PBD Podcast - "Remove, Reduce, Inform" - Mike Benz On Government, Censorship, Election Tactics & Media Control | PBD Podcast | Ep. 496

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

Former State Department official Mike Benz joins Patrick Bet-David to reveal the deep ties between U.S. agencies, big tech, and free speech. Benz sheds light on government strategies from internet censorship to power plays on global resources. Prepare for eye-opening insights. — Ⓜ️ CONNECT WITH MIKE BENZ ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/3NGQksA 🎟️ ELECTION NIGHT IN AMERICA @ VT HQ: https://bit.ly/3XPbyt0 👕 TEAM USA GEAR AT VTMERCH.COM: https://bit.ly/40gZun5 📕 PBD'S BOOK "THE ACADEMY": https://bit.ly/3XC5ftN 📰 VTNEWS.AI: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Zn2Moj 👕 VT "2024 ELECTION COLLECTION": https://bit.ly/3XD7Bsm 🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON SPOTIFY: https://bit.ly/3ze3RUM 🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ITUNES: https://bit.ly/47iOGGx 🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ALL PLATFORMS: https://bit.ly/4e0FgCe 📱 CONNECT ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/3MGK5EE 📕 CHOOSE YOUR ENEMIES WISELY: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3XnEpo0 👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4d5nYlU 🎓 VALUETAINMENT UNIVERSITY: https://bit.ly/3XC8L7k 📺 JOIN THE CHANNEL: ⁠https://bit.ly/3XjSSRK 💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time! ---- SUBSCRIBE TO: @VALUETAINMENT @vtsoscast @ValuetainmentComedy @bizdocpodcast @theunusualsuspectspodcast ABOUT US: Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pbdpodcast/support

Friends that I have that say US State Department official typically are CIA. Are you CIA? Well, you're smiling though. And I'm a poker player. Why are you smiling? He's been interesting lately. Has he? What do you think about him?

It's kind of a Bill Nye the Science Guy of geopolitics. You had a problem with early voting drop boxes. You had a problem with electronic voting machines or voter tabulation issues. That would be a terms of service violation and either your post would get flagged, you'd get de-boosted in the algorithm, your account could get suspended. All three pillars of the blob. Diplomacy, defense, intelligence, state department, DOD, CIA. He was the coordinator of those three things.

Who was the biggest name in debt? This is not a banker. This is a blob apex predator. Is there anything wrong with hiring people like this? Now you have White House policy to maximize what's best for BlackRock. 72% of Ukrainians use Telegram, a spy in every Ukrainians pocket. Why would you bet on Goliath when we got bet David? Valuetainment, giving values contagious. This world are entrepreneurs, we get no value to haters. I be running homie, look what I become. So my guest today has been all over the place lately and he's got a lot of insight on what's going on. Your job description says former US State Department official and founder of Foundation for Freedom Online.

Right? It's great to have you on the podcast, but I'm gonna start off with a question for you. One of my friends, when I was in the army, I was gonna go Delta. And I was going into, I was gonna go 18 Delta, Special Forces, and that was the stepping stone to go to Vicenza, Italy.

I was gonna go to DLI, cause I speak all these languages, and I was gonna go to Sears School, da da da da. Anyways, my order goes to another guy. The guy is my best friend. He eventually becomes Delta. If he and I are privately together, he'll tell people,

I've worked on some special operations. You'll never hear him say Delta, right? And friends that I have that say, you know, US State Department official typically are CIA. Are you CIA? I'm not CIA. Okay, for sure. I can tell you if I was, no, but it's the same thing.

It's a very flexible position. I always try to tell people not to distinguish between state and CIA because of, and frankly, even in the defense sector, the diplomacy defense intelligence apparatus is one congealed blob. because of, and frankly, even in the defense sector, the Diplomacy Defense Intelligence Apparatus is one congealed blob. You can go from DOD to state to IC with a parallel promotion track totally seamlessly.

It's the same job, but from a slightly different angle. It's just emphasizing one of the tools in our toolkits over another. The diplomacy one gets to wield the public facing NGOs, gets to wield financial leverage and sanctions, negotiations, back channeling. The IC gets to do the plausibly deniable sort of dirty work side of that,

the political subversive side of the struggle. And the military does both the kinetic, but then also the civil military. And this is sort of where the special forces story actually comes back into the internet censorship one, in the sense that the special forces, part of the job that is delegated to special forces is shaping the information environment

in order to be able to wage a counterinsurgency or to be able to prime the battlefield, to be able to influence the domestic politics so that the conditions are more favorable for the US military. And so the special forces have played an increasingly large role in some of the operations around censorship of the internet.

Okay, so Mike, what do you know a lot about? Meaning, if I talk to Dorian Yates, he can talk muscle, bodybuilding, mass. If I talk to John Jones, technical, fighting, opponent, who goes against who? Dana White, promoting, marketing, there's specialties on who you talk to, right? What do you know a lot about?

Internet censorship. Internet censorship, okay. And why do you know a lot about internet censorship? Well, I've been on this for eight years every day, day and night, breakfast, lunch, dinner. I started off as a corporate lawyer. I was working in Manhattan at a large law firm. I was doing corporate mergers and acquisitions

and hedge funds and sort of a weird twist of fate, I guess, kind of turned me on to the threat of social media censorship in 2016 during the Trump running for president the first time around. And I think it just connected, I observed some things very early as a lot of this apparatus was being formed,

that I think maybe, I still try to self reflect on exactly how this journey got to the stage that it's at, but I had a weird experience playing chess as a kid with AI censorship, I'm sorry, with AI chess tools sort of being able to overtake humans. I sort of lived through that Gary Kasparov deep blue thing. And when I saw AI censorship tools being developed in 2016 and that they were being developed by people

associated with the State Department Department the CIA and the Pentagon I was trying to tell all my friends during the 2016 Trump run for office that this was going to do to free speech in the West what Deep blue did to the psychic soul of the chess community when he beat Gary Kasparov and Everyone thought that was too fanciful at the time bends You got to prove it and so I said about the process of you know pursuing a book and a documentary and trying to prove it and then the process of proving it turned into essentially a calling and then I started to I worked for the White House

I was a speechwriter and a sort of tech policy advisor and then I went to the State Department. I ran the cyber desk there, which put me basically right at the intersection of big tech, big government, and big censorship. And so I've sort of present at the creation of this, chronicling through every move. And then I sort of became a character

in the story I was writing and then I started FFO, just basically a civil society free speech watchdog after I left office. So I got a lot of angles I want to take this with you since for you it's censorship. I'll start off with this one here. Right off the bat I want to go into this one here. So let's just say you get a phone call from the establishment left and establishment right elites. They call you. Mike, we need your help. We have 13 days left of election in the states. November 5th is around the corner.

We've tried defamation of character, didn't work. We've tried using the DOJ, he didn't drop out. We've tried assassination attempt, he looked right, and we missed him. We've tried humiliating him in front of his family, and they're still united. We've tried humiliating him in front of his wife, his wife is still right next to him. We've tried pinning his voters against him and they're even more loyal to him. We've

tried impeaching him and got his people more loyal to him. We've tried arresting this guy and doing a mugshot thinking that was it because he'd be the first one. He used it against us and his popularity went higher. We try to deplete the savings with all the losses that we put together. He's still there. We've tried every single thing that we've done. We use the pandemic as a way to shut down everything in a creative way. Whatever.

Let's just say they didn't, you know, what happened in 2020, that worked. However, we can't use that now. We need you to think like Dr. Evil. If you're able to figure out a solution for us, again, being a devil's advocate here, you have a get out of jail card for the rest of your life. Okay, let's just say they're going to offer that to you. Obviously, for you, it wouldn't work anyways. I'm just saying, play that part.

To think how the opponent or the enemy would use a way to prevent them from winning the next 13 days, what creative tools is left that they haven't used yet? Oh, well there's so many. I mean, some of them are on the censorship side, but I would say at this point with Elon firmly at the helm of X and with Zuckerberg actually loosening a lot of the censorship techniques and actually firing a lot of the established back channel connections that the blob,

you know, this sort of DOD, IC, State Department and financial stakeholder complex that's against Trump is driving it, with those options being a lot less than they were four years ago, even though they're trying now through these international regulations like this EU censorship law, and they're planning to do this in 140 countries now,

it's insane, but sort of a side story. I actually think the most direct threat, the thing that they are planning to do, is easiest to understand through the lens of an organization called the Transition Integrity Project, which was set up by this individual who was a former high-ranking Pentagon official with a CIA blue badge,

who organized exactly what you talked about, the former head of the DNC, Dona Brazil. Yeah, that's the one. And if you run a search on my X handle for TIP, I can walk you through the actual screenshots showing this absolutely diabolical plan that they had for 2020 and that they've already wargamed for 2024.

But if you, maybe if you put in BLM, you'll, it'll pull up some of these screenshots. Maybe if you refresh or something, sometimes it takes a minute to, yeah, so let's see, if you scroll down, if you scroll down, you'll see, okay, so well that's one of the screenshots right here. So in this simulation, they had Donna Brazile,

the former head of the DNC, part of your scenario, and Michael Steele, the never Trump former head of the GOP, who are both a part of this war game. And you'll see who personally role played Joe Biden in this 2020 election coup simulator war game was none other than John Podesta, the Hillary Clinton campaign manager, who was then promoted to run the largest slush fund

in the entire federal government of the Biden White House in charge of $375 billion in climate funds. Personally role-playing Joe Biden. So if you keep scrolling actually, I'm gonna show you exactly what I'm talking about. And this is, I think, gonna be shocking to a lot of people if you haven't seen this before. But scroll down.

Okay, so that's the thread right there. So if you, so, and there's a whole thread around this, but if you just click that image, I'll just show you what this is. So here's what happened in June 2020, just about a week after the George Floyd protest broke out in Minneapolis. A gaggle of high-ranking military CIA,

State Department, and political insiders all met in Washington in order to war game a scenario in which Trump lost the election but clung to power. So they contemplated the need for a way to overthrow his government, to basically do a counter-coup in case he did a coup, if he clung to power, if he used the military, if he just didn't respect the election results.

And they ran four simulations around this. One of these was called a clear Biden win. The second one was too close to tell. But the third one was called clear Trump win and they war gamed how to get Trump out of office even if he legitimately won the electoral college. And make no mistake this entire thing was a hundred percent never Trump. The the appendix at the back of it was called how to stop Trumpism after Trump, meaning even after they defeated Trump, how do you eliminate Trumpism from

the GOP? Now here's how diabolical this plan was in 2020. So 13 times in the 17 page document, they call for a need to take to the streets, to control perceptions of public legitimacy, to censor the internet so that perceptions of a Joe Biden illegitimate presidency would be minimized. At the time, they were already contemplating that the only way Joe Biden could win would be through what they called the red mirage blue shift,

that Trump would win on election night, but it would be a red mirage because it would shift blue as mail-in ballots were counted and states would flip. And they knew that this was going to cause havoc in the minds of Americans because nothing like this had ever happened. We have multiple states flipping overnight, people popping champagne the night before and then waking up and finding actually their opponent is present. So they wanted to pre-censor public conceptions that that Joe Biden's victory would be illegitimate. And so what they did is they had this plan to wrangle the legacy media, the

broadcast media, to the social media companies and that they this network would descend on all the social media companies to get every single one of them to pass a terms of service, a new terms of service violation called delegitimization, which meant if you posted on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or Reddit or Twitch, anywhere on one of the major 15 platforms that they targeted, that you didn't believe that mail-in ballots were safe and reliable. You had a problem with early voting drop boxes.

You had a problem with electronic voting machines or voter tabulation issues. That would be a terms of service violation and either your post would get flagged, you'd get de-boosted in the algorithm, your account could get suspended. Remove, reduce, inform is what they call this. Basically ban, de-boost, and then fact checking,

interstitials that limit the virality. Remove, reduce, what was the last one? Remove, reduce, inform. Inform. Right, those are basically the levels of how hard the ban hammer you get hit with. And what they did is they got a direct partnership. This is one of the groups that was operating sort of parallel to TIP was a group called EIP, the Election Integrity Partnership.

They had a formal partnership with the Department of Homeland Security. And they targeted tens of millions of tweets they said you know 2.5 million or something for stop the steal they they bragged on tape about setting up the the tech platforms to be able to take stuff down quickly they didn't all touch it when you say they who are the election integrity partnership it was it was a consortium of four different outside entities. What was the biggest name? Who was the biggest name in that recording?

Well, the technical lead was the Stanford Air News Observatory, who just got its plug pulled by Stanford after all these scandals. But the most significant was the Atlantic Council of these four. The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors currently serving on its board of directors. Current former number one heads of the CIA, seven of them, all on his board of directors current former number one heads of the CIA seven of them all on the board of this One it's it's NATO's think tank is how it effectively bills itself It gets annual funding over a million dollars a year from the Pentagon over a million dollars a year from the State Department Plus money from a web of CIA cutouts like the National Down for Democracy. It is basically a

military intelligence back channel for NATO to be able to coordinate civilian side changes to laws and society. So another one of those four partners was a group called Graphica, which has gotten over $7 million in Pentagon funding. It was incubated in the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative, which is the Psychological Operations Research Center. Pentagon's Minerva initiative which is the psychological operations research center so there's a literal Pentagon Psyops firm and previously this same network had done all these training sessions to hundreds of journalists

about how to flag Trump tweets if he just held up if he when he tweeted witch hunt about Russiagate they would train journalists in different predicates for how to argue it should be censored on social media but what they called for in this simulation was if Trump were to win fair and square we can still use this coup power even if he doesn't so it's not not a counter coup to stop a coup we'll just do it to cool him out of office and we'll do it in the following way we will make the argument that the constitutional basis of the electoral college is illegitimate and by by the way, you're already seeing that again this year. If you, if folks remember the spate of headlines that you've seen recently in the news,

the New York Times calling to torch the Constitution, the Washington Post saying the Constitution is the biggest threat to democracy, the Dean of Berkeley Law School coming out and saying we need, you know, we need to end the electoral college. This is priming. This is setting you up for the argument that they're going to make if Trump wins fair and square on November 5th. Now what they did is they said simultaneous

with this legal argument that we are going to argue that the popular vote should determine the election instead of the electoral vote, we're going to destabilize the country and inflict so much pain on people's day-to-day life so much pain on the governance of the system That people are going to clamor effectively for the easy way out Which is going which is going to be this popular vote method and they had a few ways that they that they this war game went Through doing that some of them involved state secession, California, Oregon and Washington would effectively secede

They would not respect the federal government, the typical federalism relationship between states and governments. So you would have the governors come out and effectively secede. They would form this alliance. And very importantly and significantly on screen here, you're seeing a show of numbers in the streets and numbers in the streets and actions in the streets may be decisive factors in determining what the public perceives as a just and legitimate outcome.

So again, this is right after the BLM riot breakout. Who wrote this, by the way? This was the Transition Integrity Project. This was Rosa Brooks's, she's currently at Georgetown Law, but she was, I think think undersecretary of defense or assistant secretary. She was a high level Obama Pentagon official with a CIA blue badge according to her own book.

And what you'll see here, if you go back and just look at these receipts because it's so damning, what they say is that they would leverage the destabilization power of racial justice activists and they just assumed that in this war game BLM and Antifa and the Sunrise movements would all respond to a quote Biden call to take to the streets so they presupposed that they would do that but they said we did not

robustly test this so in the next months, we need to capacity build them. And this is on another page here, but again, this is all on my timeline. And what they say is we need to build strong ties with these organizations, and then later they say we need to fund them, we need to resource them, so that they will be quote, be responsive to the movement's demands, and be responsive

to a biding call to take to the streets. And so this paramilitary street muscle is part and parcel of every intelligence operation that involves a ground-up people-powered overthrow of a government. There's two ways that you can overthrow a government. You can do a top-down military coup from the generals and by the way Rosa Brooks in January 2017, the first month of Trump being in office, wrote an op-ed where she said three ways to get rid of Trump before Before the 2024 election this is before Trump's first week had even transpired three ways to get rid of him before the 2024 election

But buried at the bottom of this was a fourth way which she called for was a military coup Which is which she acknowledged never been done in our country's history and would be a black mark on our on our Our country's legacy, but it might be necessary to stop Trump that we might need a top-down military coup Coming from a high-ranking military official from the previous administration But what they call for is the street paramilitary presence to take over federal buildings to block streets to block highways to get the unions involved and so the whole country would ground to a halt and people would clamor for the different government in the same way that happens in every CIA coup

when you are economically destabilizing the country, when you are surrounding the parliament building with protesters, and when you are making the people hungry and desperate so they will agree to a new government different than the one they elected. This is documented, this is public. It's not like they're shameless about it. They're not even something that they're hiding from you.

They were fundraising off of it. Okay, so this is the tweet, if you can go to it Rob, from the top, because what we just showed was number 17, part of zoom in a little bit. So this is the thread you put up together. What other part of this do you want to show that shows what else they asked about? Well there's one, if you go to, I mean, there's so much here, but, and it's worth noting that

recently Rosa Brooks published, I believe in The Guardian, that one of the things they currently lack right now is this same public protest power that they had in 2020. They sort of lamented that they don't have the same capacity right now to leverage off of that they had in 2020 about this street destabilization capacity. Okay let me let me let me go back to the question. Alright so the question is if you were hired by the establishment elites on the left and the right to find the way in the next 13-14 days to prevent them from winning and all the ways they've tried it with the DOJ humiliation defamation of character

You know Stormy Daniels taking away money depleting cash all that stuff hasn't worked What would be the way for you to get it done one you said through this? Okay Now let me give my rebuttal to it my rebuttal to that strategy working in 2020 that maybe won't work today is Musk buys Twitter Exes opened up It's where everybody's getting their news that even Mark Cuban is getting torched by everybody else there,

that he can't gaslight everybody else. Before, a lot of people that are challenging him back would have certainly been removed, reduced, or an informed. And they're not doing that today because he's running Twitter. So if we were to say, well, who's been censored lately? I don't know a lot of people that have been censored lately, like the way they did in 2020,

2020, we used to get strikes left and right in 2020, 2021. YouTube's even slowed down a little bit because they're worried about rumble, Twitter, they have more competition than ever before. Zuckerberg, three months ago comes out and post that letter saying we were pushed by the Biden-Harris administration for us to do XYZ and at the end of the day, it is my fault. I take for responsibility. He gives that message, part of it could be because he thinks Trump's going to get elected,

I better be good on his side or else they can really come after me and what if they find that additional things that I've done. So set that part aside. He's being nice today and he's like I'm more like a libertarian, I've been hanging out with the UFC guys. So that was a threat because he blocked Trump, to block Trump Twitter suspended and blocked Trump. He's open now everywhere He can tweet as much as he wants. No one's blocking him anymore. So that's section 230 part right now they can't impose that strong because

They're worried about Ilana Trump winning Okay, and they can come back and now Trump's somehow someway TikTok is kind of on his side because one of the bigger investors there, you know the story about TikTok as well, so I don't wanna go there. So now we got TikTok, plain neutral. They're still nasty, they still block a lot. I get the most things blocked on TikTok,

community guidelines, bullshit, bullshit. They're number one. Twitter, free. Google, Facebook, bullshit. They're number one. Twitter, free. Google, Facebook, Facebook a little bit easier. Then you have Google, right? I don't know if that's gonna be that effective today. What I'm trying to find out in 2024, how do you do it? How do you do it in 2024 to prevent the election

from happening on November 5th. You saw Maricopa County earlier today saying, hey, we're already announcing, we're gonna need additional days. We've hired a bunch of different staff, okay. That's a nice little way of putting it out there that, hey, you're not gonna win this place here. We're gonna give this to XYZ.

But Pennsylvania, Carolina, Georgia, and all the charts show that Trump wins Pennsylvania, and Georgia, it's over with, right? What do you do? What's another tool in your arsenal? Well, listen to Jamie Raskin. Jamie Raskin in Congress has said, let people vote for Trump if they want.

We're not gonna certify his election anyway. So he may be elected, but we're not gonna let him be inaugurated. When did he say that? This is like two months ago you can pull up the james james raskin i i think that's probably played rock begin it's necessary but it's not sufficient because what can be put into the constitution can slip away from you very quickly and the greatest example going on right now before our very eyes

is section three of the 14th amendment which they're just disappearing with the magic wand as if it doesn't exist, even though it could not be clearer what it's stating. And so, you know, they want to kick it to Congress, so it's gonna be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he's disqualified. And then we need bodyguards for everybody in civil war conditions all because the nine justices not all of them but these justices who have not many cases to look at every year not that much work to do a huge staff great protection simply do not want to do their job and interpret

what the great 14th amendment means and I'm glad that Sherlyn's creating her new center so we can bring that. So if you go to my X handle and you you type in provoke breakdown, you're going to see that he referenced basically they're going to provoke a breakdown on January 6. Now this is very interesting. So so here you go. I think this is one right clear Trump win. This is this.

This is the scenario. Now if you go to the next this is one, right? Clear Trump win. This is the scenario. Now, if you go to the next screenshot, you'll see what it says there in yellow highlights with the red highlight. Again, this was in June 2020, being organized by military intelligence, state department, and high level political operatives from both sides of the aisle. Again, both the former heads

of the both major political parties who were both anti-Trump. And one of the most consequential moves in their war game for how to make sure Biden was inaugurated, even if Trump was elected, was that Team Biden role played by no less than John Podesta, who would then occupy this very senior slot in the Biden administration, White House. One of the most consequential moves was that Team Biden on January 6th

provoked a breakdown in the joint session of Congress by getting the House of Representatives to agree to award the presidency to Biden based on the alternative pro-Biden submissions sent by pro-Biden governors. This is what they're planning to do. They're going to make the argument that Donald Trump is disqualified under the 14th amendment because of January 6th, and then they will do the exact same. How likely is it they're gonna do that?

I think it depends on the, how robust the consensus building has been for this, and how much infighting there is in the Democrat camp. I think that the ire between the Biden and Harris camp has disunified some of these networks that have sort of reluctantly given in to some of the recent Trump momentum. But it's hard to know right now because a lot of these tools would not be played while Biden, Harris is still the occupants of the White House. They would not, for example, deploy street mobilization protests to burn

federal buildings or police precincts or put the country in crisis while the person they want to win is occupying the White House. So it's unclear how robust the infrastructure is underneath the surface because that it, they're not going to launch the surface attack until Trump wins an electoral college victory but this is absolutely what they're planning and by the way they tried this in 2016 in 2016 they they got about 13 or 16 alternate electors to not certain to not certify Trump's election then but that was eight years ago it's unclear how how much more reach they've gotten into that but that is what this legal network is planning,

whether they can pull it off or whether it costs them too much legitimacy. It's not gonna work though, because Supreme Court, he's got it, right? Is it what, five-four right now or six-three? I don't know what the, this is not gonna be done without Supreme Court saying, relax guys, you're acting a little bit out of control.

He's the president, go cry a little bit and you'll get over it. Well, two things on that. One is, remember, it was this Supreme Court which voted seven, two, not to actually hear Trump's questions about the last election, about election fraud. That was, Trump's legal team applied for cert to the Supreme Court, and it was seven, two, they voted not to hear the case.

So the Supreme Court and it was seven two, they voted not to hear the case. So the Supreme Court actually basically did not support Trump's even ability to air that evidence publicly and then the second thing is they are simultaneously launching this operation against the Supreme Court. They've opened these sort of ethics probes into Clarence Thomas, they are reopening the lines of attack against Kavanaugh.

I think part of this is to try to induce sort of tacit personal threats to the family, the stability, the reputation, the legacy of the Supreme Court justices so that they do not intercede on whatever operation they're going to be trying to run at the congressional level. Okay, so that's one. Let's set that aside. January 26, 2025, we're going to say this, and he said civil war, right? Protection, etc., etc. If they go that route, okay, let's just say they go that route, and they're dumb enough

and hate America enough to want to go there, can't stand the sky that much and fear them so much that they want to go there. What happens to 7th? What happens to America? You think the opposite side is going to sit there and be okay with it like they... like 2020 will be elementary compared to what's gonna happen in 2024, right? Don't you think it's gonna be that level of intensity where it goes, I don't know if that's gonna die out a day, two days, a week, two weeks later. What do you think? Well, the issue is these people are specialists

in counterinsurgency. So many of these people come from DOD counterinsurgency. So many of these people come from DOD counterinsurgency operations. They come from the sort of CIA intelligence insurgency, counterinsurgency world. And what you're trying, counterinsurgency is basically a state of civil war in a country where the preferred regime

of the US government is being threatened politically or sometimes kinetically by an insurgent political force within the country who wants to either topple that government or elect a different government. And the US military and the US statecraft apparatus descends on the country to quell the insurgency. And the end goal of an insurgency is not to wipe the whole thing out,

it's to reduce it to a burning ember and to effectively nip the heads of the sunflowers so that nothing can grow that's robust. You can't end the ideology but what you can do is you can neutralize all of its capacities to convert into a successful political election and this is what they are trying to do right now. There's something called the 65 Project, which folks may have heard of. This is basically a political black ops hit job operation to disbar all 65 attorneys who had some role

in representing Donald Trump's election integrity lawsuits. Rudy Giuliani, for example, just this week was hit with I, I think, a $150 million defamation case just for talking about some election workers, I believe in Georgia. You know, had to sell his grandfather's watch. And remember, he was disbarred in the state of New York just for representing the president. The same thing happened to John Eastman in the state of California. If you've got no lawyers, because they've got basically a black ops you know political you know heart attack gun to the to the temple of every lawyer who can represent the

administration to combat this then then you've got no legal representation you've got no access to the law I'm not I'm not even thinking about that you're going to the other side right I'm talking about the day-to-day. I'm not even thinking about that. You're going to the other side, right? I'm talking about the day-to-day people. I'm not talking about what they did to Giuliani and what they did to all his people and they targeted every one of his guys. If you were somebody that was a Trump support, if you didn't flip on them, they sued you, they sued you, they sued you to get rid of all your...

They destroyed a lot of people's lives. A lot of people's lives a lot of people's lives They destroyed right I'm talking about the everyday Day-to-day person in America that's voting for this guy That thinks you guys are out of your mind that you're gonna do this to my country Yeah, how different do you your State Department official? How different do you you've been in it? You weren't in 2016 how different do you think it would be in 2020 for the way those voters react in the way they did in 2020? Well, I think the permanent psychic damage will last for centuries if something like that is done people will always remember it

but You know, there's a lot of things that you can do as kind of a special operation on the martial law side to kind of a special operation on the martial law side to contain that and then use the Justice Department to string up all the leaders, use censorship techniques to crack down all the means of communicating with each other. This is one of the reasons they made such a big issue of Facebook ahead of 2020 and why they put so much pressure

on Mark Zuckerberg ahead of the 2020 elections because Facebook was what was being used to coordinate IRL was being used to coordinate IRL meetups to coordinate, you know rally communities to coordinate you know street activity and and this same network descended on Facebook and basically called it not just at Facebook post taken down but to have entire Facebook groups stop the steal for example, was the fastest growing Facebook group in Facebook history. And through the Department of Homeland Security

and the Election Integrity Project Network folks and that delegitimization terms of service policy, they got that thing nuked inside of a week. The rise and fall of the Stop the Steal group in the short lifespan, it was one of the fastest growing groups in Facebook history and hub for those trying to delegitimize the word.

Yep, yep. The election. Can you go a little lower Rob? How big was this group? I'm actually curious the number of people. Organs of Melon, welcome to the button. Hour later the group uploaded a minute long video to its Facebook page, point and message.

The grainy footage showed a crowd outside, bowling points straight, and they started shouting, chanting, okay, perfect. but here's the difference here's it the 22 hours later was started and mastered 320 thousand at one point gained a hundred less than a day okay but here's the thing here's the difference here's the difference this won't work the reason why this won't work is because there's something called X he's in the way you can't do nothing with them you can't you can't go through him and right now the other day

Steve Ballmer is being interviewed you know who Steve Ballmer is gonna give his money to can you type in Steve Ballmer? Who he gives his money to if you just go on Google Rob and see who Steve Ballmer he's Steve Ballmer's friends with who? Bill Gates, okay developers developers developers right right so if you look at which political party he gives his money to. Steve Ballmer, can you see it Rob, or no? Just tap in Steve Ballmer Democrat or Republican. Steve Ballmer Democrat or Republican, okay.

So, there's some donations from our ownership. Steve Ballmer Democratic Democratic Party, since 2015, $7.9 million donation to the Democratic Party, and you know how much is given to Republicans? $10,000. Rob, I'm going to give you this, put it up so people can show. That's the one right there, good for you. Zoom in, NBA political contributions, Ballmer, $7.9 million Democratic Party 10,000 to Republican Don DeVos magic all Republican Dan Gilbert both but more Republican you got the James Dolan more

Republican you got Jerry Reinsdorf even Steven Spurs you see what it is but going to Steve Ballmer he's the hundred billion dollar guy he's 130 billion dollar guy they asked him a question where do you get your news from you know what he said he said X even a guy who's a liberal who doesn't give money to Republicans he gets his news from X right the only way like I'm trying to really go and dissect each of these as a reasonable man Who's a business guy that's never been in the Department of Defense? But I study games and manipulation and power and war and all this stuff. I'm

You know some of that was used against me in the insurance industry as an outsider that came in and took a big block of insurance Business like who the hell you think you are They try to get me to lose appointments defamation all this stuff I'm like, yeah, it's not gonna happen. But then I saw the way they did it and then boom, eventually I sold the business for a few hundred million dollars and they were not happy about it. But it's too late by that time because we were able

to fight through some of the things that they were doing. Good lawyers, good strategy, sequencing, all of that. I don't think, Mike, that playbook is gonna work today. Because Elon's not gonna let that happen. Elon is probably just as much hated and feared by them as Trump is because Trump's going to go be a president. He's going to go away for years. Okay. The Trumpism won't, but he'll go away for 8 to 12 years. Musk is 53. He ain't going away for 30, 40, 50 years. Okay. And I'm surprised the fact that there's not any stories that we hear about of assassination attempt on him.

My concern is the way to go about this is you gotta go after him the next 13 days if you really wanna do something. He's the target, because he's in the way, not Trump. If you get him, now you can do some stuff because it's a shit show over there, right? Well, there's like 13 different regulatory agencies who are all moving against Musk You know just yesterday or just this week it came out that you know one one of the Adams shifts, you know from chairman of the Intelligence Committee

Darling organization the countering the Center for countering digital hate CCDH,H, had in its internal playbook, Kill Musk's Twitter. You have entire State Department, USAID, National Down for Democracy programs dedicated to killing Elon Musk's ex. You have this EU legislation, the EU Digital Services Act, which is now openly, the regulators have openly said they are going to look to actually tax,

that's exactly right. Looking to tax. Look that for non-compliance with the EU censorship law, they will go after Musk's other assets, his SpaceX assets, his Tesla assets, basically all of Europe is going to do to Elon Musk on steroids, what Brazil did initially with the Starlink seizures.

All of this has the support of Biden's State Department. This is a crooked operation. I was sort of involved in some of those early negotiations in 2020. This is a very nasty beast. Now, by the way, I'm not arguing that they're going to, I'm not weighing in on the probability of success of these, you

know, sort of cloak and dagger operations, but I don't think that they can be totally dismissed out of hand because how fast the tone of the country can change in a crisis situation, a crisis event happens and it doesn't have to be an assassination, it could be a riot, it could be a street protest, it could be a news cycle, and then suddenly you get these prime movers, you know, you get the Justice Department to announce some drastic action, you get the military to sort of, you know, cordon off entire blocks of major cities as they did around January 6 in DC and as happened with some of the protest riot situations both around BLM and around January 6 and Then there starts to become a kind of

Martial law overtone in in those in that moment it is a totally different scenario than then looking at it through the sterile glass of An in a day-to-day civilian news cycle you can can do extraordinary actions to people who are normally untouchable. And all I'm saying is you can't discount that because these are not small fish who are out there working on this. The Norm Eisen types, the Mark Elias types, the Jamie Raskin types, they're not going to bed at 6 p.m. this week thinking up, thinking up you know what we're probably gonna lose. There's too much on the line. What do you think if you're a betting man, if you're in Las

Vegas, you're betting. What is what are you betting on right now happening? What are your odds of what's gonna happen November 5th? Will this guy, is Trump gonna win? Is Kamala gonna win? Where are you at? I was confident in 2016. I did bet on that significantly. I did not bet on 2020 because I thought the fog of war was too thick. And I'm not betting with my money on 2024 because I think the fog of war is too thick,

but I'm betting with my soul in the sense that it's my, I think that this is probably the most important election in US history. So the way I process what you just said is, you don't think he's gonna win. You're at a place that you don't think, not he's going to win, let me restate the words, you don't think they're gonna let him win.

I think if it was a fair fight, he would win in a landslide. But the fight is not fair, but just how unfair it is a fair fight. He would win in a landslide, but the fight is not fair But just how unfair it is is still unclear Okay, so fine so let's let's go to a different angle story-wise I want to talk to you about something else which you know, let's see where we go with this ink You tell right and I'm sure you've heard of ink you tell I'm sure you know about it. It's the... Trump tomorrow, Trump on Thursday spoke at the, is at Arizona State University, which the president is Michael Crowe,

who is today and was since its inception in 1999, the chairman of In-Q-Tel. And by the way, so what's your point with that though? Well, my point on that is Arizona State University is this really interesting hub in Arizona. It's where Obama gave his first commencement speech, but it's got a huge censorship program there through something called the Center on Narrative,

Disinformation, and Strategic Influence. It's tied all the way up to the Arizona Supreme Court with this disinformation task force that that center's head was spearheading. The McCain Institute is highly active there with a giant censorship operation through its strategic communications program. There's so much censorship of the Trump world

that runs through ASU, and it's part of something called their Global Security Initiative, the ASU Global Security Initiative, which is a formal intelligence program. So it's literally a U.S. government intelligence-funded domestic censorship program. So it's literally a U.S. government intelligence funded domestic censorship program. And they get a way of $1.6 million from the Pentagon

to do this censorship black ops. They get another couple hundred thousand from the State Department and the National Science Foundation. But it is just funny that Trump, sort of like he's always walking into the lion's den when it comes to everything from the Butler rally to going into neighborhoods that most people would think

would be hostile to a Republican or going on doing these hostile interviews, he's walking into the ASU lion's den. So let's go through this for the average person that doesn't know, if you don't mind sharing the history of In-Q-Tel and what they do. So In-Q-Tel was created in 1999. The internet had been private for about eight years. Remember the internet started off as a DARPA project. It was ARPA, then it changed its name to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Basically, it was created in the 1960s by the military because the military gets so much paperwork,

they have to manage the entire American empire abroad. They have to manage counterinsurgency situations with 300 different languages and dialects. They're getting inbound paper, not just between different agencies within DOD, but all of their connective tissue to civil society and universities. They have to manage the huge amount of paperwork.

And so they thought the most efficient way to do that would be using this new digital technology of computers and being able to send digital communications over effectively an intranet, a DOD in Internet. Then in 1990 we win the Cold War and we are trying to do soft power influence projection across the world. We figure that if we can make this Internet thing a dual use technology where civilians can build on top of it, we can effectively make this new Internet the same sort of powerful soft power projection tool that that Radio was when the CIA Created radio for Europe radio Liberty voice of America all these were State Department CIA

proprietaries to be able to pipe in Sentiment into foreign countries to influence the course of their events to advantage US interests We had a first mover advantage in movies, in film, in TV, in print. So the internet came online in 1991. Google got its start, you know, in like 1996-ish when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford PhDs, but their work that resulted in Google was a DARPA grant. the DARPA grant was a joint CIA NSA Program for flock for for tracking how birds of a feather flock together Because the CIA and NSA began to realize that internet traffic around web 1.0

Which words which is blogs and forums and static websites Could provide a political early warning radar system for the rise and fall of insurgency movements who are challenging US interests overseas. So that's what created Google from 1996 to 1998. 1999, the CIA wants to formalize this, this was during the time of this tech boom, right? You had this big tech boom, and then you had this sort of bust from 99 to 2001.

But around that time, the CIA saw how vast these new internet technologies were becoming in terms of their market size. They'd exploded so fast they began to rival big oil within a decade of their existence, where oil had been around for hundreds of years at that point. So, Incutel was created so that the CIA could basically buy a back channel influence over tech companies by being early stage investors, a venture capital arm. So they would get a little equity stake,

but then they would also get the liaison back channel network with all the tech companies that they invested in so they could be used as assets if necessary. so they could be used as assets if necessary. So they could be used as assets if necessary. So if you look at InkGrab, if you can go to IQT's website, if you just go to iqt.com and you look at, maybe it's not IQT, just type in InQtel and then go to their website, there you go.

What is the website about? IQT.org. Okay, so if you go a little lower, accept the cookies and go a little lower, and you see the portfolio. Keep going lower, keep going lower, keep going lower. Okay, so, no, go back Rob, go back. Okay, stay right there.

Okay, GitLab, you see Palantir, right? Which if I'm not, is that Peter Thiel? I think that is Peter Thiel. Databricks, advanced navigation, and I think at one point, InQtel bought Keyhole, which Keyhole was like the map, right? And then Keyhole was sold to Google.

Then Google, I think in 04, 03 they bought it, and 04, 05 they turned into Google Earth. So in other words, Google Earth that we see now was once owned by the CIA and sold to Google. And then the Google, Sergei and Larry have connection through Stanford, right? Which you were talking about earlier that they came about. When I think about Google and I

see what they're, you know, how they got started between all the other guys, how much you think CIA has access to everything that Google does, access and influence to what Google does? Well I think they're back channel conversations but I think most of them are had through civil society organizations staffed by CIA people rather than CIA directly. Like you were talking about earlier. Yes, yes. And that's what the function of a lot of these

multi-stakeholder forums are, or some of these private NGOs that are often funded directly by the Pentagon or the State Department. There's a few things while we're on this actually on the Inqutel. If you look up, I believe it was Lee Fang who was the author. If you look up Lee Fang, InQtel, Instagram, Twitter, mining.

I pointed this out the other day because it's useful. You know, this is, because I saw that you had the Global Security Initiative from ASU pulled up and so this is, and I mentioned they do all this internet censorship work. If you click that Inter security initiative from ASU pulled up and so this is and I mentioned they do all this internet censorship work if you click that intercept article from April 2016 and you know this is this is part of what that is you know I mentioned that in the 1990s the CIA and NSA were basically paying Stanford to fund the research of Sergey Brin and Larry Page for their mining of search engine aggregation results

in order to detect what people around the world were searching for and what communities they were forming and what they were saying. Well, the CIA is doing the same thing through In-Q-Tel for the firms that do all the mass data scraping of tweets, Instagram photos, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, so that you have this kind of all-seeing eye from the intelligence world

about political sentiment on social media. The other thing that I was gonna mention was, I forget if it was on the In-Q-Tel front, it'll come back to me, but we can move on to the other. If you go back to In-Q-Tel's Wikipedia, Rob, just go to In-Q-Tel's Wikipedia, I wanna know the founders. So go to the founders, Norm, let's see who Norm is.

If you can zoom in there, zoom in. So is a US aerospace businessman who served as US Undersecretary of the Army, 75, 77, I guess he was served as a chairman of Lockheed Martin Corporation he was chairman of the review of the United States human space flight plans committee 83 he was elected member of the National Academy of Engineering for the imaginative blending of the skill engineer and if you go look is that it that was the courier so where is the and then go back to the other founder let's

see who the other guy is yeah he's a little bit interesting as well. American Tech, who got his start as a video game designer, then co-founded. Okay, can you freeze right there? So you notice the other founder came from Lockheed. And this one is the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. This is what I talk about all the time,

which is that the CIA is, because the tee up to this was, you know, how extensive is the CIA's back channel or influence over Google? And I always try to stress that the CIA is second fiddle in everything it does. It is, it only exists for two purposes. One is it is a plausibly deniable support agency

for the State Department to pursue State Department goals, or it's a plausibly deniable support agency for the State Department to pursue State Department goals, or it's a plausibly deniable covert support unit for the military, for paramilitary DOD activity. Anytime you go from CIA director to head of the State Department, like Mike Pompeo did under Trump, or anytime you go from CIA director to head of the Defense Department,

like Leon Panetta under Clinton, that's a promotion. The CIA has to answer to the State Department in everything it does if it's doing national interest work. It has to answer to the DOD for everything that it does on the National Security Front if it's supporting the DOD. It is not the final boss in the room. It is, you know, it just does the dirty work, but the idea, it's not the brains of the operation.

It's sort of the low-level hitman that Tony Soprano sends in to collect debt. It's not the head of the mafia in that sense. Who's the head? Well, what you have is this apparatus that's congealed. You have this defense diplomacy intelligence apparatus, and so you have these corporate and financial stakeholders who work together with The diplomat sphere in the military sphere to create a consensus and the CIA will implement whatever

plausibly deniable Covert action consistent with the you know, the plausible deniability NSE 10-2 doctrine in order to implement that. But that plan is made above the CI's head and they have to answer every step of the way to that. So behind every dirty cloak and dagger CI operation is a dirty assistant secretary at the State Department or a dirty member of the State Department's

policy planning staff or a dirty undersecretary of defense or a dirty person of the State Department's policy planning staff, or a dirty undersecretary of defense, or a dirty person on the National Security Council who's coordinating that. They are the functionaries, they're the arms, they're not the brains of it. But what you see here actually in In-Q-Tel is the representation of both the State Department and the Pentagon.

And the other thing I want to stress though, and I just remembered this is the second thing that I wanted to come back to, was when we were talking about Google and its early role with the CIA and the NSA and DARPA, that sounds like an extraordinary story to people who got the typical sort of high school history lesson.

But in fact, this is actually the same story as it has been for every major technology advancement in the past century and a half. If you go to my ex account and you type in, you type in history GPS, I'm gonna, you'll see a video, you'll see a video by, I believe it was George Friedman, who was the former head of Stratfor.

Stratfor is known as the private CIA It's yeah, this is the one so just yep, so just to tee this up real quick So this is the guy who you know was the head of the the private CIA basically the career track that see There's two tracks at the CIA. There's the analyst track and the operations track the analysts do intelligence the, the operations do overthrowing governments, propaganda, counter-intell, all that stuff. But the analyst track, they go on to jobs either at universities or at private sector intelligence firms like Kroll or like Stratfor.

The Stratfor email leaks were actually a big deal with the Assange wiccan leaks. But this is George Freeman giving a talk, I believe it was in Dubai, but he's basically counseling one of the Gulf nation governments about how to create a robust technology sector. Because everyone knows the biggest game in town is tech, big tech is overtaking big oil,

even if you're an oil nation, you need to diversify where your incomes come from and this if you if you're not competing on technology you're going to lose economically to those who do. So he's brought in to speak at this at this conference a few years ago and he's telling them listen we believe in capitalism. We believe in you know you know in the power of the free market, but you want a really kick butt free market capitalist tech sphere to grow in your country, you need to have the government subsidize it.

And I know it sounds a little bit counterintuitive. He's saying this? Yes, he's saying you need to have your defense sector fund this and subsidize it. And he basically says, I know this sounds counterintuitive and it's a little at odds with free market, but let me tell you the history of how America got this way. And then if you want to let this play,

this clips about two minutes, but goes over the history of the GPS, the cell phone, the camera, all this. I want to begin with technology because there is a belief here that technology is the key to geopolitical power. Well, perhaps it is, but let's first discuss technology. here that technology is the key to geopolitical power? Well, perhaps it is.

But let's first discuss technology. So for example, this is an iPhone. You must have many of them. It's obviously a useful tool, and you have no idea of its history. I will now tell you its history. The cell phone was developed by the United States Army in the 1970s.

It was first deployed by the US Army. So your cell phone is a military tool. The microchip was commissioned by the US Air Force to fly the F-14 and also cruise missiles. GPS, you've used that to find your way around. So did the US Navy, which commissioned the building of the GPS squadron so its submarines could know where they are.

There's of course the camera. We all love the camera. I don't, but my wife does. It was developed for space satellite so that the film did not have to be dropped to Earth. It took pictures that could be transmitted as data to Earth. And of course there's the internet, without which this wouldn't have any place, which is developed by DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,

to move information from one point to another quickly so we didn't have to mail it. In other words, to understand the technology of this age, you must understand the geopolitical requirements of the United States, the military that it created, and the technology that it created as well. So you cannot look at the cell phone, the iPhone, the very cute little thing, the camera and everything else without understanding its military origins. Who is this guy?

George Friedman. This is the head of Stratford, the private CIA. So okay, you just prompted two questions. Peter Zahan is one of them because I think he used to be with Stratford. What do you think about him? He's been interesting lately. Has he? What's he said? I'm curious with you, because you smile.

Well, can I ask what prompted, I haven't kept up with all of the developments, so I'm just curious what prompted the... Well, you're smiling, though. And I'm a poker player. Why are you smiling? Well, I would say I have something of a philosophical and geopolitical and there's probably several other

other terms here. I have some disagreements with the way that he sees, interprets and promotes his vision of geopolitics. I think it's hard for me to find a Peter Zahan video that I agree with on either first principles grounds or the conclusions or the analysis. Now look, I'm not trying to pick a beef or whatnot, but I think I've seen, first of all,

didn't he quit Twitter and then come back, and he seemed to be promoting, at least in some soft sense, much of the internet censorship architecture that's been laid down. I mean, I see him as a sort of regurgitation of the vomit of the blob as a sort of regurgitation of the vomit of the blob as a sort of private consultant that just kind of distills the jargon of foreign policy for layman speak

in order to kind of get a mass of hearts and minds, and I'm not saying that's his business model, but the end result of it is it's kind of a Bill Nye, the science guy of geopolitics. Well, let me ask you this. Is he, so does he give you vibes of CIA or no? He doesn't give you vibes of being connected or? I don't know.

I mean, like I said, a lot of people accuse me of that as well. It's hard to actually be informed in this space without having people in that world who are a part of your network. It's a world that most civilians with a nine to five who care about football or the UFC or music or some other passion, you're either in this

or you're not or you only have a passer's chance at understanding it and if you're doing it full-time as a full-time consultant or whatever his business model is, then you're obviously pros, you're obviously connected to those networks so that doesn't mean that you are of it. And the other thing to keep in mind is that much,

so much of it by its very nature is in is informal informal networks You know, so you're not necessarily a lot of eyeballs He gets a lot of eyeballs like when he does the interviews and he makes his tours But you know, he's he's not necessarily he doesn't favor Trump, right? He's not the most pro telegram Pavel of guy, right? He's not the most pro-Telegram, Pavlov guy. He's not the most pro-Musk guy. When someone's against, let's just say Musk or Telegram, and we saw what happened with Telegram, I want to know your thoughts on that as well.

For somebody to be able to speak the way he does on so many different variety of topics, you wonder, how does he know this stuff? you just go to the diplomat and you just recycle whatever's on the top page or you read the Journal of Democracy go to journal democracy org for example so you don't think he's that deep you think he's shallow with the information that he has listen you're making me pick this beef I've done it publicly by the way if you've seen I've did like a little video on this before I try not to get into these personal things. But look, and I say this sort of with a little bit of love in the sense that, you know, we're all, everyone's trying to interpret the world of geopolitics, so I'm not trying to like, you know, pick a personal thing.

But yeah, I think, I think it's actually everything that I've seen and I'm open to being wrong on this. If someone can show me an insightful Peter Zahan video, I will clockwork orange, keep my eyes open for the whole thing. I will real time do my response to it. But I have not seen anything from Peter Zahan that I've not already seen at JournalOfDemocracy.org. It is just a watered down reprint of what the National Endowment for Democracy said three weeks ago. Hi, this is Mike Benz.

You can connect with me on Manect for any questions that you have on internet censorship, foreign policy, national security, the blob, or if you wanna know what a particular institution is doing that you may have seen or have questions about in terms of its control over the information ecosystem. So connect with me on Manect. Okay, so fine.

Let's go back to George Friedman, okay? And George Friedman, you're talking about, he's the what? He's the, what is his position there? Founding geopolitics, I'm the chairman of the publishing company, Stratford, right? So he said what he said in that speech. Here's the phone, here's the camera,

here's the internet, DARPA produced internet so we can mail things to each other faster, right? What did you want me to dissect from his message there? That the story of Google's relationship with the U.S. military, with the Central Intelligence Agency, with the State Department, with our congealed blob of a defense diplomacy intelligence foreign policy apparatus is not some crazy story that's unique in American history. It's actually the standard default course of events of technological development in the United States in the sense that the money in R&D usually comes pre-baked from military

projects and then is converted to dual use where the commercial sector can upscale it can turn it into a profit. This is one of the beating hearts of the military industrial complex is this you know it's a it's almost a trillion dollars a year that the Pentagon gets you know it's one of the biggest departments in the federal government, it's the largest employer in the entire country, and it is a cheap way to get commercial technology to have the huge multinational corporations that we have in the tech space because they don't need to do a lot of the early stage R&D as a matter of free market and have to run up

all the costs on a thousand failed attempts to develop a technology. It can be publicly subsidized by the military and then turned over to the National Science Foundation, its little civilian arm. And I only use a pejorative phrase like little because the National Science Foundation is one of those pernicious places for internet censorship. They've done in the censorship technology space the same thing as what we just saw with the cell phone, the GPS, Google search engines

and all that in the sense that the scan and ban language of AI censorship, the scan and ban capacities to be able to ingest 900 million tweets and then run these sophisticated keyword searches in proximal distance between different keywords in order micro target the narrative You want to nuke off the internet that all started as a DARPA project when when DARPA was trying to manage the insurgency of Isis and And was concerned that Isis was recruiting on Twitter and Facebook and so they spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing AI Keyword scan and ban technology and then when Trump won the 2016 election the National Science Foundation

Basically took that over they turned it into a civilian Free market of censorship technology and then no less than this then the State Department's you know policy planning staff Color revolution, Color Revolution guru Jared Cohen moved over to Google Jigsaw to create the basically the world's first AI censorship retail product which catapulted us into the world we now live in where every word you say on the internet is being monitored for its toxicity score in terms of how much it violates some blob political shibboleth. What's his background? Co-head of Goldman Sachs Global instead of Goldman Sachs.

So he's doing now. He's doing partners for manager of private. So president of global affairs and go ahead. So this was a young guy who, and again, I'm not trying to start a personal beef with this anyway. I can sort of see why he made the decisions that he did, but I think that the fruits of them have resulted in so many of the dystopian shades of life that we now see in terms of the censorship

of the internet, at least as it was until Elon Fried X and some of the recent changes that Zuck has been making. But Jared Cohen was this young gun who was embedded in a lot of these Middle East, North Africa, counterinsurgency movements. I think he created movements.org and some of this early stuff in the and I think the early 2000s and then he was plucked up to the policy planning staff of the State Department which coordinates CIA was coordinate State Department overt action with CIA covert action and this this guy at before I think he was even 30 years old,

was, so he was tapped by the Condoleezza Rice State Department of George Bush, but he was considered, I think so, you know, he was kept over by Hillary Clinton in 2009. His big claim to fame there was coming up with this idea of using social media for diplomacy activity. So Facebook was created in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, smartphone in 2007. Jared Cohen gets to the State Department's policy planning staff which coordinates state and CIA activity in around 2007 and he looks

around and he says what are we doing running these operations out of US embassies or consulates or CIA station houses? Everyone we want to recruit is on Facebook, is on Twitter, is on YouTube. We can upscale our diplomatic toolkit, our covert action toolkit, our color revolution toolkit by simply leveraging the power of social media. So we need a new doctrine called Digital Statecraft or Diplomacy 2.0 is some of the branding terms and this was credited with the crowning achievement of social

media diplomacy, the Arab Spring, from 2010 to 2012 when you had all these Middle East, North, Tunisia, Egypt, all these countries adversary governments of the Obama administration being toppled in Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions. Jared Cohen made a personal phone call to Jack Dorsey while he was at the State Department in 2009 in order to stop Twitter's scheduled maintenance that was going on the week of

the Ahmadinejad elections in Iran because the State Department was running a social media influence operation in Iran to try to influence the course of that election so the State Department personally interceded on the scheduled maintenance of Twitter just to keep Twitter open and this is where all this money was flowing into this these military connections with the social media companies. Because social media was seen as the golden goose for insta-color revolution, insta-regime change operations. That could be done at speed, at scale, at a much cheaper cost.

You don't need to have 10,000 interlocutors on the ground through a dozen different NGOs in order to mobilize people to take to the streets of the Maidan Square in 2014 you just have a Facebook group which tells everyone to be exactly where they where they need to be tells everyone what the slogans are everyone can just and then you can publicly market off of that because it's a public facing social media hashtag or a social media page. We actually funded all these groups

with State Department money and USAID money to train them how to use Facebook, Twitter hashtags and set up Facebook groups. But then all of this came to a crashing halt when it started to backfire on the foreign policy establishment, when Brexit happened and then Trump got elected on the back of social media. So let me let me ask this when when Trump got elected the first time if if I have to think

like the enemy your fear is first round you know his first term he's not gonna get a lot done he will but not a lot done you can't get him get reelected because in the second term He's really gonna do what he's gonna want to do because he doesn't give a shit about getting reelected Is the fear now of him winning because he's really gonna impose and challenge and push of getting things done That may be because you know a lot of times some Republicans said we said we're gonna do this But he didn't do it. We said you're gonna lock her up. you didn't do it. Well you said you were gonna lock her up, you didn't do it. You said you were gonna go out, but you didn't do it. You said you were gonna do that, but you didn't do it.

Some of the stuff that he said, he didn't do. And the true Republican, Republican, Republicans are like, what happened with those things? Do you think a part of the fear of the second term is they're sitting there saying, holy shit, if he gets in here and actually Learns that he didn't know anybody the people that he hired now He actually knows who's not full of shit and who is full of shit and who are the people that are snakes and who is not? Because he's had enough exchange to know who you can trust when we can trust sure

We can't get this guy to get back in here. Do you think that's the big fear? What do you think the fear is with the second term? I think the fear in a sense is actually a lot less than that, but it's somehow a lot more than that because it's a lot less than that, which is that they don't need Trump to take drastic action in order to ruin the best laid plans of mice and men, if you will.

So we have this big foreign policy blob operation to seize Eurasia. If you look up, for example, Russia 75 trillion resources, you'll get a glimpse of what I'm talking about here. This has been the great goal of NATO and the stakeholders, the State Department and the DOD since the Cold War. But if you just look at this, so you can pull up a graph, I think,

in one of these articles, which will just give you a sort of a lay of the land here. Yeah, like something like one of those will probably get you there. Yeah, so you see like Russia has by far the most natural resources of any other country on Earth. And Russia is also surrounded by a bunch of these ex-Soviet satellite states.

Everything from Central and Eastern Europe into the Stans. And there has been this NATO expansion operation since 1990. There has been this sort of, you have the security alliance, but then you have the political and economic entanglements that bring their economics into the Western economic sphere.

All of this became very fragile in the past. I mean, really started when Putin began to reassert Russian influence over Central and Eastern Europe through gas diplomacy in 2005, 2006, the blowups with Georgia and with other Baltic and Balkan states, there became this big struggle for control over the European gas economy and also to end Russia's military complex because Russia is also the reason that we have not been able to invade Syria

You know they provided the s-400 air defense systems that blocked us from doing air raids against Assad They're the ones who are providing the small arms to all the African rebel groups who are toppling all the US-backed governments They're in Chad and Niger In you know in the Ivory Coast They're providing a backstop to basically every major adversary government of the U.S. Pentagon. But they also sit on all these natural resources. You may recall, Lindsey Graham came out

just a few months ago and sort of let the cat out of the bag where he said, listen, even if you don't care about democracy in Ukraine, the fact is they sit on $12.4 trillion of natural resources. So we should be defending Ukraine and spending the military investment in defending them because we want those 12.4 trillion.

Of course, you look at it and you say, but wait a second, that's Ukraine's 12.4 trillion, right? And no, it's because when we move into these countries, we make them our political and economic vassals. It is our American companies or North American allied companies who develop the partnerships. This is what happened, for example, with Ukraine, with Burisma and NaftaGas.

NaftaGas is the big state-owned Ukrainian gas giant that Burisma was the feeder into. Well, Chevron signed a ten billion dollar partnership deal with Nathagas before the the 2014 coup shell from from from the UK signed a ten billion dollar deal with it George Soros has been personally leading campaign to privatize that company and put it into the arms of US investors so that even though the pipelines all sit in Ukraine and even though it's Ukraine's almost its entire economy outside of agriculture you as

a Ukrainian citizens do not actually profit from having the gas there from having the pipelines there because all the money is going to investors 11,000 miles away in Washington and in London but this is the game as it is in Germany this is the game as it is in Moldova, in Latvia, in Lithuania, in Poland, in Finland, in Sweden, in Turkmenistan, in Uzbekistan, in Kazakhstan. This is the game to be able to bring

these trillions of dollars of assets into the arms of Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase, and Citibank, and Black Morgan Chase and City Bank and Black Rock and the multinational corporations that service or portfolio firms and the trickle-down political insiders who are basically the donies of that of that complex But the problem is Trump could that is already a very fragile operation as Russia has Persisted with this military operation

and we have been unable to regime change their government. You know, the Navalny, the Pussy Riot operations, none of them worked. It is much harder logistically for us to mobilize against Russia by by backstopping Ukraine without drastic escalation. And so the problem is, is this is very very very fragile And all Trump needs to do to ruin it and the trillions of dollars of windfall profits and the hundreds of billions of dollars of Investments already made which will be sunk costs if this operation doesn't work is for Trump to be neutral That's all that will take for ruin for ruining it

It doesn't require drastic action by Trump if Trump negotiates a peace deal right now between Russia and Ukraine as it stands and says okay the war is over no more Russian aggression but Russia you get to keep the territory that you've already seized in the Donbass we're gonna respect the Crimean referendum from 2014. All Trump needs to do is accept that as the lay of the land and you have already dealt hundreds of billions of dollars of damages to Wall Street private equity firms to London bankers to multinational corporations Which were all skating to where the puck was going which was seizing these trillions in Eurasia and a great example of this If you go to my timeline right now on X and you type in

aggressive the phrase aggressively neutral. I'm gonna show you what the Biden State Department did to the Prime Minister of Pakistan just two years ago. Okay, this is just a funny thing because of Dua Lipa's Atlantic Council Award. But let's see, aggressively neutral position is the full phrase. In fact, if you wanna find it maybe the fastest way is you can just go type in the intercept on search,

on just a regular Google search, because I'll show you straight from the source document. The intercept type in Imran Khan State Department Cable. Is that from the intercept one? Zoom in a little bit. Yeah, yeah, or actually I think it was called the leaked State Department Cable. If you scroll down a little bit,

no, no, just scroll down a little. I think I saw it right there. Yeah, yeah, I think that. Okay, actually, we'll scroll, but I think that's, let's go with that first one. Okay, so run a Control-F search for the phrase aggressively. Okay, cool. All right, so it's there.

So actually, let's just start at the top, and then we'll go back to this thing, so we'll see, just so I can set the stage a little bit. So this is Imran Khan, the most popular Prime Minister in Pakistan history, widely loved by his people to the point where after they removed him from power, they banned elections for a short time because they were afraid he would win again, even after being removed.

So this shows what really happened with the removal of the most popular Prime Minister in Pakistan history. It was basically a coup by the Pakistani Parliament and its military, its generals, and its ISI, its intelligence service. And these intercepted leaked cable documents show what gave rise to that coup.

And it was the US State Department, diplomats from the US State Department, threatening Pakistani parliament Department, diplomats from the US State Department threatening Pakistani parliamentarians and diplomats with quote carrots and sticks and saying Imran Khan needs to be removed as president you need to impeach him and you will get basically humanitarian aid if you do it so you'll get carrots will make you rich if you do it and we will make your life a living hell

We will make you a isolated pariah will put sanctions on you if you don't Imran Khan is angered the US State Department But all will be forgiven if you in Parliament remove him from power now imagine if if Russia had done this to us or something right so now if you control F to aggressively neutral You'll see what the reasoning here is and actually before I read this let me just set the stage a little bit here so you know the history of Pakistan has this hybrid governance model where they have they're very explicit unlike the US about the different role of the civilian elected government and the

military the the military state in Pakistan has been a US vassal for at least 40 years. It was Pakistan was where we trained the Mujahideen in the 1970s, the CIA backed Islamic fundamentalist groups who were being used as essentially US funded radical terrorist groups in order to attack the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1970 and cause them to have sort of their Vietnam. That was all being coordinated in Pakistan with Pakistan fronted CIA banks like BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. And Pakistan, because it is this big US military and intelligence hub is a major trans shipment point for weapons to Ukraine There is a there's basically a sea bridge from Pakistan to Romania the weapons then go in from there

Just this year the UK built an air bridge between Pakistan and Romania in order to more efficiently ship the weapons because it's a giant weapons depot for the DOD and And and the CIA for their operations in Syria, for their operations in Afghanistan, all over Central Asia. So if Imran Khan was neutral on the war and said, I want to be friends with the US, but I also want to be friends with Russia, so I don't want to provide military transshipment from Pakistan to Romania to Ukraine to kill the Russians, then that cripples the ability for NATO to

successfully win an already teetering war with Russia. So they need a prime minister who will authorize that. If someone's simply neutral, then that ends it. And so you'll see what the State Department told the the parliamentarians in Pakistan is that he needs to be removed because Imran Khan took an aggressively neutral position on Ukraine. That is all Trump needs to be removed because Imran Khan took an aggressively neutral position on Ukraine. That is all Trump needs to do to ruin this whole operation for the blob. People here and in Europe are quite concerned because why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position on Ukraine. Okay, so let me ask you,

let me bring you back to what you're talking about. 75 trillion Russia, right? Are you going as far as saying that all these money guys, all these big companies, want to find a way to get access to that 75 trillion dollars of natural resources, which by the way, while you're doing this I'm online calculating, if the natural resources of Russia combined is more than every country in NATO combined Which it looks like it is If not, you know They're slightly above him because the second biggest country with the most natural resources that's in NATO There isn't one in top ten just so you know that not one country in the top ten

Rob if you can look it up top 50 countries with natural resources. So in order for you to get access to those $75 trillion, it will not happen with Putin. So you got to find a way to replace them, bring somebody in that you select. And once that person's in, that'll give you the way in to get those resources similar to how they did it with Ukraine because Zelensky will give you they're also second third and all these natural resources that you know Ukraine's got a lot of you know things that the world can take advantage of and they couldn't do with the guy in 2013 2014 and this was a fault so the same playbook with Ukraine the same playbook with Pakistan they want to do

with Russia to get access to the money? Oh, completely. You think that's it? I mean, that's not all of it, but that's it. I mean, in the sense that there are other things that the blob is concerned about, Western Hemisphere, the rush for Africa, you know, it's not the only thing, but it's by far the biggest.

It is the great white whale. Is that the number one reason? Yes, yes. And who is the people that want access to that 75 trillion? Well, you should look at that. Folks can read a great book called Casino Moscow, which is inadvertently about George Soros and how he went from a millionaire to a billionaire.

I mean, George Soros is the largest. Currency manipulation and what? I mean, George Soros went from a millionaire to a billionaire by being effectively an insider trader on NATO, CIA, State Department, DOD operations. When he started the Open Society Foundation in 1979 as a tax loophole for his kids, basically, then Reagan came to power in the 1980s,

created this National Endowment for Democracy, basically parked all the old CIA activities that were banned after the church committee hearing into CIA intermediated NGOs and foundations. George Soros tagged along with that and started basically investing from his New York hedge fund which was focusing on foreign currency speculation, on the rise and fall of currencies

that his foundation was partnering with the State Department in NATO. So he had five years, three years, six months advance notice on the direction of every currency before he bet on it because his foundation was getting money from the US government, was liaising, was serving as the incubator for these rent-to-riot mobs Which you can argue we're done for a sort of noble purpose if you want to talk about, you know Hungary or

Poland or you know any number of the revolutions that took place in the 1980s with with open society support But the fact is is when the 1990s hit it was George Soros and Bill Browder's private investment firms their private little hedge funds their foreign currency speculators but also they were buying up the portfolio companies they were buying up these assets because Russia from 1991 to 1999 did not have a sovereign government it was the 51st state just like Ukraine is now because Boris Yeltsin was the CIA's man in Russia You can look up a great article called spyless coups by the Washington Post by David Ignatius 1997 where he even walks throughout worse Yeltsin was faxing the CIA's cutout organization the National Dump for Democracy in 1993

Effectively asking the CIA for permission to bomb his own parliament building when when you know his own government opposed his His shock therapy sell-off of the two trillion dollars in in sovereign wealth that the Soviet Union held off to Wall Street and London bankers like George Soros's firm which made its money in Russia at that time Watch the Austin power the original Austin powers movie for how they talked about Russia You know in in you know, 1995 at that time You know, there's a there's a great scene where there's a Russian general who appears in the British intelligence lab after Austin powers gets unfrozen and

You know, he's the British intelligence is it has to convince Austin powers No, no, no Russia is the good guys now because they were our guys under the Yeltsin thing Look up if you want you can look up another movie called spinning Boris starring Jeffrey Goldblum which is based on the true story of how the State Department the intelligence services and Hollywood descended on the Russian internal election of 1996 when Yeltsin was polling at 6% in the vote in order to prop up a drunk half-dead Yeltsin to win the election that he was losing in order to keep the looting going before the Russian stock market crashed 90% of its value and Putin arose in the ashes of that, and then turned rogue as many nationalist,

as many former sort of trusted heirs of the US foreign policy establishment frequently do. But what I'm getting at here is the high water mark of the US empire, and I don't want to say this pejoratively, I want a US empire but it has it has to benefit the American homeland and this is the big divide right now but you know the the Francis Fukuyama unipolar moment the great moment that that is our sort of North Star for all of our diplomacy is the 1990s when there was no other

global hegemon China hadn't risen economically Russia hadn't reasserted itself geopolitically or militarily. It's that 1990s moment when we look like we were finally going to get control over Eurasia before we spread ourselves too thin after 9-11 and four years after that, Putin began to turn against the US blob and use the energy assets that Russia sat on in the military Industry that sat on to make Russia sovereign again, and that's what kicked off this altar for first it only impacted Republican companies. This is why Mitt Romney was you know to was on the hawkish side against Obama There's that famous debate line, you know, where Obama, during the 2012 election,

you know, cycle, had that line, you know, you're being too hard on Russia, effectively, he said, the 1980s call, they want their foreign policy back. Well, that was because that had only impacted the Republican interests in Georgia and Azerbaijan at that point, it hadn't yet hit the Democrat side of the blob, Ukrainian energy interests that Soros and in that network had all

invested in and made these major gas investments in while gas was the big transition fuel of the of the of the Green Revolution so once 2014 the counter coup happened with Don Bass and Crimea there became this uniparty alliance in terms of reconquering eastern Ukraine and reconquering Crimea and then Trump sort of sashayed his way into the middle of that and made enemies of both the You know the traditional GOP, right? The the how much but but but think about it, okay, so who lost money? Who loses money if Putin stays?

Who loses business? You know the whole thing when Ukraine was destroyed and everything that happened to the state and then you read this article, BlackRock and you know, a thing was chased, $400 billion to rebuild Ukraine. It was holy shit, $400 billion to rebuild, you know, Ukraine, which holy shit, $400 billion contract, what was it? I wanna say it was Black Rock and Chase, if I'm not mistaken.

It is, Black Rock, JP Morgan, Chase. There you go, so I remembered correctly. So half a trillion, you know, so $400 billion, whatever, to rebuild the place, okay. So who else, like where is the business model? Is it these Vanguard, State Street, Black Rock, Goldman, are those the guys that are missing out on the opportunity of Russia because the guy

to get through them is Putin? Yes, this is who determines who's in the DOD and who's in the state and who's in the CI. Look up the relationship between the Donilon brothers and the Biden administration. Look up Tom Donilon brothers and the Biden administration. Look up Tom Donilon Black Rock Investment Institute. And actually, if you can pull up in a separate tab, before you load that, look up Mike Donilon Biden Advisor.

And I just wanna show you this pair of brothers here real quick. So Mike Donilon is the right-hand man of Joe Biden for basically since the 1980s. He's the inner sanctum of the White House policy advisory and political advisory. Now, Mike Donilon's brother is a guy named Tom Donilon. So, if you go over to that tab that we just pulled up,

just pull up Tom Donilon's bio. There you go, BlackRock, we'll do that one. So if you can zoom in so that I can see it and we can just go through this. Okay, so this is the chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute. This determines where the allocations are made by BlackRock and the, you know,

I know it's a little bit less than the, what, 10 trillion dollars of assets under management because a lot of that is in holding, but it's still effectively billions, trillions of investment dollars, and this is the guy who's the chairman of that. Now, so this is a banker, right? This is a guy who's got thousands of portfolio companies

that span everything, right? BlackRock. I wanna read this and I wanna come to you. I want to read this in I want to come to you So Washington Post called him an advisor to Biden since 81. He has been described as Biden's conscience Alter ego and shared brain. Mm-hmm. That's this guy. That's this guy's brother That's this guy. That's Mike Donilon. So like one while Mike Donilon is the shared conscious, the brain, the political shadow cabinet, the brother is in charge of all investments at BlackRock. It's a family business.

And I wanna just sketch this out because this sort of gets to what's at stake and who's driving this here. So you look at this and you say, okay, Chairman of BlackRock, well that's an economic thing, right? That's like a free market, you know, just portfolio companies that happen to be

owned by a private equity firm, you know, because they own the copper companies, they own the aluminum companies, they own the oil and gas companies, at least they have major equity stakes in all of these. Well, what did he do before becoming effectively the top banker at BlackRock? Well, he was the national security advisor to Obama. That's an intelligence job, a defense job, and a statecraft job.

He chaired the cabinet of the National Security Principles Committee. He was responsible for the coordination and integration of the administration's foreign policy, intelligence, and military efforts. So once again, all three, all three pillars of the blob diplomacy, defense, intelligence, state department, DOD, CIA. He was the coordinator of those three things and now he is the banker whose job is to profit off of the the activities of that battering ram to clear the way for his portfolio companies in order to make sure that they have

Territorial control over the assets that can be extracted or mined in the region in order to make sure that the government in place in that country whether that's Georgia or Poland or Ukraine or Venezuela make sure that the the government there Is is ensuring favorable? commercial conditions for the operating companies that the export markets are secured for their products and services and You know and keep going through it right? He was previously He also chaired the Obama-Biden transition at the US State Department.

This is not a banker. This is a blob apex predator who then becomes the banker, in the sense that this is the same sort of insider trading phenomenon that I'm describing, but this is what determines who Mike Donilon is going to coordinate with Joe Biden in terms of who's running the CIA, who's running the DOD, who's running the State Department,

who are the political appointees who will maximize the profits of the BlackRock Investment Institute. And the BlackRock Investment Institute has a keen eye on all of these things because it's making its investments on the basis of the current and future anticipated activity of the biggest battering ram ram in the world the US military CIA and State Department apparatus okay so devil's, somebody be on the other side and say, I mean look, you're going to have to hire people from those backgrounds because they have the right context, the right

relationships, you're going to be protected long term, just like when somebody eventually, like a Amazon, Bezos is getting so high up, he's got to go hire somebody that was a former head of the IRS, was a former head of this and former head of that because now you're a trillion dollar company and those are the guys that you got to go after because they got the right contacts. To their argument is there anything wrong with hiring people like this? There's nothing wrong with hiring people like this but when it's foreign policy for personal profit everything turns on its head. What if what's best for BlackRock

is not actually best for the American people? But now you have White House policy being formulated to maximize what's best for BlackRock. This is the big divide between the interests of the American Empire and the American homeland. I do agree that the empire is a good thing to have and maintain and consolidate and protect and maybe even at times expand.

I don't know that we would have had the middle class jobs that we had in the 20th century. I don't know that we would have had Coke and Pepsi and Walmart and Exxon Mobil and all these things unless we had CIA activity that was creating favorable markets through its political activity, unless we had state department pressure and unless we had from time to time military or paramilitary activity spearheaded by the DOD. I don't know that we would have had the economic miracle without that. The issue is is globalization when it hit a certain maturity point in the 19... whether you want to pay get the 70s, 80s, the the 90s 2000s at some point what became good for the Empire

Stopped having a trickle-down economic Benefit to the American homeland globalization as a new world order globalization as in the Internationalization of markets supply chains and labor so for example we used to have this the manufacturing miracle right we used to have you know, everything from Pittsburgh and the steel mines and Ohio and the factories. This manufacturing belt of the heartland became the rust belt as multinational corporations

began to have, we began to open up so many export markets in Europe, in in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, that companies started to make more money exporting to foreign populations than to the US. As we started to influence foreign governments to be able to have favorable operating conditions there, we began to put our factories there so that you didn't have a regional hub hiring 10,000 people for this manufacturing plant in Ohio or in West Virginia or in Michigan. We're now going to Vietnam or Malaysia or China or a plant in Chile. You started to have the actual people being hired,

being foreign workforces. Everything was done to maximize total shareholder value in compliance with this. It's one thing to be unabashed, and I'm a free market capitalist guy. Like, die in the wool, I still believe in that. But you do have to reconcile what the long arm of statecraft can do in conjunction

with an internationalist scenario where these companies don't have loyalty to the country, they have loyalty to their shareholders. Many times these shareholders themselves are international or they're London based. And so this rift has opened up where the state we will we will give 900 billion dollars to the Pentagon and 50 billion dollars to USAID and you know 72 billion dollars to the CIA and they will overthrow a government they will take control of a foreign country's media and its parliamentarian system and its judiciary system

And we'll have a whole political institution vassal state control and we'll spend Hundreds of billions of dollars to do that so that these private multinational corporations make tens of billions of dollars But we don't get the jobs. We don't get we don't get the the local factories and regional economic development hubs But by the way, what's your position with, I have few more minutes and I want to get three topics and let's see if we can do less than 10 minutes. What's your position on tariffs? Do you have a strong opinion on tariffs

other than what we've heard from everybody? Is there a unique position you have? I generally support Trump's reopening of that conversation and I don't feel too strongly about it because I think it's very case by case. I think think that frankly the people who are on the anti-tariff side of this equation have basically been laid bare by the Nord Stream situation in the sense that the other idea around tariffs was that you were supposed to have free trade free trade free trade arms lay unfettered

capitalist arms lengthlength negotiation between consenting parties from different countries. Okay, cool. Why'd you blow up the Nord Stream pipeline? That was free trade between Russia and Germany. It is now open source reported by the New York Times and the Washington Post that it was Ukrainian divers that the CIA had advanced awareness of the official stories, the CIA knew what was gonna happen but told them to stop, but the message got lost

with one of the Ukrainian. Bullshit, bullshit, we all read that story. Even if you accept that though, even if you accept the cover story, that means the CIA still had advanced notice before it happened and the State Department came out and said Russia might have done it. Well, the CIA analyst memo is designed

for the State Department. So they lied, they blew it up. And that's free trade. That's free trade between Russia and Germany. You can argue it's a bad idea for them to do it. You can use diplomatic statecraft intervention tools to try to give Germany a better deal so that maybe our LNG coming from Houston is cheaper than the natural gas coming from the power of Siberia. What a point of view. But we didn't do that. Instead we blew it up.

So if you're okay blowing up pipelines wholesale, then you should be okay with tariffs. That's right. It's just a big bad tariff. It's a blow things up sanctions tariffs, right? Blow things up probably the last one, but that's what you use. In regards to Telegram,

Telegram, he was seen as the guy that was just hardcore freedom of speech, freedom of this values principle. Pavel was like respected, loved, 32 employees, built a $30 billion company, whatever the numbers are. You've seen the interview he did with Tucker. You've done stuff with Tucker as well. And then all of a sudden he goes away and disappears.

Then it comes out and you read the article, he gave them what they requested. What is your impression or maybe idea of what happened there? It's a blob job. It's the US foreign policy establishment reaching into NATO. There's no way that the US ambassador to Paris did not have advance notice of that judicial, of that prosecutorial inquiry into Pavel months before the arrest was made and that it did not have at least the tacit consent

of the US State Department in making that, because they wanted it. Okay, here's a great example, right? So everyone knows that Tucker Carlson's father was the head of Voice of America. Well, Voice of America, along with Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Liberty, were CIA proprietaries from their start. And they, technically it was turned over from the CIA

from the 1950s to the 70s to the Board of Broadcast Governors. This is Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty. Everyone can look this up. Look up at CIA origins. And then because that looks so bad, that it was just, you know, our literal lie, spy and lie agency was printing the news, they wanted to preserve the institution, but they simply made it under a private management, first it was called the Board of Broadcast Governors,

now it's the US Agency for Global Development, but it's still CIA media. It's still the same network, it's still the same function, it's still funded by the US government, it's still accountable to US Congress. Now, they printed an article two weeks after two weeks or two months after Tucker's interview with Pavel and it's called Telegram if you look this up radio for Europe Telegram a spy in every Ukrainians pocket

Yes, there you go. This is an incredible article to understand what's behind Pavel's arrest. So this is effectively CIA media saying we need to take control over Telegram and they're being resistant because they're not censoring what we want them to censor and we also don't know if the Russians have some back end access to or some secret deal with Pavel. So we need to effectively shake down telegrams management. We need to get leverage over them because this is becoming a problem. Here's what they cited. They cited the fact that because of Pavel's reputation, Pavel escaped the Russian government in 2014 because they,

when the CIA and State Department were orchestrating the Maidan coup one of the ways that Russian-speaking Ukrainians were coordinating that mob activity to overthrow that democratically elected government was through VK which which was the which the Russian Facebook that Pavel started before he started Telegram he He was shaken down by the Russian FSB He had to turn over VK effectively to Russian government control He was so turned off by that that he then moved to Dubai and started Telegram as a free speech service where in a non-extradition country where he would not be able to be he be able to do that free and clear but

That was being used to help a CIA State Department operation against the Russians in 2014. Now he's been completely backstabbed by them. Effectively what happened is they said, listen, Pavel's had this free speech reputation, this is one of the reasons that we've relied on Telegram for so much of our statecraft operations. The CIA and the State Department were using Telegram

to evade state control over social media in Belarus in the in the summer 2020 color revolution attempt against Lukashenko in Belarus. We did the same thing in Hong Kong using Telegram for a State Department backed rental riots there. We did the same thing with Alexei Navalny inside of Russia when we were running the normal the op in twenty nineteen twenty twenty everyone he was recruiting was telegram because russia ran on telegram when russia

after the nevolny scandals contemplated banning telegram it was u s and g o's twenty six u s government funded and g o's basically threatened the russian government with international sanctions and being up on humanitarian pariah state if they shut down telegram because that would impede the state department operation get russian speaking people on telegram

to to you know have a it secured encrypted communications channel to run anti russian government operations the problem was the game changed a couple years ago so first of all uh... pavled allegedly, if you read this article, they go over this, did some bond raise for Telegram where he raised something like a billion dollars to finance it. And allegedly some of this financing came from two Russian oligarchs or people connected to Russian oligarchs. So the CIA media here is making the argument that Russia may have effectively bribed Pavel to get back-end access to Telegram, which would be a major, major problem for the US

military, because 72% of Ukrainians use Telegram. The Ukrainian military uses Telegram for its military operations The Ukrainian Parliament uses telegram for its for its official. It's basically the official Communications channel of Ukraine is this it? 2021 after collapse of cryptocurrency project telegram brings more than a billion dollars in a bond sale among the investors were VTB capital company in which the Russian state holds a majority stake that has been ran by Putin inside of Andre Kostin and... This is the allegation they're making. I don't know if this is true. Again, this is CIA media so it might be true, might not. But this is what they're arguing here and mind you, Pavel said on

Tucker that he doesn't go to the United States anymore because every time he goes he's cornered by an FBI agent the moment he gets off the plane because they want to know if Russia has back-end access to Telegram and the FBI was actively trying to poach his own engineers in order to get a FBI back channel into the engineering back-end code of Telegram. So he said that's why he stays away from the US. Now the other thing they mention here, again 72% of Ukraine uses Telegram including Ukrainian intelligence, Ukrainian military, and Ukrainian government officials.

Which means if Telegram is indeed broken in terms of its code access by the Russian Federation, that means they were making the argument in this CIA article that maybe that's the reason Ukraine's losing the war. Maybe it's because we've been running this whole thing on Telegram and Russia's been ahead of our every move because they're reading our, even our private, because you can do Telegram in public, but you can also do Telegram private encrypted. So there's public Telegram channels,

but the military uses these private encrypted ones, and it randomizes your VPN, and the whole thing is like supposed to be super secure, but what if it's not? What if every single move that NATO has made for the past two and a half years Has been telegraphed to the Russian Federation because there's a secret deal with Pavel So they argued we need to get telegram under control. We need to seize control over it We need to get leverage to do so and the other thing is because we're losing the hearts and minds work because of the public

Russian channels and they say that basically NATO rapid response units have sent all these takedown requests channels and they say that basically NATO rapid response units have sent all these takedown requests to Pavel and his team in order to kill the Russian propaganda channels which are influencing hearts and minds in Ukraine they can't hold elections in Ukraine right now because so much of the population is against Zelensky part of this is because everyday Ukrainians get daily access to Russian telegram propaganda channels this is also how a lot of corruption scandals inside of Ukraine go viral because Ukrainian media won't print it. Ukrainian government has control over any of the quasi-private media stations there.

It's all basically the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, which is the US State Department. But these scandals all break on these Russian propaganda channels and then they filter into Ukrainian hearts and minds. And so they say, we can't even get political stabilization because these Russian propaganda channels which are accessible to Ukrainians are not banned. They're making the argument they made against Trump channels and stop this deal in 2020. So we need control over Telegram, we need a back channel so that they will do the take down requests on the censorship side, we need a back channel so that we so that they will do the take down request of the censorship side we need for military purposes and for parts of mine's

purposes and we need a back channel to be able to to make sure that the code is not accessible to russian federation and there's only one way to do that because pavel had a care in the world he's living in a non-extradition country there is nothing you could do to touch him or his assets or empire into a step foot in Paris and got nabbed by the prosecutors and I will tell you there is no high-level political prosecution that

happens in NATO without the local US Embassy being apprised of it because they might want to veto it and and in this case with someone as geopolitically essential to the war overseas in Eurasia as Pavel because if the CIA gets back channel the Russian military also runs on telegram so now we basically have a you know a sort of you know World War two style cracking the the crypto code of the entire Russian military intelligence operation if Pavel caves and we know that he's already made these pledges to essentially have these NATO back channels that You know coordinate all in answered all these rapid response. I think he's doing that

Well, he's got a lot to lose. He's a young guy. He's worth a billion dollars or something like that. I think it's been reported And I think that I think that I Think they're breaking him I think that they're breaking him. I mean, you got Signal, WhatsApp, and you got Telegram. And I've communicated with a lot of interesting people the last few years. Everybody goes Telegram, Telegram, Telegram. The tie between Signal and WhatsApp,

the whole one is profit, one is non-profit, and the way they did it. Anyways, I got a bunch of questions, but I keep looking at time, and I'm 12 minutes late to my next meeting. We'll have to run it back. But I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, I knew I was gonna enjoy it.

It's an understatement how much I enjoyed this, sincerely. I really enjoy talking to you. My brain is going, I got dinner tonight and when I go to dinner, our entire conversation over dinner is going to be the conversation you and I just have because I got so many questions for you. Well, Likewise, by the way, your processing speed on this is unbelievable hearing so much of this like for the first time on some of this. I've thoroughly enjoyed this too. I appreciate you, brother. Appreciate you for coming out and gank again. He's on my

neck. You got a lot of questions. I don't have the answers, he has the answers. Manect him, ask him the questions, he'll get back to you. Take care everybody, God bless, bye bye bye bye. Hi, this is Mike Benz. You can connect with me on Manect for any questions that you have on internet censorship, foreign policy, national security, the blob, or if you wanna know

what a particular institution is doing that you may have seen or have questions about in terms of its control over the information ecosystem. So connect with me on Manect.