Ask Dr. Drew - Mike Benz: Why The Supreme Court’s “Murthy v. Missouri” Is The Most Important “Free Speech v. Censorship” Case In US History – Ask Dr. Drew – Ep 337

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden) is being called the “most important Free Speech case in the history of America.” Mike Benz – executive director of Foundation For Freedom Online ��� discusses LIVE. The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments over alleged pressure from federal officials to censor opposing voices on social media platforms during the COVID pandemic, under the guise of “fighting misinformation.” But when the people being censored are experts like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff… who is really spreading misinformation? Mike Benz is the founder of Foundation for Freedom Online, a free speech watchdog dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet. He is a former State Department cyber official in the Trump Administration, whose responsibilities included formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters. Follow Mike at https://x.com/mikebenzcyber and https://foundationforfreedomonline.com 「 SPONSORED BY 」 Find out more about the companies that make this show possible and get special discounts on amazing products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • TRU NIAGEN - For almost a decade, Dr. Drew has been taking a healthy-aging supplement called Tru Niagen, which uses a patented form of Nicotinamide Riboside to boost NAD levels. Use code DREW for 20% off at https://drdrew.com/truniagen • PET CLUB 24/7 - Give your pet's body the natural support it deserves! No fillers. No GMOs. No preservatives. Made in the USA. Save 15% at https://drdrew.com/petclub247 • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew • PROVIA - Dreading premature hair thinning or hair loss? Provia uses a safe, natural ingredient (Procapil) to effectively target the three main causes of premature hair thinning and hair loss. Susan loves it! Get an extra discount at https://proviahair.com/drew • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 Portions of this program may examine countervailing views on important medical issues. Always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health. 「 ABOUT THE SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician with over 35 years of national radio, NYT bestselling books, and countless TV shows bearing his name. He's known for Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Teen Mom OG (MTV), The Masked Singer (FOX), multiple hit podcasts, and the iconic Loveline radio show. Dr. Drew Pinsky received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and his M.D. from the University of Southern California, School of Medicine. Read more at https://drdrew.com/about Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And welcome back to our studio today, everybody. Today, we are going to welcome Mike Benz into our program. You can follow Mike on X at MikeBenzCyber. Also, FoundationForFreedomOnline.com. He is the founder of Foundation for Freedom Online. It's a free speech watchdog dedicated to restoring the promise of free and open Internet. He is a former State Department cyber official at the Trump administration, and he's going to tell us about what he has learned from that.

He is author of what on Twitter says, the unpublishable monstrosity, weapons of mass deletion. So he's going to blow your mind today. We'll hopefully Susan will be okay and able to sleep tonight after we have a conversation with Mike Benz after this. Our laws as it pertain to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous.

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These are all things that we use. Dr. Drew approved. So, yeah. So there you go. All right. So more on Mike Benz. One of the things we'll be talking about today is the Supreme Court's case that I believe Mike Benz is saying is the most important free speech versus censorship case in U.S. history called Murthy versus Missouri. It was previously called Missouri versus Biden.

And as you know, we've had many of the plaintiffs in that case on the show, Jay Bhattacharya, Aaron Cariotti, people like that. And boy, the fact that those guys are not sufficient in and of themselves to sort of prove the case of the excesses of the cyber bullying that went on during COVID. I don't know what is. Again, Mike Benz, the founder of Foundation for Freedom Online. You can follow Mike at MikeBenzCyber and also FoundationForFreedomOnline.com. Please welcome Mike Benz. Mike, welcome to the program. Thank you for being here.

Thanks so much for having me on. You bet. And Caleb, before I get into it, is there something going on with the Twitter spaces? It doesn't come up on my feed here. You having trouble with that today? I'm getting it figured out. Okay. Every once in a while there's problems with that. So yeah. So Mike, I got a lot to talk to you about. What I want to do is sort of, rather than dump it all up front here, I want to take people through a little bit who you are, where you learned what you learned, and who the blob is. Let's kind of start with that. Sure.

So in what order would you like me to tackle that? I mean, in terms of my personal story. Your personal story and how you i mean is this something you've always known thought about is it by being inside and this and just what your training is an experience and how you got to where you are and did you have moments of you know sort of yeah someone listening to some of your videos gives me moments of uh sort of uh astonishment frankly or or of you, I guess the moments of clarity of sorts, but go ahead. Yeah. So, I mean, my background was a corporate lawyer in New York. I was in the tech space. I

had come from a sort of internet business family. The internet was always a really big part of my life and my career in terms of law. But, you know, I started writing this story about internet censorship long before I became a character in it. In about August 2016, I began writing this book, which is currently in its unpublished form, Weapons of Mass Deletion, because I came across a series of white papers and research posted online around a technique for censoring speech online using artificial intelligence. And immediately, I had flashbacks to my childhood having lived through... I was an avid chess player as a kid. I lived through that era when chess computers overtook human capacities. And the adults in the room were always saying this was never going to happen.

And at the time, it was very evident as a kid that it was. And I came across these AI censorship tools in late 2016. And I was chicken little, going around to my friends and family saying, this is going to be the end of free speech in the Western world. This is going to be just like it was for chess computers. There's going to be just like it was for chess computers. There's going to be no escape from it once these things are basically normalized. I want to stop you. I don't intuitively make the connection between what happened to chess and what's happening to free speech. Help me understand that. Yeah. So the way chess computers work are they can break down basically billions of moves per second.

And at the end of the day, they spit out a number that says who's winning on the chess board. So if a number says 0.-7, that means the computer assesses the black position as being up 7 tenths of a pawn. And through this ability to break down every move and to just brute force your way to being able to see the whole board, you can win against any human simply by having the computer analyze the position for you and make those moves. What was happening with speech online in 2016 is during the 2016 election, it was an internet election in the same way that the Brexit referendum was very much an internet vote. This was really the first election in the 10 years of social media. You had Facebook in 2004, you had YouTube 2005, Twitter 2006, smartphone 2007. It took about 10 years

for ordinary citizens and citizen journalists and independent news outlets to be able to build up subscriberships that approximated that of legacy news media, like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. And by 2016, social media started to become actually more of a dominant force for influencing hearts and minds in who they decided to vote for in an election than legacy media. Donald Trump is a great example that he had zero, zero print newspaper endorsements in 2016. He was essentially blacklisted on broadcast TV. Even Fox News was highly divided about him. But according to these digital forensics reports from David Brock and other sort of NGO affiliates, the engagement for Trump on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube was something like three to four times what it was for Hillary Clinton. So it more than offset the support in the legacy media.

And so the autopsy report coming out of the 2016 election was, we need to censor the internet in order to stop these populist political forces, both in the US and across NATO, because there was a rise of populist parties on the other side of the Atlantic as well. And that's sort of how we got to the present day. That sort of gets to the censorship industry part. On the censorship technology part, just to sort of wrap up that point,

is they had a problem with censoring the internet after the 2016 election, which was that there was only so much you could do with humans doing the censorship. YouTube tried to hire 10,000 new content moderators in January 2017. It didn't work. So they tried to hire another 10,000 in March 2017. The problem with human censorship is you need to wait until something essentially goes viral and is flagged to you before you can stop it. And so the damage, in a sense, is already done. It's what they refer to as whack-a-mole.

But if you can use artificial intelligence to basically program a foreknowledge of what a network will say, if you can just hire a bunch of social scientists to map their language, to track emerging narratives, you can pre-censor political movements. You can pre-censor dissent against public health policies or climate policies. You name it. It's basically a godlike tool to be able to, and the reason that I refer to as weapons of mass deletion is because I saw these tools as being done in the digital speech capacity, what was done with weapons of mass destruction in terms of how that changed warfare from World War II and onwards. You didn't

need a standing army of 100,000 censors. You could delete millions of posts with just a few lines of code. And this evolutionary arms race, this new Manhattan Project, is what I really got sucked into in late 2016. And then trying to understand the forces behind that is what took me into my mapping of the censorship industry. That's what took me into government and where I am today. And so the forces behind it, you characterize as the blob. So tell us about that.

Susan, listen carefully. So the blob is not my term. That's the term from Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes of the Obama administration. And I think he coined this in 2014, 2015. And this was someone from the Democrat Party. The National Security Advisor is basically the head of the intelligence community. He was basically second in charge of that.

And he was describing the Obama administration's frustration with having to deal with permanent Washington. That is this. So his moniker for the blob was a shorthand for the foreign policy establishment. Now, that's a very sort of euphemistic way of describing what we're up against in this setting. But the foreign policy establishment is essentially that class of government agencies and donors and drafters off of government policy on the private sector outside that are tasked with managing the American empire, which is our global set of interests, as opposed to the American homeland. You've got things like the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Labor, the Department of Agriculture. These are all domestic-facing agencies. But there are three sets of agencies in particular,

the State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence agencies that are strictly foreign-facing. The CIA is not allowed to operate domestically. The State Department is not allowed to operate domestically. The Pentagon is not allowed to operate domestically. They're all supposed to be foreign-facing. And because of that, they're imbued with a very special set of powers in order to manage our international interests. This is after World War II, we basically deputized this trifecta of government agencies and their affiliates throughout the rest of government with a department of dirty tricks power, the power to overthrow foreign governments, the power to control foreign media, the power to manipulate elections, you name it. There's a whole suite of dirty deeds that they are legally

deputized to deploy that U.S.-facing institutions are not. And the story of internet censorship and the censorship industry is really a story of that section of our government and that section of the donors and drafters on the outside of that weaponizing that particular Department of Dirty Tricks capacity domestically because of a fear that the internal choices of the domestic population would severely undercut a foreign policy consensus that had existed from Truman until Trump. And you had gone on in one of your presentations to talk about how them characterizing or going out of their way to make a special category of terrorists within our country of white supremacists or whatever that category is, allowed them to take some of this non-domestic focus and bring it to the homeland. Is that accurate? Well, I wish it were only that.

I mean, that was part of how it started. We can get into the deep origins of it, but certainly in the immediate origins, you could say that this started in the U.S. with Russiagate and the idea that there was this hostile foreign nation state that had manipulated our elections. And so, because of that, the CIA is tasked to take on Russia. The State Department is tasked to take on Russia. The Pentagon is tasked to take on Russia. So these all have a special word called counterintelligence, which is a dirty little framing trick used to be able to inverse the foreign-facing intelligence so that it's domestic-facing. So basically, the CIA is allowed to monitor U.S. citizens, not in their intelligence capacity, but in a counterintelligence capacity.

If they suspect that they are being used wittingly or unwittingly by Russian intelligence agencies, then U.S. agencies can be spied on. They can be wiretapped. You can have the NGO swarm funded by the State Department. You can have the Civil Affairs branch funded by the Pentagon all descend on US citizens. And so that predicate that was laid in that transition period before Trump was inaugurated, there was a January 6, 2017 CIA memo that said Russia manipulated our election, and that was ratified by the 16 other intelligence agency branches. FBI counterintelligence got in on it. The State Department, DOD, they all got in on it. That was more about counterintelligence of Russian soft power projection than it was about terrorism.

The terrorism portion does come into this because the original censorship office within the U.S. government was a counterterrorism office set up in 2014 to take on ISIS recruiting on Facebook and Twitter. This was an obscure little cell within the State Department called the Global Engagement Center, which was founded by the former Time Magazine editor or managing editor, Rick Stengel, guy who was the Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs. He described himself as Obama's propagandist-in-chief. That was his own self-title. He said his role was to export the First Amendment in 2014. But then when Trump won the election in 2016, he wrote an op-ed and then a full book calling for an end of the First

Amendment. So it went from exporting the First Amendment around the world to ending the First Amendment on a permanent basis because of the power of social media uh to basically have people elect folks that that the state department didn't want didn't want uh changing this foreign policy is this a a i've become preoccupied with the french revolution people know on this show and is this a phenomenology that just occurs in governments that they tend to go towards these bureaucratic centralized uh you know sort of overly uh well you know it's it's it's uh fascistic or or um totalitarian is is there always a drift that direction and this is just the modern version of it and they just sort of drift into it by slowly eliminating rights?

Well, it's hard to say how much of this blob structure has been created over the past five years versus has simply been revealed of what it's been for essentially a century, which is to say that this foreign policy establishment, you could argue, was created in the 1910s under Woodrow Wilson with this idea of making the world safer democracy and using that as a predicate to imbue our blob with the power to overthrow foreign governments in order to install

democracies. Now, of course, they were never democracies as the kind of French revolution contemplated, even imbuing a sort of positive connotation to that. It was always an open society tactic, which is to say that we use that predicate of democracy as a way to force other countries to open up their societies to blob control. That is, open society means- So disappointing. So disappointing when you say it that way, right? Well, people need to be able to x-ray

through the censor-speak language of this all. You know, the predicate initially when you were saying counterterrorism and whatnot, and my first response was, I wish we were still at that stage where they were using a terrorism predicate for this. They are using, today, the most popular predicate for censorship is democracy.

You know, it's this idea that they've redefined democracy to mean a consensus of individuals to a consensus of institutions, which is essentially the blob is comprised of hundreds or thousands of discrete institutions representing diplomacy, representing defense, representing intelligence, representing the Chamber of Commerce and all of the different multinational corporations, representing all the different industrial subsectors, representing the financial interests of the creditor class in Wall Street and London. And there's a very sophisticated consensus building process that goes into any whole

society mobilization, whether that be a war in Ukraine or public health response like COVID or emergency elections like, say, in 2020 and what will be before us in 2024. And so a lot of my life from 2017 to 2019 was spending my whole day in these consensus building conferences. If you know where to look, they were doing this very openly. They were doing this on their own NATO YouTube pages. They were doing this on their own Atlantic Council YouTube pages. They were doing this in Department of Homeland Security live streams. All of these stakeholders of our foreign policies, the stakeholders on the outside have a much bigger pull than the government functionaries on the inside. You don't get rich working at the CIA. You're making 100K a year as a mid-level

CIA analyst. You don't get rich even at the highest level at the State Department. It's only going to be upper 185 or something, 200. You get rich for what you do afterwards. You get rich for doing favors for the private sector side of the blob. They essentially

lobby. So I'm working my way towards Missouri versus Biden. But to this point, you today put out a video about three scandals in the Biden family, right? And I'll let you go through what those scandals were. And one of the things that worried me, and it just triggered again by what you just said, is that even though this seems outlandish, we all wonder, why aren't they going after this?

Why aren't they looking into it? My fear is that they're all doing this. And if they, except for maybe a couple of people in the house who seem very vocal, people like Jim Jordan, maybe they're not doing it, but the rest of them are. And so they'd have to come clean about their own duplicity in all this, if indeed what you're saying is accurate. So go ahead and talk about that and these three scandals you pointed out today. Yeah, well, that's standard operating procedure for both the Yankee and cowboy sides of the blob. That's sort of the term that left-wing researchers from the 1960s

and 70s had come up with to sort of identify two main power blocks representing the Democrat and Republican Party. And initially, around the time of the JFK assassination, there was a lot of literature published around this, trying to make sense of American power structures in the 20th century. And that was this idea that you had this sort of Yankee faction that was primarily the power base of the DNC, and these involved the financial institutions, Wall Street and the web of financial class interest holders, primarily in the Northeast

and London. And then you had this sort of Republican power block that they call the Cowboys, which was mostly a sort of Southern or southwest stretching from florida through texas and up into california when at the time the military complex was was located there under reagan i should say before reagan and that was essentially the military energy and chamber of commerce corporate uh backers of the republican party and these two parties jockeyed for power in the 20th century for a senior and junior position in Washington. And both of them had this grift of foreign policy for personal profit.

One of the things that I just did a couple lectures on in my subscriber streams on X, we were watching things like the Carlyle Connection, which was the Carlyle Group hedge fund that the Bush family did to do the same sort of foreign policy for personal profit that the Biden family did. And here in this case, and again, just to break down what that grift is, is if you are in a position of power within the blob, within the foreign policy establishment, and you get to set U.S. foreign policy around the globe or in a particular region, you essentially have an insider trading capability to be able to make profitable investments on what will happen in that region because you know that the Pentagon is about to overthrow that government. You know that

the CIA is about to twist the arm of a prime minister in order to get them to approve a new military base or to open up a new shale field for extraction. You know that the State Department is about to pass sanctions on that country in order to make that investment happen. And so people who occupy these senior policy positions within the foreign policy blob are able to have months or years of advanced knowledge of that and deploy their own assets and do favors for their wider network accordingly.

This is in many respects how George Soros went from a millionaire to a billionaire with foreign currency speculation as he was partnering with the US government in the 1980s. This is essentially the story of what the Biden family was doing about that video that I put out in the three scandals around the Biden administration with foreign policy for personal profit. In that case, it was Ukraine, China, and Mexico. And all of these foreign policy positions of the US government, and I should add, by the way, Joe Biden called himself Mr. Foreign Policy for the first 30 years of his career. He is a blob cut out through and through. Remember, before he was Barack Obama's vice president who had senior authority on all things Ukraine, that is Obama delegated the Ukraine portfolio to Joe Biden from 2008 through

2016. But before that, what was Joe Biden doing in Washington? He wasn't overseeing HUD. He was the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That is the Senate relationship with the State Department and our entire diplomacy defense intelligence apparatus. He had spent 30 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and 10 years rotating between chairman and ranking member. So this was somebody who was situated more than any other person in the U.S. government to be able to do these personal family investments in regions around the world because he was setting U.S. policy

on our activity there. So those three scandals that I mentioned involved. So the first one is one that's been widely published around Ukraine. You had the situation where Hunter Biden was making $65,000 a month, sitting essentially on a no-show board seat position in order to lobby the U.S. State Department to take action in Ukraine that was favorable to Burisma. Burisma was a private gas company that was a big feeder into this company called Naftogaz, which is the public-owned Ukraine company there. And what the Bidens were trying to do

were to kill Russian exports to Europe and build up Ukraine's own gas industry in order to have Ukraine replace Russia, but then Ukraine would not even hold its own gas interests. gas industry in order to have Ukraine replace Russia. But then Ukraine would not even hold its own gas interests. They would be sold off in so-called foreign direct investment to U.S. energy companies around Biden world. And so this was the play that was going on there with Burisma. This involved the State Department, the CIA, and the DOD.

At the time, we were providing hundreds of millions of dollars of military assistance. This is what Trump got impeached about in 2019, mind you, was potentially holding up military assistance. This was three years before war even broke out there in 2022, because at the same time that Hunter Biden was profiting from Burisma, Burisma's shale rights were in the eastern region of the country, which had declared itself a breakaway state after the 2014 State Department coup. And so what Hunter Biden was engaged to do was to basically lobby the State Department and the Pentagon and the intelligence community to break down the doors of eastern Ukraine in order to

open up this shale that would profit Burisma. And again, he's on the board of Burisma. It's the same story with Naftogaz, the public company there. Then there's the situation with China. Basically, the Biden administration has reversed the Trump policies around containment of China. Currently, China just signed a $400 billion deal with Iran in order to evade US sanctions on Iranian oil and gas exports. Well, who was partnered with the Chinese energy world? Well, it was Hunter Biden yet again, who's saying that he kicked 10% of his paycheck up to the big guy.

And he was caught red-handed in the Hunter Biden laptop emails saying that his client was the spy chief of China. And he had created this company that was partnered with CEFC China Energy, one of the biggest Chinese energy firms. He was even pitching Chinese investors on buying up US liquefied natural gas ports at the same time that the Biden world blob was negotiating these favorable diplomacy terms with China and allowing China to evade sanctions with respect to exports in the Middle East. And then the third one was Hunter Biden actually owns 10% of a company called Eplata, which is a micro financing loan company for illegal immigrants coming up through the southern border. And so at the same time, the Biden administration Justice Department put out a notice telling the banks that the Justice Department would take legal action against any bank who refused loans to illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, the first son has an equity investment

in a company that profits off those very loans. So these are all highly niche investments that you only know they're going to be profitable if you've got the big bad blob on your side to secure and protect them. But if you know that that jackpot is going to hit, you cash in big. It's so crazy for the average citizen to hear this.

It's scandalous. It's unsavory. It's unethical. But is it illegal? And is it something they're all engaged in? That's sort of the thing. And then what do we do about it? Well, part of the issue is Trump really bucked that trend, which had existed for 100 years. Why didn't he talk about it? Part of the issue is Trump really bucked that

trend which had existed for a hundred years. Why didn't he talk about it? Why wasn't he explicit about it? Why did he just use words like the swamp? Why didn't he send somebody out to educate about exactly what you're talking about? Why didn't he send you out? Well, it's very hard because Trump inherited

a civil war within his own party. When Trump won the election, he didn't just defeat the Clinton dynasty in 2016, he defeated the Bush dynasty. Well, guess who were the only people on his side nominally within the Pentagon, within the CIA, within the State Department? They're Bush people. It's Bush, Cheney, it's the entire wing that he defeated, and not just defeated, but actually disgraced in a lot of ways in doing so. And then you had immediately, remember, before Trump was even inaugurated, the FBI was investigating him.

And very quickly, within the first two months of Trump taking office, Trump was under the sword of Damocles of a special prosecutor. Bob Mueller, the FBI director from 9-11, was revived from the dead like a sort of cryptkeeper figure who dogged Trump for the first two and a half years of his presidency. And because of that, that swung a lot of leverage to Trump critics within the Republican Party who could win concessions from the Trump White House because he needed them to stave off an impeachment vote. Remember, many of those Republicans actually did vote to impeach.

It was a, remember, Trump was impeached in 2019 just on potentially holding up Ukraine to a foreign country. Mitt Romney, who was, mind, Mitt Romney was the guy who ran for president. He was the nominee for the RNC against Barack Obama in the 2012 Republican Party. He's a guy who commanded an incredible amount of clout. He's also on the board of the International Republican Institute, which is the main Republican CIA cutout. John McCain was the former head of the IRI, that CIA cutout. Who is John McCain? The guy head of the IRI that CIA cut out. Who is John McCain?

The guy who represented the Republican Party running against Barack Obama in 2008. So all of the major pillars of power of the GOP belonged to the specific set that Trump alienated with the foreign policy that he ran on. So he was very limited in his ability to actually stretch out his arms and make change there because the very people who he ran on reforming were the people he needed to save his own political life. And so many of the things we all look at, like the border and the cartels and these things, you all want, what is going on? Why do they allow this to happen? It makes you, what makes the average person like myself wonder, is that part of some weird, effed up, delicate balance out there that

we all are not aware of that the blob is sort of maintaining that things would be worse if the blob didn't maintain these things? Or is it really just the blob for the blob's sake and these personal political interests. Let me do this. I have to take a little break. So you can answer that question when we get back. Then I want to get into Missouri versus Biden.

I want to get into free speech. I want to get what happened with COVID. We got a lot to get into. So I hope people are as enraptured and interested in what you're telling us as I am.

So we'll get right back to it. Mike Benz, Cyber, B-E-N-Z, Cyber, as we can follow him on X. We'll be right back to it mike ben's cyber b-e-n-z cybers where you can follow him on x we'll be right back after this you can spend thousands of dollars and dozens of hours trying to look a few years younger or you can skip all that and the hassle and go with what works genu

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he puts up videos regularly and you'll sort of get up to speed with if you need to hear some of this material again and so mike before the break i was saying you know sort of what can be done about this and is this you know when you look at things that seem inexplicable inexplicable in our world it makes somebody like me wonder, is this some sort of delicate balance that is necessary and for some reason I can't understand, or is it just the blob for blob sake and political operators? That's what makes it tricky. There's certainly a very robust school of thought in international relations that the blob is necessary, which is to say that you can't make anything in our society without...

Milton Friedman did this famous speech about a pencil. I don't know if you've ever seen this. He was sort of a libertarian kind of economic theorist. And he held up a pencil once and said, look at this little pencil. How do you think you make this? Well, it doesn't just fall out of a tree. The gum, you have to get it from these special sub-trees in Guyana. And the graphite comes from sub-Saharan Africa, and it goes through this whole supply chain. Well, everything that we need to make an industrial society requires

parts and supply chains and raw materials from plots of dirt that are held by foreign governments. If we want oil and gas, you can make an argument that we only had this robust middle-class prosperity, the American miracle in the 20th century because of the work of the blob, which is to say that we had five times cheaper gas than Europe did. And part of this was because we had a CIA and a State Department and a DOD who would overthrow governments or who would coerce or who would shake down foreign governments who didn't give us the oil and gas. The same thing when it comes to gold or silver or lithium or cobalt or sugar. I mean, this started in the 1800s when we declared the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 as a sort of peace with Europe. We said, you stay there, we'll stay here.

That was our claim to South America. That was when we started the banana wars. And before our big oil empire, we had a big sugar and big ag empire that again was corporate stakeholders giving American cheap fruit and tons of food and choice and all at a discount price. But that was because we installed banana republics under the firing arm of the Department of

War protecting them, which is now called the Department of Defense. So you can make an argument that this blob is a necessary evil, but we never had a situation before 2016. Well, you can make an argument about a strange event that happened in 1962, but we never really had a moment where the blob at least came out and confessed that it was necessary to deploy its own special set of skills to take out an American threat to democracy, an American president. Democracy, again, is that watchword that we use to topple foreign governments and to install a new system of government. They never came out and said that, they argued that Bush was like Hitler. They argued that

all different presidents, that Jimmy Carter was ineffective, yada, yada. They never said, oh, threat to democracy. We need to contemplate what we do in Eastern Europe in terms of orchestrating a kind of domestic color revolution. This is all what they were saying in 2019, 2020. And it was the same, not just the same playbook, but it was the same players from those same institutions. And so the issue is, is we've had this pit bull outside the house to be able to protect American welfare, American security, American economic prosperity. But we are now living in the world where the pit bull has come inside the house and is essentially mauling

anyone who tries to do what the pit bull doesn come inside the house and is essentially mauling anyone who tries to do what the pit bull doesn't want. It makes you wonder who's really in charge of the house at this point. Well, that sort of gets us into the free speech conversation. And a lot of the stuff we discuss on this show is related to COVID, obviously, for obvious reasons. Did COVID accelerate all this? Is it what exposed it? Or

was that more of just the same? Well, the role of the blob in COVID is really fascinating because you had every aspect, top to bottom, of COVID administration and response was mediated by the foreign policy establishment. People are obviously very familiar with the role of HHS and CDC and AID, but the fact is 65% of warp speed funds were administrated by the Pentagon. The strange situation involving whoever had the miracle foresight to know that a coronavirus might be coming out soon in October 2019 when the Event 201 simulation took place. I mean, that was not just a obscure little group of scientists who were running that. The Event 201 simulation starred Avril Haines, who was the deputy director

of the Central Intelligence Agency under Barack Obama and is currently the director of national intelligence under Joe Biden. That is, she is the boss of bosses over the CIA. Now, what she was doing at a coronavirus breakout simulator three months before the virus broke out, sitting right next to the head of Chinese intelligence while she was doing so, and specifically activating in the Event 201 segment with how to control the spread of misinformation, including about conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus for people who said that it was a lab leak. This is all stuff that was in Event 201.

What the heck was the deputy director of the CIA doing articulating exactly what would go on to be what played out and what the government's response to that was? And then it gets stranger when you enter the censorship story. By the way, you should also note other aspects of even the development and the connection links between D.C. and China are present in this as well. There was a $54 million USAID grant for the gain of function at Wuhan. USAID is one of the most notorious CIA funding conduits. That is, when the CIA wants to fund an operation, they don't just deposit funds in a bank

under beneficial ownership of the Central Intelligence Agency. It's done through state department funds that are labeled under either US aid or National Endowment for Democracy or others. So you have this strange situation where CIA adjacencies were the ones funding this. And then the censorship story makes it really kind of chilling in a certain sense. All of the first major censorship institutions to censor COVID-19 narratives online came from either the Pentagon or the Central Intelligence Agency in terms of what their pedigree was. The very first gargoyle to descend on social media to map emerging narratives about coronavirus was a group called Grafica. Grafica is a group that's gotten $7 million in Pentagon grants. They initially did social media narrative mapping for the Pentagon

so that when the Pentagon and CIA went into conflict zones, they could see what their opposition was saying online. They were incubated within something called the Minerva Initiative, which was the Pentagon, who in January 2020, in reaching back starting with December 16th, 2019, just four days after the outbreak, go full scale into mapping all conspiracy theories about the virus, mapping lab leak narratives, mapping narratives that were be skeptical of vaccine rollouts. They did this for all of the NATO countries. They created a network map of what people were saying online in the US, in Canada, in the UK, in Italy, in Spain, in Greece.

They went all through NATO. They said, here are the major influencers. Here's what they're saying. Here's the reach. They did a four-month study between December 2019 and April 2020 mapping this all out. And they are a Pentagon psychological operations firm. between December 2019 and April 2020, mapping this all out. And they are a Pentagon psychological operations firm. Same thing with the Virality Project,

which was this group of four top censorship institutions. Every single one of them comes from the blob. These include the Stanford Air and Observatory, which the boss there is Michael McFaul, who is the US ambassador to Russia. The technical director there was Renee DiResta, who started her career in the CIA. The University of Washington, which is the Bill Gates University that works very closely with the military through the Puget Sound military bases there. The Atlanta Council was the third one. The Atlanta Council has seven CIA directors on its board and gets annual funding for the Pentagon, the State Department,

and the CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy. And the fourth one was Grafka. So all four of them are part of this CIA, Pentagon, State Department blob apparatus. And they were the ones who were censoring tens of millions of posts about COVID, including pre-censoring events that hadn't even happened yet. Caleb very quickly put the Grafka ironically, up next to you there. And if you can see that, it's kind of extraordinary. This is all, you've made a lot of the Atlantic Council. Were they a major player in all this?

And again, it's so, when you try to make sense of it, you look for motivation. And it's hard to find it i always get worried that one of the things i'm missing is uh something about the viral research of the virus's potential that they're just not telling us you know why react so powerfully to this virus that had you know three percent fatality rate or one and.5% and 0% in young people, essentially, except that there was some concern about it having more, that they knew something that we didn't know but turned out not to have happened or something? Or were they worried about that in some way?

Well, this is where it starts to get speculative on my end. I, you know, it's very clear what the motivations are, for example, with the blob censorship of the 2020 election. And essentially, and I'm not saying this in a partisan way, but you can see why, for example, the blob would be motivated to stop the rise of someone like Trump. Even the Biden World Foreign Policy Establishment, those three foreign policy for personal profit schemes that the Biden family was involved in, all three of those are jeopardized by a Trump presidency, right? I mean, the Ukraine one, if NATO doesn't retake the eastern region, Burisma doesn't get access to that shale. If we close off the border, the EPLATA platform basically disintegrates with the microloans.

If we do maximum pressure on China, the CEFC energy deals fall away. So there's all sorts of commercial interests at the political censorship level. When it comes to COVID, I have some deep, dark speculations about it, but I'd feel a little over my skis putting them out verbally. Oh, let's do it. Come on. Let's put one of them out verbally. Oh, let's do it. Come on. Let's put one of them out there. Look, I just speculated about the possibility of the virus having some capacity, innate capacity for mutation

or maybe some neurological effects that we haven't yet seen. I worry about that kind of stuff because their behavior is so inexplicable in relation to the virus and the way we, the world, not just, you know, California, the world reacted to it. And maybe it is just social media and this new environment in which information spreads uncontrollably, but I worry about other things and I'm sure you do too. Well, there's so many that are involved in the COVID situation, which almost, because there's so many, it sort of explains why there was so much stakeholder meetings around administrating it, from the World Economic Forum, who essentially is the sort of global version of the Chamber of Commerce, all the way into the political classes. I mean, one of the points that I just made on X the other day is the pandemic is

over, but we still have universal mass mail-in voting. We only have universal mass mail-in voting because COVID. That was something that you can go back and look at the Civil War. In 1864 or 1862, there were scandals around the use of mail-in ballots. The idea of doing universal mass mail-in ballots combined with no ID checks is something that you really need a kind of COVID-like crisis to induce. You do have the strange situation of seven states flipping overnight and this strange foreknowledge of the Red Mirage Blue Ship. So there's weird political unresolved mysteries around the utility of COVID and being able to pull that off. There's the very strange issues around vaccine diplomacy

that I find fascinating, but I try not to talk about too much because I'm not a subject matter expert in vaccines. I try to stick to the censorship industry intrigues around this. What is the vaccine diplomacy? What does that mean? I mean, giving people the vaccine for a certain gains or what? Well, the US military has a counterinsurgency doctrine to be able to quell the rise of political movements around the world who challenge US-back.-backed, U.S.-installed dictators. So a classic example of this is in Iraq and Afghanistan. So in Afghanistan, we obviously invaded in the early 2000s.

We took out the Taliban. We installed basically a narcotics warlord, Hamid Karzai, ruled with an iron fist. The civilian class within Afghanistan was aghast at Karzai's rule. There were political insurgency movements who were constantly rising in Afghanistan to try to unseat him. And in response, David Petraeus put out this new military doctrine around the need for biometrics to control the rise of dissident political movements in places where the military thought it was too fragile to be able to contain in a classical counterinsurgency way.

And the utility of biometrics and biometric collection was that you would be able to have a real-time heat map of people. They had a big problem with crowds and the fact that people would go, you know, they'd have these big demonstrations or they'd march on a town and the Pentagon and the CIA would know who, you know, two or three of the key leaders are, or maybe a dozen of their lieutenants. But then there'd be a hundred thousand people that you don't know who they are. You don't know if they're for you or you're not going to be able to pinpoint them and identify them as the bad guys that you need to take out.

But if you have all of their biometrics and one picture of the crowd can basically identify everybody, or if you've got their health information, you're able to basically create this heat map of the population. There was a whole new field within the military called identity intelligence. And they had this plan around ID 2020, which involved trying to get up to an 85% threshold of the collected biometrics of all of the civilian populations where the DOD was trying to strike down political insurgency movements. Now, one of the cutouts they used to do this were vaccine clinics.

There was a big scandal in Pakistan, I believe in 2013, where a vaccine clinic was busted as a CIA front for collecting the biometric data on the people in Pakistan. Pakistan has this very tight relationship with the US intelligence community. This is how we funded the Mujahideen to unseat the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1970s. The CIA and the Pakistani ISI are basically tied at the hip. And so, you know, that was one instance. But, you know, when you look at the State Department's vaccine diplomacy initiatives around the world, it's a way of when there is a crisis that's either induced or that is, shall we say, naturally emergent within a region, this gives a predicate for a sort of biosecurity entry by the Pentagon and by extension, the sort of political class from NATO to descend

on a region and control its internal politics because we get a toehold through humanitarian relief efforts. There was a great example a couple of years ago where USAID was busted running an HIV response clinic in Cuba, but secretly funneling teams of armed militants into this HIV prevention clinic because no one would think that a simple little public health response center would be the means through which we might get a military toehold over Cuba. You can make an argument that something very similar happened in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s and 2000s, as well as throughout Central Asia and Latin America. There's a lot there that I find personally very concerning,

but the military's role in that, that the power of epidemic response as being a predicate to be able to get a toehold in a region that you are boxed out of under normal political circumstances is something that I find very troubling. There were lots of these Pentagon presentations, actually, in the 1990s and 2000s about the three things emerging from the conflict zones that the Pentagon wanted to operate in being paramilitaries, narcotics, and pandemics. And essentially, all three of those give a predicate to put military boots on the ground in the region. That is, if there is a terrorist group there give a predicate to put military boots on the ground in the region. That is, if there is a terrorist group there, then we get to put our toehold there.

And then once we have our toehold, they can never kick us out. You know, narcotics is another one of these. And the third one is pandemic response. And so, you know, there's between the commercial, the political, and the military stakeholders in COVID. You know, there's a lot there. Yeah, I get that. Is there a Mike Benz on the other side of the aisle? Does the Biden administration have a Mike Benz? And how would he see these things or her? Well, I think I can make the opposing argument very fluently. I mean, I think that I'm as conversant in these things as I am because I study the

versions of me on the other side of it. A great example of this is I talk about the need for a whole of society, free speech coalition. That's not my term. That's the term that the people on the other side of me came up with for forming a whole of society, joint government, private sector, civil society, media coalition on that side. You know, I mean, I articulated at the start of this segment the reasons that the blob, even though I'm a sort of anti-blob crusader in many respects, I can, if you put me on the other side of the debate table, I could very strongly make the moral case for the blob having the powers that it does and doing certain things that it does.

I understand some of their motivations. At the time, even with respect to the Trump election in 2016, they were making the argument that the entire rules-based international order would collapse unless free speech was censored on social media. Because at the time Brexit had happened, they were afraid of Frexit in France with Marine Le Pen, Italegxit in Italy with Matteo Salvini, Spexit in Spain with the Vox party, Grexit in Germany with the AFD party,

Grexit in Greece. The entire EU would come undone, which would mean NATO would come undone, which would mean there's no enforcement for the creditor class in Wall Street or London or the IMF or the World Bank. And in a certain sense, they're not entirely wrong in that, yes, social media popularity of President Trump, yes, social media popularity of Nigel Farage and the Brexit movement, of Marine Le Pen in France, yes, probably would cause something akin to a seismic

reformation of the thing that they call the rules-based international order because of free speech on the internet. What we've learned from the social media revolution was that consensus in the foreign policy establishment that it existed from Truman to Trump was not so much a factor of people making up their own independent hearts and minds, but as a controlled media ecosystem, putting bumper cars on democracy and what people could vote on. And when people had their own free will to choose, they might not go along with what the New York Times says. They might make their own media channels. And so there's so much there.

And that's happening now. And now that gets us to Missouri versus Biden. Why is that the most important free speech case in the US history? You built to this. Right. Well, this is the grand stage for it all. And we should note that this Supreme Court oral argument from Monday, and that's playing out over the next several weeks and months here, is still a SCOTUS ruling on a preliminary judgment, which is to say that there's going to be years of discovery but it remains to be seen what the final judgment will be after all the discovery pours in that the plaintiffs are entitled to. But the reason this is the most important free speech case in American history is because this is really the first case that puts the existence of the First Amendment on trial. And we've had all these edge cases.

There's the famous Brandenburg case from the 1970s around where do we draw the line about whether or not, whether something, whether shouting fire in a crowded theaters. These sort of edge cases about when something is harm versus when it's sort of ordinary course. But we've never had a permanent, politically codified censorship, domestic censorship office within the US government until just a few short years ago. DHS, for example, created a formal censorship sub-agency called CISA, which literally argued that domestic First Amendment protected speech by U.S. citizens about their own internal affairs, ranging from elections, ranging from COVID, ranging from energy or climate or border, or even the Ukraine war, could all be censored by the U.S. government under the idea that critical infrastructure is something DHS is mandated to protect. And this is a cyber agency, so it's

protecting cyber infrastructure. And we have critical infrastructure. Our elections are critical infrastructure. Public health response is critical infrastructure. Border security is critical infrastructure. You can make this argument about every sensitive policy issue in the world as they did to say that because of that, well, then that's a cyber attack on critical infrastructure if your tweet undermines public faith and confidence in it. So if the Supreme Court does not strike down that arrangement as being violative of the First Amendment, then we don't have a First Amendment. I mean, this is absolutely existential.

If a government office can coordinate the censorship of domestic speech, then the government is in control of domestic speech. There's no two ways about that. Now, but there are gradations of victory here, which is where it starts to get a little bit more interesting in the sense that I expect the freedom side to win on this issue at least partially or in large part, but we really need a slam dunk home run to send a message

in order for this thing, this apparatus to be significantly dented. Because there's so many ways of creative structuring to drive a Mack truck through the pinhole of a loophole. And I can get into what those are, but that's why this case is so important. It's so interesting to me that no one sort of brings up the aliens, or at least doesn't seem to come up much, the Aliens and Sedition Act, which I had always thought was a source of great disgrace that we ever let that happen. And that we must never do anything like that again. And yet this feels exactly like that. Like you said, you pointed things that we have to do as sort of critical issues for the government. And wasn't that the Aidens and Sedition Act?

Wasn't that what they did? Yeah, it may have been. I'm not as familiar on that in particular. But what you have right now is the Biden administration formally, legally arguing before the Supreme Court that the First Amendment no longer classically applies because it didn't contemplate social media. They're basically making the argument about- And you have a Supreme Court justice who sounded sort of sympathetic to that point of view in terms of the potential contagion of social media.

Right. Well, this is now a position that is being articulated at the highest levels of our national security state. General Michael B. Hayden says the same thing, former head of the CIA, NSA, and four-star general. There's Rick Stengel, who, as I mentioned, was the guy who set up the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, the first censorship office who formerly said that his job was to export the First Amendment because it was so important and unique, and then loses one election and suddenly calls for an end to it. This is what these top of the apex predator of the national security state figures are saying, and that is because they are being outvoted by the civilian class. And so this is why the point I made on Tucker is,

what we're confronted by right now is essentially a form of military rule. If you can have the blob, the foreign policy establishment, the defense, diplomacy, and intelligence world, combined with its corporate and financial stakeholders, be able to censor the ability for civilians to reform them, then the civilians, everything that we were ever told about the legitimacy of democracy is now collapsed instantaneously. Democracy draws its legitimacy from the idea that government is not an overclass.

It serves the people, and you know that it serves the people because their hearts and minds have ratified it in the form of a democratic vote. That it is not a government overclass, it is a government underclass. It serves the people because the people want it. Well, if you can't even allow the people to express what they want because that overclass has censored or pre-censored them, then you don't have civilian rule anymore. You don't have civilian rule over your own media. You don't have civilian rule over your own elections. You don't have civilian rule over your own government. Now, this may have been the structure that we've had in this country for a century, as we've described, but they've never had to reveal themselves in this way or break out

formal censorship institutions. The government is currently, the current reigning philosophy within the censorship industry is something, a framework called the whole of society framework, which is a formal four-part alliance between the government, civil society, the private sector, and the media.

That is a formal censorship quarterback position for the government to determine the activities of the private to determine the activities of the private sector, the NGOs, the universities, the nonprofits, the media companies, and the fact checking groups. So if that's not stopped, we are diplomatically indistinguishable from North Korea or China or any other autocratic country that we sanctioned for doing exactly what we're doing now. Well, you've been very generous with your time, and I think that's a very good place to kind of roll to a stop.

I mean, that's sort of an extraordinary statement. I hope it landed. I hope people are listening to what you said. I would love to bring you back to talk about those pinholes through which a Mack truck can be driven. And it might even be more interesting as the Missouri versus Biden case goes along. And you can help us understand what is that issue there.

Caleb, I wanted to give you a chance to ask Mike some questions. You were very busy flashing. I've seen you very busy on the internet and sharing what you've been finding on the screen. I'm sure you have a couple of questions of your own. Oh, I've been way too distracted to even get my questions here. Yeah, pulling been finding on the screen. I'm sure you have a couple of questions of your own. Oh, I've been way too distracted to even get my questions here.

Yeah, pulling up stuff on the screen. It's, yeah, no, this is all very interesting to me. I actually do have a question. When did you first start noticing, you might've mentioned this earlier, I missed it. But when did you first start noticing the influence of foreign operations on places like Facebook back before the election. Did you notice

that this started coming from places like China or were they more like places like Turkey or was this from Russia? Or was it U.S.? Or USA trying to influence everyone? Because it really seemed like to me like it was a very odd rise of Facebook groups of people that would just start Republicans versus Democrats that they didn't seem like they were real people fighting. They were just trying to fake fights against each other on Facebook to try and get more engagement right around the time of the election, about probably, what, five or eight years ago. And then that all disappeared very quickly when Facebook cracked down on it.

Do you know where that was coming from? Was that China? Was that here? Or was that Turkey? I don't believe that at all, actually. Everything that I've investigated around that has shown that to be basically either hollow or completely impotent and ineffective and used purely as a predicate for the CIA to put its claws into the social media companies in order to stop the foreign

policy agenda of a candidate that they hated with all their guts. So what you're describing right there is sort of the argument that was made by the Justice Department about the Russian Internet Research Agency before the Justice Department dropped all of its cases against them when two of the defendants demanded discovery. And they said, we can't tell you how we actually know that because it would undermine U.S. national security. This was something that even the CIA made these big, bold proclamations about all the evidence they had about Russian interference in that January 2017 memo. But I read that memo the day it came out. There was nothing in it. It was completely unsupported.

All they had was an appendix at the end saying that Russia Today and Sputnik, respectively, the TV and radio, basically Russia's version of the BBC had skyrocketed in popularity relative to other state-run media institutions like PBS or the BBC. And those were public-facing institutions. You can say what you want about RT being Russian propaganda. It certainly is. But it's not some big clandestine

operation. They had a formal, they were an account like any others. Even the total amount of spend that they attributed to the IRA was $100,000. $100,000, that's one US middle-class salary. Hillary Clinton spent $1.3 billion on her campaign. And by the way, they even said that that $100,000 was split between pro-Trump and anti-Trump groups. Knowing these people and all the hoaxes they've perpetrated, that could have been a US citizen using a VPN. Many of these VPNs warp in from foreign countries, warp in from... Russia is a very popular VPN address, you know, from everything from, you know, NordVPN to a dozen of others. You can actually pick when you go to a VPN,

what country you want your IP address to be able to warp in from. You know, and many of these have been totally busted. There was a, you know, who wrote the Senate intelligence report on Russian interference? It was a firm called New Knowledge LLC. They wrote that in 2018. You know what came out in 2019? New Knowledge itself had personally purchased Russian bot farms, 23,000 fake Russian accounts to mass subscribe them to Roy Moore's Republican Senate runoff in November 2017. So the people whining about fake Russian bots and making the formal proclamations of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the oversight for the CIA. They were the ones creating the fake Russian bots. So none of these people have any credibility. They've called people Russian bots and those

people have had to go on Sky News in the UK and say, hey, I'm actually, you can go on my Twitter page right now and look up a guy named Ian456. You know, there are hundreds of examples of these people being flat busted. They have zero credibility. They're paid by the state. These people all come from the CIA or the State Department. Their job is to rig elections around the world, and they did it here. You know, something that I think is eventually going to be a part of the story are that a lot of these were actually run by individuals who saw a gold mine in creating fake news websites before those really got shut down by changes in the algorithm and changes on Facebook. There was a gold rush.

And I remember because I used to – I never ran any of these, but I remember people in my circles that ran websites and started launching these campaigns. You could put up fake news and it would go everywhere and you would get tons of ad views and they would make lots of money off of it. None of those people are going to come out now and say, oh, I did this. This is how I made a million dollars back in 2019, 2020. There was a huge industry.

They could manipulate Facebook quite easily. What's interesting to me is that the hoax and this phenomenon is sort is known to people now. And they're mocking it, making fun of it, and not falling victim to it so much. So their ability to do these things has shifted, which I would call progress. I would say that we're all seeing it. And same thing with the mainstream media. They pick up on this BS and they start reporting it as though it's factual.

They just further erode their audience and their legitimacy. And I would say that's a good thing because they're showing themselves not to be trustworthy. So I'm seeing this pattern again right now with the whole fake news industry where it's not even, I mean, some of it is, it looks like it's government propaganda run, but it's actually a lot of people, especially on X right now, because you have this gold rush of monetization. These are AI run bots that spread all of these fake stories and this fake news across to everyone, and they're just trying to incite people.

Because the more you can incite people on X, the more replies you get, the more page views you get, the more money that you make. Can you name a few of those AI bot accounts? I mean those, but there's also real people that are running them that they specifically. Can you name a few of those AI bot accounts? I mean, those, but there's also real people that are running them that they specifically Do you have them? Do you have the names? I'll see if I can find them, because there's actually one I just saw

two minutes ago that replied to you, Drew, and it looks like a real person for like 10 seconds. Then you dig into it, and it's like, they're responding to look like humans. They're using AI text generation with a verified account to make themselves look real, to drive up engagement. That's the whole point.

Is it one that responded to me or I responded to her or him? It's one that responded to you. They're getting more and more realistic, but it's a money-making scheme. There's groups of people behind this. I want him looking at those things for sure. But Mike, you were trying to answer both me and Caleb, and you've been very kind with your time. I want to give you a chance to respond to what we just said. Don't underestimate people's immune system to these type of things.

In the 1990s, it was very popular that Nigerian princes would ask you for money over email. This still happens to this day, but now it's sort of a meme. If you get a request for money over email by someone who claims to be part of the aristocracy of a sub-Saharan African continent country, it's probably a scam. You remember banner ads from the late 90s, early 2000s. These were these highly visible, click-baity type things that a lot of people would click on because it was very new to them. They hadn't developed the immune system for it. I would not underestimate, and this, I think, was the point that you were making earlier, is that people acclimate to these tricks over time. And as a general matter, credibility is something that is earned over time. And people,

even though there will always be a sort of sensation, I mean, remember, mass mainstream journalism in this country really started with yellow journalism. It started with fake news. That's right. That's always going to be with us. The question is, well, when you put the U.S. government in charge of determining what that is, then there's no citizen opposition that's possible because they're going to call you fake news.

And we saw this happen in COVID. We saw it happen in the 2020 election. We saw it happen in the early response to the breakout of war with Russia and Ukraine. We saw it happen in the immigration debate. This is a power, a godlike power that you never want the government to have because there's no getting it back from that. Nor the media. I mean, back in the days of the Lincoln-Douglas debate,

Lincoln would go back and read the transcripts of the two different papers and bring them together because he said they were listening to two different debates, the left and the right, and that all coalesced with the Hearst group. And there's evidence, and I believe it to be true, that he caused the Spanish-American War. He single-handedly precipitated that war. Yes, yes.

Rosebud. That's the Citizen Kane story. And the Spanish-American War is where the American Empire started. That's how we became an international global empire. We won the Philippines. And that's how we basically built up our navy around that. And this was coming on the heels of the War Department's early relationship with mass mainstream media. This whole game, United Fruit was one of the four consortium companies of the National Broadcast Association or whatever,

that first conglomeration of mass mainstream media, which got rolled into the Pentagon's Office of War Information. All of our ABC, NBC, and CBS, the big three TV news stations of the 20th century, all were started by former veterans of the Pentagon's Office of War Information. There had always been this relationship between mass mainstream media and the Pentagon, except these 10 essentially golden years of Internet freedom from 2006 to 2016 were living in the era of them reasserting that control over media that they had in the 20th century. And the question is, can we successfully take that on? And I know sometimes when I do these presentations, a lot of people get depressed. And I do. But take heart, okay? I mean, I'll just tell you, as a veteran of this war for eight long years, the first six

years of this were absolutely miserable because nobody would even believe it was happening. I could show clips of all these people confessing it. I could do a seven-hour supercut and it wouldn't be enough. The wins that we have had in the past 12 months are absolutely extraordinary and something that we should be extremely proud of and working to build momentum on. I'll give you one example. Just recently, there was a hit piece on me in the New York Times on Monday of this week. I was mentioned by name 24 times. Me and Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, who's got a group that's suing a lot of these censorship organizations.

And the article was a hit piece on us because it said that we were winning successfully on all fronts. We were winning legally. We were winning in terms of the legislature. We were winning in terms of getting DHS to claim that it wouldn't do it anymore. We were winning in terms of getting agencies defunded. We were winning the media PR battle. And I've watched as all these things have played out. In September 2022, the Harvard Misinformation Review published a piece calling disinformation studies within academia too big to fail, arguing that the field of censorship was now basically akin to the Lehman, you know, like the Lehman

Brothers 2008 situation or like, you know, JP Morgan. It couldn't collapse because the censorship industry is too deeply embedded within the federal government. One year later to the date, September 2023, after all the work that we've been doing on this, the Washington Post put out a piece citing the Stanford Internet, citing the Harvard Misinformation Review, saying that the field of disinformation studies is now crumbling in disarray because of everything, the big counter pushback. So this is always going to be an ebb and flow. There's going to be an evolutionary arms race of the citizens against the blob for the next 70 years. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle, but we've shown that this thing is not immortal. It can be dented. You can take it on.

It is going to, they raised the stakes by arresting people now and doing things for the Justice Department that we couldn't have contemplated a couple of years ago. But, you know, take some heart. We are, in many ways, we are winning in a way now that we did not for the first six years of this fight. We will leave it there, Mike. Again, I want to bring you back to talk about the more about Missouri versus Biden and the so-called pinholes that people could drive through if we're not careful and see if those things do show up on some of the Supreme Court

opinions. Any place else you'd like people to go? When is the book coming out? Tell me more. Yeah. So the book is probably going to be a late 2025 thing. You know, it's something I'm eight years pregnant with, so to speak. So it'll probably be next one. But the best place to follow me is on X slash Twitter at Mike Ben Cyber. I post like 30 times a day and including the stuff from my foundations, investigative research. And that's foundationforfreedomonline.com. Mike, thank you so much. We'll see you soon.

Thank you. See you soon. You got it. So, so interesting. There it is up there in big letters, Director of Foundation for Freedom Online. And let's look at the schedule coming up. We have a very interesting guest, and today was, of course, no exception to that. We have Kelly Fontania. I think that's how you pronounce her name. Look her up on X, and you'll see why I'm putting her on the show. We've got Greg Lukianoff coming in here next week, Peter McCullough with Steph Coulson, Drea DeMatteo, G-Van Fleet,

Ed Dow with Kelly Victory coming on April 3rd. So there's a lot of very interesting people yet ahead. And again, as always, at contactatdoctordrew.com, we will be taking your suggestions. If you have anybody there, follow us on Ask Dr. Drew, to make shows and guests. And again, thank you for supporting the people that support us. We are enthusiastic about the people that we partner with to create this show.

And we are enthusiastic about you guys, about the audience, and what a great audience we've sort of assembled over this debacle that we call COVID. I mean, think about the ground we've traveled. Mike Benz at the end there did give me a little bit of pause for optimism. It feels overwhelming

and wild when you hear about these things the first time. Like I said, all throughout COVID, I was like shaking my head, like what is going on here? What is happening? This doesn't make sense,

but it is starting to make sense. And we'll continue to make sense with these things. We'll continue to push back. Please join us again tomorrow. I think we're early, Caleb. Is that correct? Or is that on Thursday?

Yes, I believe it's at, tomorrow's show is at 12 p.m. noon Pacific. I see noon, yeah. And we're most likely going to be talking about the TikTok stuff and the Trojan horse behind those. And I think Neil Brennan's coming in at the end of tomorrow's show as well. And we'll see you at noon tomorrow.

Be there at 3 o'clock Eastern, 12 Pacific. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving.

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