#2237 - Mike Benz

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33:12It's bold and sophisticated yet incredibly smooth, finishing long and deep. It's authentically American, representing uncompromising quality for the rugged, the powerful, and the passionate. Tap the banner to learn more or visit buffalotracedistillery .com. That's Buffalo Trace Distillery .com Distilled, aged, and bottled by Buffalo Trace Distillery, 90 proof Franklin County, Kentucky, Buffalo Trace, American, family -owned, independent, and perfectly untamed. So if there's institutional consensus building between the military, the diplomatic sphere, the intelligence community, the NGOs, those, the media outlets, the universities.

34:03That's really democracy. Those 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 Farm 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 regional drive or industrial change.

34:39If 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 those years of consensus building, that they began to view as an attack on democracy. And so they said democracy is really about institutions and you can actually look up for example read read Hoffman um In 2019 they were doing all of these conferences where they said elections Uh are are a threat to democracy elections corrupt democracy because we can't think of democracy's elections anymore For example Ukraine has banned elections We don't we still caught we still say we are providing 300 billion dollars of military to support to promote democracy in Ukraine even though they don't have elections.

35:28What's because of the its it's controlled by US institutions. You can look at something called the red lines memo by the way on my ex -counter if you're curious. So 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? Well they've indefinitely canceled elections. So he is because of the war. Because of the war is the argument. Now we had elections during the during the civil war here in the U .S. This is not uncommon for countries to be at war and still have elections. The issue is, Zelensky is unpopular and not winning in those election polls.

36:09And 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 red lines memo which is which is i think i have it near the top of my ex account or you can look for just the phrase red lines memo and you will see zolensky's first month in office he was given a threat letter effectively by the u .s. state department where they had some of the like seventy u .s. funded and geos who wrote a letter to zolensky set up in telling him ordering him not to cross the the below listed red lines or else there will be political instability in your country.

36:54Now 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 destabilized 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 red lines, or cultural red lines. So for example, that he could not allow the use of Russian language to be aired on any of the major Ukrainian media channels.

37:36This is part of a drive by the US 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 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 in CIA, telling Ukrainians that they can't...what kind of language they can use in their own country.

38:25Ukraine 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, in 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, but this is every aspect of Ukrainian society effectively top down controlled by democratic institutions funded by the US government when the stock standard that the only reason we do that, you know, he who calls the pipe who pays the piper calls the tune, They're being funded to exert this soft power issue.

39:29Every, this, this soft power force on the Ukrainian government. And Zelensky 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 in 2014 through, up to him. And so the issue is, is those are the institutions. It's 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.

40:16And you know, you were talking with Mark and Dresden about NGOs and their role in internet censorship. And he was, I think, fleshing out sort of the concept of a gong go, a government organized, non -governmental organization.

40:30And so the National Developmental Democracy is sort of posited as an NGO, but it's got a very curious history again. This is what sponsors so much of Ukrainian media. The National Developmental 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 MK Ultra to Operation Chaos to effectively bribing student groups on college campuses, all sorts of the heart attack gun being held up in a public hearing at 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.

41:31All of these things gave rise to Jimmy Carter being elected in 1976. He was not expected to win in seventy six but he won on the back of democrat mass outrage over the malfeasance of the national security state the c -i -a and so the following year Carter does something called the Halloween massacre he fire he fires thirty percent of the c -i's operations division in a single night and then he totally cripples the c -i's budget reggae gets the power after the iran hostage situation wants the c -i's powers back But the Democrats were still hugely hostile to it. The public still had not fully forgiven the CIA.

42:10So they came up with a cute trick. And you can actually look at a September 1991 David Ignatius article called Spilus Kuz. 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 even 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 new tactic that we use through NGOs spearheaded by the National Divert Democracy. You'll find in that article a quote by the National Divert Democracy's founder, Carl Gershman where he explicitly says that it would be a terrible thing for groups supported by the US government to be seen as subsidized by the CIA.

43:09We 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 the CIA could effectively subsidize the groups without having CI fingerprints on it. If you look at its legislative history, it passed effectively a bill through Congress that that Ronald Reagan approved. The origins of it come from the CI director William Casey in 1983 working directly with the US Attorney General as well as an entire USAID blueprint the previous year. for the the the CIA requested this to be set up it's funded entirely by the u .s.

43:55government it's officially accountable to the house foreign relations committee in the senate far uh... farm relations committee so it's funded by the government it's it's literally accountable to congressional to a new us congressional committee it was this the c .i .a. director birthed 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 the National for Democracy and the entire intelligence community was... They were the ones who led this conversion from counter -communism to counter -populism.

44:35They're the ones who when Trump won rose to power and when Brexit and the whole, you know, NATO -EU country, domino, started electing right -wing populists who were hostile to the foreign policy establishments consensus. And a lot of this has to do with energy geopolitics and military interventionism, and we can get to those if you're 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 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 US companies.

45:25So this is the US government funding a CIA cutout to back channel with regulators and influencers and foreign countries to get those foreign countries to crush US 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 go. You got it. It's fine. 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, weekends, democratic voices, and participation, exploits, and exacerbates existing social cleavages, and silences opposition.

46:13Countering disinformation and promoting information integrity are necessary priorities for ensuring democracy can thrive. The CEPS 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 and National Democratic Institute developed this guide with support from USAID through the consortium for elections and political process strengthening.

46:56Here 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 their resources to address this information, but lack credibility, whereas 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.

47:40Developing 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 this information. Not sure where to start? Click here to explore the interventions database of organizations, projects, and donors is working to counter disinformation around the world. Whoa. There are 140 countries. It's entirely funded by the U .S. government. It's, I can break this down in detail. So this SEPPS program is basically, in large part, the reason that the Brazil censorship state was erected.

48:27I mean, this came a little bit later in the game, but it's a spawn out of this Ned censorship network. this explicitly created by the CIA director, self -confessed, effectively CIA cut out. What CEPS does is they manage in a preleport folio of all of the censorship institutions that they've capacity built in a region. So capacity building is a phrase in statecraft that effectively means building up an asset so that it has the capability to be instrumentalized by the US 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 chess board.

49:13What assets are on our side there? What 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 into capacity build them so that they can be instruments of US state craft. 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.

49:55but what CEPH does is to join program by the US State Department, USAID, and the National Down for Democracy. USAID is a very no -tor - it's sort of a switch player. There's no aid in USAID, by the way. Your brain is being tricked when you see the phrase USAID. It's not an aid organization. The aid in USAID stands for 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.

50:39Now, USAID for the first time in its history was created in the early 1960s by JFK in 1961. one. It was it was created because you had all of this intelligence, state craft, and military support and logistical aid that was tripping over itself. Basically, 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. And there was no way there was no sort of central coordinator of those of those capacity building operations. USAID by the way is a $50 billion budget.

51:18The entirety of the intelligence community is only 72 billion. So it is more than the CIA and more than the State Department. And aid is basically a US aid is effectively a switch player to assist the Pentagon with on the national security front to assist the State Department on the national interest front or to assist the intelligence community on a sort of clandestine operations front. So you can look up funny moments by the way in USAID being a CIA front. If you, for example, you want to pull up the Wikipedia of Zunzaneo when USAID created a, 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.

52:14And USA laundered money that was earmarked for Pakistan in order to create an identical version of Twitter but just for Cuba and to recruit them using messaging that at first involve music, sports, and hurricane updates. And 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 bring a Cuban spring to Cuba in the same way that the CIA, the State Department and USAID 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 US companies like they've done here.

53:08But so USAID provides 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. It 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 Noun for Democracy. when this CIA cut out 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, is basically the CIA, it liaising with multinational companies, with our big US national champions.

54:08And then the fourth one is called the Solidary Center, which is the CIA's work with unions, which has been a part and parcel of our CIA work since the 1940s. And so you have, but these two political branches of the National Down 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.

54:51He 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 nineteen eighties called they want their foreign policy back because at the time it was primarily the g .o .p economic stakeholders whose energy investments were being sabotaged by russian activity in georgia and isre by john it hadn't yet hit the nd i network the c i the the dnc side of the economics until you crane in twenty fourteen 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.

55:34And 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 populous whether it's the US in with Trump Bolsonaro in Brazil and 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 Atlanta 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 and its tracks and stop him from gang reelected by creating a censorship infrastructure in Brazil that is powerful and institutionally as widen and deep as other different work.

56:30So NDI, which I should note, Hunter Biden was on the Chairman's Advisory Board of NDI, the DNC CIA wing. So if anyone is a little curious as to why the CIA intervened on the Justice Department investment investigation. Folks remember the IRS wanted to question Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's lawyer who paid his taxes for five years. Then the CIA intervened and told them 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 sprawl of coalitions called D4D, designed for democracy. And designed for democracy in tandem with this CEPPS program goes on to work with the censorship court, Demorias, the censorship Voldemort on their TSE court, basically the election management and censorship body of their Supreme Court.

57:35This is the guy who has gone to war with Elon Musk. They help that censorship court set up a disinformation task force and their own institutional assets get put on the advisory committee of the Brazilian censorship court to direct the censorship policies of the same institution that banned X from Brazil that seized Starlink's assets, they worked with the universities, the 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.

58:42They were funding millions of dollars to Brazilian media institutions to promote internet censorship and to promote the banning effectively of any Bolsonaro content on social media or on end and encrypted chats. That's the USA then kicked in millions of dollars of funding to internews, which is another US government -funded media projection arm to promote media literacy programs, information integrity programs, countering this 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.

59:31It was the same thing that we do when we try to regime change a country. By 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 of 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 was basically focusing in on the court system of different countries that are in charge with adjudicating elections.

1:00:24in order to get them to grow a censorship capacity to censor the ability for people to question their elections. And they had all these stakeholders, some 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 this 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 will ruffle too many feathers. Instead, simply call it strategic communications.

1:01:01And because 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 US State Department's political opponents, they want to stop from winning the election.

1:01:24This 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, 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 not full blown. This is not yet reached full maturity where we are at complete 1984 on all of this, but it is no longer in its infant stage. If if Elon had a, if Congress was aware of that, that's SISA, that cybersecurity branch at DHS was the real Ministry of Truth in 2019 and 7, 2022.

1:02:15If people were aware of the State Department's Global Engagement Center and USAID's Democracy Human Rights and Governance and all of this in 2018, 2019 when it was really getting its feed 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 video that we just watched a reference to this phrase called Whole of Society. This is another funny video. If you want to just pull up though, if you're interested, Jamie, and if you think Joe this is appropriate, I could have made this a six hour super cut.

1:02:51But if you just, I made a two hour super cut of, if you just look at a whole of society super cut on my, on my ex account, you'll, you'll see this. And this phrase is, they're get out jail free card. So, when these CIA cutouts in State Department MSAries and the whole apparatus of the blob had this apparition moment in 2016 where the Wool Space International Order would collapse and we have to stop populism, we have to stop Trump from ending our CZ -Rasia foreign policy, 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.

1:03:35Authoritarian 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 over, or overthrow, or regime change, foreign countries is their 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 autocratic outcome with a, but we don't, we can't be seen to use the autocratic process.

1:04:23So 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 of society counter misinformation alliance. And the reason I thought it would be funny to just play this clip before Delvin into it a little bit more is because it actually starts with a clip from SISSA, the cybersecurity turned censorship, DHS internal meeting where the SISSA censorship official leading the meeting apologizes for using the phrase, whole society, because by that point, everyone is so sick of hearing it. It's like a mantra, like an incantation that they, that there, that has to be recited, almost like a religious ritual, because this is how you get this government, private sector, civil society, media alliance.

1:05:18This 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 history talking about it. Well, if you go to in my highlights tab in scroll down I think you'll you'll see it there. It's a supercut. I Use the phrase supercut if that's helpful to 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 the so they're 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.

1:06:31The 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 count disinformation studies is what they call it misnomer of the century, but But so they've there's now about a hundred US universities every major US University has a censorship center Whether it's it'll be called disinformation studies sometimes will be tucked under their sociology department or their communications even though applied physics when they do AI censorship. So you have the universe and the civil society layer, you have the universities, the NGOs, the activist groups, the independent nonprofit foundations.

1:07:13And the fourth quadrant is media, which is the government working with media to promote censorship of US 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 can just watch just like a funny supercut we only watch all the thing we'll get the picture very quickly

1:07:44and we hear this term all the time a problem like this information fighting this information really requires a whole society response and I know whole societies a little bit cliche and an alternative through and around a lot. Addressing disinformation requires a whole of society approach. This information is not going to be fixed by governments acting along. 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 society challenge.

1:08:24A whole society approach that what would be your wish list if you could implement anything or 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 society problem. So there's things that governments can do, you know, individual national governments and multilateral institutions. This information challenges democracy required that we work together as a community to share our experiences into whole governments, social media platforms, and political leaders accountable for making sure that people are empowered with information that is real and accurate.

1:09:03Democracy 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 this information, a whole of society approach. I want to get into the quote, whole of society responds that whole of society networked with sparns, private sector, public sector, civil society. Needs that were 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?

1:09:40We 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 on 140 countries, if you remember, there was one of those nine things they read off is that the US government needs to capacity build these counter 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.

1:10:24So 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, I can show you some great videos that sort of show this.

1:10:59So if you just look up WiseDex, it's in my highlights. It's also if you just do at Mike Ben Cyber WiseDex. I'm gonna show you a couple of things of how this works. So, when Jamie's able to pull that up, so - You're saying Y is Dex. Y is Dex, W -I -S -E -D -E -X. Dex. Mm -hmm. And so, Trump did something really ambitious 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 foundation for science, but if you look at its history, it basically has a, it's when military technology becomes dual use for commercial and civilian purposes.

1:12:01So for example, the internet self started off as DARPA in the 60s. Then it was transferred to the National Science Foundation for civilian effectively management. That meant it made its way to the worldwide web. That's why the National Science Foundation has a 15 % quota on national security related projects. 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. So Trump created this thing in his first term at the National Science Foundation called the Convergence Accelerator Program. And the idea was is that we were going to converge scientists from different fields to solve these home -run swing challenges like cold fusion.

1:12:53And all the quantum mechanics challenges that required physicists to talk to data scientists and network modelers and bringing them all together so that they go and converge on a common problem. So we set up about five of these tracks in like 2019. Biden gets into office. This 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 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.

1:13:40It 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 in the middle. 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.

1:14:30Actually they miss a lot, especially when the posts aren't in English. To 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. If the policies are too abstract, both steps, flagging and judging can be difficult. Why stecks 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.

1:15:18Each 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 Efikasia Negativa yields Spanish tweets promoting that same claim. The trust and safety team at a platform can use those keywords to automatically flag matching posts for human review. Weistex 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 Weistex browser plugin identifies misinformation claims that might match the post.

1:16:01The reviewer then decides which matches are correct. A much easier task than deciding if posts violate abstract policies. reviewer efficiency. So so COVID -19 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 median narrative that this is dangerous we're all gonna 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 And so 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.

1:16:58COVID -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 the 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 US and across NATO, just to... And they were conflating everything with hate speech, basically, and a few opposed open borders in the US or in Italy or in Germany or in the UK. In fact, that's why the US Justice Department funded Hate Lab.

1:17:33You want to see another crazy video from all this not saying we had to pull it up this one up. Yeah, yeah look at look up the Hate lab They're their video on the their AI Scan and band dashboard for a real time. This is just a large scale Implementation of censorship. Yes, just using all these different things to get people accustomed to it and to try to 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. On what we just watched with Ysdex, just coming back to this whole society concept. So this is the National Science Foundation.

1:18:14The 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 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 that 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 Code book of terms and claims that will then be automatically flagged and And the National Science Foundation does not want to be seen as having the government tell the private sector companies to do it.

1:19:01So it is capacity building a civil society nonprofit, a University of Michigan disinformation lab, to create this AI censorship technology to then sell to the social media platforms to make sure there's no escape 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 if you look up the word graphica it's g -r -a -p -h -i -k -a.

1:19:55Graphica is a long time military contractor that did social media monitoring surveillance and analytics work for the US 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.

1:20:40So, Graphic has gotten over $7 million in Pentagon grants. It was formally a part of the Pentagon's psychological operations research center. And Graphica was one of the very first entities to begin this censorship around the world of COVID -19. Given the strange, unresolved role of the Pentagon in potentially giving rise to COVID -19 or the strangeness of the DARPA grants around there and the military networks around the biosecurity state. Graphica began their work in before COVID -19 even got its name. They started in their own source documents, they say they started December 16th, the pneumonia -like symptoms did not begin in December 12th, 2019.

1:21:34So 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 Just one month after COVID broke out and if you pull this if you pull up their their April 2020 report You will see that they've they've literally scanned. Yeah, this is the one and and I have a highlighted version of it by the way on my on my ex account as well. But, 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.

1:22:19And you'll see, 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. 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. So if you scroll down to page five, it says, a key analytical have these maps. Okay. So you'll see that they, so similarly large mega clusters of US right wing accounts, we're diminishing the mainstreaming of the 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.

1:23:13This is right at the outbreak. One month into it, a Pentagon funded SyOps firm is doing political mapping, not in the the US, in the UK, 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. What was this in regard to the origin at this point? Yes, and you can run a control left. 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, And this is the Pentagon creating network mass.

1:23:54We're paying for this effectively to protect 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, how much would Bill Gates or George Soros need to pay a cloaked dagger public relationship to scour the entire internet and create targetable, censorable demographic communities that social media should censor in order to protect the reputation. This is us paying the Pentagon to pay a siop's firm to protect the reputation of Bill Gates and George Soros from conspiracy theories online.

1:24:40And they did the same thing with COVID origins. They did the same thing 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 COVID vaccine efficacy, if you question masks and their efficacy, if you question policies around lockdowns, all of that was systematically mapped, all four of the entities involved in the virality project by the way, where US government funded it in terms of at the organizational level, the University of Stanford and the University of Washington who are two of those four received a joint $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, which again is this basically civilian side of DARPA.

1:25:26The, you know, Graphica has received $7 million in Pentagon funds and then the, you know, the nastiest one of them all is this group, the Atlantic Council, which has, 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, gets annual funding from the USA. It's every web of US cloac and dagger intelligence and diplomatic funding funds the Atlantic Council every year. The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its on its board of directors.

1:25:59A 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 Atlanta Council, I can show you some wild clips of that by the way, including them training journalists on what to censor. I need to see that. Yeah. Okay. So if you pull up, you can find this also if you look for on Rumble, NATO training journalists, you'll see that. Is Rumble the only way place you can put that up right now? No, I have it on my exit. I actually have a 45 minute video.

1:26:38I have a 45 minute video that goes through it and all the supporting receipts that's got, I think almost three 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 journalist, or the video, and I can tell you that the source video, it's called I Call Bullshit. This was in June 2019, right on the heels of the Bullshit, Bob Mueller investigation. The Atlantic Council, again, with seven CIA directors on this board, an annual funding from the State Department of 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 of Dr.

1:27:20Strange love. And Jamie, let me know if you have trouble pulling it up because I can... He sent me down to me to add what you added, pulled up what you were talking about on other podcasts. That's not what I'm looking for. I have to. It's definitely, I think it's definitely searchable easily on Rumble actually wanted to load this up. But, and I can tell you the exact, if you just look, it's called I Call Bullshit is what it was by Ben Nimmo, the Atlanta Council. I'll just show you what I'm seeing because every time I type in what you're saying, it just brings up Utah. Okay, okay, how about it?

1:27:51How about Atlanta Council? Atlanta Council journalist. Yes.

1:28:00Or training, yeah, journalists. Oh, yeah, I think you need, yeah.

1:28:14There you go. That's the top one. Okay. So, so here you go. censorship training sessions. Yes. So can I tell you a little back story on this real quick? Trump tweets Brexit slogans. Yeah, give me some back words. Okay, all right, so if you pause, wait, if you pause right there on the thumbnail, if you just see it real quick. Okay, so I found this video in 2019, you know, 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 it around the five or six hour mark of a day two of I found this I think at five 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 -sensor and Throttle Trump's ability to be able to fight off charges that he was a Russian asset.

1:29:17Because at the time, the Pentagon and the intelligence community won him out. If you remember the Ukraine impeachment in 2019 came from Sierra Morella, the CIA agent came from the Vinnman brothers who were 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 Atlanta 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 Jurassic off 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 So the Atlantic Council effectively builds itself as NATO's think tank.

1:30:14That's what it's known as in Washington. There's 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 and he'd sanctions put it put in place they need capacity building to on the civilian side to help a military thing that's what the Atlanta council primarily does and you i'm not even a pining on whether much of what they do i'm not even saying good about organization but they set up something of the digital forensics research lab right at you know basically right on the heels of the crimee uh...

1:31:01and eastern ukraine countercoo and it was one of the earliest NATO -US military liaised internet censorship shops that targeted populist governments, Trump, you know, the whole UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, network that I talked about, Bolsonaro, right out the gate. And so this video was, again, right before Russia gate 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 Nemo, he's at the Atlanta Council on this one, but he goes on shortly after this to be effectively the technical lead for Graphica, the same Pentagon.

1:31:54By the way, He had started his career in the NATO press shop, basically doing media work for NATO, then he goes over, and again, we fund all of this, but let's just watch and we'll show you this. Oh, if you, I think. What do you 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 this information 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.

1:32:36Wait for it to get's good. Because it's shortened, 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?

1:33:20So 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. This list is destroyed. Distort, distract, dismay. Excellent. You're welcome to scream, I call bullshit too, if you're comfortable, but it's not a problem. It's all funded by US taxpayers. With that, let's play.

1:33:49Which heart? 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? Get creative Obviously it can be any number of the these it you can say it's distorting what they're saying or distraction them from whatever the issue is saying The issue isn't real they're just after me because as they which isn't 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?

1:34:32They said dismiss, do you have a dismiss?

1:34:37How 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, it's him. There are, 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, don'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. We're going to be part of that when you have an idea. This is a Brexit ad saying we should be spending the money on our own national health system instead of funny me to store it.

1:35:15Any other take -as? Any suggestions? How many of you think this one is distort involved? Jesus Christ. Okay. That's a lot. Any other? This seems so happy to comply. This seems so much more to mention. We're going to have big hand over here. Let's... Oh, were you just... You just kept your hand up? Your hand goes back down. Are there any others? Are we just going to stick with that one? Yes. Right here. Distract.

1:35:42Ah, 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. One more example of - So this goes on, but what you'll see is this is the exact political adversary group that the intelligence, diplomatic and military structures trying to stop. So Donald Trump breaks it in the UK. And if you ever wondered why is it that everyone got all on board and suddenly started doing this altogether, they were literally having years of these consensus buildings. You want to get your career made if you're at the point or institute or the International Fact Checking Union or if you're on the disinformation beat for the Washington Post or NPR or or Le Monde in France or the Frankfurt Algemeiner in Germany, you get your bonafides by going to these and you get effectively accredited by the blob.

1:36:41And they were literally training people to find creative ways to mass flag. You can't even run a Brexit ad saying, hey, we should be spending $350 million on ourselves rather than the EU. That's disinformation. Not false. They're saying 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, your 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.

1:37:26Try to find ways that this makes any sense with no one having a counter -neutral narrative. No one standing up and go, wait a minute, who's to decide what it, what if it turns out it is and it was a witch hunt? Now we know. All that russian gate stuff was 100 % bullshit. Right. So he was correct. Right. But remember the mother, mother disaster wouldn't happen till 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 defend himself. It'll be like internet gag order.

1:38:00Right. 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 naval gaze and self reflect on this until there was political and social blowback. The fact is is there were a lot of these people who in 2017, 2018 We're looking around at these, I mean, I've watched thousands of hours of these consensus -building meetings. They literally, there would be some debate in 2017 about whether or not we should do this tactic or whether or not this goes too far.

1:38:42And I watched as these people basically let those early inhibitions go as the thing took wings and as the money poured in. Because that's I always emphasize the censorship industry. If you get rid of the money, you get rid of the glamour, you get rid of the career track, you get rid of the power, you get rid of the networks. And so to me, it's, in fact, 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 and Congress began to take action, and media began to report on it and the Twitter file spilled open and the Murphy Missouri lawsuit spearheaded by the Missouri and Louisiana State Attorney generals put this in the court system.

1:39:37An America First Legal, Stephen Miller and Gene 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 the bottom fell out on this stuff. September, October, 2022, Harvard Misinformation Review, Disinformation Studies is too big to fail.

1:40:22They 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 on challenge 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 city bank 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 being. They're so deeply ingrained in the private sector interstitials working with all the trust and safety people at every platform.

1:41:04They're so deeply funded by 12 different US government departments and 50 different US 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 But there are, 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.

1:41:43There goes your State Department funding, there goes your NSF funding. And I have a great example of that by the way that's pretty eye opening on our topic of institutions. That's a, that's a quick receipt if you're interested. Sure. So, yeah. Feel free to go, James, anyway. 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 is very vague. I just want to go to their website. Yeah, Google, Google Arizona State University Center on Narrative, Disinformation and Strategic Influence.

1:42:18What's this information and strategic what? Influence. Yeah, we're just Arizona State University Center narrative. Yes. Okay. Just go to the website. Yeah, just go to the website. If you pull it up. So this, 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 hit you will hit the back button in a second, but if you scroll down So this air is on a state university. This is basically John McCain University now This is significant because John McCain was the found it the founding president Isn't it funny the the I write the picture the girl with the mask is wearing it wrong her nose is exposed Oh my gosh, I mean it just kind of shows you have fucking stupid all this stuff is Exactly, you know, they had to have her wearing a mask still even in 2024 you go to the website just wearing a mask and she's wearing it wrong her nose is exposed not only that it's a surgical mask is the dumbest one.

1:43:20The one that provides zero literally zero protection. Right. Okay. So especially with your nose open. No, that's fantastic. So a few things is background. Arizona State University, its current president Michael Crowe is now and was since the day it was born in 1999, the chairman of Incutel. You know, in Qtel 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 Qtel, and has been for 25 years. Arizona State University has these very deep partnerships with John McCain, who was the senator from Arizona.

1:44:02know john mccain who ran for president against brocco bomb on two thousand eight was the before he ran for president in two thousand eight for twenty five years he was the founder and the president of the iri the cia wing of the republican party in the iri is that is the g o p side of the of the national down for democracy that's effectively self declared c i a cutout and and fact there's no state university has a john mccain center on and disinformation that works in tandem with this one. But I just wanted to show that you'll see, this is technically Sarah's on a state university, but you'll see that it is an intelligence program.

1:44:39So if you scroll up for a second, 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 scroll down from here, you'll see the different branches. And then click on the one narrative 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.

1:45:19government diplomatic statecraft intelligence So this is a multi -million 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 setup? This information shows 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. I'm going to pause right there.

1:45:59The 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, 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, USAID, Pentagon, they all have this stock language now, which is that the purpose of the program is to protect their assets.

1:46:52And legacy news media is one of those assets. If 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 show you what some of those look like as well these dynamic disinformation dashboards but even if you just go to the projects page you know for that I think if you scroll down you'll see it yeah so these semantic information defender so this is right out of 1984 yeah so So if you scroll down, this is the terms, semantic information defender.

1:47:39This project, again, this is 1 .6 million just from the Pentagon alone. This project will develop a system that detects, characterizes and attributes misinformation and disinformation, whether image, video, audio or text. ASU provides content and narrative analysis, text detection and characterization methods It's in a large data set of known disinformation, manipulate objects. So 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, and they've been caught basically conflating anything that's pro Trump with being pro Russia and going after rank and file right wing populist and conservatives because that's who the never Trump side of the GOP, the Mitt Romney, John McCain side of the GOP is trying to take out Mitt Romney by the way who ran for president and so bomb up the cycle after John McCain.

1:48:50Remember John McCain was the founding president of the IRI, the CIA wing and the GOP. Mitt Romney is, 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 gonna go deep. You wanna see some craze?

1:49:27Yeah, but let's keep going with this. Please go deep. But created an information operations detection technique based on the principle of adversarial framing when parties hostile to US 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 of 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.

1:50:14Listen to this next one Studies the transmigration of these frames to non -Russian non -Propaganda services. This is how they get sources Right and six did not the ability to automatically detect adversarial from that. This is the AI I said, so this is a strange way to put it because US interests are could be just simply narratives that turn out to not be true So they have the ability to censor true information based on US interests But this is how they get you to that transmigration of frames to non -Russian non -Propaganda sources Yeah, 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.

1:50:54This is how right notice the 51 spies who lied about Hunter Biden They will still insist yeah, okay the laptops real, but it's still Russian because they argue that Russian propaganda outlets were amplifying it so it's and it's in Russia's interest to stigmatize the United States or to undermine the credibility of 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 can flate us as US 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?

1:51:33It's supposed to be a foreign -facing operation. But they have a get out 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 and or informal with a hostile foreign nation states intelligence services now they get spout americans this is at the ns a you know reads tucker carlsons signal chats and whatnot uh... and so they they launders that far into domestic switcher who which by the way is another great great clip um... But anyway, I was going to, I saw your eyes go a little wide with the Lockheed Martin thing. Yeah.

1:52:11If you go to YouTube and you type in MiterSquint, MiterSquint misinformation. M -I -T -E -R? Yeah. M -I -T -R -E. Miter is one of the largest military contractors. They are absolutely enormous.

1:52:33They're sort of like a technological version of the Rand Corporation, if you will. Now, they are funded by the US military. And fighting COVID -19 misinformation. Let's go do it from the beginning.

1:52:53As the nation continues the fight against COVID -19, wrong masks. We're in wrong. We're in wrong. Social media is full of conflicting misleading and false information. 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. MiterSquint for COVID -19 provides a fast, reliable way to report and counter COVID misinformation about the disease, its treatment and vaccinations.

1:53:39If 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 mobile device. MiterSquint collects the URL with the screenshot and the coded information for aggregation and analysis. You'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? MiterSquint analyzes and identifies patterns in social media that are misleading the public.

1:54:18Your report enables faster takedowns and helps maintain the public's trust and confidence in the efforts to battle COVID -19. MiterSquint for COVID -19 provides an unprecedented opportunity to report dangerous misinformation designed to create additional fear or anger and people already stressed by the pandemic. Contact us to learn more about MiterSquint and become a participant. Squint at Miter .org. Yeah, so Miter is a $2 .2 billion annual budget and tens 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.

1:55:01Again, just like the Pentagon was paying Graphica, censoring COVID 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 romp to the 2020 election. If you look at squint misinformation elections, our democracy, our elections, we must call it out. I think that starts with the If you go back to the beginning. 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. The level and quality of fact -checking varies from one platform to the next.

1:55:49That 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. Miter's 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 Miter's squint users see untrue or inaccurate postings about the elections process, you can report it with a single click, whether using a desktop top or mobile device.

1:56:30MITRE's squint collects a screenshot and the coded information for aggregation and analysis. You'll get a secure message to verify that you've sent to the screenshot. The verification message includes a report that you can share with election peers or send to the social media channel asking what the misinformation be removed. What happens then? MITRE's 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. MiterSquint is helping election officials like you defend the elections process from disinformation campaigns designed to undermine election legitimacy.

1:57:09Contact us to learn more about MiterSquint and become a participant.

1:57:15They 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. So, you see, Atlantic Council was formally 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 jumbo tron. Those elections. Oh, yeah. An unbelievable level. But they bragged afterwards about, you know, 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, basically, to scale it to every other policy issues so that it's not just around elections where they're quote, huge regulatory stakes for the companies.

1:58:11And they go over this strategy. I mean, literally, on a celebration video of how they pulled this off, again, with the 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.

1:58:56What are the threats? The threats? Yeah, when you say the government would threaten them. Well, so there's several. So in that case, there was 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 with this big, you know, the Google is now under the gun of this with the US 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, the subpoenaed version of the Twitter files, but from Facebook.

1:59:41And you'll see that in early 2021, the Biden administration was pressuring explicitly Facebook to censor COVID origins, head or dock speech, and 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 this is right. So this is there are five claims. So this is two marks 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.

2:00:27Let's show you how interconnected all this stuff is. And the subject is COVID misinformation Wuhan Lab League theory. On the question of our decision to remove claims related to the origin of COVID. Again this is June 2021. There There were five claims that met the standard. It basically, anyone who accused COVID of potentially being man -made or bioengineered or created by an individual government or country or that was modified through gain of function research. We reduced distribution, meaning they throttled. The algorithmically zapped out of all viral, they applied viability circuit breakers to content making any of those five buckets of claims.

2:01:04In February 2021, so this is right in tandem with the vaccine rollout in response to continued public pressure and tense conversations with the new administration. We started, so they only started removing it because of, quote, tense conversations with the new administration. So if you go to the next image, if you just, yeah, oh, wait, I'm sorry, why go, go over bigger fish to fry. There should be a, yeah, here you go. In June 2021, email, click emailed others 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 concern.

2:01:42Then it says below. What are these bigger? I can go over those in a second. Just one more thing on this is, you see in April, the company was seeking to work closely with the Biden administration on multiple policy fronts. This now gets to the larger issue of the interplay between the profits of multinational corporations and the protection provided by the U .S. 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 when I ran the cyberdesk for the US State Department, I got a call one day from nine Google lobbyists.

2:02:19These were all former lobbyists from big oil companies or from sovereign countries who had moved to Google to lobby the US State Department. The US, you know, was the orchestra symphony conductor for all of the assets of the American an 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 let a variety of reasons I won't get into granular detail. But that basically, you know, because the State Department traditionally defines US interests as being the wealth air of US citizens and the aggregate welfare of us national champions us citizens and u .s.

2:03:07corporations this is why again it's so insane inflammatory and there's got to be a way it's friggin illegal that the national down for democracy and the u .s. state department us a are currently running programs to tank us national champions like x because they're hosting you know they allow the hosting of pro populous political content but so you know basically the pitches where US National Champion were Google. This is another thing that the Trump White House was saying at the time, they were defining Maga as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon because their stock price being high was a big, you know, I think, boom, 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, so they're the G and Maga and they are functionally requesting that the US 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.

2:04:21And I want, without again getting too granular, these involve everything from data privacy rights, the Europe is something called the GDPR. They're 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 so they said about sort of policy pivot that they call strategic digital autonomy, meaning that Europe needs to exert more sovereign autonomy over the tech space in the digital sector rather than purely relying on American projection arms or US tech giants. And so these new EU digital market section, Digital Services Act are like, for example, a Tim Cook at Apple just got paid with a $15 billion fine from this.

2:05:15It's the only people who can stop that, who can negotiate and who can pick winners and losers in that market are the US 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 like 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 look up the, because Tim Cook called 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.

2:05:55But I just thought I'm not getting the specific thing wrong. If you look up, yeah, here you go. $15 billion fine. Additional $2 billion and 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 US companies if he is elected. This government highlights the development rather highlights the ongoing regulatory challenges faced by tech giants like Apple, which may impact their stock performance.

2:06:29Investors should monitor these regulatory developments and their potential impact on Apple's finances and Financials and stock price right and this is happening to all the tech companies and the only reason this hasn't happened yet you know in the now 30 years of Internet diplomacy is because the state department has always gone to bat for them We all sorts of carrots and sticks that we can threaten on that right the humanitarian aid the security assistance what did they want from apple that would allow them to allow apple to be fined that much well the state department can in theory could open up a diplomatic channel to the e u the u s ambassador to the e u could march into their office you know horses head uh...

2:07:10out of you know out of godfather style and say uh... you are not going to f with apple on this this decision was wrongly made if you move forward with enforcement of this fifteen billion dollar fine and the US government will renegotiate our trade posture, our tariff posture, our humanitarian assistance, our security assistance, our role in... I mean, there's any number of things that you can log role in 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.

2:08:02It would be the incentive to not do that. Favres to Europe and European. You're always dipping into political capital when you do that, right? Like whenever you are Threatening something with someone you're doing business with you are Giving up a little bit 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'd led after 2014 your They had an agreement with Russia. They're They're sort of shooting shooting themselves in the leg to try to you know get the bear that's biting it.

2:08:44So you're sort of doing this with the EU. The EU is a very delicate dance with the US, right? It's 550 million people. It's a giant market. It's, you know, it is the, there's basically three poles between China, the US, and the EU. There's a ton of overlapping trade arrangements. It's basically the economic arm of NATO. So if you were to, If you were to threaten the EU too hard, so China just overtook the US as the EU's largest trading partner. If we were to go to the mat for Apple in this case on the EU, the EU may turn around and say, fine, well, if you do that, we're going to partner with Saudi Arabia or 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.

2:09:38There's all sorts of, it's a constant interplay, that's what makes that position both so fascinating but also so complex, 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. This is another thing. 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 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 if the one in Canada actually passed, but they're basically trying to have the media companies get a cut of the big tech profits because they are monopolists in the ad space.

2:10:34Google ads makes up a huge portion of Google's revenue, Facebook, obviously. The only reason it became profitable in the first place. When Facebook IPO'd, it was initially there was a concern that it might not even be a profitable company, let alone one of the top 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 US government completely betrays them and works with Europe to screw them unless they do censorship. And if you want to see incredible receipt on this, you can look up the February 2021 USA disinformation primer.

2:11:11You can go actually to my foundations website foundation for freedom online .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 the eye cut out and in goods with state who us a serves as an instruction manual for how to exert its its soft power influence around the world to regulate ad networks to hurt us tech companies if they allow pro populous speech on the platforms by getting the getting advertiser boy cuts an advertiser black list to punch the social media companies and so you know it's it's a plot against our own people and it's being waged as part of a political proxy war to stop populous like trump from being being able to get elected in the first place and if he gets elected to be able to throttle his administration and his allies around the world so that he can't implement his agenda jesus uh...

2:12:18How does this not, how do you sleep? You know, like knowing all this, like what? It was really, really hard the first three or four years because there was, like 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 my health deteriorated. 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're going to have your denial and then your anger and then your depression and then you're bargaining and then your acceptance. You'll go through many iterations of those five stages of grief, but 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 archeological dive into the ancient dinosaur bones of the world that we live in.

2:13:29The American Empire would not exist without the Saperatus. 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. you know, Vasilage control over much of South America. We're an international empire because of the Spanish -American War 1898. We take the Philippines. 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 401Ks and middle class lifestyles and affordable homes and pensions and all the favors the State Department does to pry open markets is the reason that Walmart can export, you know, to the furthest reaches of the world.

2:14:32It's the reason that, you know, I played this really funny one, you know, a few days ago that the famous pizza hut ad with starring Gorbachev after the National Diamond for Democracy Pride, the Soviet Union open. And it's basically saying we have instability. These are Russians arguing with each other. 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 Yeah, yeah, you can actually

2:15:23Full house, perspective, political instability.

2:15:32Oh God, they all agree on pizza hut. And Gorbachev hailed the Gorbachev. So pizza hut.

2:15:53win the market for 200 million customers in Russia because it out -competed the other pizza companies. It won because the CIA pride Russia open. I mean, you can see all the touchdown dances we did about the Boris Yeltsin puppet presence. He was faxing the National Dome for Democracy in 1993 for permission, effectively, to bomb his own parliament building.

2:16:22There's the state department and Hollywood teamed up to prop up a alien force the else in and nineteen ninety six uh... when he was pulling it seven percent in the polls to uh... so that we could continue privatizing state -owned russian assets and selling them off to George soros's investment fund you can read casino mosque for more on that but basically this is i just be at pizza hot as a kid it at some point it becomes it becomes fascinating at some point it becomes comes that the tragedy shifts to a comedy and when you start looking at the size of some of these forces, it's the most exciting time ever to be alive.

2:17:03If there was, 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 I hope this, but I can't help you. And then it's just constant, 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 I think maybe in the end more terrifying than anything we've seen yet, but I'm just honored to be along for the ride with everybody else who's pulling the levers that they are.

2:17:47And if you can make it through, if you make it through the the hard times on thinking about it there is something beautiful it's like getting to know let's just say you know genghis con you know you're just ended from something people are saying that genghis con murder rape whatever you know crimes there are 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 c i a I want them to be reformed and they have to go through the gauntlet of public sunlight Jay Bada chariote Dr. Jay Bada chari was just named the NIH That is one of the most inspiring stories I think it's an incredible turnaround.

2:18:28Yeah Tell the whole story because some people aren't even aware what happened with him with the great -barring Conducoration well, he was he was kicked off of Twitter He was you know basically a premier scientist at Stanford he was labeled a fringe epidemiologist by Fouchyan 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 COVID era to run it. I mean, it's like 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 hard attack on in public and Frank Church and, you know, James Angleton, we saw, now I know a lot of that was a whitewash and wanks in the space or I or probably getting triggered by me even acknowledging that that was a decent thing.

2:19:38But 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, you know, 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 is we 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 they're going to be caught flatfooted by something very nasty.

2:20:23I think coming down the pipe. Have you ever talked to anyone there? not in enough detail to be able to feel that we are where we need to be but maybe that will change.

2:20:37Barisma. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. Yeah. You know how I mentioned the Atlanta Council so many times in this seven CIA directors on board and you'll find it the Pentagon State Department CIA cutouts like the NED, literally sponsoring at Atlanta Council conferences, the I call bullshit censorship training meetings, the partner with the HS to censor Trump partnered, you know, to censor COVID. One week before Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, Perisma signed a formal cooperation agreement with the Atlanta for the Atlanta Council to leverage its representation effectively as NATO's brain, the Think Tank for NATO, to kick energy deals to Barisma.

2:21:30You can look this up. If you can pull this on screen, I'll show you these receipts in a while. If you just type in Barisma on my ex account or Barisma Atlanta Council, any of these will get you there. So there's a much larger story here that sort of gets us back 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 Bereastman of the Atlantic Council. This is one day actually, one day before Donald Trump's inauguration, January 19, 2017. So this group is seven CIA directors on its board. And annual funding from the Pentagon, the state's buying by the, these are, these are old numbers from 2020.

2:22:15It's over a million now for all these. But what are they doing, signing a formal agreement with Burisma to kick them, deal flood? Well, so here is where it gets to the geopolitics of the energy space and what a lot of this Russia stuff is about. So 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 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. Yeah. Or just like maybe the fourth, the fifth one, if you see, or the fourth or fifth, fourth one or fourth, fifth.

2:23:02Yeah. Anyway, those. Right. So, so Russia has the most exploitable natural resources of any country on Earth by far, by far, by far. I mean, it's almost double. And that was why you may have heard this term from Francis Fukuyama, the end of history in the 1990s. This was like the, you know, the 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 goes back to the Big New Brzezinski, the Grand Chess Board, the idea that he who controls Eurasia controls the world, because this is where two -thirds of the world's resources are.

2:23:46There's this big stretch basically from central Europe all the way out into far reaches of Russia, where so many of these minerals and oil and gas and exploitable resources 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 $12 .4 trillion worth of minerals and resources. So, you know, do it for that. He just said the other day admitted this war is about money. It is. It is. So, but this is, this is so fascinating to me. I almost have have to take a self -indulgent moment if you'll allow me.

2:24:28I had initially started working on this with a book in a movie that was just about the AI censorship side. It was weapons of mass deletion and at the time I was in 2016 or early 2017 I was focused on the domestic side. I think everybody is when they see this. A lot of this was woke stuff. So 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, okay, this is a culture war, right? And then as I started tracing this and just completely obsessing every day 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.

2:25:19And you'd say, well, what are they doing at a censorship conference? Why is Chevron here? Why is Royal Dutch Shell here? Why is NAFTA, where represents from NAFTA gas at this conference about disinformation on the internet? And 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 and 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 one sort of given a sort of melee style list of entities to Afwera, you know, to sort of knock out.

2:26:09And when it got to the Department of Energy, he said, I 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.

2:26:50He's got only two assets of the Russian remnant that he can leverage to try to turn Russia back into a world power. One of them is their sort of military export economy. Russia provides small arms munitions to rebel groups around the world to oppose the US Pentagon, such as in Africa. There's a big battle going on right now between the US and France on the one hand and Russia on the other hand in the Sahel. This is why a lot of these French run governments have had their have been toppled in the past year. Chad and Niger, Cody Boire. This is povled her off the telegram founder when the CIA's on media channels like radio for Europe, radio liberty and voice of America were effectively calling for telegram to be reigned in because it may be a Russian spy in every Ukrainian's pocket and we need to stop the ability for Russians at free speech on telegram.

2:27:53And you know, a lot of this is because of the use of rest 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 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 exporting that can make them very healthy if they are able to export that freely.

2:28:43It's sort of a similar issue with Iran and Iranian sanctions. So almost 100 % of Russian gas used to be, of European gas used to come from Russia. But these pipelines have been around for many, many, many, many decades. And it was the motor engine of Russia's economy, oil and gas, you know, Ross Nefton gas problem. And when Putin did something to reassert Russia's political influence over central 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 thought to be under US NATO control.

2:29:36And 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. There are energy soft power influence over central and eastern Europe, Germany with the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, Ukraine with the direct gas pipelines that then go all the way out into Western Europe.

2:30:26And we could not compete with Russia strictly because gas is a commodity. It's not like a phone where it comes in a different flavor, based on what we're talking on quality, it's just strictly about the price you sell it at. And the only way that you can get gas into Europe effectively other than natural gas pipelines are expensive, liquefied natural gas, where you basically harvest it in the Permian basin and Houston, you freeze it, you ship it 6 ,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean through the magnitude more expensive than the Russian alternative. So European countries wanted cheap Russian gas.

2:31:18The US and the UK and NATO wanted the EU member states to sanction Russian gas, both because it would cripple Russia's economy and also, so there's a national security on 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 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.

2:31:55So 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. So they have to get Europe to pass these sanctions on Russia. But the issue is, is a lot of these EU member states, not one I have to buy, super expensive Western LNG. It would be ideal if you could simply harvest the endogenous gas supplies in Ukraine. Ukraine, Ukraine happens to sit on Europe's third largest, unexploited natural gas resources, or the, you know, the shell that can be converted.

2:32:36And so they, so Berisma was a tool to be able to supplement the Western LNG with 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 over privatization for decades. And Perismo was the largest of the private for -profit firms that had the rights,

2:33:23the gas the surrounding Crimea offshore gas supplies. And so, Perisma was seen as an instrument of state craft by the US 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 under -exploited, 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 countercoup, the US was sponsoring the, this is what the military aid and the military assistance impeachment of Trump was about in 2019.

2:34:08We weren't at war with Russia then, right? This was 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 when Hunter Biden said, when he was asked what he was doing on barisma, whether he felt shame about it, he said he was doing a patriotic duty for his country. Barisma was an incentive state craft for the state department. What they were doing is, they were building that up, that's why they had funding from USAID, Again, the CIA funding conduit was working in the Atlanta Council with seven CIA directors on sport, Hunter Biden's on the chairman's advisory board of the NDI.

2:34:59Hunter Biden's law firm even has, this just broke four months ago. Hunter Biden's law firm actually had a, uh, uh, wrote a pitch to the US State Department for how, uh, for how Berisma could serve as a, you know, as basically a vassal for US State Department interests in the region. you had the you had the barrispas backchanneling with uh... was that the u .s. ambassador in Rome for on similar grounds in terms of the uh... the the italy grease 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 barrisma chairman's advisory board of the c .i .a .s dnc cutout But who else was on the board of the board of directors right next to right next to Hunter Biden?

2:35:50Cofer Black cofer Black who spent 30 years in the CIA won CIA distinguished metals awards You can read the Daily Beast article where cofer Black is described as Mitt Romney's Sherpa to the intelligence community to get the C .I. Is blessing to back him against Barack Obama What is this C .I .A. luminary doing on the board of barisma 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 cut up 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 state craft because every dollar that peresma generates is one less dollar that gas prom 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're getting the backing of the battering ram of the blob and remember we personally intervened it was Joe Biden at the council on farm relations who bragged about about forcing using the diplomatic carrots and sticks of the us empire that if you crane One of their billion dollars in assistance, they had to fire the prosecutor who is investigating Berisma.

2:37:12Nobody, 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 Berisma, the treasure map that would break and I think would be and would would frankly be a diplomatic scandal because this gets to the larger play around the i m f and its play to privatize napda 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 when we won the cold war and then it was the Harvard endowment and uh...

2:37:54you know the soros you know crew and the u .s. state department who privatized trillions of dollars of state -owned wealth by the Soviet Union so that they could become a capital 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 Berisma feeds into, so that you have Western stakeholders who make the money by capturing that that market have the have the blob of the the state department the c i in the d o d impose enough pressure to carve russia out of the market now you've got private sector stakeholders who are basically you know early stage equity holders in a totally protected because it's protected by the bat the the bayonet of the the pentagon the state department and the i c to make sure that that the profits run through there so that russia doesn't get it so it's a great job if you get it and

2:39:05all this stuff that was on the laptop that what what was the whole thing about ten percent of the big guy and what so was what what evidence is there yeah well you know the ten percent of the big guy in another text you know he i think he'd said you know he to one of his family members that half the paycheck goes to. What you have here is almost a tale as old as time since 1948 in terms of this relationship between private sector profit and foreign policy. I call it foreign policy for personal profit, which is this idea that if you have a senior level job in blobcraft in defense diplomacy or intelligence.

2:39:54You don't make your money as a W2 employee of the U .S. government. So for example, Mark Milley, 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 Central Intelligence Agency director. that's you get your money from serving the stakeholders afterwards. Like Mark Milley, you know, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what's he doing now? He's at JP Morgan, you know, doing the macroeconomic forecasting 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 is about to exert its influence.

2:40:39They know whether to invest in natural gas in companies in Germany or Ukraine because they have the head of the joint chiefs of staff as to 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 Donalon brothers. Look up Tom Donalon's BlackRock Investment Institute profile. Tom Donalon is the brother of Mike Donalon. Donald Lahn is the closest advisor to Joe Biden and has been for 40 years. Mike Donald Lahn is, you know, I think began working with Biden in 1982. He's literally the, what they call the inner kitchen cabinet of the West Wing of the White House.

2:41:24Now, that's a great, that's a great job to have if you are Mike Donald Lahn's brother, Tom Donald Lahn, who's currently the chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute. so while his brother is the closest advisor to the president of the states black rock which has ten trillion dollars of assets under management and portfolio companies in every industry in every region on earth tom donnellan a theory only needs to make a phone call to his brother mike donnellan to know exactly what to invest in in term 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 industry in the region yet this is basically like policy tracker but for like military intelligence if all legal tom donnellan again was time dot tonnellan tom donnellan didn't start out as a banker he was the national security advisor in charge of military intelligence and uh...

2:42:20and state craft for the u .s. empire he was uh... he was at the state department he was he was in i c he was at D .O .D. he went straight from the blob to to Black Rock's banker many such cases as I mentioned Mark Milley another one is Jared Cohen if you know who was the policy planning staff whiz kid at the state department who introduced the CIA's you know the CIA effectively to using social media for regime change work he was the you know he was the guy who was known as Condi's party starter uh... and to for how how connoisseur rice as secretary of state uh... could get could get the could could stop running regime change operations out of u .s.

2:43:05embassies and consulates and uh... nc i station houses they could simply used social media to organize these and that's what resulted in the air of spring in the face book and twitter revolutions that toppled Tunisia in Egypt and then jared kowin then goes on to start google jigsaw which is the, which, which, which set in motion the entire world of AI censorship we now live under. When 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 Goldman Friggins Sachs. So blob to banker pipeline every time, you know, and this is how these people go from, you know, making $200 ,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 adjusting us far in policy in a way that maximizes their own personal game that they're not necessarily doing the calculus about what should be spending all this money on you if that's what the stakeholders want and this is what biden was doing and this is what the ten percent of the big guy thing comes back to maybe you just look at that the overwhelming something just unbelievable scope of it.

2:44:22I mean, first of all, Joe Biden was known as Mr. foreign policy by the council on foreign relations for 40 years. That is, he was the blobs 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 damage to the American empire, but when homeland politics interfere with the empire's plans, they sicken against us. And so for 40 years he was on the Senate Farm Relations Committee for 15 of those years He was either the chairman or the ranking member so the top dog for oversight of the US of the US State Department So so he's got these international connections People are constantly pitching him for 40 years.

2:45:06There's a great video. I think you can look it up If you ever seen Joe Biden bragging about being a prostitute for the biggest donor, and that when he turns 40, he was told that at one meeting that for the real big money, he should come back to them when he turns 40. Have you ever seen this? It's a great clip. I think if you just look up the word prostitute, Biden prostitute on my ex account, you can find this. But basically, 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, oh yeah this is great.

2:45:55Well I'm not sure you should assume I'm not corrupt but I'm thank you for that. The system does produce corruption and I think implicit in the system is corruption. When And in fact, whether or not you can run for public office and it costs a great deal of money to run to the United States Senate even a small state like Delaware, you have to go to those people who have money. And they always want something. We work to all the wheat politicians as the young kids say rip off the American public. I think the American public in a way rips off wheat politicians by forcing us to run the way they do.

2:46:26To 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 beyond your own state, it's very difficult to raise that money from a large group of people. I'm a 29 -year -old oddball. The 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 20, 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 and the man in which I talk about it. But what happened was they said, come back when you're 40, son.

2:47:02And he's 80. It's amazing how good he talked about it then. Yeah, right. So smooth, right? Mikey, you're so lucky to think about, man. I'm gonna 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. And I think most people, including me, were not aware of the scope of it until you came out with all this. So you're the man, the arena, and you know, been a personal inspiration for me for a long time.

2:47:41And 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 for now.