Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/31/25 Mike Benz on How the Censorship Complex Works

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Mike Benz joins the show to talk about how the various government, corporate, and NGO groups making up the censorship machine work together to control the information space and, therefore, how the public understands the world.   Discussed on the show: God Complex: The Rise Of America's Censorship Machine “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” (Time) “Trump Fired Them. Now They’re Plotting to Stop Him.” (NOTUS) Mike Benz is the founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online. He formerly worked for the State Department. Follow him on Twitter @MikeBenzCyber  For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott's full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.comYou can also support Scott's work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country? Because the babies are making it. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

now end this war and now here's your host scott horton all right y'all introducing mike bens he is the executive director of the foundation for freedom online and he has a hell of a youtube channel where he does a lot of podcasts and talks about things and you follow him on uh twitter he is mike bens that's with a z at the and Cyber on X there. And yeah, welcome the show. How are you doing? Great, Scott. It's going to be an interesting week ahead.

Spooky Halloween. Yeah, all right. Well, we'll get to that in a week. I mean, in a few minutes. But here's some things to talk about. First of all, yeah, first of all, let's talk about the new documentary. We don't have to get into the whole thing, but I want to at least give you a chance to plug it.

Maybe we can talk about some of the substance of the thing later. And I think you do so many interviews. for so many things. You might not even know which documentary I'm referring to, but there's one I think you're talking about God Complex. Yes, I believe so. All about the new, all about the censorship regime and how they did that. And you play a great role in that. And that's available for everybody on YouTube, right? Yeah, free. Yep. Okay. So go ahead. Well, so the film is called God Complex. It's about the censorship industrial complex. I think that was going to be the original name. And then I think Chanel, Ryan from OAN, mentioned that it's basically a God complex because you effectively,

you know, you're giving Godlike control over planet Earth when you control the information distribution of news, reporting on scandals, opposition to wars, opposition to government mandates. You are effectively removing, it's not just a government at that point when you have government control over the speech of the masses you're effectively playing god yeah um and so this is in broad strokes we're talking about the um the essentially matt taibi's great work on the twitter files did a lot to reveal this and there have been lawsuits and uh other journalism uh including uh i guess jacob seagull did a really great report in the tablet about all of this stuff. And so, but can you give us like sort of a thumbnail sketch of, of like you do, draw a

picture of the web of control. Exactly. So this is a useful framework to understand, not just for the censorship industrial complex, but how whole of society mobilization is done for any foreign policy decision that requires all stakeholder buy-in. For example, if you want to conduct a war, you need not just the government pushing its propaganda, you need the private sector pushing it, you need the nonprofits and foundations flooding the zone with the NGOs, and you need the media bullhorn in the independent media sector. And so the censorship industrial complex is comprised of four different institutional components. You have government agencies like the State Department, USAID, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of War, the Department of HHS for censorship

issues. The Department of Energy will even give grants for misinformation around climate and the like. So that's the government side. On the private sector side, which is the second quadrant, you have the for-profit corporations who usually draft off of what the government is doing for their own personal profit. So in this bucket, you will have hedge funds, private equity funds, multinational corporations. So for example, if Microsoft stands to gain $134 billion from the EU unlocking funds for Poland if they go through certain governmental reforms and the right wing populist party in Poland is blocking those reforms because they don't want their government contorted that way. Then Microsoft may fund censorship of right wing extremism or right

wing populace that the State Department is also trying to get rid of. So they will draft off of it and they will co-invest it. The third category is the is the nonprofit sector. This is what they call civil society. And this ranges everything from NGOs, trade organizations, university centers are a big part of this, as well as community leaders, cultural figures, and the like. And then the fourth is media, is the kind of Wisner's Wurlitzer of media that is either tied financially to the state, which is often the case in Ukraine. For example, 90% of Ukrainian media outlets were funded by USAID. I covered how in Moldova, USAID sponsored 110 media outlets,

just in little old Moldova, population 2.6 million. But even when it's not direct sponsorship, although it frequently is in weird ways. I covered how Reuters, for example, has gotten $300 million in government contracts. And this is, you know, often they're premium services. They also have a premium newswire that the government agency subscribe to them like.

But it's, you have, have not just the funding. You also have access and favors. If we report favorably on the Pentagon, the Pentagon will give us access or will leak things to us. We saw this, for example, when Hillary Clinton and the like were plotting who at the New York Times, Maggie Haberman, to leak things to, because they know it would be treated favorably. So you have this symbiosis where you have a government role, a private sector role, a civil society role, and a media role. And they each have levers to pull in order to make in order to compensate for each one of their own weaknesses.

For example, our government is bound by a First Amendment. So it can't be the one that has the finger on the trigger when it goes boom. So this is why they use a whole of society framework. This is their term, not mine, in order to evade the First Amendment. It's effectively like saying murder is illegal in terms of the government killing speech, but contract killing isn't. If you, for example, engage and sponsor a civil society NGO or the Harvard misinformation review or Bellingcat or some outside civil society group and the government tells them to go after this speech, then you can essentially do murder for hire, but you can't do murder. And so this is what's being litigated in the courts and this is the way this whole apparatus has been set up, not just the United States, but across the transatlantic NATO alliance.

yeah all right so i mean since the and just short because i don't want to get too far into this we can get back to it but there's so much else to talk about too but um just on this does the advent of the second trump administration mean a rollback in any meaningful sense can give me a percent that things are better obviously Elon musk buying twitter changed a lot just right there but that's just one thing and trump threatened mark zuckerberg and mark Zuckerberg then unscrewed Trump's Facebook account, but I don't know if that, you know, I know that, for example, you probably remember when they came out with the proper not list in 2016 at Scum Michael Weiss from the Atlantic Council and Craig Timberg at the Washington Post

accused all good alternative journalists of fomending Russian propaganda and Google then, the monopoly search engine of the West, then dialed us all way down and including anti-war.com or I work. And I don't think that's ever been fixed. But I, anyway, can you just, it's hard for me to picture the thing, but that's what I want to do. Can you, can you give me like on a thermometer? Yeah. Are things any better? They're way, way, way, way, way better in, in so many ways. Now, now, you have to sort of understand there's, there's three levels to the power struggle that's going on right now in terms of government ability to influence speech. There's the national level, which the Trump admin is nominally in control of.

You have the state level in our federalist system. So every state gets to set its own laws to the extent that it's not, you know, interfering with, you know, interstate commerce, yada, yada. And then you have the international picture. And so there are three layers to this fight. And at the national layer, I would say we are winning in huge ways. Now, I don't agree with everything that the Trump admin has done on this. But the, on the whole, it has been.

been overwhelming. It's been a blitzkrieg, basically. I mean, we wiped out the huge, huge percent of the funding for this apparatus. Probably about 75 percent of the funds have just been completely eradicated. This includes at USAID, which was one of the biggest funders of this, what I call the, you know, there's two ways that the government can control your speech at the U.S. level. There's what I call the knife in the boomerang. The knife is when they just stab you here directly. And the, that is, the government pays, you know, the National Science Foundation sponsors the Stanford Aernet Observatory to target Scott Horton because of something he says about an election or vaccines

or the Ukraine war, for example. The Ukraine war was one of the disinformation categories in the 2022 disinformation governance board. So I would imagine, you know, as someone who's involved in anti-war, you know, dot com and writes prolific books about this topic is going to end up on a you know on a knifing list for the government to directly do that at home the other way is what i call the boomerang which is when the u.s government sends money out to international NGOs or to london based firms and those london based firms or international NGOs have a broad purview to operate both abroad and at home and they simply take their domestic operation to target people at home so this is for example like

places like the Atlanta Council is a great example of this. The Atlanta Council has got seven CIA directors as we speak on their board of directors. They are funded by the Department of War and then also three different military divisions of the U.S., the Army, Navy, and Air Force. They're funded by the State Department. They're funded by USAID. They're funded by CIA cutouts like the National Down for Democracy. They're also funded by foreign governments like the UK foreign office. they are they're done that's that's funding is for the purpose of you know influencing consensus building abroad about NATO uh you know foreign policy and military goals but they operate domestically and there's no smithmont act so to speak no smithmunt type protections against foreign funded

NGOs operating domestically which is a big gap right now in our regulatory structure in terms of protecting citizens from our own blobby beast but so In terms of USA, that boomerang funding has been enormously crushed through USAID closures, through the State Department reforms. The State Department has rolled up about 130 different sub-agencies and has done essentially a regime change at the senior leadership level of many of the worst State Department bureaus, like the Department of Democracy, Rights and Labor, which is the color revolution cell of the State Department, has been completely reoriented. There are, Marco Rubio has put his, he's enormously impressed me.

I had a chance to speak with him and interview him around the closure of the Global Engagement Center, which was another one of these command nodes for internet censorship. And he was pretty full throttle on the whole philosophical change about this. And it's one thing to fund propaganda. And I don't think the U.S. government is getting out of that business in terms of turning the dial up on our own messaging. And this is, you know, there are, for example, there's a pretty obvious foreign policy initiative being undertaken right now around Venezuela. So I would not, for example, expect the legacy remnant of the State Department

foreign affairs controlling the remnant U.S. aid funds to necessarily dial down support for media outlets in surrounding countries like Colombia or Trinidad and Tobago or opposition. That's Ruby owns project specifically, right? Right, right. But so what I'm getting at is there's kind of a necessary perspective that the goal for me is not to win on everything all at once immediately. What you want to do is you like there's kind of a triage within what's politically possible. And within that, so not only you have.

USAID and so state has just cut tens of millions, hundreds of millions of these contracts to fund foreign propaganda outlets. And a lot of this was because these propaganda outlets were being used for disinformation. They'd be funded for media assistance. And what they would do is they do countering disinformation work. So they would be telling Google's central and eastern Europe office and their trust and safety team and Facebook's central and eastern Europe office to censor anyone who supports Victor Orban in Hungary, or anyone who supports the PIS party in Poland, or anyone who's calling for a real, for an election to be held in Ukraine, etc. And so a lot of these things are against Trump foreign policy. And so zapping that funding is both sort of consistent

on universal human rights principles around protecting free speech and advancing the Trump foreign policy. So that stuff has been easier than, for example, something like around the current contest with Venezuela or Iran or the like. What I'm saying is there will still be nodes of this. And I would not be surprised if you still see, you know, if you see announcements around countering Venezuelan disinformation or Iranian disinformation, although I don't think it will be nearly at the level that it was before, at least over the next three years of the Trump admin. But domestically has been some of the biggest cuts on this. What we've done at the National Science Foundation, which is, which was the biggest money gun of all of these for domestic funding.

About $100 million to U.S. universities and NGOs just to spend their days listening to what we say and pressuring through, through essentially they call the top, top down and bottom up pressure, top down pressure from the government through government jawboning and government threats to break up the tech companies, the government threats to withhold licenses or government threats to not protect them from foreign regulations like the EU Digital Markets Act or Digital Services Act or the Canadian or Australian digital taxes. These tech companies need Big Daddy government to protect them in the international market from all the foreign laws that Malaysia or the Philippines or Australia or the EU will pass.

And so they, you know, according to Facebook's own Global Affairs Chief, Nick Clegg, who was the former, you know, UK liberal leader. who wrote the book, How to Stop Brexit, after Brexit had already been passed, Nick Clegg was telling in 2021, because you mentioned Mark Zuckerberg. And I actually don't think Zuckerberg's change came from Trump jaw voting. It actually happened. You know, what's reported publicly is the Jim Jordan letter that he wrote was in the summer of 2024, five years or five months before the 2020 election.

And also, so Trump was not. even necessarily winning in the polls at that time when Zuck did that. But Zuck had been turning for a couple of years before that. I don't think Zuck actually wanted to go through with this at all from the beginning. In 2019, he gave the speech at Georgetown and another one at San Jose about how he thought censorship had gone too far on Facebook in 2019, before COVID-19 even hit. But then he was hit with a boycott campaign called hashtag, Change the Terms, and Facebook lost $60 billion.

in market cap. So they had huge revenue drops because their entire profitability is based on advertising. This was how they convert eyeballs to dollars. And so they had a huge revenue drop. The market got super skittish on whether or not they would bounce. They lost $60 billion in market cap and Zuckerberg folded and basically brought the ADL, the SPLC, the Atlanta Council DFR Lab, just a whole host of blob. overlords into the trust and safety team.

They made all the reforms. And Zuckerberg just turned his focus on VR while Nick Clegg and the, you know, this entire set within the Facebook trust and safety team pretty much ran the show. But in 2021 with the vaccine mandates, this is an incredible, this is in the Facebook files that Jim Jordan subpoenaed in March 2023. What it said was Zuckerberg, the White House, Rob, Latterty, the digital affairs guy at the White House, told Facebook to censor all vaccine, anything that questioned COVID origins or vaccine side effects and the like, even true

information. And Zuckerberg says to Nick Clegg, do we really have to do this? This seems extreme. And Nick Clegg, his global affairs guy, says, yes, we do because we are dependent on the admin on multiple policy fronts. So we should think creatively about ways to to be receptive to their demands for takedowns because we have bigger fish to fry with the admin. And so this was this was the way this worked. And then, but Zuckerberg actually started making changes in 2023, a full year before the Jim Jordan letter. And what's funny is all these little blob NGOs and think tanks with a revolving door of state department and CIA and Department of War people. On my foundation's website, we published a long investigative report

One of these NGOs is called the Center for Democracy and Technology. And in 2023, they were saying we need some sort of Russiagate-style predicate because at Facebook right now, at Facebook and Instagram, the whole meta properties, including WhatsApp and their content moderation policies there, are beginning to align with Elon's cuts on trust and safety because we don't have the pressure of a national security predicate. This was in 2023, two years, a year and a half before the 2024 election. So I think Zuckerberg, it was a long time coming. If I can just close out this point with a kind of funny way of thinking about this. The ultimate failure in losing the big tech community, or at least the Elon and, because Elon was a Democrat. And Elon, SpaceX was, you know, basically powered by government subsidies, still is to a large,

extent, Tesla was powered by government subsidies and a coup in Bolivia for lithium supplies. I mean, you go down the line and there's a kind of national security blanket on many of these big tech folks, whether that's Elon or whether that's Larry Ellison, whose Oracle is named after Project Oracle, the CIA project that Larry Ellison worked on in the 1970s. The CIA was the first customer of Oracle in 1979. The CIA was the first customer of Palantir, which is Peter Teal's, you know, a big part of his net worth. I mean, there's, but ultimately kind of the crazy part about how the Democrats lost big tech was an insufficient amount of crony capitalism. You know, the whole thing is you're supposed to be, you know, if you're going to be completely

devilish to your enemies, cronyism works by being. good to your friends. But the Democrats just kept milking the big tech companies for more and more and more, even after they got everything they wanted in terms of censoring the 2020 election. And so what you got was a kind of exasperation from Mark Zuckerberg. I did everything I could. I bent over backwards. I didn't want to do it. I thought there would be some reward at the end. I thought you would protect me from Europe. I thought that you would protect me from, you know, the, you know, my data monopoly. I thought you would protect my, you know, my advertising revenues. Instead, you're continuing to force me to do everything you say in order to get the next

delivery of government favors and those favors never come. And so, and I think this is part of what played into Google, although Google, unlike with, because Jack Dorsey just endorsed Thomas Massey for president. Jack Dorsey was a libertarian. Jack Dorsey said, him censoring Donald Trump and taking him off Twitter was, quote, a business decision because of the advertising pressure on Twitter to take him out. And this is tied into the government pressure because all of the big ad companies are dependent on government contracts. Places like, you know, publicists and intercom and all these, they have hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of government contracts. They, there's only about, there's six big supply size.

ad exchange companies. And they get billions of dollars in contracts to advertise for the Department of War, for the U.S. Army, for HHS, for all these different government agencies. And so there's a lot of leverage that the governments can put on the advertising side of this in order to do both a top down and bottom up pressure against the tech companies. But I think they basically threw their hat in with Trump, who announced early in the campaign that he would put an end to the this pressure valve, that he would try to restore some semblance of a free market within the big tech space. This also includes on the AI. I think Biden lost Mark Andreessen, for example, in a meeting that Andreessen talked about on Joe Rogan, where, you know, the government basically

picked open AI and anthropic and a handful of, you know, kind of Democrat-aligned AI cartel companies and told Mark Andreessen in the so-called Little Tech VC incubator world that don't even bother funding startups because AI is just going to be centralized and it's going to be a basically three or four different AI companies competing with each other that will be government licensed and the government protected and so don't even don't even bother trying to compete with the big boys and so you know you had this big swing anyway what I'm getting at is the funds of this have been massively cut and i think that people have seen things are a lot more open now uh on on the social media platforms within the united states oh man all right so

there's so much there and in so many other things too i mean uh well and this goes right to i guess my next line of question in here um is the one major exception of that very recently would be the government of Israel, aka Larry Ellison, buying TikTok, so as to censor people who oppose Israel's foreign policy there. And I have to ask you about this. And I'm very sorry because I really did look for receipts this morning. I couldn't find him anymore. And I read this thing, and it wasn't very specific, but it was a long time, half a year ago or something. I read this thing. And it says, oh, be very suspicious of Mike Benz because, you know, he got his start being this very pro-Israel troll and had a few choice quotes in there and this kind of thing. And I saw and I didn't get a chance

to watch this either. I'm going to give you all the time in the world to answer me. Don't worry. I saw the headline Soros versus Netanyahu. And I thought, well, if he's just on Netanyahu's side of that, I don't think he probably would title his YouTube video that. But I remember, I think the first time we talked, I asked you about Israel's role in the censorship regime. Maybe that wasn't, that might have been i might be confused in that conversation i won't say that um anyway point is some say oh that guy he's just a lecud and you can't trust him on the other hand though man i have to say i like a lot of the things you say and i've watched you know quite a few of your youtubes and i i hope but i doubt that you read my book provoked because i would like to brag and boast

like look at all the work i did on the u s a id and n ed and all the color code of revolutions from, you know, from, you know, 1997, 98, in Slovakia, Albania, Croatia, before Serbia and the Bulldozer Revolution of 2000, and then the Rose Revolution, the Orange Revolution, the Tulip Revolution. I have all that in my book, and I did the deepest of dives on all that. There's another guy named Mark McKinnon, who did a book called The New Cold War, who I think takes the trophy for Best Book on the Color-Coded Revolutions. he's lukewarm on them, but he's just a reporter. So it's okay. It's a really great book. But anyway,

so I'm also very anti-USAID and intervention in these countries very much so. And I'm also very anti-Joros, but I'm also very anti-Israel. And I know that as Arthur Bloom, the great journalist and writer, has written that much of the anti-Soros pressure in America now is AstroTurf, for the Lakud, because they hate him, because unlike what some people might assume about George Soros, he actually doesn't give much of a damn about Zionism at all, and certainly has not been a supporter of settlement expansion on the West Bank and greater Israel and all of this kind of stuff. And in fact, as I think you're going to probably elaborate over the next half hour or so here, he's bankrolling a lot of the groups that are supporting the leftist anti-Zionists in the

streets or you know exactly whatever purposes and how much of that is his uh his input or their own choice considering the circumstances uh you know is also worth discussing but um i really do what i really want to get to is what is george sorrows his role now open society the renaissance foundation and all of the associated groups the you know ndi and and i and any of them, USAID, in terms of doing the same sort of operations here in this country. Because I think what you just talked about in terms of the 2020 election and the censorship then was part of what might have been considered a sort of pseudo color coded type revolution and destabilization campaign against Trump in that summer with the Black Lives Matter protests.

There's that famous Time magazine article where the lady talks about how Democrats could turn these protesters off with a switch and tell them where to go and what to set fire to and all these things. And then they say about Antifa, they go, well, it's not really an organization. It's this leaderless network. Some of these quotes are straight out of Colonel Halevi and Gene Sharp and how to overthrow friends of Russia in their near abroad that I've been studying this whole time here. We're antiwar.com folk when we've been on this case for a very long time. time. So I know that's a lot to tackle, but I know you like talking almost as much as I do. So please tell us just what Israeli foreign ministry show you are or are not to start here. And what is the story behind all of that? What role does Israel play in your analysis?

And by the way, you can be a Zionist. I don't insist everybody agree with me. I don't assist that everybody prioritize the same stories as I do. but because I guess there was, you know, some kind of, you know, implications out there of something a little nefarious, a sort of a willfulness of ignoring Israel or something like that, I would like to give you a chance to respond to those takes. So, and honestly, for your own sake, too, because I think, depending on how good your answer is,

maybe people who were skeptical before might really want to listen to the rest of what you have to say from now on, too, you know? Well, I don't really care what people say about me. They can have their own opinion. I've put out, you know, my response to this, and I'm very proud of my life history and everything I've been involved in. I wouldn't take anything that I did back.

I don't really care to kind of talk about my own personal, I guess, experiences. I'd rather talk about kind of how I see the world and kind of the technical. tonic forces at play here on this. And I think that they're, it's a very complicated topic. I'm sorry that I didn't see. I did see a pretty lengthy response that you made to someone who was criticizing you from, I think, a quite different angle in saying that, oh, look at what a sort of, um, kind of right wing troll you were or something like that. And I saw you explaining that actually,

no, I was combating anti-Semitism by making friends with these people, which I think is fine. But I just wonder, like, because sometimes people say that when what they mean is, you know, sheep dogging for Israel when, of course, those are two totally different things. And so I'm sorry, I'm not trying to personally attack you at all. But I'm just am very curious. I think the audience would like to know. And I'm sorry because I really did look by, I didn't see your response to the kind of question that I have brought up here. Well, to be clear, I don't care if the audience wants to know. Okay.

I don't. Well, I mean, I'm asking in good faith. You know what I mean? No, I, right, but I guess there's like a cross-examination that I really don't care to get into about my own personal stuff. I'm here to talk about, I guess, policy and geopolitical analysis, and there's a lot on that. But I don't feel like giving you an exclusive on my life history. do you know what I'm sorry I'm not asking about your personal life in any way I'm asking about like your professional life as an online credit you're asking me to respond to trolls like you're asking me to like respond to online chatter about no no I'm sorry you think it would be good for my credibility and I'm telling you I don't care about that no but I I lead with receipts I didn't mean it like everything that I talk about is there's a receipt on screen I don't care if you trust me I don't care if you think I'm funded by Mossad you know the food stamps are getting cut off tomorrow at the time of our recordings and so does my

massage check so actually for the next month i will be totally open to being critical of israel well yeah please forgive me man you know the thing about the israeli foreign ministry thing was just tongue and cheek i was just setting you up obviously no i know i mean i'm being tongue and cheek too it's it's but it's a very complicated romance between maga at the domestic level and the Israeli foreign policy, the Israeli side of the foreign policy establishment. And a lot of this goes back to what happened in the Obama years. There was a perception with the Iran deal, which was substantially sponsored by Barack Obama and spearheaded by Jake Sullivan and Bill Burns, who would go on to be the CIA director under Biden, a kind of change

in the U.S. foreign policy relationship with the right-wing government of Israel. The Netanyahu tried to stop the Iran deal very intensely. There was intense the Kud Party pressure against the U.S.-UK.-driven Iran deal. The U.K., I mean, I don't think of it as a nuclear deal. It was called the nuclear deal. It was really an energy deal. It was a way to exploit the oil and gas reserves of Iran and open it up for commerce. And this is also part of the play against Russia at the time in the post-K Crimea, you know, so-called annexation, the referendum to join the Russian Federation, that this would be a way to also get, you know, with U.S. and U.K. partnerships getting in on the money to Iran, you would be able to offset Russia. And so, because this has been the big problem is if you

kick Russia out of the EU energy market, where does the EU get its energy from? And there are only a couple of options. You know, you've got basically LNG from the Permian basin in Houston or Norway or Qatar, which in Qatar shares many of its gas fields with Iran. And so it's a lot, it's expensive to Europe if you ship it from Houston. It's less expensive in the form of natural gas. And so this was, there was a lot going on at the time. And Israel and Saudi Arabia felt left out and badly burned by decades of friendship or very little sunlight between the foreign policy goals of U.S. and Israel really since the 1970s and the oil crisis in 73. And this created us a partisan schism around Israel in the run-up to

the 2016 election. You had, Saudi Arabia was terrified that opening up Iran would make Iran the regional dominant player in oil and gas. So they had a sort of financial interest in Trump world and, you know, having Trump win. And you had Israel with its perceived security crisis that if Iran 100xed its economy, that it would 100x, you know, military support to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, yada, yada. And so you had this kind of strange soup in the beginning of MAGA, where you had a American nationalist movement, which was really focused on the crumbling infrastructure of our own country, the fact that our streets weren't safe, the fact that our schools were

failing, the fact that, you know, there was economic stagnation that are no trickle-down, you know, Reaganite style economics. You drive down the I-95 and it's, you know, China looks a lot cleaner and safer and more advanced in many respects than our own infrastructure and streets and et cetera. And so you had this kind of working class doesn't even know where, you know, Ukraine is on a map type voting base. And then you had a on the on the money side of things and on the international community and foreign policy institutional side, you had kind of what at the time was on the outskirts of the foreign policy establishment, which was, you know, the sort of Lakud Party folks in Israel. And you had, you know, the MBS folks in Saudi Arabia and a handful.

of others that were at that point relegated to the rim of influence in the international community. But both sides needed each other to overcome the Democrats. You had the, if you didn't have the money and the institutional clout of some aspect of the foreign policy establishment and the media organs that flow from that, the NGO organs that flow from that, just the sheer financial capital that comes from that, then you would not be able to arm the voters with the megaphones and the influence nodes to win an election. Likewise, on the foreign policy interest, you would not be able to overcome the Iran deal, Soros, Bill Burns, Obama, Biden, foreign policy plan for Iran, unless you had a mega voting base that was voting for Trump. So you had this kind of

strange bedfellow's marriage from the outset. And that dynamic continues to this day, which is one of the things that is playing out right now within the Republican Party. This, and I think it kind of came to ahead with the Iran strikes where there was, I think, I think it's fair to say that the U.S. was dragged into doing some form of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities because of the advance actions of Israel that then sort of demanded in order to keep this alliance intact the kind of kinetic strikes or support for the Iron Dome. And this kind of brought to ahead things a couple months ago that had been brewing for a decade. I mean, it was 2015 when Trump started running. We're in 2025 now. And that continues to this day in the sense that if one

side loses the other, they probably both lose to the Democrats. And this is kind of, you know, you mentioned like Larry Ellison in this. This is one of the things that makes it difficult for people like me to try to deal with the digital ID issue. Like this is something that is very terrifying. We have seen digital ID as a literal U.S. aid project to control the internal politics of Ukraine through the DIA app. This is a, you know, a digital ID. They called it a state in a smartphone. phone, which was a U.S.A. project that was co-sponsored by Google. And I forget if it was Visa or American Express, but one of the credit card companies. So that basically everything in Ukraine operates under this kind of digital ID thing. Their health records, their voting records,

their services for, you know, state payouts. And it's tied to their bank accounts and their social media accounts. And so USAID, which is a front for U.S. intelligence and statecraft, has, you know, essentially the perfect general Michael V. Hayden, you know, kind of stellar winds thin thread ability to completely have a political radar system, an early warning radar system for anyone who opposes Zelensky within Ukraine because we know everything because of their digital ID. And then you see this is happening in the UK with Kirstarmer, who is, you know, another, I mean, the backstory on him is completely wild, but he's openly, not only do they have this thing coming, but he's openly doing propaganda on X about, you know,

how digital ID will, you know, bring Britain into the modern world, which Britain in the modern world is pretty much the last place you want to be. I should note separately. But the fact is, is like you have you have this kind of many of these victories in terms of beating back the Atlantis as foreign policy blob within in terms of its funding and partnerships with the U.S. government. But there are a couple of these exceptions that I like I mentioned the Venezuela one. The Israel one is another one. It's difficult because you have this situation where I, someone like me wants to oppose

digital ID and I'm aware that Larry Ellison, is a fundraiser for Republicans. He was, you know, kind of a VIP at Trump inaugural types. They, is a big force that has been a vector for assisting Trump world power. At the same time, works very closely with the government of Israel. And you have another one of these kind of, what do you, what in terms, if you were to go against Larry Ellison on this, and Larry Ellison switches to supporting Democrats. You can see how this causes political friction in terms of how far to push versus punish people within your own coalition or without risking defection. And this is one of these things that's very difficult because, for example, on the free speech

side, I think that the end result of what the Trump administration has done on confronting universities has been spectacular. This is the first time the American government has has confronted the revolving door nexus between American education and the U.S. government. I mean, I always say you can't spell academia without CIA. The U.S. university system really blossomed in a Cold War funding context, starting with Eisenhower in the 1950s, as a super NGO blob structure within, in U.S. power. I mean, Harvard. That's a great way to put it.

Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to say, I like that. Go ahead. Well, it's important to understand this. There's no free market in American education. Everyone agrees our PISA scores are what, we're like number 40 or something in the world in terms of, you know, our education. You have, so both at the K through 12 and at the higher education level, you have this, you have

this foreign policy. internationalist set that has control over our own, what should be kind of nationalists, or at least nationally controlled or domestic-focused education priorities. And to understand why that is, you have to kind of go back to see how this all got, how did they get so powerful in the first place? Something like Harvard was, you know, around in the 1600s in the Salem witch trials. It was Harvard was around before we even had a United States of America. But Harvard did not become Harvard until it became a instrument of state craft during the Cold War and set up international influence nodes and received, I mean, $9 billion is the amount that Harvard University was set to

receive in government grants on January 2025 coming into Trump's inauguration. $9 billion, not in contracts, in grants, in free money. If I want to compete with Harvard University, I need to compete with the fact that Harvard gets $9 billion in free money to play with. And not only that, the head of the Harvard Endowment is Penny Pritzker, who is who gave Barack Obama his political start in Chicago, one of the earliest backers of Barack Obama during his run as senator. And Penny Pritzker was also not only made the Secretary of Commerce under the, I believe, the Obama administration, but she was made the special envoy for Ukraine.

Reconstruction during the Biden administration while she was the head at the Harvard Endowment, a $56 billion pot of hedge fund money that can swing markets, that can put enormous coercive pressure on civil society institutions and market players in order to, you know, coerce governments internationally, to be able to speculate on currencies, to be able to, you know, make or break markets. And so you have this like Harvard node, which, and we saw this in the 1990s. How did we privatize Russia in the 1990s? Had we do the economic rape of Russia that effectively, you know, looted it and left them bitter and angry against trusting the Americans in terms of switching over to a capitalist system. And this is kind of what gave rise to Putin and Putinism was the rejection

of the shock therapy privatization policies of the Elton years. But that was done by Harvard University by way of USAID. USAID gave something like $336 million to the Harvard Institute for International Development, which at the time was Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Summers and these guys. And they worked with Anatoly Chabez, the sort of oligarch regulator in Russia, and who benefited from a 90% drop in Russia's stock market? and the turnover of over a trillion dollars of Soviet Union publicly held wealth onto the private market. It was the Harvard Endowment, which got no-bid contracts and got exclusive sole-bitter

auctions for everything from debt to steel mill interest to oil interests. It was Harvard University and at the time the Soros Quantum Fund, which was also this USAID adjacent, you know, sort of you had the open society NGOs that were all over Russia, and they were effectively the civil society arm of the Soros Management Fund, family of funds, the time the quantum and Renaissance and all these guys. And they got to, you know, buy up these assets at fire sale prices. And that relationship continues, where they are advancing U.S. foreign policy interests. Harvard University can tell a foreign government to do something in much more explicit terms and without having the fingerprints of U.S. statecraft on it. It won't be reported in the

international press that Tony Blinken crowbarred a foreign country to turn over all of its private resources to his friends. It'll be reported that this was simply, you know, economic reform advice from trusted experts in the Harvard, you know, economist world. Hey guys, Scott here from Moondos artisan coffees. It's the Scott Horton show flavored coffee breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good. All you do is go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee and it'll forge you on there to Moondos artisan coffees. Get it. They hate Starbucks because they represent the war party, of course. And so they're Moondos and they support peace. And guess what? Scott Horton's show coffee is the number one

bestselling coffee at Moondos Artisan coffees right now. Just go again to Scott Horton.org slash coffee. Man, if you have any money, you should be buying gold with it. Central banks are hoarding it up. And if you need some, you should go to RRBI.c.co. That's Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. It's my buddy, Tim Frye. He's a really great guy. Him and this business, they've been over there for a very, very long time, and they will help you get your medals, and they will always do you right. That's Roberts and Roberts, Brokerage, Inc. at R-RBI.co. Now, I write this episode of a Scott Horton show brought to you by the books I wrote. You can see them behind me there. Enough already. Fools errant, and then enough already and

provoked. And then, of course, one might have fallen down there, but I got Ron Paul, the great Ron Paul, Scott Horton show interviews and hotter than the sun. You see that one back there over there that way? Hotted than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons. That's all interviews I did all about nukes and really great stuff. And I bust my ass on these things. And you know, I've gotten a really great reception on all of them. They all have been endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg endorsed two of the three I wrote.

He would have endorsed the third one I know, but he died too soon, unfortunately. Tucker Carlson says that provoked is the definitive account. In fact, that's what Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Matey said about it too. The definitive account of the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine. So maybe check that up. Hey, guys, you know I have another podcast now, right? Yeah, me and the great American historian Daryl Cooper that is Martyr Made. He's my co-host and we host a show every Friday night.

We might be switching to two days a week here sometime soon. But right now, we're doing Friday nights live at eight o'clock Eastern time on the YouTube's checked out our Twitter handle provoked show. So let me ask you because I've reported all about that and I have a whole section on that in my book about the shock therapy in the 90s and the role that they all played in that USAID and Harvard and all of that. But I had overlooked, but it sounds if it sounds like what you're saying is that when you list off USAID, NED, IRI,

NDI and all the Soros groups that the Harvard Institute for International Development goes right in that list the whole time through today, even if we're talking all of Georgia, Ukraine 04, Ukraine 14, and all of the rest. Is that right? They all do this. They all do this. All of the major universities. The business model for universities, you know, what do they always say about Harvard? You know, it's a hedge fund with a university attached. Well, so is Colombia. So is MIT. So is the Stanford University. They all are.

There's, it's, the business model is not what people think it is. And like, look at, look at, like, what is Mike Pompeo doing right now? He was the secretary of state and he was the director of the central intelligence agency. Well, he's at the Columbia SEPA school, the school for international public affairs and their Institute for Global Politics. This is the same kind of interstitial coordinating node. they meet with the Ukraine government. Now they're doing it.

I mean, this is shadow diplomacy is what this is. So let's talk about the, I want to talk about this whole network at home. One quick thing on that, because who is with Mike Pompeo at the Columbia SEPA school? What is Hillary Clinton doing right now? She's at, she was Secretary of State, and now she's at the Columbia SEPA school right next to working with Mike Pompeo. What is Victoria Newland doing right now? She's employed by Columbia University at the Columbia SEPA school at the Institute of Global Politics with her colleagues, Hillary Clinton and Mike Pompeo. I mean, you have, and she was the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, 50% of which doesn't even work for the State Department.

It's CIA under diplomatic cover and while she's on the board of the National Down for Democracy. Okay. Now, so I want to ask you, though, about American leftists. And I don't mean college kids because I've known some black block and, uh, what would now be called Antifa, I guessed left anarcho communist types back when I was on free radio Austin in the days of the Seattle protests and all that. I wasn't there, but I knew some of the kids that went there and stuff like that. Most of them are not college kids. Most of them are working class kids and are pretty hardcore leftists. And then Columbia students protesting

against Israel on the street or for cutting kids parts off or whatever crazy thing they're protesting for. That's its own sort of thing. whatever it is. But what I'm really interested in, though, is the role of these Soros organizations, especially in and associated groups in funding the real radical left, like the ones who will burn your city down radical left, who, again, are not the college kids. Can I answer that after? The way to phrase it would be like this. Is Antifa American otpore or poorer, or is it different than that? Yeah. I want to I do want to get to that, which is like a fascinating rabbit hole. There's one point that I was

kind of building up to to connect. Oh, I'm sorry, man. I can't help myself sometimes. Go ahead. It's all good. I mean, we could talk for 20 hours on this. But since you were talking about kind of the Israel, you know, sort of side of the free speech issue, I just want to kind of connect what I was saying to this. Yeah. And, you know, and I hope this is helpful for any folks within the kind of, you know, MAGA foreign policy world to hear this, which and, and also just on the domestic side, because we're negotiating what we're going to do with the Department of Education. Right now, Trump has something called the Compact for Higher Education, which is a really interesting, innovative kind of first of its class attempt to set ground rules for access

to federal funding for the universities, because this has been untouched since the Cold War, this relationship between free government money and subsidized shadow diplomacy universities. But the Trump admin, I kind of started that rant by talking about how I liked the outcome of what was happening in terms of, I think, something like $7 billion are on hold the Harvard university and several hundred million dollars at Columbia are on hold. And I started that by saying, this is the right outcome, but for the wrong reasons. Like, I don't think that that should be, right now that's being spearheaded in substantial part on, like, anti-Semitism and like speech code type pressures. And I think that that is really not the way to try to, like, drive reforms that are lasting in terms of the relationship between the federal government and the universities.

I think there are free speech issues with that. I think that while there are real cases of some of these protests turning violent or bordering on harassment or outright like blocking access to a library or like harassing kids as they're trying to get to class, I think that those instances are often conflated. I mean, this gets to this like anti-Zionism, you know, is anti-Semitism kind of theme, which I think is, I don't think that's a good way to go about it. I think it actually backfires tremendously on pro-Israel voices to try to do that. And I think when that is the terms under which you get access to federal funding,

you're not doing it in the interest of Americans. You're doing it in the interest of the foreign policy focused side of MAGA, while you have that sort of MAGA movement in power and I don't think it actually redounds to the benefits of the voting base who voted for that government and power and I think it actually engenders resentment and it actually makes it more difficult to litigate internationally the international side of the censorship industrial complex.

We're arguing at the State Department and White House level against the EU Digital Services Act and against these hate speech laws in the UK, without arresting 100, I'm sorry, 12,000 people a year, which is, you know, like 20 times more than Russia and like 10 times more than China even arrest for social media. The little UK is, you know, the global leader in arresting people for hate speech. And we're, and this is effectively like hate speech, soft laws for access to federal funding. At a time when we're simultaneously trying to, you know, rid DEI out of the, out of the higher education space. So I think it just creates a mountain of

contradictions, a jumbled of you can't, it makes it harder to litigate things as a universe, free speech is a universal principle. And I think you could achieve the same result by simply going after the kind of blob, you know, influence access rather than on free speech grounds. So I think that the compact for higher education should have a second draft that kind of, you know, reflects that and, you know, helps the people in the United States who go through the university system rather than being, you know, tied to these other pretext. Yeah. And it totally just helped the MAGA movement overall to be consistently 100% good on free speech, unlike those other guys. And we don't carve out exceptions for anybody else and that kind of thing. leads to something to believe in man you know come on right but and so like tying this to what's happening with soros and i'll just do like one kind of interstitial to this is there are going to be foreign policy choices that a republican apparatus uh is going to make that are different than a democrat

apparatus because of these international, the international constellation of allies and donors and influence nodes. Like the schism that opened up in 2015 with the Iran deal is still with us. The Soros and Netanyahu were at war within Israel. Netanyahu is basically kicked Soros out of Israel. He accused Soros of fomenting black, Israeli, you know, Ethiopian, when Israel imported Ethiopians, Netanyahu, there was a series of protests and riots that were carried out by the Ethiopians within Israel. And this is shortly after the Iran deal. And Netanyahu accused Soros of fomenting basically BLM-style black riots within Israel to try to destabilize that Netanyahu government, who was opposing the Soros economic reform of the Middle East. And it's important to understand that there are

economic interests in this as well. Obviously, Jared Kushner, through the Abraham Accords, kind of consolidated this Israeli-Saudi-Arabia economic alliance structure that was forming in the, as a kind of necessary enemy of my enemy as my friend between Israel. Israel and Saudi Arabia with their mutual opposition to the Iran deal, but you also have Soros, the Soros Management Fund, which invests in the companies that profit from the Iran deal. Now, that plays out at home as well. I don't, Soros is a complicated figure in terms of the ideology, and I don't see him as a particularly ideological guy. He's, you know, he sort of fashions himself a philosopher of sorts.

But I don't think it's particularly right-wing, left-wing. He worked very actively with- He's the center-left Bill Clinton type. Right, but he'll work with John McKeon. He was an anti-communist back in the days of communism and is anti-Russian now. Completely. But he will back a left-wing socialist party

if it helps the Soros Management Fund in terms of energy. I mean, this happened in Brazil. The Obama administration and the Soros Foundation teamed up. I'm sorry, the Biden administration and the Soros Foundation teamed up to back Lula against Bolsonaro in Brazil for the 2022 election. I've covered this tens of millions of USA dollars, Ned Grants, the works to set up this censorship industrial complex within Brazil, including Morayas, the Lord Voldemort judge directly working with USAID and a whole web of USAID funded disinformation contractors, even at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia was working with the Brazilian TSE censorship court on this and even funding direct grants to the exact trusted flaggers within the that Brazil censorship

court. But what Soros did in that case was he had invested in all of these Brazilian clean energy alternatives. There was a, you know, there's a lot of, Brazil is a very bountiful place, you know, between the Amazon and it's, you know, very large oil reserves and the like. And also it's, you know, a 200 million person market. And it, Lula, day one, instituted this, that forced companies off of diesel fuel and into clean, like ethanol-based diesel replacements. And it just so happened that George Soros took these massive long positions

in these ethanol fuel replacements in the run-up to the 2022 election while his Open Society Foundation is on the ground tilting the election towards the candidate who will mandate people buy products from those companies. So this is, this is the Soros business model. It was a Soros business model in the 1980s when, you know, he was helping. Let me stop you there for just one second because, yeah, no, this is totally right.

But we're talking about the United States of America. So now when I look at 2020, I want to refer again to this Time magazine article. A lot of people are familiar with it. Molly Ball wrote this thing where she says, how we saved the election from the evil people who are trying to steal it. Yeah. And people might remember they. had run posts in

the Atlantic and in the Washington Post saying that if Trump wins in a landslide, fine, but any other circumstance, they're going to fight and they would even threaten to have the far western states secede from the union

or recall their election. All these things. Yeah, they were preparing for some color-coded refusal to accept the election results a la Orange Revolution 04 template, big time right there. But then, so I replay my memory of that summer and all the Black Lives Matter riots and all that.

And there's this most important part of that article. And I remember honestly being surprised with the secret deal between the Chamber of Commerce and the AFLCIO. No, see, now that part I buy because I don't know if you've ever read about this. There's this great historian. He was a sort of post-Marxist named Gabriel Colco who wrote this book called The Triumph of Conservatism. And it's about how progressivism was always a right-wing plot and based from his point of view to usurp true Marxist revolutionaries and and tame them, which is, yeah, essentially right, that the right-wing in power traditionally has needed to control the left so that they're not too bad. You know what I mean? No one wants to get their entire thing burned down.

So but then and this includes like in the 60s, some of the very radical leftists were backed by very wealthy people. You know, I know that that's true from some of that old, you know, John Birch history stuff that I had read from when I was younger and all of that. But then again, like I say, when I knew some of these black block kids, they were not college kids. They were working class kids and they weren't getting bankrolled by anybody, certainly not George Soros. There's no central command for whatever ridiculous, you know, little commie subcult that they were a part of. You know, there's a million little branches of the leftists out there or whatever. But then the part of that article that was so intriguing to me was about how you notice not many leftists, maybe a few in disguise, but otherwise the leftist didn't show up on January 6th.

Why not? Because they got a text message is telling them not to come. You're not invited to this one. And that they were just talking about during the summer in the riots, they were able to turn the protests and the riots off with a text message and tell which groups, how to activate where and when. And then I'm looking at Antifa and the more I'm reading about Otpur and Por and and all these other copycat, you know,

basically the clones of Otpore from Serbia 2000 spread throughout in these color code revolutions. I'm looking at a lot of this template here being practiced in the United States of America, especially in 2020 there. And then, but so it's a vague sketch overlying it to me. And so I'm just wondering like how well you can really flesh that out. Is that really what happened in 2020?

Is that comparable to a real color code revolution? I know you covered the ridiculous No King's, you know, top-down AstroTurf attempt a couple of weeks ago to hold these big protests that went nowhere. And all they could do is turn out, you know, a bunch of old ladies from Facebook, right? It's exactly what happened. It's still those networks are still here today and trying to find a spark to ignite. It's what their whole strategy relies on. They're terrified. They're, you know, the sands have shifted and they may not be able to win a lot.

elections in the near future with some of the, I mean, they lost the popular vote. First time Republicans won the popular vote in 20 years or over 20 years. And, you know, when when the blob loses a free and fair election, the first step, if you don't think you're going to win the next one, is to induce a destabilization event. You need to, you know, basically reshuffle the cards to create a situation where you either can win the next election because the people believe this government is destabilized and unable to provide for its people, or you, you know, run the government out because the government's perceived as illegitimate. You have masses of people in the streets. And you put the government on

the horns of a dilemma where they either need to mow down thousands of protesters or, you know, forfeit their own federal property and, you know, flee in a helicopter. And that is, that is the ultimate goal of these networks to induce one of those two things. I think that we are going to potentially experience something. I mean, the stage is set right now with EBT, you know, the food stamp program, potentially drying up funds on November 1st and a set of protests scheduled for November 5th. You know, there's a saying that society is always seven meals away from collapse. I did about 10 hours of private streams for my ex-subscribers on, how the blob uses hunger and starvation for protests and riots in color revolutions this week

because I am very concerned about the how the food stamps. Like the reason the No Kings protests failed to do anything or failed to create a sufficient show of force to really destabilize the Trump government is because it's all 60-year-old white liberals who have zero risk. tolerance for doing dirty deeds or in other words there's a few weeks too early right and there's no spark the the the blob is not good at creating a spark with their with their you know it's almost like you know teal zero to one it's a very different task to go from zero to one than to go from one to a hundred it's it's it's not very good at straight astro-turfing something out of nothing but it's very good at giving money and pouring gasoline on something that already has a spark. That helps at any number of levels.

I mean, you can just, it's comical when you watch like, so the main Soros group that does this at home is a group called Indivisible. They've been around, I mean, since the beginning of like Trumpism, it's, you know, run by these two kids. And it's always young people they put as, you know, front people for this, just like a note for, you know, it was like, you know, these scrappy young people and students. And they look like it's, it makes it look like it's organic.

And, you know, so when you see all these young people in the streets, it's like, buy the kids for the kids. And of course, these kids have very high risk tolerance. They are, you know, much more prone to confront police or take over a federal building or burn down a police precinct or throw a Molotov cocktail in a police car than, you know, a 60-year-old with bad knees and a mortgage to finish paying off. And so they have a lot more, they have less to lose and a lot more to gain because oftentimes these foot soldiers will take up posts in a new government or will be, you know, promoted within the leadership of the new government through an NGO they found that they'll be rewarded for with government grants to and the like. But what I'm getting at here is this network is the main driver of instability in the United States and has been for a long time.

There's a great article. If you pull it up, it's by notice, N-O-T-U-S. And they're kind of the, you know, this leftist adjacent foreign policy-oriented, you know, blog slash reporting website. But they did this article over the summer about what a mistake it was for Trump to get rid of USAID. And what it, what, so if you just type in Notice Trump, USAID, you'll see this. And what the article did is interviewed a bunch of fired USAID employees who said, you know, you should have, it's a big mistake to fire us because our job is professionally overthrowing governments. And we have the knowledge, the skill set, the rolodex of contacts, the networks, the training to overthrow governments. It's all we do all day. And you've just

released tens of thousands of us into your own system. You should have just kept paying us and had us play solitaire on U.S.A. computers. Instead, we've got nothing to do and every tool in the world to use these same techniques, tactics, networks to run that playbook at home. But make no mistake, this didn't start in the summer of 2024. You mentioned the Molly Ball Art Time Magazine article. And that, there was something before that called the transition. integrity project, which was just an incredible anecdote in American history. And if the law were applied evenly, every person involved in this would be under arrest for the same crimes that they rolled up 19 Trump allies around in terms of the alternate electors plot. Actually, Arctic

Frost involved that as well. So by this logic, the FBI should be spying on every one of these people's phones and secretly subpoenaing their text messages and call logs from AT&T while putting a gag order on AT&T to not tell them we're spying on them. But that aside, the Transition Integrity Project was a project started in the summer of 2020 at a time when they were afraid that Trump might win the 2020 election and would almost certainly win the 2020 election on election night. At the time, you know, the mass mail-in ballot change started really in March 2020 with the, you know, HHS and the declaration of COVID as this pandemic and we can't be next to each other at the voting booths. And so we need to have

these mass mail-in ballots and, you know, no signature requirements. And they can, you know, count him after election day and etc and it was it was the first time our country has ever run an election that way it was something that even during the civil war abraham lincoln you know and his folks were talking about the problems of mail-in ballots i mean nobody has trusted mail-in ballots and we were all told that we were supposed to and by the math of the republican democrat split over the use of mail-in ballots there was um the perception that the only way Biden might win would be in what they called a red, red mirage blue shift event. The red mirage being that Trump would win on election night, but that would really be a mirage because there

would be a blue shift in the following days as these mass mail-in ballots poured in, and they were counted and would tilt the election towards Joe Biden. And so one of the things that's really important in both color revolution, tactic, strategy, planning, as well as in counterinsurgency is control over perceptions of legitimacy of a government. This is a really, really important linchpin strategic North Star. For example, if you read Michael McFaul, who is the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Obama, he now runs the Freeman Spogli Center at Stanford University and was essentially the boss over the Stanford Air Observatory and the Stanford Cyber Policy Center

and this whole censorship network and Russian influence network there. But Michael McFall, you know, for basically 30 years before his U.S. ambassadorship, was a color revolution planner, theoretician. He was a, you know, one of these, you know, when I admit, again, back to this joke about, you can't spell academia without CIA,

he was one of these democratization studies, international affairs, you know, how to build civil society resistance movements in order, kind of building on the gene sharp literature and legacy. And control over perceptions of the legitimacy of a government is a big part of how you actually create the legitimacy for a post-coup government and also how you rally people to the streets to protest and then riot to create that Euro-My-Dan swear moment. Right. And so the idea, because otherwise it's a coup. If the president is legitimate, then having masses of people, January 6th style, as we're told, invade the Capitol building and take it over and

declare, you know, the QAnon shaman, the president, that's just an insurrection. But if the government is illegitimate, then the government's attempt to stop the legitimate government of the people is the actual coup. And so you can frame a coup as a counter coup simply by switching perceptions of legitimacy of a government. That's just what Palpatine did in episode three. Well, you know, we are, you know, sometimes, you know, reality is stranger than fiction. Yeah, Lucas, he was honest on there.

Now, so the COVID lockdowns. Look, it was the Democrats, what I'm asking here, I'll tell you up front. I'm asking whether my perception can be proven right, whether you know that I'm right. It looks to me like the Democrat governors locked their states down the worst, the longest through the year 2020, as a destabilization campaign against this entire country. And if it costs them their governorship, which in most cases it didn't, Whitmer got. reelected, no problem. But if it had cost them their governorship, well, fine. That would be them taking one for the team in order to destabilize the country and the Trump administration to soften him up and get rid of him. But then again, I've never seen. We're like, oh, the emails

have been revealed where they said, we have to keep the lockdowns because it'll hurt Trump politically or whatever. But I can easily imagine them, as I just described. So what do you know about that. We're the lockdown's really part and parcel of a whole color-coded coup against this guy in 2020. Well, let me answer that. And then I want to come back to this transition integrity project thing because I only got to lay out kind of the tip of the iceberg because there's when you when you see the structure of how that was all set up and what they did and you know, how that was what I was talking about when I referenced the Atlantic Council or the Atlantic Magazine and the Washington Post article about how they were preparing to do a color-coded coup if Trump won.

they this was all they were getting ready to that's what you're talking about right with that yes and not just planning to they set up the whole network it was you know conspiracy requires agreement and an act in furtherance they didn't just have the agreement they they took all and I'll lay that all out but just on the lockdown thing yeah so you know the receipts around the intention of the lockdown I don't have and so this is just speculation unlike with the Transition Integrity Project where I can walk you through all the documents and time stamps and page numbers. And I have all this on my ex account. If anyone just goes to Mike Ben Cyber and just puts in TIP or Transition Integrity Project or Rosa Brooks or any of the characters

in this that will spell out. But on the lockdown front, there's a couple of things to hit here that are interesting. Trump was running at the time on the economy. Because of the, you know, the COVID pandemic, at the time, Trump had a lot of momentum in terms of, uh, I mean, I ran into this because I was working in the White House and I was trying to fight against big tech censorship. And what I ran into is that Trump was saying MAGA equals Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon because that was the golden goose of the U.S. stock market and Trump was campaigning on the stock market being at all time highs. And when you shut down commerce, when you shut down the economy, you naturally create. economic destabilization, and you take that point away, the government is perceived as failing, and the very thing Trump was running on, you know, are you better off today than

you were four years ago, was undermined right as, during election year. And it's, there are a couple of points worth hitting on that. I want to hit the teachers' unions role in this. And I also want to, since, you know, at the time of our recording, we are about to enter, you know, this November food stamp shutdown issue. Chris Coons came out yesterday and when he was asked about the, you know, Senator Chris Coons came, came out and said that when he was asked about the food stamp shutdown and what this might do to, you know, Democrats because so many, a vastly disproportionate amount of food stamp recipients are Democrats. And he answered it by saying, actually, we think that it will redound to our advantage because it will create leverage. So this is a

Democrat coming out and saying that the economic destabilization of, you know, of Democrat voters will actually create leverage for the Democrat party. And I think this is because this will give rise to potentially protests and food riots. And there's a huge. And then somebody kicked him in the shin under the table for saying that out loud, right? It's right. But you have to understand this, there's a body of literature underneath this. And I went over this on these private lectures this week, and I'll be posting clips on that to my main account. But if you look at USAID, for example,

has something called the Food for Peace program. And it has funds a web of these CIA pass-through type entities and the National Down for Democracy and the U.S. Institute of Peace and all these groups that have done, they've something like 180 research studies over 60 organizations USAID published this grand synthesis of the role of food instability in color revolution and government destabilization work and showed like a 178% like increase in propensity to take to the streets if there's food deprivation and what they say is that typically you can't create the spark or typically

food instability, lack of access to food is not something that in and of itself makes people revolt against their government. But it can serve as the straw that breaks the camels back. And it can create a spark that allows all the other grievances to build on top of it. It can create that kind of George Floyd moment where everybody else who hates Trump or has a problem with it is emboldened to take to the streets and add, you know, to the anger of what started off as food protests. And you, this idea of like a kind of economic deprivation that, you know, shuts down the country economically and gets people into the streets and in protest, there's an aspect that played out in 2020. So let me talk about the role of the shutdowns in, for example, you mentioned

the governors, but another part of this was. that the schools were shut down. And you had a very powerful force on the national stage at the time and still today. Randy Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, there's 1.7 million teachers. They are kind of the most active and powerful political arm of the National Education Association, the main umbrella teachers union group for the United States. And Randy Weingarten just wrote a book called Why Fascist Fear Teachers, and she laid out how powerful teachers unions are to control national economies. Because if the teachers walk out and the schools shut down,

then the parents have to stay home. You're not just depriving kids of the ability to learn for a couple months in school. You are depriving parents of the ability to work. they have to stay home and, you know, care for their kids. They have to, you know, basically not go to their jobs because many, the vast majority of parents cannot afford a nanny to look after the kids. She describes exactly what she did in 2020, but just like in a hypothetical type context, that this is something you could do.

Right, but you have to understand it's not hypothetical at all. Yeah. We're having this conversation five years later. We all saw exactly what she did. Randy Weingarten was on the executive board of the National Down for Democracy, the most prolific CIA cutout. Yes, yes. And then, wow. And she was at NDI, the DNC branch of the CIA.

And you have to understand there's this relationship between the foreign policy establishment in our domestic teachers unions. There is a big scandal in the 1960s. Just go to Google right now and type in CIA, NEA, World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession. been CIA million dollars national education association. This is a domestic, so you can actually read this in the declassified JFK files, which is how I first found out about this. In March 2025, Tulsi Gabbard declassified the JFK files. And one of the things I went over in my subscriber streams when we are covering this was this incredible document on the CIA and teachers unions in the JFK files. And that's right here. CIA.gov. CIA piped a million to two teachers

groups and CIA.gov charges CIA used to teachers union in the nation magazine when the CIA was the NEA. Yes. Go ahead. Now, and look up with the NEA. That's the biggest teachers union in the United States. This is the umbrella teachers union for every teacher's union in the United States. They are the AFL-CIO of the teachers union space.

And they were directly taking funds from the central intelligence. agency in order to effectively in, you know, they call it capacity building to build up the capacity of select teachers union influence nodes in order to win the civil war within the teachers union sect about policy, about education, about curriculum. Now that part of this was because of the Cold War at the time. And there were, you know, at the time you had this kind of CIA, you had a whole host of scandals around the CIA picking favorites in domestic, you know, the natural civil war that happens within every party over party policy. And at the time the Democrats, the Republican Party was hegemonic in terms of its Cold War posture.

But the Democrat Party was not. Today, that's reversed. The Democrat Party is hegemonic on foreign policy. But there's a civil war within the Republican Party between the Maga Camp and the neocon you know internationalist republican set right and so you're sorry i just have a heart out here but i got to go a guy's going to interview me in one and a half minutes here okay but i thank you so much for doing the show i've actually been trying and failing to get a whole of you for many months now so i'm glad we had a chance to do this i hope we can do it again soon man yep great all right thanks

to the chat okay everybody that is mike bence he is at the foundation for freedom online he is in the great new documentary um called the god complex and And check out his great YouTube channel as well. Thank you again, Mike. Thanks, Scott. The Scott Horton Show is brought to you by Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc. Moondos, Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom, APS Radio News, and dissident media. Subscribe to the show at Scotthorton.org, Scott Horton Show.com, Libertarian Institute.org,

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