online. and they did the same thing with covet origins they did the same thing with with vaccines the same group graphica was a part of something called the virality project which you know had which mapped out 66 different claims of if you questioned covet vaccine efficacy if you question masks and their efficacy if you if you question policies around around lockdowns all of that was

80:49systematically mapped all four of the entities involved in the virality project by the way were U.S. government funded in terms of at their at the organizational level, University of Stanford and the University of Washington, who are two of those four, received a joint three million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, which, again, is this basically civilian side of DARPA. the you know graphica has received seven million in pentagon funds and then the you know the nastiest one of them all is this group the the atlantic council which has uh which gets annual funding over over a million dollars a year from the pentagon over a million dollars a year from the state department it also gets annual funding from the cia cut out national down for democracy

81:31gets annual funding from usa basically every web of u.s cloak and dagger intelligence and and diplomatic funding funds the atlantic council every year the atlantic council has seven cia directors on its on its board of directors a lot of people don't know seven former number one heads of the cia are still alive let alone all locally clustered on the exact organization which is the premier heavyweight in internet censorship around the world and the atlantic council and i can show you some wild clips of that by the way including them training journalists on what to censor Oh, I need to see that. Yeah. Okay. So if you pull up, you can find this also if you look on Rumble, NATO training journalists. You'll see that. Is Rumble the only place you can put that up right now? No, I have it on my ex account. I actually have a 45-minute video.

82:24I have a 45-minute video that goes through it and all the supporting receipts that's got, I think, almost 3 million views right now. But there's a two-minute, there's like a two- to four-minute video. If you look at Atlantic Council censorship journalists or the videos and I can tell you that the source video is called I call bullshit. This was in June 2019, right on the heels of the Bob Mueller investigation. The Atlantic Council, again, with seven CIA directors on its board and annual funding from the State Department Pentagon, does this 360 meeting where they bring in journalists and fact checkers from all over the world to come to this. You know, I mean, it looks like something straight out Dr. Strangelove. And, Jamie, let me know if you have trouble pulling it up because I can.

83:10He sent me down to me adding what you added pulled up what you were talking about on other podcasts That's not what I'm looking for so after it's definitely it's I think it's definitely searchable easily on rumble action want to load this up, but And I can I can tell you the exact if you just look it's called I call bullshit is what it was by Ben Nimmo the Atlantic Council I'll just show you what I'm saying because every time I type in what you're saying it just brings up you talk Okay, okay. How about how about it? How about Atlantic Council? land council journalists or training yeah journalists there you go that's the top one so here you go The censorship training session. Yes. So can I can I tell you a little backstory on this real? Well Trump tweets brexit slogans. Yeah, give me some okay All right

84:17So if you pause wait if you pause right there on the on the thumbnail if you just see it real quick Okay, so I found this video in 2019, you know my like my whole life has been 24 7 morning noon night Tracking watching I know these people closer than my own friends and family. This is you know I found this video, I think, at around the five or six hour mark of of a day two of found this. I think a five or six hour mark of a nine hour video in June 2019, where this this is basically the month before the Bob Mueller investigation. And they they wanted to pre-censor and and throttle Trump's ability to be able to fight off charges that he was a Russian asset. Because at the time, the Pentagon and the intelligence community want him out. If you remember, the Ukraine impeachment in 2019 came from Sierra Morella.

85:11The CIA agent came from the Vindman brothers who were the military. Basically, Trump had a big beef with the existing brass of the Pentagon and the intelligence community over Russia policy, over Eurasia policy, which is a whole thing that we can maybe talk about if you're interested. But so the Atlantic Council was was one of the very, very, very first movers in the censorship industry space. I mentioned how this really started in 2014 with 25 years of free speech diplomacy sort of ended with the 2014 Ukraine fiasco because of this Durasimov Doctrine hybrid warfare thing. And I mentioned that that's when NATO began setting down infrastructure just to censor the Internet. And that's what snowballed into what we now have. And so the Atlantic Council effectively bills itself as NATO's think tank. That's what it's known as in Washington.

86:03You know, there's, you know, places like the Council on Foreign Relations are sort of more known for Chamber of Commerce and big business sort of working on government policy. The Atlantic Council is one of these that's for NATO. And it's basically NATO's clandestine civilian sort of civil military arm. When there's a NATO military agenda that needs massaging at the political level, they need laws passed, they need sanctions put in place, they need capacity building on the civilian side to help a military thing. That's what the Atlantic Council primarily does. And I'm not even opining on whether much of what they do. I'm not even saying good or bad organization, but they set up something called the Digital Forensics Research Lab, right at, you know, basically right on the heels of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine counter coup.

86:50And it was one of the earliest NATO U.S. military liaised Internet censorship shops that targeted populist governments. Trump, you know, the whole U.K., Italy, Germany, Spain network that I talked about, Bolsonaro right out the gate. And so this video was, again, right before Russiagate ended. And they were so they thought they could put Trump in prison with this. And this was a training session that they did for journalists and fact checkers in June 2019. You'll see this session is called is an interactive session. It's called I call bullshit. And by the way, Ben Nimmo, he's at the Atlanta Council in this one. But he goes on shortly after this to be effectively the technical lead for Grafica, the same Pentagon. So, by the way, he had started his career in the NATO press shop, basically doing media work for NATO. So then he goes over.

87:49And again, we fund all of this. But let's just watch and we'll show you this. If you think who works in this space, well, I think, acknowledge that in any information operation, it's not just lies. You take a grain of truth and they will build a pearl of disinformation around it. When we're in this space, there isn't a simple binary true or false. There are all kinds of shades of meaning in between. Now, there are various different ways of modeling how you can identify the ways in which people are trying to twist the story. Wait for it. This gets good. Because it's short and because, frankly, I developed it, is the four Ds. Dismiss, distort, distract, and dismay. These are the four responses that we see time and again. Not false. None of these are false. How can we get censored anyway? Uncomfortable evidence.

88:42All of you should have some of these cards on the table. If you don't look on another table and steal one, that's not being used. Because these are going to help get our attention. We are going to go through a set of slides showing quotes from different organizations and individuals who are using certain rhetorical devices to make their argument. And so if you go through all of them, at least one of these four will apply. Again, dismiss, distort, distract, dismay. Everyone say it with me. Dismiss, distort, distract, dismay. Excellent. You're welcome to scream I call bullshit, too, if you're comfortable. This is all funded by U.S. taxpayers. So with that, let's play. Witch Hunt. How can you censor the sitting president? arguing that what he said is disinformation. How can you tell the tech platforms that that tweet is disinformation?

89:49Get creative. Well, obviously it can be any number of the Ds. You can say it's distorting what they're saying or distracting them from whatever the issue is saying. The issue isn't real. They're just after me because there's their witches and it's evil. I'm the injured party here. So it could be a whole lot of them. Trump's got a nice range when it comes to disinformation. Does anyone have a number one pick that they would like to mention related to this one? They said dismissed. Yes, dismissed. Dismissed? How many of you think dismissed? Raise your card, please. I think we're on to something here. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So you're right that underneath that attempt, he's twisting the story. he's accusing somebody else of the same thing, right? But the main thing is what he's saying is like,

90:42don't listen to them because it's a witch hunt. So that was our first one. All right. Number two. Getting topical here. Pro-Brexit. This is a Brexit ad saying we should be spending the money on our own national health system instead of funding the EU. Distort. Any other takers? Any suggestions? Well, let's ask. How many of you think this one is distort involved? Jesus Christ. Okay, that's a lot. Any other? They seem so happy to comply. We've got a big hand over here. Let's... Oh, were you just... you just kept your hand up? Her hand goes back down. Are there any others? Are we just going to stick with that one? Yes, right there. Distract. Ah, okay, so for those who couldn't hear, it's also distract because it's trying to focus attention on the NHS rather than the vote itself. Yeah. So, okay.

91:41So this goes on, but what you'll see is this is the exact political adversary group that the intelligence, diplomatic, and military structure is trying to stop. Donald Trump, Brexit in the UK. And, you know, if you ever wondered why is it that everyone got all on board and suddenly started doing this all together, they were literally having years of these consensus building that you want to get your career made if you're at the pointer institute or the international fact checking union or if you're on the disinformation beat for the washington post or npr or le monde in france or the frankfurt algemeiner in germany you get your bona fides by going to these and you get effectively accredited by the blob and they are we're literally training people to to find creative ways to mass flag you

92:36can't even run a brexit ad saying hey we should be spending 350 million dollars on ourselves rather than the eu that's disinformation not false they're saying right right it's not false there's any number of ways that we can use to put pressure on the tech platforms to call this disinformation, you're hosting disinformation, simply because it's not the agenda item that we want here. And again, the seven CIA directors currently on the board of that organization, those placards reading I call bullshit were paid for by us. It's just wild to watch everybody happily comply enthusiastically, try to find ways that this makes any sense with no one having a counter-narrative. No one's standing up and going, wait a minute, who's to decide? What if it turns

93:23out it is, and it was a witch hunt? Now we know. All that Russiagate stuff was 100% bullshit. So he was correct. Right. But remember, the Mueller disaster wouldn't happen until just the following month. Right. So at the time, they thought, you know, ah, great, if we can get him censored around calling this a witch hunt, then once the findings come in, he's going to be cornered. He won't even be able to defend himself it'll be like a internet gag order right headline readers and low information voters overwhelmingly believed it right now i should note that it i mean this is nothing elon was a huge game changer on a lot of these people did not begin to sort of navel gaze and self-reflect on this until there was political and social blowback the fact is is um there were a lot of

94:10these people who in 2017, 2018, were looking around at these, I've just, I mean, I've watched thousands of hours of these, you know, consensus building meetings. They, they literally, you know, there would be some debate in 2017 about whether or not we should do this tactic or whether or not, you know, this goes too far. And I watched as, as these people basically let those early inhibitions go as the thing took wings and as the money poured in because that's why i always emphasize the censorship industry if you if you get rid of the money you get rid of the glamour you get rid of the career track uh you get rid of the the power you get rid of the networks and so to me it's it's the fact is is if these people could not have their careers made by doing this, they wouldn't be pursuing those careers. But when Elon arrived on the scene,

95:10and Congress began to take action, and media began to report on it, and the Twitter files spilled open, and the murthy Missouri lawsuit spearheaded by the Missouri and Louisiana state attorney generals, you know, put this in the court system and America First Legal, Stephen Miller and Gina Hamilton's group began to, I mean, it wasn't really until there started to be a whole society freedom network on the other side of this, that the moral ambivalences that were expressed in the beginning began to reassert themselves. And I think there is some self-reflection on that. You know, it's funny, in 2022, Harvard wrote this piece. I covered it at my foundation. It was called Disinformation Studies is Too Big to Fail. And they made the argument, this is right before

95:59the bottom fell out on this stuff. September, October, 2022, Harvard Misinformation Review, disinformation studies is too big to fail. They made the argument, we've arrived. It took a while. In the beginning of it, they say the catalyst for this entire field was the 2016 election. Basically, we created this entire spanning octopus of censorship work because Trump won the election in 2016. Now it's 2022. We've gone unchallenged for six years. And now if they want to get rid of us, they can't. They were making the argument that they were basically like Citibank during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, that they were simply a bank that's too big to fail because now they are so deeply ingrained in the media disinformation beat. They're so deeply ingrained in the private

96:46sector interstitials working with all the trust and safety people at every platform. They're so deeply funded by 12 different U.S. government departments and 50 different U.S. government programs. There's no way to get rid of us, even if you want to. That's what they were stunting on in right before Elon, you know, finished the acquisition of X and Republicans won the House in 2022. And all this went in reverse. And now you'll see just this, you know, just this week in the news that they're, you know, there's quotes about them wanting to flee the country and that the whole field is potentially in disarray if Trump does indeed go forward and defund this. Because now you're going to have 100 university centers gone. There goes your State Department funding. There goes your NSF funding.

97:33And I have a great example of that, by the way, that's pretty eye-opening on our topic of institutions. That's a quick receipt if you're interested. Sure. Yeah, yeah. So feel free to guide Jamie any way you want. Yeah. So, Jamie, if you go to the Arizona State University Global Security Initiative, I'm going to show you some of this in action a little bit. Arizona State University Global. That's very vague. I just want to go to their website. Go to. Oh, yeah. Google. Yeah. Google. OK. Google Arizona State University Center on narrative disinformation and strategic influence. Disinformation and strategic what? Influence. Yeah. We're just Arizona State University Center of narrative. Yes. OK. Just go to their website. Yeah. Just go to the website.

98:19If you pull it up, so this is, if you click on Global Security Initiative, I'm just going to show you an example real quick. Just click on the top thing. This is Global Security Initiative. And then you will hit the back button in a second. But if you scroll down, so this is Arizona State University. This is basically John McCain University. Now, this is significant because John McCain was the founding president of the IRI. Isn't it funny? Of the IRI. The girl with the mask is wearing it wrong. Her nose is exposed. Oh, my gosh. I mean, it just kind of shows you how fucking stupid all this stuff is. That's exactly right. You know, they had to have her wearing a mask still. Even in 2024, you go to the website, she's wearing a mask, and she's wearing it wrong. Her nose is exposed. Not only that, it's a surgical mask. It's the dumbest one.

99:07The one that provides zero, literally zero protection. Right. Okay. Especially with your nose open. No, that's fantastic. So a few things as background. Arizona State University, its current president, Michael Crow, is now and was since the day it was born in 1999, the chairman of In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is the CIA's venture capital arm. This is literally the CIA's proprietary investments in early stage technology companies. And the head of Arizona State University, its president, is the chairman of In-Q-Tel and has been for 25 years. Arizona State University has these very deep partnerships with John McCain, who was the senator from Arizona. John McCain, who ran for president against Barack Obama in 2008, was the before he ran for president in 2008 for 25 years.

99:57He was the founder and the president of the IRI, the CIA wing of the Republican Party. And the IRI is that is the GOP side of the of the National Endowment for Democracy. That's effectively self-declared CIA cutout. and in fact arizona state university has a john mccain center on disinformation that that uh that works in tandem with this one but i just wanted to show that you'll see this is technically it's arizona state university but you'll see that it is an intelligence program so if you if you if you scroll up for a second you'll see you'll see at the bottom right this is a program at arizona state university that is an intelligence program its job is to assist the intelligence community with this work. And if you scroll down, and you can scroll down from here, you'll see the different branches. And then click on the one,

100:45Narrative Disinformation Strategic Influence. Now, this program has a $1.6 million grant from the Pentagon to do censorship work. It has $300,000 in grants from the State Department. It's got another almost $500,000 worth of additional government grants from adjacent U.S. government diplomatic statecraft intelligence folks. So this is a multimillion-dollar censorship center currently still up and running at Arizona State University, funded by us. Now, if you click on why is disinformation dangerous, I want to show you something real quick, because this language is everywhere. This is stock standard language. Why do we have this set up? Disinformation sows confusion and distrust. Diminishing people's faith and confidence in the institutions that are critical to a functioning, healthy democracy, such as government, news media and science.

101:43I'm going to pause right there. The dirty tricks that this is laden with is what allows them to get away with this. So note that they are saying that they have set up this apparatus and we can get it. I can show you the different projects they're involved with on the censorship side. But the issue they're saying is not that something's wrong, but that people's the simple act of diminishing public faith and confidence in the news media. Government and science is an attack on democracy. This is the identical language that dozens of university centers and both of the major censorship programs at the National Science Foundation, as well as at State, USA, Pentagon, they all have this stock language now, which is that the purpose of the program is to protect their assets. And legacy news media is one of those assets.

102:41If you on social media undermine public faith in the New York Times as a credible institution, you are attacking democracy in the white blood cells of the blob. These disinformation centers being run out of our NGOs and universities and for profit, private sector, censorship, mercenary firms will scan and ban you off the Internet. And I can I can show you what some of those look like as well. These dynamic disinformation dashboards. But even if you just go to the projects page for that, I think if you scroll down, you'll see it. Yeah. So these are semantic information defender. This is right out of 1984. Yeah. So if you scroll down, let's say- Just the terms. Semantic information defender. Okay. This project, again, this is 1.6 million just from the Pentagon alone.

103:30This project will develop a system that detects, characterize, and attributes misinformation and disinformation. Whether image, video, audio or text, ASU provides content and narrative analysis, text detection and characterization methods and a large data set of known disinformation and affiliate objects. So this is a this is a database of all images, videos, audio text that effectively the ghost of John McCain, the founder of the CIA side of the GOP after Reagan reoriented the IC around the NGO complex. is doing and they've been caught basically conflating anything that's pro-Trump with being pro-Russia and and going after rank and file right-wing populists and conservatives because that's who the never Trump side of the GOP the Mitt Romney John McCain side of the GOP is trying

104:30to take out Mitt Romney by the way who ran for president against Obama that the the cycle after John McCain. Remember John McCain was the founding president of the IRI, the CIA wing of the GOP. Mitt Romney was and still is a board member of the IRI. I should note Marco Rubio, our incoming secretary of state, is also a board member of the IRI. He is going to need to confront this in a way I hope everyone is prepared for. But it's all the way down to framing techniques. Could you just look at this for a second? Detecting and tracking adversarial framing. Just listen to how this is phrased. A pilot project with Lockheed Martin. So defense contractor. Oh, we're going to go deep. You want to see some crazy? Oh, yeah. Let's keep going with this. Please go deep.

105:17But created an information operations detection technique based on the principle of adversarial framing when parties hostile to U.S. interests frame events in the media to justify support for future actions. that is such a weird way to phrase things because it's so okay here we go the research helps planners and decision makers identify trends in real time that indicate changes in the information operations strategy potentially indicating imminent actions a follow-on project funded by the department of defense expands techniques developed in the pilot project to additional countries incorporates blog data into the framing analysis alongside known propaganda outlets Let's listen to this next one. Studies the transmediation of these frames to non-Russian, non-propaganda services. This is how they get it. Sources, rather. Right.

106:10And seeks to develop the ability to automatically detect adversarial from... This is the AI censorship. Adversarial framing is such a strange way to put it because U.S. interests could be just simply narratives that turn out to not be true. So they have the ability to censor true information based on U.S. interests. But this is how they get you. See that transmediation of frames to non-Russian, non-propaganda sources? Yes. But that's how they get to say that we are spouting Russian disinformation if we say something. But so does some random outlet they don't like in Russia. This is how you notice the 51 spies who lied about Hunter Biden. They will still insist. Yeah. OK, the laptop's real, but it's still Russian because they argue that Russian propaganda outlets were amplifying it.

106:52So it's and it's in Russia's interest to stigmatize the United States or to undermine the credibility of Joe Biden as president or to help Trump because Trump's foreign policy is is is helpful to them. So this is how they conflate us as U.S. civilians with a First Amendment guarantee with the get out of Constitution free card of our counterintelligence capacities. You know, like the CIA is not allowed to operate at home, right? It's supposed to be a foreign facing operation. But they have a get out of jail free card on that, which is if it's counterintelligence, if they think a U.S. citizen is being recruited by or in a network formal or informal with a hostile foreign nation states intelligence services, now they get to spy on Americans. This is how the NSA, you know, reads Tucker Carlson's signal chats and whatnot.

107:41And so they they launders that foreign to domestic switcheroo, which, by the way, is another great, great clip. But anyway, I was going to get I saw your eyes go a little wide with the Lockheed Martin thing. Yeah. Can if you if you go to YouTube and you type in miter squint, miter squint misinformation. MITER? Yeah, MITRE. MITRE is one of the largest military contractors. They're absolutely enormous. They're sort of like a technological version of the RAND Corporation, if you will. So they are funded by the U.S. military. Fighting COVID-19 misinformation. Let's go do it from the beginning. as the nation continues the fight against COVID-19 wrong mask wearing it wrong spread of dangerous misinformation social media is full of conflicting misleading and false

108:51information the level and quality of fact checking varies from one platform to the next that means that half truths or flat-out fiction may appear as facts people who are predisposed to believe the postings will perceive them as truth. When deception and misinformation have the potential to negatively influence personal and national health outcomes, we must call it out and correct it. MITRE Squint for COVID-19 provides a fast, reliable way to report and counter COVID misinformation about the disease, its treatment, and vaccinations. If you're a medical or public health expert or other Squint user, you can report untrue or inaccurate COVID-19 related postings with a single click, whether using a desktop or a mobile device. MITRE Squint collects the URL with a screenshot and the coded information for aggregation and analysis.

109:45You'll get a secure message to verify that you sent the screenshot. The verification message includes a report that you can share or send to the social media channel asking that the misinformation be removed. What happens then? MITRE Squint analyzes and identifies patterns in social media that are misleading the public. Your report enables faster takedowns and helps maintain the public's trust and confidence in the efforts to battle COVID-19. MITRE Squint for COVID-19 provides an unprecedented opportunity to report dangerous misinformation designed to create additional fear or anger in people already stressed by the pandemic. Contact us to learn more about MITRE Squint and become a participant. at mitre.org yeah so mitre is a like a 2.2 billion dollar annual budget and um you know that

110:37tens of millions of that come from the pentagon they're a major pentagon contractor they did the same thing by the way that was the second squint ai censorship technology they developed again just like the pentagon was paying grafica censoring covet origins censoring conspiracy theories They're paying AI censorship technology to simultaneously manage the censorship of COVID skeptic narratives. They started this actually in the rump to the 2020 election. If you look at squint misinformation elections. Our democracy, our elections, we must call it out. I think that starts at the 40th second. If you go back to the beginning. I was trying to skip the intro. Oh, I see. Including the viral messages spread through social media. Social media platforms are only as accurate and truthful as the people who post to them.

111:31The level and quality of fact-checking varies from one platform to the next. That means that half-truths or flat-out fiction may appear as facts. People who are predisposed to believe the postings will perceive them as the truth. When deception and misinformation impact the infrastructure, operations, and processes integral to our democracy, our elections, we must call it out and correct it. MITRE Squint provides a fast, easy, and comprehensive way for election officials to combat the spread of misinformation on social media channels. When elections officials and designated MITRE Squint users see untrue or inaccurate postings about the elections process, you can report it with a single click, whether using a desktop or mobile device. MITRE Squint collects a screenshot and the coded information for aggregation and analysis.

112:22You'll get a secure message to verify that you sent the screenshot. The verification message includes a report that you can share with election peers or send to the social media channel asking that the misinformation be removed. What happens then? MITRE Squint analyzes and identifies patterns in social media that are misleading voters. Your report enables faster takedowns and helps restore integrity to the elections process. MITRE Squint is helping election officials like you Defend the elections process from disinformation campaigns designed to undermine election legitimacy. Contact us to learn more about MITRE Squint and become a participant. They were partnered in the whole 2020 censorship operation. There's another thing I just thought of that is just an unbelievable clip with the Atlanta Council.

113:12The Atlanta Council was formerly partnered with the Department of Homeland Security to censor the 2020 election, to censor Trump supporters. 100% of their repeat misinformation spreaders were Trump supporters. There's unbelievable videos on all of this. Some of this has been played on the congressional jumbotron. It was election interference. Oh, yeah. An unbelievable level. But they bragged afterwards about how this thing could be scaled and how they were able to get this done and how they could use this technique to get social media companies to ban things well beyond. And basically to scale it to every other policy issue so that it's not just around elections where they're, quote, huge regulatory stakes for the companies.

113:58And they go over this strategy. I mean, literally on a on a celebration video of how they pulled this off again with the Atlanta Council, Graphica, Stanford, you did the same institutions. In this video, they go over this two part technique for how they were able to do this and how they can do this in the future. And one is using their front effectively as a civil society organization, leveraging the threat of government pressure from their government partners at a top down level and leveraging the induction of crisis PR, black PR, if the companies did not do the censorship from the bottom up. So the government would threaten top down and the media would threaten bottom up. What are the threats? The threats? Yeah, when you say the government would threaten them.

114:47Well, so there's several. So in that case, in 2020, there was regulatory overhang coming from Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren about breaking the big tech companies up, which they actually move forward with this big – Google is now under the gun of this with the U.S. Justice Department. But more significantly, it's the threats – probably one of the most incredible examples of this. If you want to see the receipts on it, it's wild, but I can also just tell you about it. If you look up on my profile, the phrase 10 flaming examples, it'll pull up the Facebook files. What Jim Jordan's committee, you know, the subpoenaed version of the Twitter files, but from Facebook. And you'll see that in in early 2021, the Biden administration was pressuring explicitly Facebook to censor COVID origins, heterodox speech.

115:41and Facebook was skittish about doing it, saying there's a highly unusual request coming directly from the White House. We don't really want to do this. This is what Nick Clegg, the head of public policy, was emailing with Mark Zuckerberg about. So if you scroll over, so you see if this is right. There were five claims. So this is to Mark Zuckerberg from Nick Clegg. Nick Clegg was the former head of the UK Labor Party. He wrote a book called how to stop Brexit after Brexit already passed. Let's show you how interconnected all this stuff is. And the subject is COVID misinformation, Wuhan lab leak theory. On the question of our decision to remove claims related to the origin of COVID, again, this is June 2021. There were five claims that met the standard. Basically, anyone who accused COVID of potentially being man-made or bioengineered

116:33or created by an individual government or country, or that it was modified through gain-of-function research. we reduced distribution meaning they they throttled they algorithmically uh zapped out of all virality they applied virality circuit breakers to uh to content making any of those five buckets of claims in february 2021 so this is right in tandem with the vaccine rollout in response to continued public pressure intense conversations with the new administration we started so they only started removing it because of quote tense conversations with the new administration so if go to the next if you go to the next image if you just yeah oh wait i'm sorry uh go go over yeah bigger fish to fry there should be a yeah here we go in june 2021 email clegg emailed

117:17others in the company that given the bigger fish we have to fry with the biden administration we should think creatively about how we can be responsive to the biden administration's concerned then it says below what are these bigger what is it i can go over those instead but just one more thing on this is you see in April 2020 the company was seeking to work closely with the Biden administration on multiple policy fronts so this now gets to the larger issue of the interplay between the profits of multinational corporations and the protection provided by the US government when it actively advocates on their behalf so for example right now one of the major major issues and I'll tell you this because I when I ran the cyber desk for the US State department, I got a call one day from nine Google lobbyists. These were all former lobbyists from

118:07big oil companies or from sovereign countries who had moved to Google to lobby the U.S. State Department. The U.S., you know, was the orchestra symphony conductor for all of the assets of the American empire. And these nine lobbyists told me over the course of about a 90 minute call that the number one threat to Google's business model, the most existential threat over the next five years was the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. And they led a variety of reasons. I won't get into too granular detail, but that basically, you know, because the State Department traditionally defines U.S. interests as being the welfare of U.S. citizens and the aggregate welfare of U.S. national champions, U.S. citizens and U.S. corporations.

118:53This is why, again, it's so insane, inflammatory, and there's got to be a way it's friggin illegal that the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. State Department USA are currently running programs to tank U.S. national champions like X because they're hosting. You know, they allow the hosting of pro populist political content. But so basically the pitch is where U.S. national champion were Google. this is another thing that the trump white house was saying at the time you know the they were defining magas microsoft apple google and amazon because their stock price being high was a big you know i think boon i don't know what the political calculus was but i'm trying to tell them hey they're censoring the internet guys and well point is is you know so they're they're the

119:39and MAGA, and they are functionally requesting that the U.S. State Department adjust its diplomatic posture with EU counterparts in order to have the appropriate asks and demands of the European Union that protect the profits and business divisions of Google. And I won't, without, again, getting too granular, these involve everything from data privacy rights. Europe has something called the GDPR. There are all sorts of fines. It's kind of ironic how this all played out. When Trump won in 2016, Europe was many of these European governments were afraid of a Trump autocracy. and um and so they set about a sort of policy pivot that they called strategic digital autonomy meaning that europe needs to exert more sovereign autonomy over the tech space in the digital sector

120:43rather than purely relying on american projection arms are u.s tech giants and so these new eu digital markets action digital services act are like for example uh tim cook you know at apple just got hit with a $15 billion fine from this. It's the only people who can stop that, who can negotiate, and who can pick winners and losers in that market are the U.S. State Department. Those are the people who negotiate. Those are the people who do the carrots and sticks. Hey, EU counterpart. Hey, counterpart in France. Hey, counterpart in EU. What was the stick to Apple in relation to? What was it in response to? I just remember the $15 billion. I forget if it was on a data, if it was on data grounds or if it was on pretty you can if you can look up the because he tim cook

121:34called donald trump on that specifically i think this is another one of these things where apple felt betrayed that the biden administration didn't stick out for them as much but i just so i'm not uh getting the specific thing wrong if you look up yeah here you go 15 billion dollar fine um additional two billion dollar any trust fund he has been investigating big tech firms to curb their power and ensure a level playing field. Apple recently lost a court battle. It was ordered to pay $14.08 billion in back taxes to Ireland. Trump told Cook that he would not let the EU take advantage of U.S. companies if he is elected. This government highlights, this development rather, highlights the ongoing regulatory challenges faced by tech giants like Apple, which may impact their

122:14stock performance. Investors should monitor these regulatory developments and their potential impact on Apple's financials and stock price. Right. And this is happening to all the tech companies. And the only reason this hasn't happened yet in the now 30 years of internet diplomacy is because the State Department has always gone to bat for them. All sorts of carrots and sticks that we can threaten on that, right? The humanitarian aid, the security assistance. So what do they want from Apple that would allow them to allow Apple to be fined that much money? Well, the State Department, in theory, could open up a diplomatic channel to the EU The U.S. ambassador to the EU could march into their office, you know, horse's head out of, you know, out of Godfather style and say, you are not going to F with Apple on this.

123:03this decision was wrongly made, if you move forward with enforcement of this $15 billion fine, the U.S. government will renegotiate our trade posture, our tariff posture, our humanitarian assistance, our security assistance, our role in name. There's any number of things that you can log roll on this, our joint activities with you in South America, in Africa, in Central Asia, on this particular industry. It's the State Department who's got the assets of the empire to manage and to offer up to foreign countries to protect the – and to, frankly, oftentimes to secure those markets for those tech companies in the first place. What would be the incentive to not do that? Favors to Europe and European – I mean, you're always dipping into political capital when you do that, right?

123:59Like whenever you are threatening something with someone you're doing business with, you are giving up a little bit of political capital and making that threat in the sense that they might. You're sort of sanctioning yourself in a certain respect. This is what, for example, the sanctions on on on Russia that we led after 2014. You're they had an agreement with Russia. They're sort of shooting themselves in the leg to try to get the bear that's biting it. So you're sort of doing this with the EU. The EU is a very delicate dance with the U.S., right? It's 550 million people. It's a giant market. There's basically three poles between China, the U.S., and the EU. There's a ton of overlapping trade arrangements. it's it's basically the economic arm of nato um it's so if you were to if you were to threaten

124:57to if you were to threaten the eu too hard so china just overtook the u.s as the eu's largest trading partner if if we were to go to the mat for apple in this case on the eu the eu may turn around say fine well if you do that we're going to partner with saudi arabia we're going to partner with China or we're going to partner, hey, we may need to turn the natural gas imports from Russia back on. There's all sorts of, it's a constant interplay. That's what makes that position both so fascinating, but also so complex is because you're having to manage all the different stakeholder relations from the banks, from the corporations, from the political groups, from the outside ones. And Facebook, I mean, it's data, it's ads.

125:47This is another thing that the media companies have been on a crusade against Facebook and Google because they many of these media companies feel like their revenues are being stolen by the the ad money going to Google and Facebook. there have been laws that have been put in place in canada and i believe australia where they're basically trying to i forget the one can actually pass but they're basically trying to you know have the media companies get a cut of the big tech profits because they are monopolists in the ad space and you know google ads makes up a huge portion of google's revenue facebook obviously the only reason it became profitable in the first place you know when facebook ipo'd uh it was

126:30And initially, there was a concern that it might not even be a profitable company, let alone one of the top, you know, eight biggest companies in the world, because they had not yet monetized those eyeballs through ads in the way that they've scaled incredibly to do. But what happens when what happens when our own U.S. government completely betrays them and works with Europe to screw them unless they do censorship? And if you want an incredible receipt on this, you can look up the February 2021 USA disinformation primer.

126:57You can go actually to my foundation's website, foundationforfreedomonline.com, and just type in the word USAID, and you'll see that disinformation primer. USAID, in tandem with the National Down for Democracy, that's CIA cutout, and includes with State, who USAID serves, has an instruction manual for how to exert its soft power influence around the world to regulate ad networks, to hurt U.S. tech companies, if they allow pro-populist speech on the platforms by getting the getting advertiser boycotts and advertiser blacklists to punch the social media companies. And so, you know, it's a plot against our own people. And it's being waged as part of a political proxy war to stop populists like Trump from being able to get elected in the first place. And if he gets

127:53elected to be able to throttle his administration and his allies around the world so that he can't implement his agenda jesus how does this not how do you sleep you know like knowing all this like what it was it was really really hard the first three or four years because there was like i i was in this before when the whole thing was totally depressing and there were no wins at all. You know, I was like, and it was bad. My health deteriorated. I, you know, I didn't look good. I didn't feel good. I mean, I tell everyone, you have to go through your five stages of grief on this. You know, you're going to have your, you know, your denial and then your anger and then your, you know, your depression and then your bargaining and then your acceptance. And you'll go through many iterations of those five stages of grief.

128:51But you get to a certain point, I think, where you accept that this is our inheritance and this is, in a way, as evil as so many components of it are, the larger picture is kind of a fascinating archaeological dive into the ancient dinosaur bones of the world that we live in. The American empire would not exist without this apparatus. It took a twisted turn in 2016. But the fact is we are an international empire because of the banana wars in the 1800s that gave the U.S. vassalage control over much of South America.

129:31We're an international empire because of the the Spanish-American War in 1898. We take the Philippines. We had you know, we have the we had the miracle of the 20th century because this free speech diplomacy, which in large part was a State Department CIA cynical front just to be able to capacity build our own assets behind the Iron Curtain that ended up giving us cheap gas and, you know, 401ks. and middle-class lifestyles and affordable homes and pensions and all the favors that the State Department does to pry open markets. Is the reason that Walmart can export to the furthest reaches of the world? Is the reason that, you know, I played this really funny one a few days ago that the famous Pizza Hut ad with with starring Gorbachev after the after the National

130:31Endowment for Democracy pried the Soviet Union open. And he's basically saying we have we have instability. These are Russians arguing with each other. You know, we've instability at home. This is horrible. We're basically a satellite state of the United States. And then the other person at the Pizza Hut says, ah, but we have Pizza Hut and Gorbachev stars and spouses of pizza Hut advertisement. and people... Can you find it online? Yeah, yeah. You can actually... Oh, God. They all agree on Pizza Hut. And Gorbachev hailed the Gorbachev. Oh, my God. So Pizza Hut. That commercial is insane. It seems like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Yeah. So Pizza Hut did not win the market for 200 million customers in Russia because it out competed the other pizza companies. It won because the CIA pried Russia open.

131:51I mean, you can see all the touchdown dances we did about the Boris Yeltsin puppet presidency. Boris Yeltsin was faxing the National Endowment for Democracy in 1993 for permission, effectively, to bomb his own parliament building. There's a whole Hollywood movie called Spinning Boris, which is based on the true story of how the State Department and Hollywood teamed up to prop up a ailing Boris Yeltsin in 1996 when he was polling at 7% in the polls. so that we could continue privatizing state-owned Russian assets and selling them off to George Soros' investment fund. You can read Casino Moscow for more on that. But basically, this is... I ate at Pizza Hut as a kid. At some point, it becomes fascinating. At some point, it becomes... The tragedy shifts to a comedy, and when you start looking at the size of some of these forces,

132:45it's the most exciting time ever to be alive. if there was, it didn't look like there was any light of the tunnel when I started this in 2016, it was L after L after L after L first, nobody would listen. Then the people who listen, say you're crazy. Then the people who say you're crazy, say, well, you know, you're right, but you're hopeless. Then the people who say you're hopeless, you know, say, okay, well, maybe you're not hopeless, but I can't help you. And then it's just constant. And then, and then the dam starts breaking a little bit here, a little bit there. And now this is the most exciting time. ever we have existential threats that are that i think maybe in the end more terrifying than anything we've we've seen yet but i'm just honored to to be along for the ride with everybody else

133:30who's who's pulling the levers that they are and um you know if you can make it through if you can make it through the the hard times i'm thinking about it there is something beautiful it's like getting to know let's just say you know genghis khan you know you're descended from or something people are going to say Genghis Khan murder rape whatever you know crimes there are but but that's if you're descended from that it's still your family and I'm not trying to smash these institutions I'm not trying to get rid of the Pentagon or get rid of the CIA or I want them to be reformed and they have to go through the gauntlet of public sunlight Jay Bhattacharya Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was just named the NIH that is one of the most inspiring stories I think It's an incredible turnaround. Yeah.

134:16Tell the whole story because some people aren't even aware of what happened with him with the Great Barrington Declaration. Well, he was kicked off of Twitter. He was basically a premier scientist at Stanford. He was labeled a fringe epidemiologist by Fauci and company. And he was just tapped to be our new NIH director, the National Institute of Health. This is the premier medical research institution in all of medicine. And they put in one of the most critical voices of the entire COVID era to run it. I mean, it's like putting Bobby Kennedy in as the head of HHS. Right. And to me, that's sort of what needs to happen now in the censorship space, which is that when you look back at the church committee with the CIA, they held up that heart attack gun.

135:10in public and frank church and you know james angleton we saw now look i know a lot of that was a whitewash and wonks in the space or i were probably getting triggered by me even acknowledging that that was a decent thing but the fact is is it did have to go through it it did have to go through a gauntlet where where the the way to restore faith in the institution is to make it do a naked lap, make it do its walk of shame, and then it can put its clothes back on and return into the good graces. I'm not trying to take these institutions out. I'm not anti-American empire, but the empire has to serve the homeland. And the fact is, it does have to go through this period of penitence. And I hope that the incoming administration understands the magnitude and severity of the need to do that because if they don't,

136:07they're going to be caught flat footed by something very nasty. I think coming down the pipe. Have you, have you talked to anyone there? Um, not in enough detail to be able to, uh, feel that we are where we need to be, but maybe that will change. Um, Burisma. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's wild. Yeah. You know how I mentioned, um, the Atlanta council so many times in this seven CIA directors on its board annual funding the pentagon state department cia cutouts like the ned literally sponsoring at atlanta council conferences the i call bullshit censorship training meetings the work partnered with dhs to censor trump partnered you know to censor covet one week before donald trump was inaugurated in january 2017 burisma signed a formal cooperation agreement with the atlanta council

137:02for the Atlantic Council to leverage its representation effectively as NATO's brain, the think tank for NATO, to kick energy deals to Burisma. You can look this up. You can pull this on screen. I'll show you these receipts. They're wild. If you just type in Burisma on my X account or Burisma Atlantic Council, any of these will get you there. So there's a much larger story here that sort of gets us back to to Eurasia. And just for perspective, this issue around Russia gets to something that has been decades of tension in the making. Yeah. So this is Burisma and the Atlantic Council. This is one day, actually, one day before Donald Trump's inauguration, January 19th, 2017. so this group with seven cia directors on its board an annual funding from the pentagon the

137:59state department by the way these are these are all numbers from 2020 it's over a million now for all these um but uh but what are they doing signing a a formal agreement with burisma to kick them deal flood well so here is where it gets to the the geopolitics of the energy space and what a lot of this russia stuff is about so uh if you look up for example a if you just go to google and you type in russia 75 trillion you'll see what trump got knifed for uh you in in term 1.0 and that is still the knife's edge dangling over trump term 2.0 so if you pull up like an image graph of it it'll make it a little bit i think more yeah uh yeah or just like maybe the fourth the fifth one if you see or the fourth or fifth fourth one or yeah for the fifth yeah

138:49any one of those right so so russia has the most exploitable natural resources of any country on earth by far by four by far i mean it's almost double and that was why you may have heard this term from francis fukiyama the end of history in the 1990s this was like the you know the the moment that america was the unipolar power there is this long-range plan to pursue at least the political annexation of Eurasia. This is the, this goes back to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the, the grand chessboard, the idea that he who controls Eurasia controls the world, because this is where two thirds of the world's resources are. And so there's this, there's this big, you know, stretch basically from central Europe, uh, all the way out into, uh, into the far reaches of Russia,

139:40where so many of these minerals and oil and gas and re-explorable resources are, are concentrated. If you remember, Lindsey Graham finally threw up the white flag about four months ago when he said, listen, even if you don't care about Ukraine, they've got twelve point four trillion dollars worth of minerals and resources. So, you know, do it for that. He just said the other day he admitted this war is about money. It is. It is. So but this is that this is so fascinating to me. I almost have to take a self-indulgent moment, if you'll allow me. I had initially started working on this with a book and a movie that was just about the AI censorship side. It was weapons of mass deletion. And at the time, in 2016, early 2017, I was focused on the domestic side, like I think everybody is when they see this. A lot of this was woke stuff.

140:33So you see some pink-haired feminist person with an outrageous Twitter account who's a trust and safety person at Twitter. And you say, ah, OK, this is a culture war. Right. And then as I started tracing this and just completely obsessing every day in the on the research side of this, you'd see these censorship planning conferences with high ranking military and intelligence officials. And on the panel with them would be Eurasian focused energy investors and energy companies. And you'd say, well, what are they doing at a censorship conference? What why is why is Chevron here? Why is Royal Dutch Shell here? Why is NAFTA? Why are representatives from NAFTA gas at this conference about disinformation on the Internet?

141:21And to me, that was one of the early breakthroughs in being able to trace the larger networks and history of it was the close conjoined nature of censorship in geopolitics. And in particular around the energy world, because, you know, going back to this Milton Friedman sort of argument around free markets versus does the government secure the markets? Milton Friedman was once sort of given a sort of melee style list of entities to afuera, you know, to sort of not, you know, knock out.

141:54And when it got to the Department of Energy, he said, keep that one, but fold it under the Department of Defense, because our energy work is basically a subset of our military work, because the military is effectively who secures energy markets, the military and the State Department, the military using kinetic force or the threats of doing so, the State Department on economic sanctions and economic inducements to secure the energy resources. So this is where it gets really interesting. So. We were just talking about Boris Yeltsin in the 90s. Putin rises to power in 1999. The Russian economy is totally destroyed. He is you know, he's got only two assets of the of the of the Russian remnant that he can leverage to try to turn Russia back into a world power.

142:46one of them is their sort of military export economy russia provides um small arms munitions to rebel groups around the world to oppose the u.s pentagon uh such as in africa there's a big battle going on right now between the u.s and france on the one hand and russia on the other hand on in the in the sahel this is why a lot of these french run governments have uh have had there have been toppled in the past year, Chad, Niger, Cote d'Ivoire. This is one of the reasons that it's very curious that France arrested Pavel Durov, the Telegram founder, when the CIA's own media channels like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America were effectively calling for Telegram to be reined in because it may be a Russian spy in every Ukrainian's pocket,

143:35and we need to stop the ability for Russians to have free speech on Telegram. And, you know, A lot of this is because of the he's arrested in France is curious because France is involved in a proxy war against Russia. And that's only made possible because Russian Russia exports those arms. Russia is also the only reason we were not able to successfully topple Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Folks remember the S-300, S-400 anti-aircraft, you know, air defense systems. Basically, if we can get rid of Russia's military machine, there's no there's there's very, very little resistance to the Pentagon around the world. from Venezuela to Africa to Central Asia to, you know, to Syria. And Russia's other big economic export, the main one, is that they have the largest energy resources in the world, and

144:24exporting that can make them very wealthy if they are able to export that freely. It's sort of a similar issue with Iran and Iranian sanctions. So almost 100% of Russian gas used to be, used to of European gas used to come from Russia. These pipelines have been around for many, many, many, many decades. And it was in it was the motor engine of Russia's economy, oil and gas, Rosneft and Gazprom. And when Putin did something to reassert Russia's political influence over Central and Eastern Europe, after NATO already thought these were NATO acquired territories, places like Georgia and Moldova, Ukraine. Putin began shutting off the gas in 2005, 2006, or threatening to do so to leave a sort of dark, cold winter to these European countries that were

145:19thought to be under U.S.-NATO control. And these countries began to acquiesce to Russian influence on gas. And their politics started shifting to be more pro-Russian. Their civil society organizations got deeper Russian penetration. Their media organizations began to, you know, spout more pro-Russian affinity lines. And so our State Department of Intelligence Services flew into a panic like, oh, my God, we're going to we're going to lose the Cold War late in the game if we do not embark on a quest to destroy Russia's energy diplomacy. This is what they were calling it energy diplomacy their energy soft power influence over central and eastern europe germany with the nordstrom one pipeline uh ukraine with the with the direct uh the direct gas pipelines that then go all the way out you know into into western europe because the and we

146:14could not compete with russia strictly uh on because gas is a commodity it's it's not like uh you know an iphone or it's not like a it's like a phone where it comes in a you know different flavors based on quality. It's just strictly about the price you sell it at. And the only way that that you can get gas into Europe effectively, other than natural cheap natural gas pipelines are expensive liquefied natural gas, you know, where you, you know, you basically harvest it in the Permian Basin in Houston, you freeze it, you ship it, you know, 6,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean through the Baltic Strait, you unfreeze it, you then, you know, ship it to Ukraine. It's like orders of magnitude more expensive than the Russian alternative. So European countries wanted cheap Russian gas. The US and the UK and NATO wanted

147:09the EU member states to sanction Russian gas, both because it would cripple Russia's economy. And also, so there's a national security element here. Now we get to take over Africa. Now we get to take over Central Asia because there's no Russian resistance from the military because they're bankrupt. Now we can beat back Russian influence into Central and Eastern Europe because they're bankrupt. It's the same way we won the Cold War. The Soviet Union collapsed because it was bankrupt. So they embarked on a diplomatic quest to get all these countries to pass sanctions on Russia, but they couldn't do the full sanctions in 2006. So they embarked on what they called energy diversification. Then the 2014 fiasco pops off in Ukraine and this becomes existential because now half of Ukraine is effectively militarily backstopped by Russia.

147:55So they have to get Europe to pass these sanctions on Russia. But the issue is, is a lot of these EU member states did not want to have to buy super expensive Western LNG. It would be ideal if you could simply harvest the endogenous gas supplies in Ukraine. Ukraine happens to sit on Europe's third largest unexploited natural gas resources or the shale that can be converted. And so they so Burisma was a tool to be able to supplement the Western LNG with an endogenous and at home Ukrainian alternative gas supply so that the sanctions could go through in Europe. And so that Ukraine would not be reliant on Russia to have cheap natural gas. But this required NAFTA gas, the state owned Ukrainian gas company, which George Soros has been locked in a power struggle with Putin to over privatization with for decades.

148:57And and Burisma was the largest of the private for profit firms that had the rights, the gas rights for exploitation of eastern Ukraine and the, you know, the surrounding Crimea offshore offshore gas supplies. And so Burisma was was seen as an instrument of statecraft by the U.S. State Department to economically bankrupt Russia and to militarily shut down Russia's war machine as part of the larger play for NAFTA gas and to build up Ukraine's innate gas supplies, which were which were underexploited in part because of a military tension over who actually controls that territory. That's why the Donbass is so important. That's why after the counter coup, the U.S. was sponsoring the this is what the military aid impeach, the military assistance impeachment of Trump was about in 2019.

149:54We weren't at war with Russia then. Right. This is 2019. This is three years before the outbreak. We were sponsoring the military reconquest of that region because that's where the energy resources are. The population is mostly in the West. The resources are mostly in the East. It's the same thing with China and Xinjiang in terms of that dichotomy. And so this is when Hunter Biden said when he was asked what he was doing on Burisma and whether he felt shame about it, he said he was doing a patriotic duty for his country. burisma was an instrument of statecraft for the state department what they were doing is is they were they were building that up that's why they had work that's why they had funding from from us aid again the cia funding conduit was was working the atlantic council with seven cia

150:42directors on sport hunter biden's on the chairman's advisory board of the ndi hunter biden's law firm even has this just broke four months ago hunter's biden's law firm actually had a uh wrote a pitch to the U.S. State Department for how Burisma could serve as basically a vassal for U.S. State Department interests in the region. You had Burisma's back-channeling with, what was it, the U.S. ambassador in Rome on similar grounds in terms of the Italy-Greece supplies. But what you have here is a private sector for-profit company. Many such cases, by the way, because not only was Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma as chairman's advisory board of the CIA's DNC cutout, but who else was on the board of the board of directors right next to right next to Hunter Biden?

151:36Kofor Black, Kofor Black, who spent 30 years in the CIA, won CIA Distinguished Metals Awards. You can read the Daily Beast article where Kofor Black is described as Mitt Romney's Sherpa to the intelligence community to get the CIA's blessing to back him against Barack Obama. What is this CIA luminary doing on the board of Burisma? What is Hunter Biden, who the CIA personally calls the Justice Department off investigating his funding sources and is on the chairman's advisory board of the CIA cutout? It's because just like we have done since the 1940s, it is a private. It is a dual use entity. It's a for it's a for profit, standalone private sector firm. but it's also an instrument of statecraft because every dollar that Burisma generates is one less

152:25dollar that Gazprom generates. And so it's the it's the best job in the world if you can get it. It is it's it's you get to keep all the profits and you are getting the backing of the battering ram of the blob. And remember, we personally intervened. It was Joe Biden at the Council on Foreign Relations who bragged about about forcing using the diplomatic carrots and sticks of the U.S. empire that if Ukraine wanted their billion dollars in assistance, they had to fire the prosecutor who is investigating Burisma. Nobody, nobody in our Congress, I think, is prepared if there was a total declassification of all CIA and State Department cables and documents and meeting minutes and emails and communications, if you had, for all intelligence work related to Burisma, the treasure map that would break open, I think, would frankly be a diplomatic

153:23scandal because this gets to the larger play around the IMF and its play to privatize NAFTA gas because there's something very nasty here, which is that we have been trying to get just like we put Russia through shock therapy when we won the Cold War. And then it was the Harvard Endowment and the Soros crew and the U.S. State Department who privatized trillions of dollars of state-owned wealth by the Soviet Union so that it could become a capitalist society, but then the assets are held by Wall Street and London. This has been the play with Ukraine. They know the potential of the entire European energy market running through Ukraine if they can just get it up and running. So this grand Ukraine energy play has been to privatize NAFTA gas, the feeder that Burisma feeds into,

154:13so that you have Western stakeholders who make the money by capturing that market, have the blob of the State Department, the CIA, and the DOD impose enough pressure to carve Russia out of the market. Now you've got private sector stakeholders who are basically early stage equity holders in a totally protected, because it's protected by the bayonet of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the IC to make sure that the profits run through there so that Russia doesn't get it. So it's a great job if you can get it. Jesus Christ. And all this stuff that was on the laptop, what was the whole thing about 10% to the big guy? And so what evidence is there?

155:03Yeah, well, you know, the 10% of the big guy and in another text, you know, he I think he had said, you know, to one of his family members that, you know, half the paycheck goes to what you have here is is almost is almost a tale as old as time since 1948 in terms of this relationship between private sector profit and foreign policy. I mean, I call it foreign policy for personal profit, which is this idea that if you have a senior level job in blob craft in defense, diplomacy or intelligence, you don't make your money as a W2 employee of the U.S. government.

155:44So, for example, Mark Milley, you know, the CIA director only makes about a little over $200,000 a year. You make, I mean, more as a third year corporate associate than the, than the central intelligence agency director. That's, you get your money from serving the stakeholders afterwards. Like Mark Milley was, you know, joint head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What's he doing now? You know, he's at he's at JP Morgan, you know, doing the macroeconomic forecasting. So, you know, so that they basically have the insider trading vision of the guy who's tapped into everyone at the Pentagon. so they know what markets are about to open up because where the Pentagon's about to exert its influence. They know whether to invest in natural gas in companies in Germany or Ukraine because they have the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

156:33to make phone calls to the people in the Pentagon about what's going to happen to that country in six months. Look up, you want to see a great example of this. Look up the Donilon brothers. Look up Tom Donilon's BlackRock Investment Institute profile. Tom Donilon is the brother of Mike Donilon. Mike Donilon is the the closest advisor to Joe Biden and has been for 40 years. Mike Donilon is, you know, I think began working with Biden in 1982. He's literally the what they call the inner kitchen cabinet of of the West Wing of the White House. Now, that's a great that's a great job to have if you are Mike Donilon's brother, Tom Donilon, who's currently the chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute.

157:19So while his brother is the closest advisor to the president, United States, BlackRock, which has $10 trillion of assets under management and portfolio companies in every industry in every region on Earth. Tom Donilon in theory only needs to make a phone call to his brother Mike Donilon to know exactly what to invest in in terms because he knows what billions hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditure of State Department and Pentagon and intelligence work is going to do to the industries in the region yeah this is basically like Pelosi tracker but for like military intelligence it's all legal Tom Donilon again was Tom Donilon Tom Donilon didn't start out as a banker. He was the National Security Advisor in charge of military intelligence and statecraft

158:07for the U.S. empire. He was at the State Department. He was in IC. He was at DOD. He went straight from the blob to BlackRock's banker. Many such cases. I mentioned Mark Milley. Another one is Jared Cohen, who was the policy planning staff whiz kid at the State Department who introduced the CIA effectively to using social media for regime change work. He was the guy who was known as Condi's party starter for how Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State could stop running regime change operations out of U.S. embassies and consulates and CIA station houses. They could simply used social media to organize these. And that's what resulted in the Arab Spring and the Facebook and Twitter revolutions that toppled Tunisia and Egypt. And then Jared Cohen then

159:06goes on to start Google Jigsaw, which is the, you know, which set in motion the entire world of AI censorship we now live under. He just left Google Jigsaw. What's he doing now? Well, he's, yeah, now he's at Goldman Sachs and he's doing their geopolitical, you know, forecasting for for Goldman frigging Sachs. So blob to banker pipeline every time, you know, and this is how these people go from, you know, making two, $300,000 a year to being able to live like the people who they used to have to answer to when they were in government. So they are using the assets of the American empire. They're, they're adjusting us foreign policy in a way that maximizes their own personal game that they're not necessarily doing the calculus about well should we be spending all this money on you if that's what the stakeholders want and this is

159:59what biden was doing and this is what the 10 of the big guy thing comes back to i mean you just look at the the overwhelming just unbelievable scope of it i mean so first of all joe biden was known as mr foreign policy in um by the council on foreign relations for 40 years that is he was the blob's inside guy and the blob is the foreign policy establishment which now has substantial control over our domestic politics it's supposed to face outward to manage the american empire but when homeland politics interfere with the empire's plans they sick it against us and so for 40 years he was on the senate foreign relations committee for 15 of those years he was either the chairman or the ranking member so the top dog for oversight of the u.s uh of the u.s state department

160:44so uh so he's got these international connections people are constantly pitching him for 40 years there's a great video i think you can look it up if you ever seen joe biden bragging about um you know being a being a prostitute for uh for the for the biggest donor and that when he when he turns when he turns 40 uh he was told that what at one meeting that uh for the real big money he should come back to them when he turns 40 have you ever seen this uh it's a great clip if he i think if you just look up the word prostitute on a Biden prostitute on my X account, you can you can find this. But basically, the Biden incorporated was was running a foreign policy for personal profit operation. I mean, here's a crazy example. Joe Biden. I'm sorry, Hunter Biden, I believe was uh... yet this is great

161:42well i'm not sure you should assume i'm not corrupt but i'm thankful system does produce corruption in in i think implicit in the system is corruption when in fact whether or not you can run for public office cost a great deal of money to rent the united states and small state like delaware uh... you have to go to those people who have and they always want We were told that we politicians, as the young kids say, rip off the American public. I think the American public, in a way, rips off we politicians by forcing us to run the way they do. To raise $300,000 is no mean feat. And unless you happen to be some sort of anomaly, like myself, being a 29-year-old candidate and can attract some attention behind your own state, it's very difficult to raise that money from a large group of people. I'm a 29-year-old oddball.

162:29The only reason I was able to raise the money is I was able to have a national constituency to run for office. Because I was 29, I'm like the token black or the token woman. I was the token young person. I went to the big guys for the money. I was ready to prostitute myself in the manner in which I talk about it. But what happened was they said, come back when you're 40, son. And he's 80. Amazing how good he talked back then. Yeah, right. So smooth. Right. Mike, you gave us a lot to think about, man. I'm going to have to listen to this one three or four times just to try to begin to absorb it. But if it wasn't for you, we wouldn't know this. I mean, it takes someone who has done exhausting deep dives into this shit. And to be able to express it the way you do, I think, is incredibly important.

163:14I think most people, including me, were not aware of the scope of it until you came out with all this. Well, you're the man in the arena. And, you know, I've been a personal inspiration for me for a long time. I mean, what you've had to take on just to be able to do this show is something for the history books. So thanks for having me on. My pleasure. Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody.