Danny Jones Podcast - #340 - Mike Benz: DARPA & USAID are Weaponizing Music to Control Human Behavior

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Mike Benz is a former State Department official and current Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, a free speech watchdog organization dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet. SPONSORS https://mizzenandmain.com - Use code DANNY20 for 20% off. https://www.amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJ22 for 22% off your first order. https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/DANNY - Use code DANNY and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS Mike's YouTube channel:  @MikeBenzCyberOfficial  https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber https://www.instagram.com/mikebenzcyber https://foundationforfreedomonline.com FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Music diplomacy 17:17 - USAID is funding shadow diplomacy 19:41 - Dua Lipa is pop propaganda 26:14 - Bono's liveaid scam 35:32 - Taylor Swift & The Gerasimov Doctrine 49:08 - NATO & Graphika censorship 01:05:03 - The Minerva Initiative 01:12:15 - Taylor Swift is a military disinformation asset 01:22:28 - Digital Censorship Act: how the EU can censor American speech 01:36:55 - Newsguard, middleware & social media censorship 01:48:47 - YouTube's settlement with Trump 01:57:12 - Google's 'Project Owl' 02:07:05 - Section 230 is a distraction 02:19:28 - Aftermath of Charlie Kirk's death 02:24:04 - The federal vs. state censorship crisis 02:39:02 - Who benefits from the censorship industry 02:44:39 - WEF push for digital ID's 02:51:09 - Elon Musk & the digital control grid 03:03:22 - Future of freedom of speech Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, Mike Benz, thanks for coming, man. I've been a fan of yours for a long time. I told you I was deep diving your stuff on the music diplomacy like over a year ago. And I'm a huge fan. And big shout out to Julian Doyle for hooking this up. And like I told you before we started, I don't know how you know more about this topic than I know about my own life. No, it's absorption. And thanks for having me.

The music diplomacy stuff is fascinating. We were just talking about this a little. before it's you know music is everywhere we were just talking about the alley g clip with the yeah and trump uh you know alley g asked trump what's the most popular thing in the world because he's trying to sell them some like no drip ice cream and trump just says music yeah and you know music really sets the vibe for the background of so much of cultural affairs social affairs it's what kids do you know to go to concerts it's what's what's You know, it's kind of the aligning magnet of so many things.

And the reason that I talk about like music in diplomacy and music in intelligence work and music in the military field is because it's, you know, it's one of these unexpected areas where the penetration is just deceptively deep. And when you understand how deep it is in the music industry, you begin to appreciate how it can be so big in academia, in unions, in the legal field, when it's all. all the way down to something like music, you see these recurring patterns on how structures of influence are set up.

Yeah, it's crazy because it's ubiquitous and it's everywhere. And I always thought when I would hear things about this or see like things in documentaries about people in the music industry being compromised by different agencies or being used as useful idiots, whatever you want to call it. I always just thought like brushed it off,

like can't be serious, which is why I was so just enthralled when I started reading that Twitter thread that you did about the, about the history of all of this stuff. It's just completely nuts, dude. Should we go through it for folks? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we should. How did it? So what is the history of this stuff?

Did it all start in Cuba? So the relationship between the State Department and CIA and the music industry, I sort of started in the 1940s with jazz diplomacy. This was this period where the, you know, the World War II had just ended. and we are now in a fight for geopolitical control over all the different neutral countries in the world against the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union has this communist government and they're making appeals to Africa, among other places, saying that the capitalist society in the West is racist. They're discriminating against black people. There's all this class injustice. So African countries should sign economic partnerships with the Soviet Union.

They should have their governments be more aligned with the Soviet Union because they're more egalitarian. And so this was a lot of how the J. Edgar Hoover, FBI, was sort of calling a lot of folks who were pro-civil rights. They were calling them communists and Soviets because the Soviet Union was amplifying these kind of, you know, there's racial discrimination against African American stuff on their own media channels. And so in Africa, what the State Department did is it took, who were very popular at the time, these black jazz musicians, Louis Armstrong and the like and would fly them as essentially music diplomats to Africa and making the point to African diplomats and African civil society organizations that actually the West does not discriminate, the Soviets are wrong.

And so you had these musical ambassador types of, being flown around by you know on taxpayer time and then with the with classical music around the same time the c i start something called the congress for cultural freedom which is this big arts and literature and music hub it's basically hundreds of poets musicians thought leaders in the art space in the culture space in the music space gloria steinem was a part of that with the with the feminist movement um but among that were classical musicians. So at the time, Shostakovich and these kind of Russian classical composers were seen to be superior to like Western classical musicians. And so even in the classical music hub,

the CIA organizes these conferences through the like musical conferences, musical exchanges, musical concerts in Rome, in Paris, in Germany, through this CIA-funded cutout, the Congress or cultural freedom in order to show that actually Western classical music is, you know, competes on par and is better than Russian classical music. And then you had the whole rock and roll movement where you had this export to essentially behind the Iron Curtain. You had this anti-authoritarian, you know, challenging the government, you know, rock music space. And a lot of this stuff was sponsored by the U.S. government, sponsoring rock concerts by the Berlin Wall that try to, you know, know, show that we're against the, you know, the big government of the Soviet Union and against

big brother. Then you had this in, in the rap space, you mentioned Cuba. So in the, in the early 2000s, the CIA, USAID, the state department really began to turn attention to the rap and hip hop space as it, you know, achieved this kind of cultural saturation and did this in a bunch of countries. So a very famous one is this group called the San Ysidro Collective in Cuba. In 2009, this CIA cutout called the National Endowment for Democracy. It was conceived of by the CIA director in 1983. The CIA gets a copy of every single grant that they give. This was disclosed in 1986 in the Washington Post.

Its founder says we were created because the CIA used to get in trouble in the 1960s and 70s. I'm sorry, groups seen as subsidized by the CIA were scandalized by that. So our endowment, Ned, the National Endowment for Democracy, was set up so that we could fund the groups that the CIA, though they'd be too scandalized to get from the CIA. Meanwhile, the CIA gets a copy of every single one of their grants. So it's just an empty cutout for it. So in 2009, they write this memo. They have this in-house journal called The Journal of Democracy.

We pay for it as taxpayers. And in this 2009 memo, they're talking about how their attempts at regime change in Cuba have been unsuccessful and they should try a more targeted Afro-Cuban strategy because the Afro-Cuban population is actually is higher, I think, than it's like the highest, the highest most popular demographic in Cuba, and yet they're underrepresented in the Cuban government and there are grievances that can be inflamed in Cuba on that basis. And they did this demographic survey. Again, this is a CIA cutout doing this. And they say, okay, well, the Afro-Cuban population is disproportionately unemployed, prone to using drugs, and has cultural salience communicated through rap and hip-hop music. A year later, they begin funding together with USAID. So it's USAID, which is a giant CIA money funnel, plus the CIA's effectively proprietary cutout. begin funneling money and aid to this rap collective called the San Ysidro movement,

who pens this anthem about taking to the streets to rebel against the government. At the same time, USAID sets up a fake Twitter in Cuba. It's called Zunzineo. This is a big scandal where humanitarian funds were earmarked for Pakistan by USAID, and then they were diverted through Cayman Islands banks to set up a Twitter knockoff. Because in 2009, 2010, this is when the Arab Spring was going on. Right. So you had these CIA social media revolutions. And so they wanted to bring a Cuban spring there.

So they get, they have these insider documents that end up leaking a couple years later where they say that the goal is to attract people because Cuba at the time had banned Twitter. And so they wanted to make this look like this was by Cubans for Cubans. So they, so USAID got these two unsuspecting business executives. to set up this Twitter knockoff. The plan was, according to the USA documents, to attract them by advertising a social media website that would emphasize sports, music, and hurricane updates. And then once they hit 100,000 subscribers,

they would switch to anti-government political messaging. And so this group, by the way, the Santa Cedra movement and their anthem, they penned to try to get people to take to the streets in a color revolution. You can still see odes to this in Art Basel in Miami. I live in Miami. You still see this.

Miami was the biggest CIA hub for the whole Cold War. There was a station, JM Wave. The Miami station was the largest CIA hub in the world. And because Miami was so close to, you know, it was giant port city and it's the Caribbean, it's Central America. You get the South America tip. So anyway, even, even, even, today in 2024 the Biden administration overthrew the government of bangladesh they did so in part through

ned grants this CIA cut out grants to Bangladeshi hip hop artists and even these documents leaked where ned actually wrote back to the state department that they funded these two rap and hip hop videos that were designed to get people to take to the streets to so distrust in government to inflame tensions between the youth and unemployed people and the government not serving them. And the Biden administration at the same time opened up this brand new center called the Global Music Diplomacy Bureau within the state department. The state department is what coordinates CIA and USAID. So I think in 2024, they brought 22 rap and hip hop artists from 14 different countries for a three-day training session at the state department. They're training them how to mobilize youth, how to get people to the streets. And this is

another big thing with these concerts. They simulate street mobilization. When you get all these people together in the street, you get them in the practice of taking to the street and they put aside all the differences they might have with each other on grievance grounds. Like, for example, there was an underground rock scene that the CIA and State Department work. with in Yugoslavia in the 1990s when they were backing something called the Oatpour movement, which is kind of the origins of this like iron fist for all these color revolutions. And the whole purpose is the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You have all these groups who don't necessarily like each other.

But when they are infighting, they can't form a unified front to win an election or to rally behind like an opposition candidate who will take the place of the leadership. So having the backdrop for organizing being music everyone likes, rather than, you know, abortion when half of the people might not, you know, have religious differences. So they might not want to organize about that. Or, you know, tax policy when half of the people you might want to recruit our business owners of the like. Or, you know, energy policy when half of the people might like cheap fossil fuels, half of the people might like, you know, renewable energy. But the music cuts through all of that. all together we have one thing in common which is that we hate this government but now we're all marching together we're all on the streets together we're all vibe into the same music and so you know you see this all the time and this is also another thing like bono for example who's uh been kind of my like uh you know bet and noir on some of this u s aid stuff because you know bono's out here talking about how u s aid has the cuts to usa id have killed 300 000 people so far

and it's like, did he said. He did. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He's citing this Boston University study, which is complete garbage. Even in the study itself, it's like, well, we don't count duplicate deaths. So theoretically, if someone dies from dysentery, AIDS, Ebola, SARS, Zika, and MERS, we count that as 12 deaths. And none of these things, nobody's auditing this. Like, you know, basically a lot of people see me as like a force behind this U.S. AID shut down. And that was a major blow to the capacity of a lot of these intelligence operations, these covert influence operations.

As I just mentioned, USAID is running the rap game in many countries, let alone what it's doing in terms of impacting markets, what it's doing in terms of impacting governments. So there's a lot of people who are very angry at that, but they can't really think of a good reason to keep it in light of the fact that you don't see a lot of foreign leaders complaining about USAID being shut down. Like when when Trump announced the shutdown of USAID, the president of Mexico came out and said, thank God. The president of El Salvador came out and said, thank God. The heads of the drug commissions in Peru said, thank God. Because when Bolivia banned USAID, they they finally got cocaine under control.

Turned out the USAID cocaine programs were responsible in large part for keeping the cocaine going, which is a common story here because, you know, you saw the same thing in Afghanistan. You saw the same thing in Syria. You saw the same thing, the golden triangle, the golden crescent in Colombia and the like. But anyway, I think the music stuff is so interesting because, you know, you have like the military, I think in 2023, began this massive sponsorship of South by Southwest.

In Miami, where I live, the largest music performing arts center, it's called the Adrian Arsch Center. Adrian Arsh is one of the top five largest donors to the Atlantic Council, which is seven CIA directors on its board. It's funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID,

and it builds itself as NATO's think tank. And, you know, the benefactor for that is doing the largest performing arts center in Miami. And a lot of this is because politics is downstream of culture. Right. And so, you know, you, if you can influence the culture and influence the mythology, you effectively set the bounds for what's politically possible. Let's be honest.

Most clothes are uncomfortable, high maintenance, and just don't feel great to wear. You spend way too much time ironing, dry cleaning, and tugging stiff fabrics, which is why I love Mizzen and Maine. Today's sponsor, Mizan and Maine makes classic men's wear with performance fabrics, so it's effortless to look sharp and feel great. Over 10 years ago, Mizan and Maine invented the performance fabric dress shirt. Since then, they've perfected it with modern fabrics that look refined, but feel incredible. Their shirts and pants are stretchy, lightweight, moisture wicking, wrinkle-free, and completely machine washable. So no ironing or dry cleaning.

The moment you put them on, you feel the difference. Professional styles that feel comfortable, whether you're in the office, traveling or even out in the golf course. And it's timeless style that lasts. Thousands of guys swear by Mizzen and Maine because it's clothing you can invest in once and wear for years. And right now, Mizzen and Maine is offering our listeners

20% off your first purchase at Mizzen and Main.com using my promo code Danny 20. That's Mizon spelled M-I-Z-Z-E-N-M-A-I-N-M-A-I-N.com promo code Danny 20. for 20% off. Mizaninam.com promo code Danny 20. And if you'd rather shop in person, you can find Mizan and Maine stores and select states.

It's linked down below. Now back to the show. Right. Now, is USA doing any of this stuff in America with American musicians or anything? Or is it all foreign? So it's all supposed to be foreign. The justification is for the legal.

It's supposed to be foreign, but the issue is they get around that by the fact that these are, you know, global distribution capacities. And what they'll do is they'll fund an organization to do global work, but then it also does domestic work. Like for example, take something like the Tides Center, which is this big, you know, international NGO. It's closely associated with George Soros. So a lot of Republicans and conservatives, you know, take a lot of umbrage with the Tide Center

because it funds Black Lives Matter, the Black Lives Matter formal legal entity, their 501C3. It gives the 501C3 to the Soros prosecutor managers, this group called FJP, Fair and Just Prosecutions. But so the Tide Center operates domestically with these Soros prosecutors and BLM and all of these different groups,

anti-fair related groups, climate-related groups, all these groups that do like street paramilitary action. But they get all this money from USAID. I think they got $27 million worth of grants just in the ones that I found on USAspending.gov. And like of that that I found in the past couple of years that 27 million, like 22 million were for grants to quote secure concrete commitments from foreign governments on civil society matters. So like they are being paid by USAID to secure formal concrete commitments from foreign governments to the American government. They're basically being paid as an intermediary for the U.S. government to do shadow diplomacy on behalf of the U.S. government. So that's like funding their coffers. So that allows them to essentially hire people, have institutional clout, have these giant net.

network connections and then they can leverage that in an in kind way when it comes to all their little housed domestic product. So with something like music, you've got this global distribution, right? So like this is one of the things they did with the Santa C-Dra movement in Cuba is this was a local, you know, island hip-hop collective. But by teaming up with USAID and teaming up with the assistant secretary of state for the U.S. Department of State, they got distribution in America. They got distribution globally. They get all these awards at awards ceremonies. You know, I talked about this just because it's so funny, but like even someone like Dua Lepa.

I was going to say, I was going to ask you about her. You know, it's so funny because I love to. I think the music's great. I think she's got a really cool vibe. It is funny to me when you look at the fact that she won the Atlantic Council Distinguished Leadership Award. I think it was like 2022 or 2023. Now, the Atlantic Council, as I mentioned, as seven CIA directors on their board.

They're funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, the UK Foreign Office, USAID, Ned, the CIA cut out. And what are they doing giving a distinguished leadership award to a, you know, hip, to like a pop music princess? Did Victoria Newland hand her the medal? You know, it's, she should have. And of course, Victoria Newland now is on the board of Ned. as on the board of the National Doundah for Democracy,

who is the one that I mentioned, was funding the Santa Cedra movement, the hip-hop collective in Cuba and was funding the Bangladeshi hip-hop artists ahead of the coup in 2024. So she is involved in that. But the, so Dua Lipa, you know,

has this kind of like Serbian, you know, Kosovoire heritage. And Serbia is one of these lynchpin. We fought the whole NATO did its first offensive action in its entire history. It was formed in 1949, never fired a bullet, despite being the Western World's military alliance for 46 years until 1995, when the first, you know, bombings of, you know, Yugoslavia happened. And so we broke up Yugoslavia with the overthrow of Milosevic. We chopped into all these different smaller countries. We created Kosovo, you know,

out of, you know, out of, you know, a province effectively in Yugoslavia. And so it was created effectively by our blob, by our State Department CIA apparatus. Her dad is like a music organizer in Kosovo. And the State Department has this big problem right now with the Serbian government because they're one of these places that is slipping out of NATO's grasp. There are a couple countries in Europe that are providing, problems for the foreign policy establishment currently. Belarus is one of them.

We tried a color revolution there in 2020. It didn't work. Moldova was giving us problems. And then this election just happened yesterday at the time of this recording. So they appeared to have solved the Moldova problem. They almost had a, they almost had a Romania problem. And then they canceled that election and through the lead candidate in jail. But Serbia remains this kind of neutral state that folks.

believe is tilting towards Russia. And so what Dula Lipa has been campaigning on is this kind of truth and reconciliation committee type thing to throw, they call it transitional justice. Whenever there's a transition to democracy, you impose the justice system on the previous administration so that, no, but they can't win an election again because everyone's in jail. This is like this State Department checklist strategy because it's very expensive to run a revolution. What you want as a country that's on autopilot. You know, you rig the election once or you overthrow the government once and then it's, it achieves the state of what they call stability, Democratic stability, which, you know, basically means it's like a one-party rule. This is what the CIA tried to do

with the Christian Democrats throughout the Cold War, the Christian Democrat Party, which is presence in Germany and all over central and eastern Europe. But so the cheapest way to make sure you win forever is that everybody from the opposition, even if they're more popular with the people, they're just in jail. And so Dula Lipa has been campaigning on transitional justice to try to get essentially the State Department's enemies thrown in jail and, you know, using her platform for this. And so, you know, but. But how do those conversations go with Dua Lepa? Like, is she aware of what she's doing? I don't know. I don't know about. I mean, obviously. Is her agent call her up and be like, yo, uh, uh,

we may have to send this tweet, they copy and paste this or like, it wouldn't need to be. And there's a lot of different examples here because we can talk about Bono, which is like one of these just very clear cut cases. Or you can talk about the Taylor Swift side where it's where these forces see Taylor Swift as a weapon,

but I don't know to what extent Taylor is clued into it. And then I see Dula Lipa as being probably somewhere, in between those, although this is speculation. I have no idea what her conversations are with their management or what's happening at the distribution level. You know, there's a lot of these weird relationships between like creative artists, you know, like the CIA type, you know, agencies and their role in music distribution. I always wonder.

I always think about that because like, you know, obviously there's everybody online. I don't know if you've noticed, but every podcast host is compromised by a certain government or intelligence agency, including me. I'm paid for by the CIA. But like, yeah, me too. I didn't get my check this month. And like, I was wondering like, you know, how many U.S. AIDS are there in other countries that are trying to fund like media in the U.S. or like does the media, does the U.S. intelligence actually fund U.S. like podcaster? You would think like they would definitely thought about it. But like, like, what would that be like? It would be too risky.

to like overtly do that. You would almost want to like do it in a way where they're not aware of it. Well, NATO, for example, I think it was published last year that they had just, they had this, what they call it, societal resilience grant fund where I think it was like 26 TikTokers

that they pay through this social, societal resilience fund to generate pro-NATO messaging. So it's very easy, for example, if you want that in the US and you can't legally do that, through USAID or the US State Department because those are supposed to face outward, you simply go to one of these international bodies like NATO that the US spends more than 50% of NATO funding comes from the US. So it's those TikTok influencers are being paid by US taxpayer

money, but it's doing it through NATO rather than through USAID. Okay. And you have all sorts of these. Every country's got an international development office. You know, the UK does You know, for example, like on the Bono story. Bono was a guy who was teamed up with Jeff Sachs. And I'm not throwing shade at Jeffrey Sachs here. I think that he's had a really interesting evolution. But Jeffrey Sachs was a Harvard economist in the 1990s who led the State Department CIA economic carving up of Russia.

This is what people call the economic group of Russia. This was when we just won the Cold War and Russia trusted us to transition their economy to a market capitalist economy. And what ended up happening was USAID gave tens of millions of dollars to the Harvard Institute for International Development. So the U.S. Agency for International Development took taxpayer funds and gave them to Jeffrey Sachs's Harvard Institute for International Development, which is basically a bunch of these Harvard economists, Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Summers, who go over to Russia. to advise the Russian ministers, the economic ministers and all the different, like oligarch government feeder heads on how to transition their economy to capitalism

by taking, you know, was effectively like almost $2 trillion worth of publicly held Soviet Union, because in a communist government, the government owns the wealth when you transition to a market economy and that's held by private investors, you have to sell off all of those nationally held assets. This is what the privatization process. We put every country through this. We're putting

Ukraine through this right now. We're privatizing all their state held industries off to Wall Street and London. And who makes the money from that? You're getting bargain basement discount prices buying up dirt cheap assets from the government. And so Jeffrey Sachs was leading this in the 1990s. And they end up essentially destroying the entire Russian economy. Their market crash. like 95%. This is what created the grounds for Putin to rise to power is that everybody got so pissed off during the Yeltsin years at the poverty. Anyway, Bobano links up with Jeffrey Sachs in the 90s and actually a little bit before that doing this international development work. Now Bono, of course, is you know, you two. He's the frontman. He's this international like sex symbol at the time

and, you know, giant selling out stadiums. He did these, you know, big kind of USAID fundraiser concerts, Band Aid and Live Aid to raise money for AIDS. The BBC later reported that of the $100 million raised for hunger relief in Somalia at Band-Aid, 95 million of it went to CIA-backed warlords to buy guns. So this is like another one of these things where you think you're raising public awareness. Oh, there's a hunger problem in Somalia, in Eritrea, in Ethiopia, and Ethiopia. But there's also a civil war where you've got the CIA taking sides in that civil war.

And these groups need weapons, logistics, supplies. And so when you've got U.S. aid vans coming in that are said to be carrying metal, supplies or they're doing hunger relief and you but you can't open that box because then the food will expire you can't open these medical packages because then the therapeutics will evaporate it's very easy to hide guns in them and so when you see these scandals where all this money is going not to make the world the better place and kumboya and we're bringing food and medicine but you're bringing guns and then the USA got busted in Venezuela on this in 2019 where

USA medical trucks were caused with guns and who runs the supply for like the AIDS relief they're like all the therapeutics and treatments for for the pet far program for USAID it's Kimonix kymonics is the the group that the head of kimonics said he started the comonics because he always wanted his own private CIA and the the so what you see is it's like while Bono's doing these kumbaya you know love love the world heal the world you know concerts where the money is being diverted for CIA covert action to actually kill people, not save people. And so Bono was formerly knighted by the British crown.

And he met with the UK ambassador after he helped put down the Irish revolt against the British crown. If you remember Sunday, Bloody Sunday. No more. No more war. It's like this guy with a, you know, you look at him now, he's got the Ukraine emoji in his bio. And the whole thing is war against Russia. But don't know war against the British crown. and oh, I'm being knighted by the British crown.

I'm now Sir, Sir Bono, because I helped put down that word. But it's, you know, but you see this. And what you end up doing is you end up bringing a lot of people into a perceived cause who aren't even necessarily signed up for it. Like, I'll give you an example. So Bono does this AIDS fundraiser type thing, or he does this raise money for Ukraine concert. You're going to have 100,000 people come to this concert,

whether they care about Ukraine or not. But now the public sees 100,000 people for Ukraine. They just did this in Brazil. The Biden administration ran this giant CIA, USAID State Department operation to oust Bolsonaro from Brazil and install this guy, Lula. There was this big, Brazil had this version of January 6th that they called January 8th. It's basically a very similar type, strange event that happened in Brazil around the time of that election. And so what they did in Brazil is they did this big music concert about a month and a half ago to rally against amnesty for these January 8th prisoners.

Brazil is trying to do through their parliament what Trump did for the January 6 folks. All the folks who were nonviolent on January 6th got like a commutation of sentence and sort of pardon. And so they're trying to do that in Brazil. So what Brazil did is they organized this giant music conference. conference, you know, against the amnesty to try to try to get the, the, stop the Senate from passing this amnesty of folks. And then the head of the, one of the ministers on the, on the Supreme Court there, who's, you know, completely on the side of Lula, you know, says, look, there are like 300,000 people who came out to this anti-amnesty event. The demic, the people's will is that

there's no amnesty. And it's like, okay, well, you had all the top performing music artists in Latin America and South America, these people, you can't say these people were there for the amnesty. They were there for the music. They were there for the music. You know, and. Oh my God. But this then becomes a, you know, self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like the Kamala campaign where she had the Beyonce, Beyonce, but Beyonce concerts. Everyone came to see Beyonce. Right. It's, it's, it's that every time. Did you know one in eight Americans are currently on anti-anxiety medications? The Aminida muscaria mushroom is growing in popularity and is commonly used for things like anxiety and addiction. And I had some recently sent to me by today's sponsor Minnesota Nice Ethno Botanicals.

It's non-addictive and activates the same gaba receptors as benzodiazepines and alcohol. And making it a fantastic way to help taper dependency. Stress and anxiety make it easy to slip back into addiction. And that's why thousands are turning to Aminita Muscaria from Minnesota Nice. It's not a magic bullet. Real recovery takes community and support, but this mushroom has been used for centuries to promote relaxation, improve sleep, and even enhanced dreams. Its founder, Christian Rasmussen used Aminita to overcome his own withdrawal and build Minnesota Nice to make natural healing accessible and affordable. Their capsules kick in within one hour and last up to six to eight hours, and it costs a fraction of pharmaceuticals.

And it's not just Aminida muscaria. They've got blue lotus gummies, yes, blue lotus in a gummy. Rishi for sleep, and more. Plus, they give back, like donating $12,000 to the Fungi Foundation for leading new research with brain mechanics. This is the kind of company I can get behind. Try their incredible new blend

of ancient and modern technology. And Minnesota Nice wants to help you find harmony with our exclusive offer. Just go to mniceethno.com slash DJ and use my code DJ22 for 22% off your first order. That's MNNICE. NICE ethno.com slash DJ and use my code DJ 22 for 22% off your first order.

It's linked down below. Now back to the show. And you see this like the Taylor Swift thing? Yeah. Do you mind if we just keep hitting this for a little bit? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm down. Yeah. Because the Taylor Swift thing is so funny.

So all right. So this all started. About two years ago, I was doing like a private live stream for my subscribers. and I was going through the NATO Psychological Operations Center YouTube page. This is a fabulous place. I encourage everyone to mine this for content before the... The NATO Psychological Operations YouTube page. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

So it's technically called the NATO Stratcom COE, which is the Stratcom stands for strategic communications. And the COE is the center of excellence. but it was set up in 2014 after NATO lost control over Crimea and the Donbass in Ukraine. So Victoria Newland and, you know, the blob overthrows the Democrat, the elected government in Ukraine. Fuck the EU. Right. You know, they install Yats and Yuc.

Yeah. But then they don't expect the counter coup when the entire eastern, I'm going to fuel up to actually. Yeah. So they don't expect the entire eastern half of Ukraine to just completely break away. and say we're not going to respect the newly installed, you know, government that no one voted for. Right. And they don't expect Crimea to vote in an independent referendum to join the Russian Federation. So they blame this on what they called, well, first they called it the Jarosimov doctrine.

Jirassimob doctrine? Yeah. This is a hilarious story, actually. So there's this NATO scholar named Mark Galiati, who in after the counter coup in Ukraine, in 2014. He writes, he, he, he finds this quote from this Russian general named Valerie Jarosimov. Drosimov wrote the nature, the fundamental nature of war has changed. We no longer need to deploy militaries and tanks to defeat an opponent. All we need to do is control the information ecosystem. Right. And especially social media now, now that it's emerged, you know, with this Arab Spring, phenomenon. And if we control the information system, then that determines who gets elected,

and then the elected government will simply use the military however we want. So it's actually much cheaper, easier, and more effective to win the military war simply through winning the information war and getting the right person elected rather than having a head-to-head military confrontation. So this was called the Jarosimov doctrine. Russia is controlling social media and media and that's why they voted for the Crimea referendum to join Russia that's why the Donbass broke away now three years later mark Galiati would would write a oopsie-poopsie article i think it was in foreign affairs and he wrote it was called i'm sorry for creating the drasimov doctrine and what he writes in this and you can look this up this is like literally you can just type in

i'm sorry for the drosimov doctrine mark Galiati And what he writes is, I actually, silly me, Drosimov wasn't talking about the Russians when he said that. I sort of took it out of context. He was talking about what the United States and NATO do. He was talking about what we did during the Arab Spring. But by that point, like the horse had left the barn. We had already begun between 2014-2017. We spent billions of dollars on this concept of what?

what we now call hybrid warfare. Yeah, here we go. I'm sorry for creating the Jarosimov doctrine. And I actually was with a friend who texted Mark Galiati about this. And so I was the first to write about Russia's infamous high tech military strategy. One small problem. It doesn't exist. Yes.

Right. But this, when he wrote that, that created this industry of what NATO would later call its tanks to tweets doctrine. Right. You know, when it went from tanks to tweets. because they were like, well, the Russians see this. So this justifies us doing it. Have you ever seen that South Park episode where they want to kill deer,

but there's the state law in Colorado that the deer or the animal before they hunt it has to present some threat to you? So they have to yell, it's coming right for us before they shoot it. So in order to shoot something, you have to yell, it's coming right for us before you beforehand. And so like this is what they did for the military to get into the business of social media censorship of all this like behavioral modification bullshit. They had to be like, well, it's coming right for us. The Russians are doing it. Right. And so so that's so at that moment when the Derasimov doctrine was you know, spike, they were like, well, we need a dedicated information

warfare center in order to in order to do psychological operations to counter the Russian psychological operations. And so they set this up in Riga Latvia. it's called the NATO Stratcom Center of Excellence. And Stratcom is strategic communication. So this is control over the information sector, control over social media, and control over protecting NATO narratives. This is like, you know, NATO's legitimacy was in question,

especially in 2016 when Trump was running and Trump ran on potentially bailing on NATO or cutting back NATO funding. And he was running on neutrality with Russia. And this is the whole Russia gate stuff kicking off. Yeah. And so this YouTube page is all about like the centers work in psychological operations online in manipulating strategic narratives in order to favor NATO over not just Russia,

but any domestic political government or movement within NATO countries that are seen to be pro-Russia. Whose idea was it to put this stuff on a YouTube channel? Well, this is the thing. They're competing in the marketplace of ideas. Right. And so this goes out to all. of their different civil society partners. This all works through these giant network of networks type things.

Like you have a thousand different NGOs attached to this. You have 500 different university centers attached to this. You've got five or six dozen private for profit companies or pop up, you know, consultancy firms or PR firms. And they all need to kind of drink from the common troth. So you need to have some level of public facing information distribution for this. And also because it's not structured as an intelligence operation, like there's some level of transparency that's put forward to, you know, give this patina that this is

civil society coming together. Right. So anyway, I'm doing this lecture in last two years ago on the origins of the censorship industry. And I'm talking about this, you know, psychological operations center out of NATO. And I'm going through their YouTube channel. And I, And this is, I think, like June 2019-ish or something. And I'm showing the presentation, it was three people who all had these very strange links to the intelligence world, presenting to a bunch of military generals. I could even pull the video if you want to see it. It's very funny. You could also just.

How do we find it? If you go to my X account and you just type in Taylor Swift, I think you'll see this. This blew up. Dude, you have no idea. Yeah, this really, like, this created a giant firestorm. Oh, this might have been the first threat. When was this? Oh, this was recenter?

More recent. Well, this was, well, this is a scroll down. Scroll down. There's probably a lot of, okay. There's a lot of these. But if you go to the media, you'll probably see the video or if you. Media time. What year?

What year was it again? Yeah, this one, this 257 one. Top right. Yeah, top right. Now, there's a lot of curse words. It's okay, but here you. Yep. So, yeah.

So this was, this is, I believe, from 2019. Right. So just to give a little background here, you have three people who are presenting to NATO on how they can win the information war at a time when NATO's political legitimacy was in question. Actually, before we watch this, if you open up a new tab and just Google, the term will a populist wave wash away NATO? I think it was probably like 2017. Wash away NATO, yeah.

I think this may have, let's see. scroll down, scroll down or scroll up, yeah, there there go. NATO homepage. Yeah, this is on NATO's website, okay? Wow. By Mark Galliotti, the same author of the, of the Derasimov doctrine. And this is in January 2016.

This is two weeks, January 6th, 2017. Now, there's two weeks before Trump is inaugurated for the first time. Now, January 6th, 2017, I always call this the other January 6th, because two things happened that day. So the CIA, that's the day that the CIA came out and said Russia interfered in the 2016 election. This is the big day, January 6th, 2017. Just hours after the CIA endorsed Russiagate and said, actually, the 2016 election was not legitimate. legitimate because Russia interfered. I read that memo the day it came out on January 6th, 2017, and it was complete bullshit. From start to finish, it was a joke. They didn't cite anything.

It's like a 15-page memo, like five of the pages are intentionally left blank. The whole thing relies on this exhibit at the end, this exhibit A. And there's nothing in the exhibit A just says like Russia today had like a 10 times more increased engagement. So did Sputnik. It's like, well, these are public facing. Say what you want. But that's like, That's like saying the BBC had higher engagement. This is, that's not an intelligence operation. That's, that's organic, like it or not. Right.

But anyway, and then the bots and troll stuff came after that. That's just hours after the CI put that on January 6th. DHS, our Department of Homeland Security, declared that elections are critical infrastructure. And so that federalized elections. It said, actually, DHS doesn't just get to protect, you know, our subsea cables and our lower satellites and our, you know, public health hospital. They actually get to protect the metaphysical concept of elections, which means misinformation online that undermines the public faith and confidence in the election

system is now a DHS capacity to neutralize. So January 6th was the day that the government got to get around the First Amendment to be able to censor tweets and Facebook posts and YouTube videos. Wow. But that's so the same day, Mark Galliotti, writes this, will the populist wave wash away NATO and the EU? Anti-establishment populism is undeniably on the rise across the West. From Donald Trump's election pledged to drain the swamp in Washington,

why would that be a threat to NATO, huh? Right. Through Brexit to the ascendancy of movements such as Italy's five stars on the left in Germany's AFD on the right, a rejection of old orthodoxies and with them political elites and institutions is proving a powerful appeal. So what they're worried about the time is this Brexit, fregs it if marine le pen wins in france gregs it if a fd wins in germany spags it if the vaux party

wins so the EU is going to wash away which means there's effectively the the commercial bridge to nato is completely severed so nato's going to fall apart so there's no enforcement arm for the iMF and the world bank it's you know like the end of the world is what they're worried about if people simply win elections organically in a fair and square democrat fight so this is what forces them to have the military, you know, this Grosimov Doctrine hybrid warfare, military control over media. Right. So, so this is what's in the background of all this. And so in 2019, if you, if you go, go back to the tab. Now this, I have to warn you, is got a lot of F bombs in it. That's okay. We can find the original video for this too. But so what you're going to see here,

before we watch this, just a little bit more table setting. So there are three people, one of them was 77th brigade from the Brits that's the British military intelligence and psychological operations folks you had this other woman who started her career in the CIA and then was part of the Stanford Air Observatory that worked with DHS to censor the 2020 election and COVID-19 narratives now this woman speaking right here the media so when when there was a huge amount of media blowback on me for posting this clip and You know, shame on me for finding what's on a frigging NATO YouTube page. But so, you know, this woman here at the time, she was at the Johns Hopkins, you know,

I think it was a school of international, a school of advanced international studies, which is like this. Maybe it was like some physics. She was at Johns Hopkins doing AI social media work. But at the same time, she was also at Graphica. Graphica, this is what people left out, the Wall Street Journal, Everyone called me for comment about this because the Pentagon had to issue like two denials of what I what I say here. And which is like hilarious. But what they leave out is she was also working for Graphica at the time.

Now, Graphica has gotten over $7 million in Pentagon contracts for AI social media, for AI based social media narrative monitoring. Oh my God. So Graphica started off as this essentially like CIA, DOD, contractor to help our intelligence and military folks identify ISIS propaganda on social media, identify, you know, Boko Haram presence on social media to identify. What they do is they create these keyword maps of the linguistic way of talking, the slogans, the keywords, the leaders, and then they create this topographical network map. It looks like a big ball of yarn with nodes and network links between them so that you can yeah it looks it looks like this and so this is

wow wait wait zoom out a little let's uh you you want to see what these guys did with by the way yes oh you okay all right just run it in a google search for um graphical april 2020 this is bonkers what this what this group did here uh i think if you type in like infodemic graphica april 2020 now they worked directly with NATO for this. They work with the NATO Stratcom COE, Graphica did. The info, the second, second link there. Yeah, yeah, right there, boom. Yeah. All right. Yeah, and click download now. All right. Yeah, if you click download now, it'll actually, it should just open it up. No, let's make register. It, you to register now? Oh, shit. Fill out the consent form. no way full content

wait wait to access full content no it should download it just just click just try that yeah yeah open a new tab yeah there you go yeah oh okay no way check your download tab this always happens every time I talk about something because I've covered this a couple

times they said Mike Ben's fucking out of form on that website now DHS deleted a bunch of pages over this the Arizona State University Censorship Center shut down its website the all right all right all right so but but but um well why don't why don't we start with the Taylor thing

okay and then and then we'll come back to this so you can see the kind of stuff that they're involved in perfect so so I just uh I just registered now they want thank you for your submission oh okay I got it my email okay okay okay okay well if you okay well if you got it let's let's just let's knock this out because it's it's a good it's good back for seeing what they're going to say about Taylor Swift here.

Okay, okay, perfect. So you can sort of see their way of seeing the world. But so just a little bit of background on this. So Graphica, again, they do this AI social media monitoring. And so they create essentially the hit list that NGOs and governments can use to tell platforms to take this down. Okay. So Graphica was one of the partners. Remember how I mentioned how on January 6th, 2017, DHS got a get out of First Amendment free card by saying anything that,

questions elections is a DHS capacity to neutralize as a cyber threat. Right. Cyber misinformation threat actors are a threat to elections. And so, so Graphica was partnered with DHS to censor the 2020 election. Anyone who questioned mail and ballots, if you got kicked off of YouTube for questioning mail and ballots or early voting drop boxes or electronic voting machines, it's because Graphica drew you in a big-ass network chart. they ingested

859 million tweets and said 22 million of those tweets were misinformation because they delegitimized the election process. So then this is like their business model.

They're a for-profit company. Okay. And so if you start at the top here, you'll see what they did. Now, here's a crazy thing here. If you actually, if you start on page one and then I'll just guide you

with control Fs on this. So, all right. So this was published in April 2020. But they started on this right away. Now understand again, Graphica, they're a contractor for DOD and CIA doing this, first for terrorist groups, then for domestic political elections, and then for the pandemic. According to their own website on Graphica.com, they said that they started ingesting data to create this report on December 16th, 2019.

The pneumonia-like symptoms in Wuhan were first reported on December 16th. December 12th, 2019. So according to their own report, they started creating the global network map of misinformation about the origins of COVID-19, the week that 18 started. A DOD-C-I-A-A-C-A contractor to censor opponents of the DOD and CIA, according to their own website, started this censorship project over to censor the origins of the week it was discovered. Now, when I published that on my foundation site, they said, no, no, no, no, no. We actually started on January 16th, 2020, and we backdated the data to

December 16th, 2019. I said, okay, well, even if that's the case, you started within a month. It wasn't even called 19 at the time. It was still the virus. Right. So within a month of the breakout, you have this, you know, contractor for CIA narrative monitoring, monitoring domestic so if you look at this,

if you scroll down now, you'll see, so this is a joint thing they did with the NATO STRATCOM COE. And if you, if you look at this, you'll see like, you know,

this is like their disinformation map. If you go down and you'll see conspiracy communities, Zero hedge, Bill Gates and George Soros. Whoa. So, and this is crazy. If you see,

it's pro-Kremlin voices. So anti-CCC activists. So like run a control F for the word conservative, for example. Just control F. Okay, yeah, yeah. So, okay. And you scroll up a little bit because I think right wing will also get a bunch of these. Okay, a few key analytical highlights.

Okay. So what it shows is that the conversation became flooded with information sources in March and these, you know, all these stuff. The large mega clusters of U.S. right wing accounts. And then if you scroll down. So this is targeting domestic political communities partnered with NATO, which the U.S. government funds, they've gotten, again, at that time, over $7 million in Pentagon grants for this work. And they're targeting U.S. domestic conservative groups. Graphica's decade requires disinformation map, seated on disinformation-specific hash tags,

reveals that while conservative groups have a larger total presence than liberal groups, the combined volume of activity from conservative groups is 27 percent compared with 8 percent from left-leaning. groups. It wasn't just the U.S. They also looked at Italy, France, all across the EU, Latin America. This indicates that not only are more right-wing accounts involved in the conversation, but these accounts are more active in their engagement than left-in. This is about disinformation. Wow. So, like, so if you, how many times does conservative appear in this report? 35 times it says? Is that what that says? It says eight. Okay, try right-wing, right-right-dash-wing. Yeah, 54 times. The French right-wing. The French right-wing.

The Italian, a global heat map partnered with NATO. Scroll through it. So what else you can find? No, no. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, just keep keeping the down button. U.S.

right wing accounts. French right wing have been, oh my God, dude. Anti-CCP and U.S. right-wing clusters include videos of Guo Wangguai. Right. It's like, but think about this. It's like, Corona is a bio weapon.

They're calling them anti-CC groups. I mean, Like is not what Pentagon's supposed to be? Oh, it has, it has this crazy map for every month with color-coded. The heat map they used, did you see this thing where Susan Wichick-Wi-Ki-Kee,

the head of YouTube, you know, just because, you know, YouTube just apologized. They just paid Trump $25 million. I saw that. And then they apologized. Oh, the Biden administration made us censor all these videos. And, you know,

I want to talk about that. Yeah, we'll go into that. Susan Wajiki claimed that she, they took down a million videos that were, that went against COVID Orthodoxy. million videos on YouTube alone. This is where they source this stuff from. Yeah, she died. Yeah, right. But you'll see this, it's, and all of these nodes are us. It's you and me. Right. And we're putting in the CIA Pentagon contractor working with the exact NATO Stratcom, the video we're

about to watch. They're getting the heat map right at the start of COVID, January 2020. So if you just enter a bunch of times and you'll see like what they do, you know, with, you know, just how deep this is. But like, for example, put in like put in bill gates putting gates because didn't bill gates have some crazy conference in new york in right in november or bill gates the gates foundation sponsored event 201 event 201 that's what it was event 201 which had averil haines the deputy director of the central intelligence agency who then became the director of national intelligence the head of the entire odin i throughout the the all of they had her they had the one of the heads of chinese intelligence

And they did a, you know, this multi-day simulation of how, you know, of a bat-borne corona from China coming from a wet market. And then the fourth segment was how to censor the internet to stop it. They had a tabletop simulation for how to call this, you know, questions about the origins disinformation. And this was before he broke out. This is October 2019. This is right beforehand.

And the gates, you know, Gates who's invested in all these income. companies and but what you see is NATO is literally mapping out everybody who criticizes, how much would you need to pay a PR firm to get the power of NATO, the central intelligence agency and the Pentagon to map everyone who criticizes you on social media so that those posts can be censored so that your reputation can be pristine so that all the policies you, you call for go unchallenged. They did this with Bill Gates. If you type in Soros, You'll see like they did you'll see the right wing left wing they got everybody covered. This is insane man.

You see 16 times. This is so fucking scary. Soros, yeah. Yep. Yep. And so 23 times mapping everyone who challenges George Soros. Now again, all this stuff, Soros is invested in all these pharma companies, by the way. The Soros management fund is neck deep.

They are ass to elbow deep in like Abbott Labs. Right. You know, AstraZeneca. They made a huge bet on Astrosanica ahead of the, the, the, the, the, the, Zeneca, which ended up being recalled, by the way. You know, and it's, but like by that point, you already had the full force and credit of the U.S. government, you know, telling everyone get every, whatever name becomes available, shove it up your butt.

Doesn't matter which one it is. Could be Pfizer, could be Moderna, could be EstraZeneca, could be J&J. 23 times. And so Soros, when you see Soros co-investing in these CIA operations like he did when, in the 1980s when he was partnered with USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy and they're destabilizing all these central European governments and then the Soros New York Management Fund. The hedge fund is betting on the foreign currency speculation. They're betting on the Forex markets on the direction of these governments while they're on the ground,

essentially insider trading on, you know, national security secrets are covert operations. But you see this, Soros does this everywhere. And, you know, he does this in Mongolia, he does this in Latin America. And so you'll always see Ned and Soros co-funding things. But just so you don't have to take my word for it, type in, type in Graphica and NATO Stratcom COE. In fact, you can probably go to YouTube and do this. I've seen their YouTube videos together.

Okay. Like new tab. Graphica, NATO Stratcom. Yeah, NATO Stratcom. You're typing C-O-E. Yeah. You're typing COE. Yeah.

And then type in like, you know, COVID. or something after that too. And you'll see, you'll see this. There you go. Well, wait, we scroll up. You'll see it right there. NATO STRACCOMC is partnered with social media analysis from Graphica to analyze and counter disinformation. There were, they're literally joint partners.

And if you type in, you'll see that they did this with this very report. Now, what is the state of this shit now? Is this still happening? Or is they, they pulled this back or what? What's going on? So here you'll see this. You'll see all that stuff there. And if you go to YouTube, you'll see it.

If you just click, like, click video, you'll see a bunch of these like joint videos that they've done together. Yeah. Yeah, blah, blah. There's a million of these. Because we were a victim of this all throughout this time. Like our YouTube channel, we got put in purgatory many times. And now, like, we're to the point where we're terrified to talk about it.

This episode is brought to you by prize picks. You and I make decisions every day. But with prize picks, being right can get you paid. Don't miss out on the excitement this season where it's good to be right. I've used other apps before. But with prize picks, I actually understand why people use this app. It's just clean, fast, and simple. simpler than all the others. You can pick more or less on your player projections, throw a couple of your favorites into a lineup, and you're good to go. That's it. It's daily fantasy without the clutter. This week I'm looking at Sequan Barkley. Can he punch in more than one rushing touchdown? Can Joe Burroughs slaying more than two and a half touchdowns? Or can Josh Allen get over 270 passing yards? You scroll through, you make your lineup in less than a minute, and suddenly Sunday is twice as fun. And one of my favorite parts is if one of your guys goes down early and doesn't come back, you're not automatically sunk. They've got a

an injury reboot. Plus all deposits and withdrawals are smooth. Venmo, Apple Pay, MasterCard, whatever works for you. No waiting to play or wondering where your money went. So if you're like me and you live for those what if I'm right moments during a football game, then prize picks is the way to go. Download the app and use my code Danny to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code D-A-N-N-Y to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. Prize picks. It's good to be right. So like is this?

We've made huge headway at the U.S. federal government level. So for example, Graphica was incubated in the friggin Minerva Center of the Pentagon, the psychological operations research center of the Pentagon. Look this, go to my, I don't know if they still have this up on their website, but if you just like open a new tab there and like go to my X handle, Yeah, or keep that one.

Yeah, yeah. And just type in Graphica, you know, you know, with the K there. And you'll see I pulled the screenshots in case they took it down from the website and scroll down, scroll down. Or if you type in Minerva, actually, do Minerva. M-I-N-R-V-A. Yeah. M-I-N-R-V-A. No E.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, with an E. Oh, with or without Graphica. Yeah, without Graphica. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. So this is, so just pull that first image. Oh, God. Okay. So here is, you know, the grants that Graphica gets. Okay. So you'll see it's the Senate Committee, Senate Intelligence Committee. So that's the committee that oversees the CIA. DARPA, the Knight Foundation, who we just, my, my foundation just published a big report about the Knight Foundation has given over $107 million in disinformation grants to, to all the,

NGOs and private companies to flag disinformation over a hundred million dollars why we just we just published this report this week oh wow but the knight foundation they funded the stanford air observatory they funded um like they're at georgetown now they fund all the night foundation is huge in miami by the way they fund all these performing arts centers in miami while they're while they're partnered with the cia darpa back to this music thing uh but you'll see at the bottom left there it says minerva initiative Because Graphica was was partnered with the Pentagon's psychological operations research center to study Russian disinformation, create these network maps. It was all Trump supporters. Right.

They were like flagging like Alec Baldwin, like Adam Baldwin, you know, as like a Russian. But so if you if you go to the next one, like you'll see there's a Minerva research initiative, which is the DOD's social, cultural, behavioral and political forces. So this is shaping culture, behavior, and politics through our war department. And if you like, and this has had some controversy associated, you go to the next image. But let me show you a couple of things from it, actually. So if you go back to the, just click the X button and scroll down. Yeah, scroll down. Scroll down a little, scroll down one more. Yeah, okay.

So like right here. Okay, so this is the kind of stuff that Minerva Initiative was funding, okay? Because you asked what's the state of this? Yeah. The Minerva Initiative ceases to be. It is an ex-Meneuve initiative. Everyone should thank Pete Hegzeth for that.

Wow. We've gotten so many wins at the U.S. federal level, and among them is Graphica's main government partner for so many years that does the psychological operations work is now shut down. So, so this is, so like one of their grants, post-conflict security structures and citizen buy-in. This project seeks to understand how to stabilize those precarious moments when the state needs to reestablish itself as the accepted authority and create citizen buy-in. So, so this is the Pentagon farming out psychology research for how to make citizens buy-in to the

government. This is what they're doing with COVID policy. citizen buy-in to establish the government as the accepted authority. And I pull a bunch of these other grants. If you hit the X button or even if you, yeah, like scroll down. Yeah, okay, so here's no one. Climate change and alternative governance. So if you scroll down. So this project answers key questions about how different actors contribute to or impede climate governance

from long-term challenges to crisis response, how these actors compete or co- or, cooperate as governors, how these connections impact actors legitimacy and authority in how civilians interact with them and attribute responsibility negatively or positively for climate, for climate management. So this is basically the Pentagon, which is effectively our Department of Energy as well. You know, this is whenever we do Pentagon stuff, the oil and gas folks. This is just billions of dollars going into creating the Truman Show for the citizens of the United States. Exactly what it is. This is literally the Pentagon's psychological operational

Operations Center, research center, giving grants to Texas A&M, by the way, which is like, you know, I've described the pre-Donald Trump era. Like, from Truman until Trump, politics in Washington was always like Texas A&M versus Yale. It was like, you know, the Cowboys versus the Yankees. It was the George Bush, you know, military and oil and gas mafia against the New York, you know, hedge fund world. And so you had, uh, you know, So I just think this is funny. You know, this is where, like, the Bush Intelligence School is at Texas A&M. But what they're doing is there's, they're creating heat maps of anyone who challenges the U.S. government installed energy policies in foreign country so that they can neutralize any citizen who's got more legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry than the public. And if you, I've got a bunch more of these grants if you go to that whole thread. But, but, you know, coming back, if you like, if you scroll down maybe just in that, or in the

thread there on the right. You'll see this manoeuvre. Dot defense.gov. Okay, so like, okay, click this, the second image there maybe. Yeah, try that. Oh, yeah. And you'll see, like, so what they're doing here,

this is, this is the U.S. Army counterinsurgency manual from 2014, I believe, that I pulled here. So this is all of our small war stuff. This is people like, well, why is the Pentagon involved in this? That's so weird. And it's not when you understand that in the 1960s, when JFK, you know, towards this Green Beret model and we moved towards small wars rather than big ones.

The whole thing became about the hearts and minds of the people rather than about, you know, like big tank to tank type stuff or plane to plane type stuff. And so, you know, because we're running insurgencies to topple governments or we're doing counterinsurgencies to stop an upstart movement from deposing one of our installed dictators like Afghanistan. And so you'll see this is in our counterinsurgency guide. legitimacy is the main objective, you know, counterinsurgency forces may achieve this objective through military or non-military means. So the whole goal is to, you know, what did the World Economic

Forum say? You'll have nothing and you'll be happy. Right. The problem is, is when we install a puppet government and they loot everything, like Yeltsin and Russia, they just sell off all of the assets that were held by the people, or installed government in Africa, they'll just sell off the oil, the gas, the diamonds, the gold, the aluminum, the copper, the lithium, the people will be unhappy with their government. They will see the government is illegitimate, so they will start to revolt. So how do you put down that revolt? How do you take everything from the country, but then make them happy with nothing?

And that's like the big, you know, play that's, and they have a whole strategy on how to do that. But Graphica plays into this through neutralizing. They call it, what is it? Shape, clear, hold, build transition, is the five-step. counterinsurgency manual and the second step of that is well the first step is shape you shape the information environment first the second is you get rid of everyone from the insurgency in a big purge they call that the clearing process and then you hold against the residual and then you build and then you transition off to a rule of law but so graphica is in the first two phases of that

so you see this is the exact place this is the the literal center center of excellence that we just talked about at the time this is in 2019 and what this woman from graphica from the exact place partnered with the the nato center of excellence on disinformation and what she's going to pitch to them and i didn't know this at the time we were just going through this because i was giving a lecture on ai censorship because this was about how to use you see an identification they've got these graphica style network node maps and segmentation how to so she's giving this talk about how NATO needs to spend more money on these AI-based censorship firms, and that's the key for NATO winning the information war. But buried in the middle of this, excuse the F-bombs that may

come flying out of this. You'll see, and just, you know, maybe we'll just start with the punchline so it's not missed there. And if you zoom into the goal example, you see that right there? Top right. Yeah, top right. You plunge it on that, Steve. You'll see. But what she's telling this room full of NATO generals is to identify key actors to train and spread desired messaging. And that is a picture of Taylor Swift, as you will hear her confirm. So the U.S. government is funding this conference. The U.S. government is leading NATO is trying to get solicitations from these outside experts on how to win how NATO can win the information war. and I can put down domestic revolts in their own countries from these right-wing populist parties

who are running on neutrality and cheap energy with Russia. And so the goal is to get people like Taylor Swift to train in spread desired messaging. The example, encourage opinion leaders to share counter-information and content. But the risk is that opinion leaders may not want to share content or may accidentally share misling. So anyway, listen to her, go through this. Okay. Let's run it, Steve. and the most common is working with famous people, more main influencers to share information

of particular message. So I include Taylor Swift in here because, are you fucking kidding me? NATO Psychological Operations Unit. It's on the screen. Center of Excellence, the NATO Center of Excellence, in 2019, Taylor fucking Swift, who I probably rage posted about 1,400 times about as a geopolitical

instrument of statecraft because her goddamn IP discography was purchased by the fucking Carlisle Group. Oh, yeah. The private equity arm of the Iraq War with Dick Cheney on its board and the entire Halliburton, West Texas oil mafia. they were the literal funders and profiteers of the entire West Texas military mafia

and it was jointly brought by the Carlisle Group in the Soros Group who's the London and New York financier class of West Texas so the fucking military industrial complex plus its energy stakeholders who rely on the battering ram of the Pentagon the State Department of the CIA but Taylor

Swift's discography. She had to re-record her own shit last year in order to win her right in order to have a peril pair of carrieks to. She had to re-record her own songs so that of course she was real out for Biden in 2020 because George Soros and the Carlisle group bought it. She won Time magazine's person

of the year this year. And I think it was the Wall Street Journal that hypothesized that Taylor Swift would be Biden's quote secret weapon to win the 2024 election. And by the way, her eras tour which is the has the economy of, I think, you know, top 20 nation states by GDP in the entire globe or tour.

Taylor Swift is a cultural battle. Pause right there. Pause right there. So if you, the, so what happened here is, again, understand NATO and the EU are like the same, just the commercial arm and the military arm are the same thing. Okay. And so the EU, the head of the EU, came out and solicited Taylor Swift. when she was like wrapping up her heiress tour to do another leg in Europe ahead of the European election so that she could do a get out the vote drive for pro EU candidates.

It's the same thing that they're doing with, you know, NATO narratives in a general sense. They're trying to rig elections. They're doing the Beyonce strategy that you outline. So, but, you know, this is another one of these things. And actually, if you go to my page and you type in, type in Rumsfeld. if you go to my ex account. I'll just show you another example of this. Just since we're hitting on the military and the music.

Yeah. So she sold, she sold her IP to George Soros and the Carlisle group. Yeah. And then they wouldn't, she tried to buy it back and they refused. Well, because I think it was, I don't know that,

I mean, there's a whole operation around her. I don't know that she necessarily wanted to do it or if it was done through her man. She's, I think she sued her, like, was it Scooter Braun?

scooter yeah she like suit like i think she said she didn't really yeah or like she was misled about the thing and she has got some lawsuit against all of them i don't know what the status it is wait but oh wait scroll down a little bit um scroll down or is that the only one um uh okay do how about copeland type in c o p e l-a-n-d so because we're getting to this like well how does this music get distributed and things like this? Okay, so take like, so all right, before we play this, I'm just gonna read it. So here's Miles Copeland,

the manager of Sting and the Police, producer for REM, dead Kennedys and more, talking about how the Pentagon recruited him to swing hearts and minds in Middle East. Now a little bit, now, now Miles Copeland, before he was the manager of Sting and the police and producer for R&M and all these groups, his, is it father or, I think,

of us his father, maybe grandfather. Miles, the original, I think he's, this is my, the original Miles Copeland was one of the founding members of the OSS and was part of the original group that did the CI's first covert action in Italy in 1948. He wrote a book. If you open up a new tab and you type in Miles Copeland, Cloak and Dagger. Yeah, inside the CIA of this one. Wow.

Now, in this book, he writes that we, that this, you know, as one of the guys, who operationally carried out the CIA's first election rigging event. This was the 1948, April 1948, Italy election. This is what effectively convinced the State Department to give the CIA its plausible liability cloak because of how effective this operation was and they wanted to scale it around the world. And he writes in here that if the CIA had not interfered in that election, the pro-U.S. candidate would have lost 60 to 40.

And we couldn't have done it without the help of the Italian mafia. Wow. who was our boots on the ground stuffing ballot boxes and breaking up opposition meetings. And so, you know, so, you know, Copeland, I forget if it's the son or the grandson, but, you know, becomes this big music producer. And then we'll play, you know, we'll just like play this 50 seconds, I think. So I get a call from Donald Rumsfeld. My secretary comes up to me and says, Miles, it's Donald Rumsfeld on the phone.

I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Pause, pause, pause right there. Let's read this. Okay. Copeland was brought to the Pentagon three times to advise the Bush administration on propaganda plans in the Middle East, including the notion of filming a Bon Jovi concert in Damascus in Syria. With the crowd waving tiny American flags. So this again is like giant outdoor music concerts, artists you know and love, Taylor Swift, Bono, Bon Jovi. And we had just, we're in the middle of the war on terror.

you know, 9-11 is like just happened. And so the Pentagon is working directly with the music industry in order to have this propaganda shape the hearts and minds, to shape the elections to install the control apparatus. But you wonder, like, why is it that you've got the military all up in the Taylor Swift thing through the Carlis group and the Soros group and through Graphica and the NATO Center of Excellence? You know, why is it that you've got Bono doing the war profiteering, you know, for the Ukraine war? and but breaking up you know uh paramilitary threats against the the uk coming from the you know the irish why is it that the the pentagon is sponsoring south by southwest why is it that you've got these

pentagon u.s aid contracts to to you know Bangladeshi hip-hop artists and you know Cuban rap groups and you know the military effectively sponsoring rock concerts at the the burn and wall and it's it's the same thing over and over again but if you just play the clip like you'll see how a plays out. Pick up the phone, you know, thinking this is a joke. And it's the deputy secretary of defense, Tori Clark. And she says, we hear that you know about our music and we think there might be a way

to win hearts and minds in Middle East. And would you help us come up with some programs that we might do and put forward that helps us, you know, make the Rockies not hate us? I said, well, sure, you know, I'm a loyal American. and I'm happy to help. The plan is to find 12 girls who will be the basis of a show featuring Arab dance and Arab music. Okay, all right. Wow.

But it's everywhere. We do this everywhere. It's a checklist item. It's insane. Okay. That was crazy. That was a crazy deep dive into all this stuff. Fascinating shit.

But I want to transition a little bit. One of the things that I really, really want to try to understand better is this whole sort of backdoor way of. And I think I don't, I think you explained that you were, you were working in like the cyber program of where again? State Department. Of the State Department, right? And then you said, I think you mentioned that you got like a call or something from Facebook. Yeah.

And they were getting pressure from other countries. It was Google. Yeah. So in some way. All these other countries like in Europe and in South America, like Brazil, are censoring everything and somehow using, we're using these other countries to pressure us to censor the same way they're doing it. Right. Yeah. So our government is really unique.

I got to get rid of these things. Yeah. Our government is really unique in that we have a First Amendment, which is a, you know, this very ironclad protection. against government's ability to compel the censorship of speech. There's no other country on planet Earth that has that protection. So what happened in Europe is you had this transatlantic agenda, the set of stakeholders who all profit off of what people call

like globalist action. Like for example, there's going to be a transition in the energy market. There are all these stakeholders who were going to profit from that transition. they're going to, you know, profit from the lithium and the cobalt rather than from the fossil fuels. And if you can argue, for example, well, you know, this will hurt our military enemies like Russia because they are a, as John McCain said, a gas station with a military.

When we transition the global market away from gas and we do these mandates away from gas, then, you know, we're knocking out two birds with one stone. But that requires this kind of global collective action. And also what happens in one of these countries impacts what happens in the other. When Donald Trump wins the election here in the U.S., that impacts what happens in Europe when the Poland just had an election. What happens in Poland's election will determine whether or not the U.S. war policy in Ukraine is as effective. Because Poland is the big vector for the liquefied natural gas that the U.S. is shipping from Houston

to use Ukraine's gas architecture by cutting. out Russia, if Poland decides actually we want neutrality with Russia and they don't want to allow all these gas transits or they don't get enough of a cut, then that would be a big problem. So this is a big transatlantic community, if you will, big transatlantic blob. And with the restrictions in the First Amendment, this capacity to censor the Internet is limited with what can be done out of the U.S. federal government. They got away with it for a time, essentially from like 2017 to 2020. for mostly because people didn't know what they were doing.

They had not been exposed. They had not been sued. There was not really political force mobilized to actually hold them accountable to the First Amendment. And as that has dropped off, we've cut the USAID funds. We've cut the State Department funds for this. We've cut the Pentagon programs doing this, most of them. We've cut the National Science Foundation funds for this. We've cut the DHS rules.

Like they are now more and more reliant on foreign censorship laws that force U.S. social media companies to censor in order to keep their markets or suffer giant fines. So like, for example, the Google call that I got in 2020. Right. Was about this set of regulations in Europe called the EU Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act. Okay. Now, the Digital Services Act is the Digital Censorship Act. That's like if you're providing digital services like social media platforms, you need to be answerable to our disinformation code of practice and need to work with the EU Digital Commission

to censor any narratives that the EU calls disinformation. Now, this was championed by the U.S. State Department as a way to get around the First Amendment. When they first started setting up the censorship architecture, they were very careful to try to structure it in a way that was in a legal gray area where they thought they might be able to get away with it. The Atlantic Council, which is, as I mentioned, you know, was funded not just by the Pentagon as seven CIA directors on its board. And one of the biggest contributors is Adrian Arsch, who, you know, runs all the arts and culture stuff in Miami. They, they wrote this memo in 2018 right before the the first domestic censorship agency in the in the U.S.

federal government was set up. It's called SISA. It's got a really boring name, the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency. Yeah, but well, all that means is elections at the time, anything that's deemed critical infrastructure. Right. In the cyberspace is censorable by DHS's SISA unit. Right.

So as I mentioned on January 6th, 2017, they said elections of critical infrastructure. So SISA could tell, you know, it could essentially hire this outside group to tell companies to, you know, ban anyone questioning Dominion or then later they declared public health to be critical infrastructure. So anyone who censored anyone to question COVID, you know, they, SISA did that too. But when the Atlanta Council was first coming up with this idea for SISA's censorship operation, they published a series of memos they called Forward Defense. It's not offense. It's forward defense. Forward defense. And oxymoron.

Yeah. And what they said is, well, the only capacity we have that currently does internet censorship is the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which was set up in 2014 to censor ISIS propaganda so that the State Department could tell YouTube and Twitter and Facebook to take down these ISIS accounts. And they kind of got away with it because it was foreign facing. It wasn't U.S. citizens, so they didn't really have First Amendment protection. And it was terrorism and look at what just happened in Garland, Texas. Look what happened to the Ariana Grande concert. Like, we don't, ISIS terrorism is bad. And they're recruiting people on Facebook and Twitter.

And so they got away with that at that time. But then in 2016, when Trump won, the Global Engagement Center shifted to Russian propaganda and Russian disinformation. And then they just called Trump supporters Russians. They said, so there's now Trump. 2018. I said the problem is, is we can't censor, you know, U.S. citizens out of the State Department. They said, well, okay, they literally have a memo on this. I think I posted the screenshots on my ex account, but I don't mean to put Steve through all the muscle here. They said, well, you know, what we could do is, you know, this is really an intelligence operation. You know,

the CIA can go to Le Monde in France and tell them not to publish something. They can go to the Frankfurt Algraminer in Germany and tell them not to publish something. So they could go to the social media companies and tell them, you know, not to publish something. They can go to the to send tell them not to publish something they said but hi yeah but we can't do that domestically with the cia because now technically you might be able to under some counterintelligence thing is how they saw isn't that what the twitter files were yeah okay and who got busted in the twitter files doing calling doing this it was the atlantic council itself which had this whole unit called the dfr lab that was flagging tens of thousands of posts the atlantic council was

formerly partnered with dhs and it was their idea you know that again seven and CIA directors on their board, and they got three former DHS secretaries, Michael Chertoff, and, you know, all these, all these folks. They got Jet Johnson to co-sign this. He was the one who signed the executive order on January 6th, 2017 to set this all up. And so they said, okay, well, how about the FBI? The FBI's got domestic jurisdiction, and it's an intelligence agency. Hadaday presents in the red corner the undisputed, undefeated weed whacker guys. Champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere. And in the blue corner, the challenger, extra strength, Hannity!

Eye drops and work all day to prevent the release of histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes. And the winner, by knockout, is Padaday. Padaday. Bring it on. If you love diving into culture and comedy, like on Danny Jones podcast, playoff hockey is right up your alley. NHL on T&T has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable. Playoff hockey is a different level, overtime, big hits, and no one coast. The studio crew with Paul Bissonette cracking jokes and Wayne Gretzky breaking things down makes it even more fun to watch.

Every shift matters, and the personalities keep things. lively. Watch the Stanley Cup playoffs on TNT, TBS, True TV, and HBO Max. They said, oh, the problem with that is the FBI has a legal requirement as the investigative armor of the Justice Department to have a predicate of lawbreaking. And it's not illegal to support Donald Trump or to, you know, later questioned COVID-19. So what's the only other domestic intelligence equity you have? You have 17 intelligence agencies. Only two of them are domestic, FBI, DHS. They said DHS is not beholden to the Justice Department. It can be standalone. They don't need a lawbreaking predicate to do this. So they essentially out of DHS created

this combination of the CIA's powers abroad with the FBI's jurisdiction at home. They actually bragged about this on tape at October 2021 disinformation conference at CISSA. They bragged about how they pulled off this structure of this kind of domestic CIA, fusing these, fusing these things. Can't the CIA do it under counterintelligence? Yeah, they could if it had a foreign, if it had a foreign nexus in theory, they could say this is sort of like if it was just Russia gate stuff, it would be unseemly. It would it would have political blowback. They could probably argue because you know, you can target a U.S. citizen who's accused of being a Russian agent under the CIA. This is how they were able to plant, you know, spies CIA spies on

on Trump's campaign. It was like they, you know, they said, well, there's a suspected Russian connection. And so we can spy on our own citizens to stop spies from foreign countries. That's like how they always get away with it. Right. This is how the CIA was sick on Martin Luther King,

for example. Right. You know, like Martin Luther King, they said, well, his biggest financial backer, Stanley Levison, Stanley Levison is affiliated with the American Communist Party. The American Communist Party is affiliated with the Soviet Union, so the CIA can spy on Martin Luther King. Anyway, so, so what happened here is, I think like we're sort of on the general topic of like this, this Google call and what was happening in Europe.

So, so they were aware at the time, the thin ice they were skating on. I don't think they expected to get away with it for as long as they did. And then once they, once they won the 2020 election for about a year and a half, they went completely gangbusters on this until Elon purchased X. Twitter files, Republicans won the House, and then Jim Jordan led this big Jim Jordan. Yes. And Dan Bishop, who was incredible from the DHS subcommittee, led all these exposures. And then didn't Jim Jordan subpoena YouTube files as well? Yep, YouTube files, Facebook files, all that stuff.

I never saw, I never saw much about the YouTube files. They were good. I mean, it was basically. Well, I imagine if the Twitter files are what they are. Yeah. If we saw that they were having weekly meetings with the moderators in the FBI and the CIA, I imagine what YouTube could be, the place that was incubated by the CIA.

Yeah, they published like about 100 pages in it, like a summary report, but unlike the Twitter files, they didn't really give, a lot of it was more executive summaries than actually being able to see the cold, hard screenshots, you know, hundreds of them at a time. Yeah.

So I think the rollout could have been a lot. But I don't know what kind of restrictions they're under when you subpoena, of that stuff to not make all of it publicly available. Like it may be only reviewable by, you know, congressional staffers and then the executive report. So they may have had restrictions on that, but they were very effective. But so what the State Department and the blob was lining up in the background of all

of this was having other countries regulatory bodies be able to do what the First Amendment would not let them do here. And the main weapon in that was the EU Digital Censorship Act. I'm not going to dignify it with the Digital Services Act because it's just a censorship. Act. What that does is, because, you know, Europe, no country in Europe has a First Amendment, but the things that are illegal are like hate speech and, you know, and the like. There's no, it's not like disinformation is not a legal crime. But what the EU does is this kind of supra European body is it says even if it's not illegal in any country, this, you know, kind of insular EU governing

body will be able to decide what disinformation is and it will be able to tell the platforms that either you have to throttle that content or suppress it algorithmically and also allow all of our vetted researchers to get inside access to all the internal platform data so we can create these topographical network maps of disinformation spreaders or else you will suffer billions of dollars and fines the penalty for noncompliance is six percent of course global annual revenue under this law, which is in effect as we speak, 6% of global annual revenue. In fines?

In fines for noncompliance with the Digital Censorship Act. Now, that means all of the revenue that, like, YouTube gets in India, in New Zealand, in Madagascar, in the United States, in Brazil, has to be turned over to the European Union if they don't comply with the censorship order. 6% of global revenue. You know, a lot of companies, most Fortune 500 companies operate at like a, you know, what is the typical private equity fund?

A milestone is like 8%, right? That's like a good return on investment where, you know, the performance fee kicks in. And this is six, not of profit. Total. Like 6% of all revenue. Right. which means, you know, like a lot of companies don't even have a 6% profit margin, let alone, you know,

so the alternative is you lose the EU market. And how can you be a global social media platform without access to the 550 million people in Europe? So they're completely under the gun of this. And this is now all of the people who do, who determine what disinformation, you know, is are the worst people on earth that you can imagine to do this. I can imagine. Like, give me a example. Like, like NewsGuard is partnered with the EU DISTIC mission on this. Right.

John Kariaki was showing me this stuff. And who's on the board of NewsGuard? Oh my God. It's diabolical. Rick Stengel, the former head of the Global Engagement Center, who, you know, as we talked about, was the OG U.S. censorship agency. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former head of NATO. He was the guy who was the head of NATO from 2009 to 2014.

2014 is right when the Drosimov Doctrine kicks off. He's the guy who sets up effectively, the NATO Stratcom COE. And then now he's the guy on the board, you know, that's of the company that's directly partnered with the EU Digital Commission to determine what disinformation is. You can just look this up.

Look up, yeah. Well, go to the board of advisors. Oh, advisors. Yeah. Yeah, this is advising on what disinformation is. Just go to the website. I'm sure it's lifted on the website. Yeah.

Well, let's, uh, maybe. Maybe not. It definitely was. I mean, if you just go to my X account, you'll see all the screenshots. Our team. Yeah, go to our team. Editorial.

Go down to advisors. Keep going. Unless they scrub this, which would be hilarious. Keep going. No, just keep scrolling down. Business. Technology.

That's hilarious if they delete. They always delete that I were talking. If you just go to my, if you just go to my ex, my ex account, you'll see, I have it all archive there. I have the archive.is and that stuff. But if you just type in like NewsGuard and maybe NATO or just NewsGuard will get you there. Yeah.

Down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Down, down, down, down. Okay, so just a little bit more on this. They're partnered with Randy Weingarten's American Federation teachers. If you, like, pop that open. Now, this is another blob entity. Randy Weingarten was on the executive board of the National Nound for Democracy. is the head of the 1.7 million teachers union.

Randy Weingarten, who had the Ukraine emoji in her ex account. And so it's another like this very teachers union partnered with the, so again, this is like their news guard is the narrative guard. They just ban anything that's pro-populous. And if you scroll over, like you'll see, yeah, just like hit a couple of these.

You'll see this is a traffic like news nutrition labels. So like your YouTube video will be flagged in schools so that like kids can't cite anything they learn from you but click the ax and we'll just scroll down down down down down okay and you'll see there that but uh go up yeah right where the circle circle guys were that's fine that's fine well yeah i was just going to show like and this is the head of news guard okay doing disinformation in democracy you'll see reney dress she was one of the people who was the three people presenting in that nato stracom video by the way yes yeah as i mentioned uh you know the for an in observatory people. But okay, so X out of that.

And you'll see, by the way, you'll see the George Bush Institute is one of the co-sponsors in Freedom House, which is one of the OG CIA NGO. Four star general. Yes. Yes. Right.

Yes. So on the board of news guard, determining what disinformation is. Michael Hayden. Michael Hayden, head of the CIA, head of the NSA, four star general. So this is, you know,

Michael B. Hayden, I think, was averaging like one or two death threats per week against Donald Trump. He was like, you know, he should hang and like, you know, he should be, tried for treason, and this is who's determining, you know, what disinformation is to the EU. Go ahead, open up a new tab, for example, and that's funny if they scrub that from the website, and type in NewsGuard EU disinformation. They're selling compliance services for this. The European Commission announces NewsGuard as new partner. There you go. The Code of Practice on

disinformation. And if you scroll down, you'll see they talk about, they're going to help us censor climate narratives and they're going to censor like you know Jesus they're going to apply all these uh yeah the the world health organization to identify COVID-19, you know, infodemics to stop the spread and also the stop of monetizing disinformation because NewsGuard works with the ad the supply side ad exchanges to kill all the the ad revenue. So anyway, so you know, NewsGuard American company. Oh, here's another great thing. Type in, um, Go to Google and type in NewsGuard MyQuest. Just type in My Quest.

And then type in middleware after that. Space middleware, one word, yeah, yeah. Where? Yeah. So what they do is they sell censorship blacklist. Okay, scroll down, yeah, here go, boom, first one. What I learned on My Quest. So this is the NewsGuard CEO.

And you'll see what it says, can you just zoom into What's that subtitle say? Middleware could be the solution to our tech woes, but Congress is going to have to force the internet companies to use it. Okay, so middleware was this branding term they came up with. They came up with this out of the Stanford Air and Observatory. In fact, I think he even references this. This is this Francis Fukuyama, like CIA State Department node.

They had all these like prep conferences for how we can install censorship out of the government. how can we bill it in a way that's politically palatable? So they came up with this concept. Oh, it's not censorship software that NewsGuard sells. It's middleware that's simply a filter in between the platform and the user. And we can create, instead of having forced government censorship, we can bill it as a competitive middleware industry where like six or seven different disinformation companies will, it won't be like a monopoly on speech.

You'll get a choice between six or seven different. Coke and Pepsi disinformation filters that have to be forcibly applied. So, so, you know, but again, what he's saying there, if you just again scroll up or you can scroll down, but just to come back to, you can see those words on your screen, you can really take that in. What he's saying is, listen, the social media companies don't want to buy our coerced censorship blacklist. Right. So Congress is going to have to force them to to buy it from us. But we have a First Amendment,

and that shit is incredibly politically unpopular. So if the U.S. government can't force it, Hillary Clinton's little friends in Europe will. Tony Blinken's little friends in Europe will. George Bush's little friends in Europe will. And that is what they've done. They've gotten Europe to use NewsGuard by force under penalty of the mandatory code of practice on disinformation.

And the only way to start, this is through the Donald Trump State Department and Donald Trump White House threatening to punch them back a hundred times harder. Every French wine company, Macron is all over this, every German, you know, pharmaceutical company and manufacturing company, we need to have a retaliatory regulatory structure in place. We need to have tariff threats through the roof. We need to threaten to leave NATO or to slash NATO funding because if this thing is enforced, that's the end of free speech in America. They won't have a choice. Yeah, how does this come back on us? Because U.S. companies get fined into oblivion. Yeah. The only way to comply is by setting up this compliance

node and then having that compliance node do everything the EU body says. And, and, you know, I've played this clip a million times. But if you go to my ex account and you play, you put the word restaff in, you'll see in 23, these exact same censorship operatives from the national down from democracy, and the Atlantic Council who are in this meeting, just put a hyphen in between REE and staff. And I'm sorry that I played this clip like everywhere I go now, but it's so important. It's about a minute and 20 seconds,

but it'll answer your question directly about what's going on here. So speaking here is Rebecca Tromblay, who is the head of tech toxic conversations in Twitter 1.0. And she's flanked by Dean Jackson from the National Dount for Democracy, the CIA cut out, And that now at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

which was run for seven, seven years by Bill Burns, the CIA director. All these are funded by the U.S. government. And then Katie Harbath is also in this. She's a National Endowment for Democracy and Atlantic Council. So the whole thing is this CIA NGO censorship soup. And you'll see this is in December 2020, after Elon had already completed the acquisition of X. Right.

And Mark Zuckerberg in the background, this is before he told Jim Jordan that he, was, you know, that he apologized and was getting rid of the fact-jank team. He'd already begun to do this. This was how I had sort of advanced notice about what Zuckerberg was doing, because I was just falling with the sensory people who were saying, they're saying there's this chain effect. We're screwed in the U.S. here unless Europe saves us.

If it weren't for Europe right now, I think that I would feel pretty defeated and despondent in this moment. It is certainly become much, much more difficult for outside researchers. to do the sorts of, right, of the options that you listen here, to actually engage directly with people at the platforms because there are simply fewer of them, right? We spent literally years building up relationships with good folks at all of these platforms

who are trying to do the right thing. And for the most part, they're gone, right? It's really, really difficult to know who to reach out to, who to work with. If it weren't for the European Union and the Digital Services Act, I don't know that we'd have much hope of rectifying that situation at all. But given the sort of requirements that for performing risk assessments, for sharing more transparent information with the public, and crucially for sharing data with researchers,

those are the flag. I do think that we still have some options for leverage to continue the work that we've been doing. And hopefully, ultimately, that leads to a sort of restaffing of some of these positions, increased focus again as the DSA begins to come into force and the platforms feel the real pressure of actual enforcement action. These are American professional censors think going to Europe to get their censorship jobs back in the United States. And that's what we're up against right now. And thank God. So they're like doing a test run over there to like sort of like carbon copy it back

beyond a test run. It's in effect. They're, they're skittish about enforcement, I think, because they're afraid of Trump's blowback, but they're already imposing these compliance costs on the tech companies. They've had to set up these compliance units, all the tech companies, but we're well beyond a test run. But thank God that the Trump administration has stalled trade talks. This major EU-U.S. Trade deal has been stalled over this exact thing. Really? J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and the State Department of National Security Council people are prized to this threat now and they're taking it very, very seriously. So I don't mean to cut you off, but I want to talk about, and you can finish your thought there, but I want to ask you about this thing with YouTube paying Donald Trump and this new thing that's happening with YouTube and Trump. Yeah. Well, they, you know, they paid him, I think, $24.5 million. YouTube did for, you know, his compensation for banning him.

2021. And then they have pledged to get rid of third party fact checking and move towards an X-style community notes. And they have pledged to start a pilot program to allow banned accounts who questioned COVID-19 or the 2020 election to come back on the platform. That is not up yet, but they've said they're going to be starting it soon. And they have blamed the Biden administration for the censorship actions. They said they really, They told us to do it and we shouldn't have complied. It's sort of like what Zuckerberg said. But I think Zuckerberg didn't want to do it, whereas Google did it willingly, joyfully.

Zuckerberg. Interesting. Yeah. Zuckerberg in 2019 was giving speeches about how he thought censorship had gone too far. And then he got hit with a $60 billion market cap devastation from the advertiser boycotts under the change the terms. campaign against Facebook and then they caved. Zuckerberg cares more about is, I think Zuckerberg and Elon actually have very, very, very similar values.

The difference is Elon has a spine. And Elon is willing to, you know, when the advertiser boycott hit X, Elon went on what was it, like Aaron Sorkin and said, and he was asked, what will you do if it bankrupts X? And Elon said, the world will watch, you know, fuck you to the advertisers. Right. Whereas Zuck, I think it's, you know, Facebook is his baby. Meta is his baby.

And he was, I mean, because you see the emails. It was in the Facebook files that Jim Jordan showed where Zuckerberg is being told by, I think it was Nick Clegg, who is the UK Labor Party guy, UK liberals folks who then became head of global affairs for meta. And Zuckerberg says, you know, do we really have to, you know, get rid of this COVID misinformation stuff that the White House flagged? And Nick Clegg says, yeah, we have to because we have bigger fish to fry with the Biden administration. So we should try to think creatively on how to be receptive to their demands.

Yeah. And a lot of this was they needed their help against Europe, against all these fines, not from the Digital Services Act, from the Digital Markets Act, mostly. And so Zuckerberg response. that email and says, can we at least tell the public the Biden administration made us do it? And then the email trail runs dry. But I have to imagine a phone. This is in 2021. Like mid-2021. So Zuckerberg didn't want to do it in the first place. When they, you know, when he was told essentially by his business team, listen, we got to play ball because we need the government's help. He says, well, can we at least tell the public? Like this is why we're doing it.

And presumably they didn't tell the public because that would have under- mind the giving of the favor to the Biden administration. Right. And then there was that thing that he talks about that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio, like pointing at the TV or something like that that he got a little flag for. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Now, the White House was telling them to take down, you know, the Leo DiCaprio. So Trump has how many more days left in office and YouTube is, I mean, we're almost a year into his last term, I guess. And YouTube is saying they're going to start moving in this direction and start. And start. are leveling out the playing field.

Yeah. At what point do they actually make this happen? And like what happens when the next president comes along? Yeah. So it seems like there's just this constant back and forth. So the bigger you are, the deeper your pockets, the more you're a threat to the national sovereignty of foreign countries. Like Google was under this pressure in 2020.

And again, a lot of this is like the Trump administration was completely in term one, betraying him at every agency, at the FBI, at the CIA, at the DoD, and at state where I was. Like, when I came to state, my bureau was championing the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. We, that was like they wanted this censorship capacity for Europe to stop, you know, pro-Trump disinformation. But what Google called me about was about negotiating with, because they're one of our stakeholders. They're a national champion. We have this kind of like policy at state that we define the national interest as like what's best for American citizens and American interests. And we define American interest as like part of that is

our national champions, our big multinational companies who operate internationally. So like if it's good for ExxonMobil, it's good for the United States. If it's good for Microsoft, it's good for the United States. If it's good for Google, it's good for the United States. And so I was the deputy assistant secretary in the bureau and my job was like interfacing with our national champions to get their feedback about our negotiating posture with you know these international laws and so one of them at the time was the EU Digital Markets Act which is like the monopoly side so it's the censorship side for like control over speech policies that's the digital censorship act and then there's the Digital Markets Act which was you know basically fines on Google um as Europe was pursuing what they called their

strategic digital autonomy initiative, which was like, it's so ironic. Like they started this when Trump won in 2016 because they, you know, Europe was saying, Trump is going to wield the social media companies as a geopolitical weapon against Europe. And we need to have digital autonomy, you know, like three weeks later, you know, all those companies were censoring Trump in cahoots with Europe. But it was still used as a crowbar to make sure that those companies, would censor what Europe was doing. And so Google wanted the State Department's help

to strike a negotiating posture with Europe that would protect Google's profits to the maximum degree. And they identified the EU Digital Markets Act to me as, quote, the number one existential threat for alphabet over the next five years. Okay. And, you know, meanwhile, like, they had just banned my boss, Donald Trump.

And I'm, like, sitting on the, this phone they've got nine Google lobbyists and these are all like I looked up all their LinkedIn histories you know before the call it was weird how they even got on my calendar in the first place because it's like it's like a process to speak to the deputy assistant secretary and it's normally like a multi-week process to get on the calendar and like my secretary just told me like a day or two before the call they were like yeah so Google is on your calendar for I'm like I didn't approve this who who approved And I think it was just kind of the...

Google jumps the line. It was like the unspoken. The guy in the job before me, you know, got this like, what I'm told is like a kind of fat salary as a Google lobbyist, like right after doing my job. Like, that's like how you make your money is you help Google and Facebook and Microsoft while you're running the International Communications and Information Technology Bureau, the big tech bureau at state. Yeah.

And then you go and work for them as a lobbyist because they'll pay you a lot of money because you've already been good to them and shown that you're... Same thing with the pharmaceutical industry. Yeah. No, it's the same thing. And so I guess, you know, they could jump the line. And at the time, I thought, well, you know what? Actually, I'm kind of glad you did because I'm awfully curious about what you have to say about this. Yeah.

Because, you know, they're asking for the Trump government's help while they had banned Trump from YouTube. It was completely insane. YouTube, Google.com is the number one most traffic website on planet Earth. Number two is YouTube.com. And they're the same company. They are already rigged Google search. They launched something called Project Owl in early 2017. I had Robert Epstein on here and explained a lot of this stuff.

Yeah, the authoritative news re-ranking stuff. So they'd already completely... Where you like during the presidential run between Hillary and Trump, you could try to Google something, positive about Trump, you'd find only negative things. Try to find something negative about Hillary. You couldn't find anything. Yeah.

And then they formalized that with this, you know, this thing called Project Allen. You can pull it up if you want in the background. But they launched this authoritative news re-ranking program in 2017. In fact, one of the USAID funded. Yeah, here you go. Wow. Look at that logo. Yeah.

Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Watch is over you. It's not big brother. It's big Google owl. That's actually pretty cool. That's a pretty cool looking owl.

Yeah. Yeah. I love the, I love that one. The Illuminati money sign. It's like subtle, but. But an internal initiative to improve search quality by combating the spread of miss info and hate speech. Yeah. Another thing I want to ask you about after this is this hate speech thing in California.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, this is the same. It's the same crew. They literally have a whole state level strategy. But actually, if you go to. If you go to YouTube and you type in D4, one word, D4 disinformation. On YouTube?

Yeah, on YouTube. You'll find this Globsec video, Global Security, from May 2017. And you'll watch as Michael Chertoff and the National Endowment for Democracy corner, the head of content moderation for Central and Eastern Europe for Google, in a room in 2017 and tell them that they need to do more to censor populist voices because they are undermining, you know, the legitimacy of NATO and like, D4 disinformation. Do you see?

D4? Yeah, typing Globsec. Yeah, one word, G-L-O-B-S-E-C. Please tell me they didn't pull this down. Yeah. Oh, scroll down. Oh, my God. They pulled it.

Oh, my God. This is my favorite video in the world. How many of you used it out? Okay, wait, yeah, go to the Globesec YouTube video. That one? Channel? Go to search. Type in D4.

Thank God I downloaded. Yeah, you're there. Okay, there go. There you go. I wonder why it's not in search. Okay, so right there. Yeah, when I first found this video, it had like six. I got a lot of videos later have to find like that.

Yeah. Including this one probably. I have like multiple five terabyte hard drives just for this. Okay, so it's like pause here. So what you'll see is, okay, they're doing like the intro montage. By the Globsec is funded by the State Department. USAID, the host of this. They're playing a montage of like, you know, Hitler propaganda to JFK conspiracies to the election of Donald Trump. That's like what they're about to do here.

You know, it's like, but so scroll down. It says, so can democracy withstand the information revolution? So, so. Wow. And GlobSec, by the way, is one of the credentialed implementers of the EU Digital Censorship Act. So funded by U.S. aid to administer Europe's Censorship law, it's like, think about, we're, our tax dollars are paying for the implementation of a foreign government censorship law to censor our voices. And this is the group doing it. So click, click the more button. Let me just read you the description of this video. Social media are transforming the world in a much faster way than anyone could have predicted.

Traditional media are being challenged by the plurality of internet news sources and social networks. internet users are relying on the abundance of unfiltered alternative media that often spread fake news or propaganda yeah of course they don't spread propaganda at USAID and the US state department search engines and social media work with algorithms that personalized visible content thus preventing exposure to differing views or reinforcing confirmation but research shows that populist right-wing groups excel in abusing these algorithms that amplify their propaganda and spread it like a virus across the internet. Populist right-wing groups. What can be done to protect internet users from fake news, lies and propaganda?

How can this be done without introducing censorship? You'll see how quick they gave up on that. What is the role of IT companies in this matter? To what extent to social media bear responsibility for us losing the 2016 election and the Brexit referendum and what's happening in France with Marine Le Pen and Italy with the five-star movement and Spain with the Vox Party and Germany with the AFD party. How can we fight these extremist groups, the right-wing populist groups, and the internet battlefield and environment they have so successfully mastered? And who's, who's, you know, here, Michael Chertoff, the head of DHS and the mastermind behind the DHS Sisa operation. It was part, it was his idea out of the Atlantic Council. And in fact, Michael Chertoff became

the head of the disinformation governance board at DHS when Nina Jankovitz had to step down. fun fact oh he was also the he was also the head of freedom house which is the big CIA NGO you know from the 1980s oh and on top of that he was also the chairman of BAE systems the biggest military contractor Mattel kingdom BAE systems yeah they basically run the British Ministry of Defense right right right who else Christopher Walker who's the head of analysis this is the research and it's like the CIA right has the two tracks you know the analyst division and the operations division And Ned is the same way. They've got their covert operations division,

and then they've got their, you know, intelligence analysis and, you know, brain function. And he's the head of the brain function for the CIA's National Now for Democracy. And who they have cornered in the room, the head of public policy, that's what content moderation is folded under, for both Facebook and Google.

So, and what you'll see, like in this video, if you watch it, is you've got, The Atlantic Council director, you know, the guy who's on the board of the, you know, the CIA's think tank and NATO's think tank. And the guy who's the head of the brain for the CIA's most prolific, you know, cutout telling Google and Facebook in early 2017, you have to stop any ability to amplify right-wing populist groups in the U.S. and Europe. You need to do more and more, more. and the Google rep there says, listen, we've already started this project. Al, we've done our authoritative re-ranking. What more do you want us to do?

And you'll hear them dog pile on them while they're still being monetized. You need to use Google. What about Google ads? What about, you know, the amplification funnel that's happening at the YouTube level? So this was happening under Trump One. This was not just the Biden administration. But Trump didn't know it and they didn't want to believe it. I was the chicken little dude in the White House in 2020.

I wrote the speech for Trump in 2020 about censorship in June when 27 state attorney generals came to talk about censorship and then said, actually we don't want to talk about censorship at these remarks because we have a 50 state consensus with the Democrats on taking on Google and Facebook. And if we make it about censorship, we'll lose the Democrats. And we said, no, no, this is about censorship. We're talking about censorship. They said, well, can we frame it as consumer abuse? It's like, no, we have to talk about censors. So I write this beautiful speech.

It's like June 2020. Trump, no, look, Trump always does his own thing with speeches. That's the beauty of Trump. Yes. But, you know, after reading the introductions, he like, you know, glances down because when he's seated, he has the printout rather than teleprompter. And he sees that it's about, and this is like my Mona Lisa. I was like, we're going to, we're going to red pill the entire world about everything.

And all the statistics and all the networks, it all the names. It had everything that was going to be done. done and he like he's like glancing down and looks up and he goes you know everyone talks about censorship like it's a big deal let them try let them try to do uh let them try to censor me they tried to do that before in 2016 it's not going to work and i'm like sitting here like whatever hairs i have remaining at the time i'm just like tearing out i'm like oh my god even when it's right in front of them they refuse to believe it and then like the next month trump started getting fact checked on X or on Twitter, you know, and suddenly it was like censorship is real.

But meanwhile, at the time, millions of his own supporters had been either de-platformed, you know, shadow banned, ghost ban, recommendation ban, demonetized. But, you know, at the time, Trump, in the middle of the pandemic, Trump was running on an all-time stock market highs. They were calling MAGA, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon because the stock prices of the roof. So they didn't want to take it on. The whole thing was repeal Section 230. Yeah. You know, close your eyes and Babe Ruth swing.

We're just going to, this one tweak to some, you know, Federal Communications Act regulation from the 1990s is going to save us. And it's like they did not want to do trench warfare. They didn't want to do it with the State Department, with the Pentagon, with the National Science Foundation, with DHS, with the FBI, with the NGOs, with the tech. companies themselves. And so the censorship apparatus ran on autopilot. And thank God, they're, they've wised up to it. And they're, they're taken off the hydra head limb by limb right now.

So the section 230 thing is interesting. It was a section 230 or 40? Two 30. So in 2020, the Democrats were threatening to pull this section 230 thing from these social media platforms. And section 230 basically is like a, uh, a lawsuit shield. Yeah. For the, these giant companies, these social media companies that are essentially, you know, like utilities. Right. So that they're not liable for someone going on their platform and posting something, right? Yeah. And now it seems like after this Charlie Kirk assassination that the Republicans are doing this.

You had, you had Lindsey Graham just say something about Section 230. You had Pam Bondi. She just said something about hate speech and Section 230, but I think she walked it back. Yeah. And just the other day, and I was watching this Tucker Carlson monologue that he did the other day where he was showing basically all these Democrats in Congress and talking about threatening Section 230, talking to Cash Patel. You need to start talking about Section 230. They're talking about you, Cash Patel. They're saying mean things about you.

And what is going on with that? And can you explain to people, can you give them like a better context of like this whole Section 230 thing and using that as like this stick against these social media companies? Yeah. So it boils down to this platform publisher. So the idea is when the internet came online in the 1990s and you started to have, you know, independent websites, before social media, this law was formed that basically allowed the modern internet. Whether it's a comment on your blog or a static web 1.0, you know, website that somebody else, like, you know, writes on. what section 230 of the you allowed you to do is it said if you are if you are a platform rather than a publisher with editorial control if you're a neutral platform and you do not exercise

editorial discretion over what content is hosted then you have a liability from lawsuits like defamation lawsuits. Like if the New York Times writes something about you, they, New York Times is a publisher, you can sue the New York Times for defamation. If Twitter in its kind of classical state, if a user, if they simply were a platform that hosted but did not exercise editorial discretion over what was published, then the idea is you could do a defamation lawsuit against that user who posts on that platform, but you could not sue the platform itself because it had a liability shield from Section 230. And so when all the social media companies in 2017-2018 started exercising editorial discretion

over what could be published on their platforms through their Terms of Service policies, it naturally created this wave of pressure and, you know, legal scholarship around violations of section 230 because they were no longer acting as platforms. They were clearly acting as a publisher by deciding what kind of content could or couldn't be published there. And then, you know, there's sort of a counter argument where it's saying, well, we're not deciding individually what's published. We're setting general terms of service policies. And then, you know, so it's not like we published your you're still your own publisher on our

site but there are rules to qualify for what it can be to so that like fight has played out and if you just get rid of the section 230 entirely all you're going to be left with is you know YouTube and Facebook because nobody else can like gab for example or like bit shoot

or Odyssey or like smaller platforms will not be able to comply you know they'll be bankrupt very quickly. And, you know, so the question, I've always seen this, this kind of Chinese finger trap. It's like you put your fingers into the section 230 and you can never get it out because it's just really, really hard to find the exact constellation of puzzle pieces that protects

the ability to have a tech market online, but then also preempts the kind of censorship decisions that the American people don't like, but then you also do want to be able to have platforms have discretion over what kind of content they host. Like that the issue is is when you have these giant mega platforms that functionally are utilities, you can't operate in the modern world. Try being a salesperson without a Facebook account, an Instagram, a YouTube, a LinkedIn. Like you're kicked back to the industrial age. You can't have a modern job. You can't have a modern job. You can't be a mom and pop florist shop unless you can promote your business. So, so, you know, in terms of what the Trump administration is doing right now,

there's, there are things that have made me a little uncomfortable that have gone up to a certain line. There's an open question about, like, so I don't know that like, like, Lindsay, Graham actually I'm not familiar with what he specifically said that you mentioned but if you're saying he was threatening section 230 enforcement well I mean to me that's so you can find a clip of it Steve Lindsay Graham talking about section 230 recently so so there's a couple things here one is you know incitement to these protections are mostly in my view around political speech like the first amendment is a protection of speech but there are you know, you don't have protection to incite violence, for example.

Right. And there's standards. There's something called the Brandenburg standard. Brandenburg v. Ohio was a case from a couple decades ago that established, like, where the line is about incitement. You know, there has to be like an imminent threat to bodily harm. Like it can't be like some, it's First Amendment protected speech to, you know, say, I think someone should die or, you know. but there are lines where if you say, you know, go here now and do this.

Yeah, right, exactly. If it's like imminent, this is like, you know, firing a movie theater type thing. And so, you know, with the Charlie Kirk stuff, I think that you've got, you've got this really kind of dangerous moment where you had what I think is the most high profile assassination in modern history and done in a way that was way more vivid than any assassination, I think, in world history.

I mean, we don't know what JFK looked like when it took years for the Zepruder film to come out. Right. And that was fuzzy. It was like 10 years or something. Can you imagine if we had social media during the 60s? Yeah. But with Charlie, you saw right away.

I mean, you saw the life leave his body. You saw the close-up shots are absolutely gory and gruesome. And it was done in broad daylight at an open college event. And, you know, there, there is, it's, you know, it's not, if you say, you know, assassinate Mike Ben's next, you know, assassinate, you know, Danny Jones. There's, there is a kind of, well, this is not really like political speech. This is, you know, incitement to violence. And the question is is, is it actually incitement. Right. You know, now, it's, one thing to say, you know, Charlie Kirk sucked. He was a, he was a horrible person. He's, you know, you know, or even to say something like it's a good thing he died or that. So that's uncouth. It's completely distasteful. I completely disagree with it. That would be like a

political commentary on an event. You have seen a lot of language that is really, dark in that gray zone like when you see someone say Matt Walsh next and then you see that that person is you know got like a 65,000 followers and has like a you know a history maybe the tweet right before that was them drawing you know like a you know a bullet point you know laser sight on on the thing and you know I think what's had I'm I'm not as worried about for the free speech environment about some of the things that are happening with this Charlie Kirk thing because This is not like this is a health care dispute or, you know, immigration dispute or a, you know, DEI.

This is like you have to, I mean, you look at what happened with this, this ice shooting. Like the week after Charlie Kirk, right? This guy goes in and engraves bullets, say, anti-ice and goes and shoots up this ice facility and evidently kills like migrants detained there. but, you know, he had, you know, engravings just like the Charlie Kirk shooter. And there were a couple other weird things that, you know, so, but I don't think in general that the conservative base has, you know, wants to replicate what Democrats and the kind of never Trump Republicans did in the 2020 era.

You know, there isn't, the only thing that I've seen that comes close to the, that line so far because if lindsay graham says that i don't i mean there were so many times that was said by republicans during russia gate you had the you had the republican controlled house intelligence committee you know threatening section 230 against that this is one of the reasons that it went this far with censorship because the democrats were calling for censorship but the republicans who were in control of congress at the time were all like these neocon republican types who were all part of this like Russiagate blob and they wanted a crackdown on Russian

disinformation too and they were threatening Section 230 alongside Donald Trump. But you know I think when Pam Bondi made that statement about hate speech she quickly ran into the ire of the base over that and she issued I think what was intended to be a clarification where she said oh I meant hate speech that crosses the line into incitement to violence And so I think that was an attempt to say like, because a lot of these people, the regular jobs, they're not fluid with the language and the distinctions. You know, her job is running the Justice Department. She, you know, doesn't have like a bachelor's in disinformation studies and this sort of thing. And so I think she probably just grabbed the nearest available term for, you know, speech that we will take action against. But obviously we don't want action just on, we want a copy of Europe style.

hate speech laws but obviously if you have incitement of violence you don't need hate speech first um but so i think that she did try to correct that to make it synchronize with free speech principles you know there is this question about whether or not the fccc applied pressure around the jimmy kimmel thing next are yeah but um i don't actually know what the underlying facts on the ground were about what the fcc actually did in that case i know there were allegation that there was pressure to potentially hold up like a merger. You know, at the end of the day, it lasted a week. And even Sinclair is, you know, is back on, you know, with Kimmel.

So I think that every movement is prone to passions. The question is is whether they become institutionalized, you know, in the heat of something like, you know, your top leader, Charlie Kirk is the biggest boots on the ground operation in the entire GEOC. OP. And you knew him, right? I knew him. He was, he reached out. I, I, I had less than 5,000 followers when Charlie Kirk reached out to me. I just started my ex account in December 22. I started like December 9th in like two or three weeks. He reached out to me and was like, hey, I like what you're doing. This is really interesting. You'd come on my show and tell my audience. This is before Fox and, you know, mainstream media and Tucker and Rogan and all this. Like he, he, he, he managed to. Manage to. to cultivate young talent everywhere. And I had no doubt he was gonna be President of the United States one day.

If he was 35, I could see him as J.D. Vance's VP in 2028. But, you know, when you see that, there's going to be passions, especially when, I mean, everybody, everybody who does public speaking had to completely reevaluate their entire security situation in light of that. You know, I got a million phone calls, about that. I know that people like Tim Poole like canceled events and because if there's not a severe

like federal enforcement effort to neutralize that and these like groups like Antivov gotten away with this forever. They got away with this under Trump one. They got away with it on inauguration day. And you know that like the local DAs are going to let these people off. Like these SOROS DAs, it's a factory. They get the legal bills paid for by the National Lawyers Guild The soros prosecutors let them off. And so it's like half the country becomes a no-go zone. Right. So I think in that moment, there was a kind of passionate search for we don't want copycat killers.

We don't want people who are going to get the glory of killing, you know, the next, you know, big conservative voice. But I think that where we've settled, you know, within two weeks' time is you don't really see like, calls for censorship. What you see is people voting with their feet. You see people, you know, canceling subscriptions to things. And you see, you know, people trying to, you know, vote with their dollars. But all in all, I think it was actually a very restrained response. Yeah. So what was the context of this? Steve? Is this a clip or is this, uh, did you find the actual clip or is this just like a summary of the context of it? This is a section. So he says, this is taken out of the video. Section two, how long is the video?

five minutes eight minutes yeah so he says section 230 needs to be repealed he said if you're mad at social media companies that radicalize our nation you should be mad well so i mean again just my thoughts on this is like this is saying you know we the alpha centauri should have a green energy program it's like okay right like you know when are we going to alpha centari right like like nothing's going to happen on section 230. It's this is I exist because everyone focused on section 230 like I was the person like in Trump one telling everybody stop tweeting repeal section 230 it is the ultimate Chinese finger trap. It's a dead end. It's not going anywhere. You just don't want to have to stare into the sun and confront the enormity of what you're up against. You need the trench warfare against the government

agencies the NGOs the for-profit sensory mercenary firms the rapid response units the international side of this with the the foreign governments the tech companies themselves like they they wanted an easy way out and so they kept striking out on a home run swing and so when i see this this is like all bark no bite and not a very loud bark at that right now um so that this law that's passed the state legislator in California is like it's a hate speech law for social media companies. And I think Gavin Newsom has like another week or so to sign it and then it would go into law, going to effect in 2027. Yeah. Yeah, this has been a long time coming. They've been working on this strategy for a couple of years now. So in fact, there's a great norm. If you pull up,

go to Norm Eisen Democracy Playbook 2025. five. Let's a good pause with there. I got to take a leak real quick. Yeah, yeah. We'll be right back. So, yeah, we're talking about these state laws and what's happening. Right, right.

So you got three levels to the sort of government architecture of the censorship industrial complex. Mm-hmm. You have the national, the U.S. national government, our federal government, which, you know, turns every four years on elections. Then you've got the substructure of the state. that in the states, you've got every state level government, and then you've got international governments. So you've got the state, federal, and international side of this. And all three of

those are in flux in terms of the state of freedom versus censorship and the policies that they promote. All three of those are angles of attack, and manipulable to coerce platforms into allowing or not allowing speech. Right. And so what we did during the period between 2020 and 2024 on the freedom side of the, you know, free speech censorship, you know, kind of, you know, spectrum is we had states like Florida and Texas do these kind of digital Bill of Rights type bills in order to try to enforce more freedom than what the tech platforms, you know, we're trying to do with,

with the censorship. And so this, this goes both ways where you have, you know, the red states were trying to have these freedom bills and the blue states are trying to have these censorship bills. And so this is playing out right now. And there's, there's a special focus because the, the blob has lost so much of its federal government censorship powers. So, what I have pulled up right here is the 2025 democracy playbook by Norma Eisen. Are you familiar with Norm Eisen? Mm-mm. So Normaizen is a good name to know.

He is the legal hazard. Norman? Yeah. Normie. Normie. So Norma Eisen is the guy who is behind, he's the lawyer who's behind the Trump indictments, the Trump impeachments. I think he drafted 10 articles of impeachment for Donald Trump before he was even

inaugurated in 2017. he was the former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic under the Biden administration. He was also the Biden administration White House Ethics Tsar. So every time he- It's on brand. Yeah. They put the worst people. It's like Tony Fauci's, you know, wife was the NIH ethics czar, you know, during, during.

It's like he that's perfect. So you ever read the Fountainhead, the Einrand book? No. You know, it's, uh, this character. The villain is this guy Ellsworth Toey. And, uh, you know, he like wants to take over the world effectively in his own little McAvalian way. And, um, he, uh, he's, I think he's like a religion, he majors in like religion and

college and he brags, everyone told him not to do it because it's a path that goes nowhere. And yeah, he's like, no, actually, if you understand the, and this is like what ethics is. Like ethics is like the yes, no button. So if you control that. that you control the yes you know all this but uh so so norm isin is this he coordinates all the law affairs like all the all the lawsuits against trump like all the lawsuits against him trying to like shut down USAID or the the state department's global engagement center but he's this big transatlantic blob operative he does all the international stuff um close works closely with all these like

NATO state department USAID groups and so every year for the past like seven years he's put out this democracy playbook, which is like the bat signal to the blob about what they all need to do to stop their common political opponents. And so this year in January 2025, he put this out, the seven pillars to defend democracy in 2025. And if you go down to like the list of pillars probably in the thing, you'll see like I can decode these. There you go. So protect elections, you know, which is going to mean like. You need to let dead people stay on the rolls. You need to make sure that there's no need for a signature for mail and ballots.

You know, defend rule of law, which is just going to mean arrest everybody in the Trump administration and protect our own people from being arrested. You know, fight corruption just means, you know, find a predicate to arrest them. Reinforce civic and media space. This is like this translated language for meaning keep the money gun. This is a month before we announce the shot. done of USAID. And he actually says in this memo about how USAID was actually good under Trump one. Of course. And we, you know, we need to use that money gun to, you know, pay our friends in, in the university centers and the NGOs and in the media. But pillar six says counter disinformation.

We need to need to. So actually, if you run a search for a USAID, you'll, you'll see this. Just type in USAID in the search. See. So it says, so this is under reinforce. civic and media spaces. So this should include supporting investigative, these investigative consortiums such as the corruption reporting project. Now the corruption reporting project, they hate me. They, half of their budget came from USAID and the State Department. Oh, there's, there's nothing more corrupt than the corruption reporting project. Let me tell you this. They took USAID funds and dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani so they could be used for the, for impeaching Trump in 2019. So like we sponsored our own, you know, impeaching

of our president through U.S. aid funding. Again, the money is supposed to go out to influence the world around us to make things better for Americans and it ends up being used to impeach our own Democrat, the elected president. Wait, run, hit the enter or just go down 37 times you'll see he mentions it.

Okay, so let's see this. So this is on the countering disinformation. It says at the user level, social media companies should prioritize digital media literacy. That means media literacy means if you read the wrong media sources, you are media illiterate, immediate your mind right.

So like NewsGuard builds itself as a media literacy company now and getting schools to not allow your YouTube videos to be played for students on public Wi-Fi lest they become media illiterate because they're reading the wrong sources.

So like one of the things that Norm Eisen says is a good thing is that META partnered with USAID in 2023 to promote the initiative of 200 university students in Indonesia promoting media literacy. And YouTube YouTube, Meta and YouTube created digital literacy programs

in recent years and all this. But if you run a search for Brazil, you'll get to wear out why I'm bringing this up. Oh, wow, 14. Okay, again. Did you see this Wikipedia blacklist thing? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's been around for a while. Yeah.

Well, this, but that's the media literacy strategy. Right. Wait, click enter again. I'll tell you when to stop. Again. Again. Again. Oh, well, you see, well, wait, scroll back up.

You'll see he's bragging about the Digital Services Act and the EU is, and these are, he's in, look, in YouTube eliminated. 17 critical policies that had limited the spread of misinformation. Right. So that's why they want the EU in Brazil. So we scroll down again or hit the Brazil thing. I know, I know where this is in it. One more, one more, one more, one more, one more, one more, one more, one more, one more. Okay, wait.

Okay, there, we'll stop, yeah, stop right there. Okay. So on the Wikipedia thing, by the way, this is the media literacy strategy. So they're doing these media literacy laws in California as mandatory media literacy, K through 12. New York now has mandatory. Illinois has mandatory, all these blue states and they're creeping into the purple and red ones.

And this is like required news guard style blacklists of the kind of media that you can use for research assignments in high school and middle school. the kind of websites you can access on the, because, you know, all these schools are now having, like, school issued laptops. Right. So that you don't get distracted on your, you know, your own device sort of thing. And they can put you in a little fishbowl of the kind of information you can see

and not see. And so these media literacy programs say, well, these websites, these blacklisted websites are, you know, will make you media illiterate. So you can only stay within the confines of these websites. And one of them is. Wikipedia, there's something called the sift method that media literacy theorists use. It's basically the opposite of critical thinking. It's like, don't do your own research because that leads you down a rabbit hole and turns

you into a right-wing populist. So you should only sift casually through the first 10 results on Google.com and whatever Wikipedia says. This is like theory in media literacy is the sift method. But effectively what this means is because anyone from one's, side of the aisle or anyone who's from one ideological side of thinking because there are left wing populist accounts that get censored on this it's like are you anti-nato are you like the gray zone for example is like a left wing populist site like they're not republican by any stretch they don't

you know like trump or whatever but they they have that kind of like old school Bernie thing where he wanted to take away war funding to pay for free medical care and free housing and free education. And so they will end up because they're against the state department in NATO and USAID and this whole stakeholder blob and these big corporations. They'll end up on a, you know, media literacy blacklist and a Wikipedia blacklist. They are blacklisted on Wikipedia. But what that means is that like people have to like the New York Times has to cover their own people's scandals for it to be entered into history. Like the historical account of something, like Wikipedia does not allow primary source reporting. Right. Only secondary sources.

So, like, unless the New York Times covers one of their own people's scandals, it's inadmissible in history. Like, the blacklist is like, Fox News, Brightbart, Zero Hedge, great. Like, you like can't tell the history of Hillary Clinton unless the New York Times has, like, accidentally reported something damaging to her. Right. And it's the same thing now in schools. Did you see that Bill Clinton had everything about him and Epstein scrubbed? Yeah, right. Right.

When they started talking about the Epstein files. Right. And it's like, well, who are you going to cite? to cover it. Like, you know, the only people who will cover that are people who don't like Bill Blin. And so the only people who are, you know, whitelisted are the ones who do. Right. Right. So, so here's what Normaism writes in the countering disinformation section. Although there has been some action on the federal level to place guardrails around new media, it is uncertain how next steps will evolve. This is in January 2025 before Trump took office. So they're afraid that the whole

censorship industrial complex at the federal level is going to be shut down and whether progress will continue progress for putting guardrails around speech right federal action may be uncertain the pro-democracy proponents at the state level should consider wielding their considerable regulatory power to minimize the destabilizing effects of new media so he's saying listen this is in january 2025 shit shit shit shit we're probably not going to be able to do the u.s.s. shit anymore probably not be able to do the cissor shit at DHS anymore probably not going to do the FBI flagging posts anymore probably not going to be able to have the pentagon Minerva initiative shit flagging stuff anymore probably not going to be able to the state department global engagement

center we need to move our strategy to the state level and this is what you see in california this is what you see in new york there are 35 states that they have all these different things percolating in and this is all like uh you know this is coming out of the brookings institution by norm Misen. Brookings Institution, I've shown CIA pay stubs going back to the 1970s and 80s, where the CIA would send people to Brookings for their, you know, intelligence training. Brookings has its own, you know, intelligence, you know, bureau for this stuff. But the fact is, this whole State Department of USA and CIA network just planning to move stuff to the states. And so you see it's a two-part strategy, state-level censorship laws, and then also saying they may

find partners and allied regulators such as the EU and Brazil. The EU, as we talked about with the EU Digital Censorship Act and Brazil, which kicked X out of the country and has imposed these massive fines. So, I mean, these are, this is literally the White House ethics are for Obama and the chief litigator during the Biden administration of all things Trump world, explicitly telling the blob to move information to do state-level censorship laws and to partner with the EU for censorship. And in the next the next tab that I had pulled up, this is a report from my foundation, FFO. We just published this this week, credit to our managing director, Alan Bacari for this. This is the, remember we talked about the Knight Foundation? How the Knight Foundation

sponsored Graphica and they also fund all the arts and cultural centers in, in Miami. Well, their Knight Institute, parked out of Georgetown, has this new counter disinfo hub that is pushing all these state regulation of social media laws. And if you scroll down through it, you'll see like some of the receipts, like $107 million that they've spent on doing disinformation work, funding the NGOs, funding the censorship university centers, you know, through all this.

And if you just run like a, you'll see like who's on it's James Baker. If you remember this, the, the former, what was it, general counsel or deputy general counsel for the, for the FBI during the Twitter files. And then he moved over to the content moderation lawyer team to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. This is he's still around getting paid by the Knight Foundation for censorship work, just like he was saying paid for censor it in the night in the Twitter files. But if you if you just control F for the word state, you'll see that this Knight Foundation supergroup,

which is dulling out $100 million in grants to sponsor this kind of this kind of regulation. See that 35, you know, they're promoting 35 different bills in 75 state bills to all punish social media companies for allowing algorithms that have, that allow, you know, basically counter blob speech. And then we, we've clipped all these videos. It's crazy because it seems like we have, we have like, 30 minutes left. There's a couple things I want to cover. So I kind of want to do like some rapid fire. Not really rapid fire, but you know, I want to cover. I want to ask a couple things where we wrap up. First of all, it seems like in general, there's like this whole censorship thing is just to protect the people in power.

It's like it's wrapped, it's gift wrapped in this fake narrative that's to protect us from each other. Right. But it's really only to protect the people in power so they can continue to pillage and plunder the world without us knowing it. And keep us fighting. I mean, in a way it's even sicker than that. It's not even to protect people in power to protect the sponsors of the people in power. Right. Like every single one of these. Well, it was obvious when the guy, I forget the guy's name and the congressman that was talking to Cash Patel. And he said to him when he was talking about 230, he said, they're talking about your personal life, Cash Patel. Like that, that's, you're saying the quiet part out loud. You're trying to tell this guy that he needs to worry about it because, I mean, that's the whole point.

That comes with the territory of being a public figure. Yeah. Is being screwed. and having conspiracy theories come up about you. Right. And people talk about you. Right. Right. No. And if there was action at the Trump executive branch level against that, I would be the first person in line to say that's wrong.

And then you have seen that. Like Michael Schellenberger and others have also, you know, published about getting close to the line a couple times on the on the Trump admin stuff. Yeah. But it is, you know, that worries me too. when I see that, but I also think you have this kind of passion flare up. It's a different thing from creating a, you know, I mean, what the Biden administration was doing is they were just creating bureaus in every, I mean,

DHS had a formal office of misdiss and malinformation. They formalized it. It was called MDM. They had an office of missed dis and malinformation. They formalized it. They institutionalized it. This was not like a random person. you know,

it wasn't like a Pam Bondi offhand remark. Right. It wasn't like a, in fact, if you stay on the foundation website, if you go to Foundation for Freedomonline.com, and then you go to the search

and you just type in White House. I'll show you how formalized this was. Yeah, right there. Yeah. Just go to the main page. Yep. And then get the search button. Just type in White House.

And go to, Scroll down, scroll down. That whole society, how the previous admin coordinated censorship industry. So if you, and scroll down a little bit here. So what you'll see here is the White House formerly created a 26 government agency, interagency working group on information integrity

on social media. Information integrity is like media literacy. It's one of these, you know, when the word disinformation stars, getting scandalized. Information integrity means all of the world can be segregated into two groups. High integrity information and low integrity information. Right. And basically high integrity information information information gets white listed. You can cite on Wikipedia. Low information integrity and new sources get blacklisted. It's that it's just a censorship. Yes. And this and if you

scroll down, and this is to coordinate the whole society. So scroll down to this like to the first image I think. Here you go. So here's a list of all of the interagency working group members, 26 different government agencies. And you'll see this is everything from the CIA to the Department of State to Gender Policy Council. I even know we had one of those. The National Security Council, U.S.Aid, and then you'll see also in nonprofits, corporations, and individuals, you'll see NewsGuard, directly partner with NewsGuard. So you have the CIA working in a formalized censorship capacity together with U.S. US aid, the Department of Defense, DARPA,

the National Security Council, Miter, Newsguard, and a bunch of their handpicked, you know, government-funded university centers. And like, they could formalize and scale and have this kind of speed scale and comprehensive speech control capacity, which to me, like, you're gonna have people make errant remarks in this because they don't like the speech.

Yes. And so there's going to be a kind of passionate pain aversion, that politicians are going to use where they say, well, you can't say that about me. Well, it's okay. Well, have you put forward a bill about it? You know, did you use state coercion to influence it? And if you did, that's messed up. And when it becomes systemic, then it should be actionable.

Lawsuits should be filed, you know, in the same way that they were filed against the Biden administration. What I've seen so far, though, has been a couple of passionate periodic flare-ups. but generally speaking, a pretty principled approach combined with, you know, taking a fire hose to what was, what looked like, you know, a god comp, like an insurmountable power. And it's, it's at the federal level, we've been dismembering it limb by limb. But like I said, you have these two threats from the international side and at the state level.

And those, it remains to be seen how those will play out. What is your take on this, uh, W-E-F push to have this digital ID attached to internet access? Super fucked up. I, I, I think it's awful. I mean,

this is kind of a, I guess, a basic take, but it's kind of the obvious one. Yeah. Um, are familiar with the DIA app? This is a crazy story.

No, I'm not. If you type in USAID, D-I-I-A. So, So this was like, this is what we imposed on Ukraine. USAID developed. Yeah.

There you go. The first DIA in Washington, D.C. summit. Okay. So, so USAID did this digital ID program in Ukraine. Starting a couple years ago, they rolled it out in like four countries. It was like the experimental guinea pigs where they did this. They did this like they tie your digital identity to, they call it a state and a smartphone and it was developed by USAID in combination with I think it was like American Express or

something like the credit you know because these crack card companies always you know like literally they're just totally in bed with it whenever the government right and of course like who gave Joe Biden start to his career was the credit card companies and when he was in Delaware before he you know that was like his original sponsors for his Senate run were the Delaware credit card I know that. Yeah, yeah. But, but, you know, this is basically a tool that, you know, they say it's a state and a smartphone and it's your digital ID and it's going to synchronize your health information and your voter information and your social media information and your banking information. And it'll just make it really easy and convenient for the, you know, the government to have everything in one place because it's an inefficient government which has strained economic resources. So in Ukraine in the middle of a war. And so what they're doing is, is like, they're using this to be able to scrub wrong thinkers. Like in Ukraine, if you criticize the Zelensky government, you're blackbagged, you're done.

Like you criticize that government, what, they banned like 26 different political parties, they banned elections that, you know, Zelensky was supposed to have, you know, he was five year terms elected in May or April 2019. Mm-hmm. Coming up on a year and a half and he's, you know, they banned elections

and they banned a political party. party that, you know, as, as approached popularity. And now they can just immediately see and have total control. It's like what they did in the Canadian Truckers Envoy thing. Yes. You know, they, they just went straight to the bank accounts of people. Right. You can do that with me.

The World Economic Forum is pushing that. What was their word of the year in 2021? Disinformation, misinformation, misinformation. And the World Economic Forum is partnered with NewsGuard. You know, they ran this whole. GARM operation to get rid of $2.6 billion in programmatic ad spend on populist and alternative websites. So you know exactly what they're going to use it for. And I'm troubled to see this being backed by people like Larry Ellison. Like Larry Ellison has been like a Trump supporter.

I think he's been seen as like a pretty level-headed ally by people in the Trump movement for like a decade now. And I see, you know, what's him pushing this through the Tony Blair Institute. And Tony Blair is like not like none of these people. You know, you could, there are always risks with centralized control. Yes. But there can be weird upsides in a temporary way. Like Elon having centralized control over X, you know, it's, it's always like,

now, I love Elon. I think he's a great man of history. And I think he's a great man of history. And I think he saved. human civilization. I can see how people could be concerned about a dark Elon era. If he were to, you know, take an ayahuasca trip and decide, you know what, actually I'm going to, you know, I'm going to go against my principles.

I'm going to use my decentralized power. But at the same time, that centralized control did allow them to buoy. If this stuff was decentralized like meta was, meta was being run at the decentralized layers. Like Zuckerberg was getting run over by his lieutenants about the content moderation stuff. And also, so like not everybody wanted to go down with the ship. You know, and and but with this, you know, digital ID thing, that is the scary part of it to me is it would be one thing if it was the World Economic Forum. And you could be like, listen, this is why I've, I've said for a, you know, a decade now in this that like the main threat on clean. up the censorship industrial complex has not come from like democrats pushing censorship it's been

internationalist republicans because if it was as simple as republican versus democrat you could eliminate this thing with a major with in one election with a majority and like what was happening from 2016 to 2020 is you had a republican executive branch under Donald trump you had a republican controlled house of representatives from 2016 2018 you had a republican controlled senate and you had a republican majority on the Supreme Court. And yet the entire censorship industrial complex was birthed in that period. And you had, because what you had is you had this Lindsey Graham, you know, coalition in the Republicans who were pushing the Russia gate stuff. They wanted maximum pressure on, they didn't like Trump's foreign policy. And Trump required them to fend off Mueller at the FBI, to fend off an impeachment vote,

to get a budget passed. And so they could threaten to defect to the Democrats and get a majority over populist Republicans. And so I think there's something similar here where it's like if the digital ID push was just being pushed by, you know, Democrats and like international globalists, that would be something that I think could be resisted pretty easily, actually.

But when I see Larry Ellison pushing it, that's a danger of Will Robinson thing because he's got clout and credibility as an ally. And I don't know Trump's top. for taking on allies at that level. Right. And there's a lot of people that have expressed concern as well with Elon's Doge thing. With and, you know, this is all conjecture, obviously, but there's people who have speculated that Elon going into and doing the Doge thing with the IRS, the HHS, and all these organizations that if he could be going in there and sucking out all the user data,

simultaneously being partnered with Palantir AI and then Christy Noem pushing this what was it, the real ID stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That like they could be pushing, they could be sort of creating this sort of like totalitarian CCP style digital ID on people. Yeah.

And it's terrifying sounding. No, the threat is very real. I mean, a control grid. That's what, what's her name? Catherine Fitz calls it a control grid. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to distinguish that from everything we said we hated about, you know, General Michael V. Hayden's, you know, the 9-11, if you've ever seen, what was it, a good

American, the Bill Binney whistleblower thing where, you know, he's going through this, you know, the prism, like every, all the, all the stuff that, you know, James Clapper lied about and said that they didn't collect all this, you know, incidental bulk collection. It's like every phone call you've made, your entire digital footprint. And when you, you, tie that to if if if Republicans set that up in the United States and you tie that with like Democrat like misinformation on social media yeah that's game over right I mean there's the you can't even mount an organizational resistance to that like in Ukraine they can't vote their way out of that right I mean you you could if you disempowered this it's like North Korea

you know you or China what the you know what they do with this like like Like, you can't have a democracy when the incumbent government can effectively neutralize any political opposition because they can micro-target things at that level and have, like, a legal predicate to act on it. So, you know, at the same time, this kind of, like, digital grid is kind of an inescapable, like, efficiency. Like, this has been a long time coming. Yeah. You know, we, I remember the digital ID stuff a decade ago as like, you know, an imminent threat. And I think we have gotten closer to it. But where I sort of am right now in terms of, I guess, advocacy on directions is like legal firewalls are probably better than technological firewalls.

Like I don't think you can stop the promise of a. efficiency like Palantir coming in and saying, hey, give us this $100 million contract and we'll take your, you know, uh, data at HHS. Like I think, I think like at a certain point, like our government sucks at efficiency stuff. We farm everything out to third party contractors. You know, it's a, the, the biggest part of a secretary's job in charge of any agency is the budget fight. Like you, you look at like, what do four star generals? do for example like they they just they're lobbyists their lobbyists for pentagon funding this it's the same thing

the fdaa commissioners has to do the NIH the hHS the you know all the way down to the census bureau they all and so any money they can save by you know some contract that allows other parts of the agency to get more money like there's going to be a temptation to do that especially when it's also doing favors for outside folks that they might get on the board of later or they might do a favor for it's the same thing we're talking about with the Google stuff in the in the state department right well you mean e like with doge too like people will criticize him saying like well Elon you're going to go after all these little agencies for you know cutting you know waste fraud and abuse but what about the 30 trillion dollar black hole in the pentagon yeah you know but i i think Elon probably

he also gets a lot of his money from the Pentagon right i know historically like historically there was you know SpaceX obviously I think I think Elon tried to kind of repay back

a lot of the subsidies that his earlier companies got I know there was I've seen some evidence on that you know

because he's tried to think be true to the kind of libertarian you know principles but definitely

like Tesla got a ton of subsidies SpaceX you know ton of subsidies he launched every day they launch.

Arguably, you know, U.S. foreign policy on Bolivia was a kind of Tesla play. I think this is like 2019. You can look this up. I think Elon even had a funny tweet at the time. If you type in like Elon, Bolivia, lithium coup, just if you type that in Google, you'll probably get a search here because, you know, the Tesla batteries. Elon lithium coup. Yeah.

Because, you know, the lithium and cobalt are like, you know. There you go. And they now deleted July 2020 tweet Elon Musk responded to an accusation about the U.S. involvement in Bolivia's 2019 coup by stating we will coup whoever we want deal with it. The exchange centered on an idea that the coup was motivated by access to oblivious lithium reserves, a key component to for his company Tesla batteries. Wow. Yeah. So like, you know, there's... That's fucking insane. These kind of episodes, you know, they... There's a tale is all his time, right? I mean, this goes back to, you know, the banana republics and united fruit working with the war department and all that stuff like you know that that is that is kind of an inescapable part of you know um you know the the nexus between that

but i think to you know it's credit i don't think that he's doing that with modern day foreign policy like if you like Elon has come out pretty strongly on the side of peace for example yes like the you know the ukraine he's questioned our involvement in nato and you know our funding of that i do believe doge started to look at pentagon stuff and really ran into ran into you know some headwinds there this is um but i can imagine yeah uh you know i've got a lot to say on that particular thing but um but you know i mean if elon was just in it for himself i don't think he'd make an enemy of those things like he i mean he was given starlink for free uh in Ukraine. He's, you know, his own, you know, there's a lot of money to be made in Eurasia if it's under,

you know, American military occupation rather than under, you know, Russian. And so I think he's, you know, he's gotten a kind of godlike power, but he's, I would argue, used it responsibly. and in a pretty restrained way all and all. It's just how I feel about it. Yeah. Yeah. And then like, you know, another thing when it comes to like the speech laws in the like in Europe, especially in like the UK, I've been, like I've been flooded with these videos of people

being arrested. Yeah. For tweets in the UK. And it's insane. That's our closest ally. Yeah. And I think it was in 2023. They had 12,000 people arrested for tweets.

Yeah. And. Russia was only 3,000. Yep, exactly. No, it's our closest ally. Yeah. And, you know, and we funded that. I mean, you know, the, the, the, the U.S. Justice Department funded hate lab, which is the AI political radar system that the UK metropolitan police use in London to arrest people off of.

You can look up hate lab. And, you know, UK hate lab was funded by the Justice Department to go after Brexit supporters. They argued that hate speech comes disproportionately. from Brexit people. And so, so we funded their little, the science of hate. Yeah, in fact, if you go to, even if you look at YouTube on the hate lab,

you can see what these videos look like. It's every identity, it's like hate speech on gender grounds, hate speech on religious grounds, hate speech on ethnic grounds. What is the, zoom in on that book cover? I wanna see what it says. How prejudice becomes hate and what we can do to stop it. Oh, there's nothing to do with that though.

Oh, okay. It's, I mean, like this is, this is their cover but it's just going after like pro brexit pro reform party like go to youtube and type in like hate lab i actually featured them in my i did a 2018 documentary this is seven years ago now uh type in type in type in brexit in search yeah no no no in that search yeah brexit b r e xit yeah okay scroll down scroll down scroll down to i'm look at all the videos that mentioned brexit here wow and i think but uh scroll down down down no no Dundadda, da, da, da, da, da, do.

Okay, I don't know. No, you didn't. I might not be on YouTube. I forget where I pulled the video from, but basically, even if you just go back to their website, you'll see, you'll see, like, what I'm getting at here. Like, what they do is, they do real-time heat maps of, like, every tweet in the UK. And they run it through these machine learning trained filters.

You know, they have all the keywords. associated with like the Brexit movement oh here you go like you know the effect of Brexit on the disrupting networks of hate and you know all this stuff uh and what they do is so every tweet gets like a confidence score for whether whether it's hate speech right yes so like you could plug in like shakespeare's to be or not to be and and and it will give you like you know a hate speech toxicity score of like 0.07 and then you could plug in like a biggie small's rap song And it'll give you like a higher than that because they'll have like a identity score like a strong language score, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like if there are end bombs that are dropped, like that might, you know, bring it up to a certain threshold.

Yeah. And if it crosses like a certain, like an 85% confidence interval, it goes straight to the UK metropolitan police. And they get like a real time readout of every tweet, every Facebook post. at least this was the way it worked until 2022. I don't know if the rate limiting, this is one of the reasons that the UK Online Safety Act, the UK's version of the EU Digital Censorship Act, compels like internal data to go to outside vetted researchers.

It's because like they lost access to the, a lot of the AI tools that was used to scrape. You know, I mentioned like in 2020, they scraped 859 million tweets to build these AI censorship tools. And then, like, Elon imposed this big fee to access that API. It's like a million dollars or something. And so you have all these little labs doing the censorship work. And now it's being imposed by law that you, they are able to build these AI censorship algorithms.

But, you know, that's like what's happening in the UK. It's a proxy attack on political actors who might depose the blob's little candidate there. Care Starmer is a blob creation. It's insane, man. And it's like, you know, so much of it. The crazy thing is that it's like with the access to information on the internet, all of this stuff is, it's so visible to everyone. All the stuff that's going on. And it's being talked about more than ever now.

And it's like, if you want to find this information, you can find it, right? You can go to Mike Benz's Twitter page and fucking find all of this corruption that's going on. And I feel like more and more people, at least young people, are like waking up to this stuff now more than ever. Yeah. And they're getting fed up with it. And it feels like it's, to me, there's just a vibe to me, especially like with everything that just happened with the Epstein files,

the Iran thing, the Charlie Kirk assassination. Right now, I have like, the vibe is not good. It feels almost like COVID vibes right now. Like we've reached this weird fever pitch where everyone is kind of like aware of nothing's adding up. The government's lying to us. And people are fed up. They can't afford a house. They can't afford a one bedroom, one bath house for $5 million at an 8% interest rate.

They're, you know, stuck in the gig economy delivering Caesar salads with Uber Eats. And they have nothing to show. for what they're working for. Yeah. And I don't know where it goes, dude. Think about this, like what a YouTuber overtook astronaut is like, you know, the thing most middle schoolers say they want to do, you know, when they grow up. And when you look at, for example, like these censorship policies, I mean, imagine being

like an 18 year old kid and not being able to have a social media account for the rest of your life. You know, you got to spend the next 80 years banned from YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, like, You know, you can't have a career to even start a career. Right. Your PhD, you know, medieval literature specialist, you've got to have a YouTube channel to promote that, a Facebook account, an Instagram account, a X account. And there's more and more people that are going through like the full college gamut,

getting their PhDs. And, I mean, I've noticed it that are just going straight to YouTube. Yeah. They're like, I'm not going to like play the game being a researcher as a career. I'm just going to go display. all the knowledge that I've learned, debate people, learn new things and, like, spread information online. And if you, if you're a doctor and you go against the government narrative, now you're kaput. Right. You know, they have your license. You know, they pull your license for

information. Yeah. And so I think that how scary that is as a, you know, this could happen to me and what are the liabilities of, because like the social media thing is a way out of the gig economy. You have a lot of people who are like driving Uber's during the day and or working like a service job, but like their side hustle is they're like trying to build up a social media channel so that they can support themselves and ultimately do that professionally. And like you see one of your friends gets banned for life because they said something about climate change or public vaccines or something. And it's like, oh my God, I'm going to be financially assassinated over like one thing that's true anyway. And so.

that has been like hugely motivational to me to see just like people sponging the stuff up and making their voices heard. I think there's enough of a coalition here in the United States finally that it is robust even though there are these threats. And, you know, I agree with you on the Epstein stuff and, you know, like the Iran thing and things like that. Like there are there's always going to be something though, you know. And I do think in general. Like what president has actually fulfilled everything he ran on during his election. Yeah. None.

Right. And I do that. Like there is a level of perspective. Like, you know, you've got like accounts that were banned for five years and now they're back on X and they're bigger than ever and they've got monetization abilities. And like, and the only thing. Now look, understandably, when something's a pain point, like, you do get, you know, the complaining to celebrating ratio is always going to be high because you're always focused on like what the current problem is and what the next barrier is. But I do think there is a kind of moment where these are, these are relatively good times in terms of like the state of play for speech online. Like, whatever your opinions are, like, yes.

Like, I agree, I agree, but I feel, it just feels like we're in a pocket that's not gonna last long. Right, well, it's a fragile thing. And that means that the consensus, the institution, the coalition has to stay together to keep fighting for it. And like, you have a lot of these, like the ADL was a huge censorship organization,

like unbelievable amounts of pressure. Yeah, Elon said they're a terrorist organization. He just tweeted they're a terrorist organization. Where's the lie? I mean, but they do. just took down their heat map of Charlie Kirk, you know, putting TPSA on their hate group thing. They just scrubbed this, I think. Oh, they had TPP USA listed as a hate group type thing, you know.

And they did that because of the pressure, you know, because of, you know, Elon and the, and I think, you know, them wanting to probably stay within earshot of admin people and, you know, and the base made its voice heard. and even the ADL is like, you know, taking that off. And so, but that's why the thing I'm more, I'm most concerned about right now are like the coalition dynamics. It was a scary moment to me when Elon and Trump had that big fight because, you know, the cause, generally speaking for freedom of speech on the internet has to stay together an institutional and coalition level.

That's, that is, there's no law you can pass that can't be repealed. there's no regulatory structure you can set up right now that can't be dismantled and replaced it's it's the coalition that has the staying power so when i see things like larry ellison pushing the digital id thing that to me is a scarier threat because um that is that is from within the coalition and very difficult to reconcile with you know because he came out and said well this is a you know a good thing because people will be on their best behavior when they're surveyed 24-7 by right you know it's like bra okay do we get a 24-7 look at you in your yacht right exactly no dude it's it's it's fucking terrifying man well listen mike we're gonna have to do another one because i feel

like there's so much more shit we could talk about yeah so um next time you're in miami well maybe we'll try to make it happen um i'll link your x and your youtube anything else we should link below kind of like an IG and a rumble. Okay, yep. We'll get that too. And are you cool doing a couple of Patreon questions real quick? What time is it? We got time?

Yeah, we got 15 minutes for you to catch your flight. All right, that's all. Good night, folks.