Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/11/22 Branko Marcetic on the DHS’s Role in Online Censorship

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

Scott is joined by Branko Marcetic of Jacobin to discuss the recent revelations that the Department of Homeland Security has been guiding tech platforms on what they should censor. They observe some specific cases where platforms like Facebook and Google changed rules and suppressed stories to help prop up the U.S. government’s narratives, even when they proved false. Scott and Marcetic also talk about the potential for cross-idealogical coalitions to fight back against these blatant and dangerous government interventions in the information space.  Discussed on the show: “The Quiet Merger Between Online Platforms and the National Security State Continues” (Jacobin) “Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation” (The Intercept) Global Guerillas Branko Marcetic is a writer for Jacobin Magazine, a fellow at In These Times, and host of the 1/200 podcast. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. Follow him on Twitter @BMarchetich. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com. And if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else. But not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scotthortonshow.substack.com. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.

I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at Scott Horton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com. slash Scott Horton's show. Hey, you guys, on the line, I've got Bronco Marchteach. That's how I say it. I'm a Texan, I don't know. Eastern European names, what do I know? But I do know this. Like I said, on Fox Business Channel a couple of weeks ago.

He's the author of Yesterday's Man about Joe Biden. And he's a guy, 99% sure. This is where I first learned that the first thing that Joe Biden did when he joined the U.S. Senate in 1973 was to announce Richard Nixon's hasty and precipitous withdrawal from Vietnam. And there's a lot of other great stuff in there too about what a horrible bastard Joe Biden is.

But I'm glad I had a chance to say the title of your book on Fox. Welcome to the show. How you doing, Bronco? Hey, great. Thanks for having me. And I didn't realize that you gave me a shout-up, but I appreciate that.

I try to fit as many points in a minute and a half as I possibly can. ain't easy, but yeah, so anyways, also he's writing for Jack I've been here, the quiet merger between online platforms and the national security state

continues. And so geez, it was nine years ago, nine and a half that Ed Snowden leaked all of that stuff. And man, did a bunch of important news stories come out of there. And then since then, we've had the Vault 7 leak and slight reforms

by the Congress and a couple of things struck down by the courts, but I think we got a pretty wide eye onto just how well they're surveilling us. It's essentially to unlimited degrees, whatever they want. And the most important one of the snowing things to me was they keep your location data. And this is my paranoia about cell phones in the first place in the 90s. Don't you get it? They're going to triangulate your ass everywhere you go. Yeah, not only that, we know they keep your records of everywhere you've been for the last five years at least every living room you sat in every bedroom you've been in every backseat of a car you rode in and who else was with you in that car or whatever it is um and uh it's just unlimited just

you know uh east german stasi in their wildest dreams um could have never come up with this stuff and then you have this web 2.0 where they got us in these really great and functional and fun and addictive walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter and of course the one and only preeminent search engine which doesn't work nearly as well as it used to but still better than all the rest of them Google and um and the major question then

where does the U.S. national government begin and end and the same for Silicon Valley it really is one and the same thing to such a great degree and um but as you write here we're finding out more and more about how blurry that line is and the shape of it. So, I guess, first of all, can we start with this recent report in The Intercept by Ken Clippenstein about the Department of Homeland Security and their efforts to influence social media in America?

I know there's a hell of a lot there, but then again, you just wrote a piece of viewing it also. Yeah, so the Kinglip and Steen and Lee Fung obtained these government documents through this lawsuit that was launched over basically tech censorship, particularly, you know, to do with the Hunter Biden and Lifthor story, which I think we all remember. And there's a lot in there, as you say. A lot of it is basically it's DHS officials, and particularly this one sub-agency within the DHS, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency. And what we see in these documents is discussions about what the federal government can do, and particularly the Department of Homeland Security, in concert with all these private firms,

to basically control the spread and the impact of what they call MDM, so misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information. And a lot of that is the discussions are actually, you know, not to do with direct government censorship. A lot of it's to do with things like increasing information literacy and boosting, quote, unquote, authoritative or trusted sources or directing people to trusted sources and, you know, giving funding to particular sources that are considered trusted and so on and so forth. So, you know, that's not so bad. But I think it is important to note that censorship is a part of what was going on as well. I mean, one of the things that Fung and Clippenstein point out is that, you know, among the documents, there's one that outlines the use of a government portal that lets government officials,

law enforcement officials, basically suggest what posts on Facebook and Instagram they think should be suppressed, you know, beyond that, even though the, you know, the people involved in these discussions are constantly saying, you know, it's not a good idea for the government to censor, let alone, to, you know, even just be a, so as a clearinghouse for information, because that could seem to be government propaganda, you know, whether the government is doing it directly or indirectly, that is still government-driven censorship. And that's really what's going on. I mean, they're pushing these tech firms to, you know, throttle information that they see as, you know,

well, misinformation or in some way, ways harmful. You know, another example of that is the Hunter Biden and laptop story, which I just mentioned. In the lawsuit that the firing in Klippenstein draw, it's mentioned that, you know, the FBI was directly involved in pushing. Twitter and Facebook to censor the laptop story. I know if people remember, but when that story hit, when the New York Post released it, you were not able to share that story on Twitter. You can't even send it to someone in a private DM. Importantly, in October

of 2020, it was the Republicans' big October surprise against the Democrats, and somehow they erased it off of the internet, which sounds important. possible, but they did it effectively enough. Yeah, and that was at a time when, you know, I think was it a few dozen, maybe more intelligence officials also signed this letter saying this is just Russian disinformation and a whole host of outlets published that uncritically. We now know that, you know, I mean, I think it was obvious at the time as well,

but we now know for sure that that is not true, the laptop and this contents are not Russian disinformation. That claim has simply disappeared. But that also led, you know, outlets like the, like NPR, for instance, to say, you know what, we're just not going to cover the story at all because we just, we think there's no basis. I mean, obviously there's a partisan motivation for them to do that too. But I think the fact that they had this cover added to it. So, you know, I mean, there's that. There's other other details in the lawsuit. You know, they point to this podcast interview with another FBI official who kind of boasts about the fact that The FBI was in close contact with tech firms, you know, he says sometimes on a monthly or even a weekly basis, asking them what they're seeing, telling them what they're seeing, and sort of coming up with what, you know, what they think should be suppressed.

There's also talk of, you know, I think on February 18th, some of the participants mentioned that with tensions between Russia and Ukraine rising, you know, that they need to have more discussions about what. what they can do in the, you know, information space around that whole conflict. And sure enough, I mean, since then, what have we seen? We've seen that Facebook changed its rules around cause for violence and around praising Nazis. So, but, you know, only specifically in the context of the Ukraine war, and only specifically for, you know, by change, you mean they lifted the restriction on them. Exactly. Yeah. So, so used to be you couldn't call for. violence on Facebook. It seems like at the behest of the U.S. government, Facebook said,

you know what, now you can call for violence, but only if you're calling for violence against Russian leadership. So, you know, if a person posts something like death to Putin, that's okay. Used to be that you couldn't praise Azov, the Azov regiment, which is a far right regiment made up of neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists, a very dangerous outfit. For years, that was banned. Now they change that they said, well, you know what? You can praise them, but only under limited circumstances. If you say that they're brave for defending Ukraine, then that's okay, which to me seems actually more dangerous and propagandistic if you sort of put their contribution to a war in such an anodyne way. But there you go. And there's been other examples

beyond that. PayPal, for instance, shuttered some independent news outlets. The great consortium news.com. consortium news, which is just criminal. Like, how dare they? Joe Loria, their editor was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal

for 20 years, for the London Times. And his predecessor, the founder and editor was Robert Perry from Newsweek and the Associated Press. And they're going to say,

oh, nope, you don't exist now. To them? To anyone, then? It's outrageous. And, you know, it's key because both of those outlets

were very critical of the kind of you know, let's say established Western narrative on the war, including in some of the stuff that I've talked about, you know, the role in the nature of the Azo regiment. And people don't just show their accounts. It actually seized the funds that they had. So not only did it make fundraising harder for these outlets, which are already running on fumes, you know, you're not making a ton of money if you're an independent outlet on the web. But then they also said, the money that you have collected well now that's ours and maybe we'll give it back to you later

on we'll see um and they didn't really give a very good reason for why they they shut them down but i think it's it's obvious that that the war has something to do with it so uh there's a lot in there i would encourage people i would encourage people to read the original intercept i would encourage people to click through all the links and all of those and actually have a read of the documents themselves and see what's uh what's being said that it's pretty long but it's interesting stuff and and you know you'll get a sense of this, you know, what the headline calls this kind of creeping merger of these two entities. So you have a great paragraph here, all important, just in 75 words or something.

The University of Adelaide and Stanford University, both did these studies about what John Rob calls the Twitter swarm and essentially, and I guess the Facebook swarms too and what have and to show just how much of this is centrally and artificially directed. Sort of like, well, the other October surprise of 2020, the FBI's fake kidnapping plot where 10 out of 12 plotters were FBI informants. How much of that is the Twitter swarm, too? FBI informant bots going around pretending to love Israel and want to arm Ukraine. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned.

in Snowden before, one of the, I mean, among the many revelations in the Snowden documents was this, this, you know, a particular document that outlined some of the powers that that U.S. government agencies have to manipulate things online. And, you know, I mean, we're talking about at this point, you know, 2008, 2010, that kind of period. So this is, this is old stuff in many ways. You know, they talked about the way that they could create accounts to spread. particular information, particular narratives. They talked about the way that some agencies have the power to come in and edit comments on, you know, with their videos, on news stories and the like. So this isn't new, but I mean, the scale of it is pretty remarkable in that University of Adelaide study. They looked at at 5 million tweets. This is a pretty massive sample size.

And what they found was that in any given hour, the likelihood of a 20, tweet on the Ukraine war in either direction being from a from a bot was between it would hover between 60 and 80 percent and then the when they looked at the the tweets that were coming from bots 90 percent of those tweets were sort of pro-Ukraine tweets now you know I mean obviously Ukraine is being attacked by Russia you know that morally it's not difficult to know where you stand on that position. But I think it is significant that, that, you know, it reflects the fact that the way that our perceptions of this war being shaped, you know, not just by tech firms, not just by private actors who are using their resources to try and sway people one way or another, but specifically by the U.S. government. Overwhelmingly, you know, we hear so much, I think, in U.S. discourse and in the West more generally, about Russia, about China, about Iran.

about how these countries are kind of coming in and trying to manipulate us online. But it turns out actually the United States government that's doing the most to do that. And, you know, it's not just the narratives that they're pushing forward aren't necessarily just things like, you know, go Ukraine, which, you know, I'd say most people, most level-headed people agree with. They're pushing stuff like, you know, trying to obscure the causes of the war, telling us that all this entire thing is purely about, you know, Russian expansion Expansianism and imperialism and Putin being hitline alike instead of, you know, some of the stuff that I know you and myself and a host of other commentators who have been kind of attacked have tried to stress, which is that there is a very important role for U.S. foreign policy in the causes of this war that we have to understand.

So, you know, it has a potentially a bad impact overall. And I'll just say one more thing, which is that, you know where I first found out about this study was from consortium news. so there you go one of the one of the outlets that that you know is being censored for for you know supposedly pushing malinformation or whatever and yet it turns out that without it you know we might not know about some of the ways that their public opinion is being shaped and manipulated by the US government hang on just one second hey y'all the audiobook of my book enough already timed and the war on terrorism is finally done yes of course read by me It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, and soon on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there.

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Yeah, man. Well, you know, I remember interviewing this guy a couple of years ago about how I can't remember. I think he was an Australian. I don't know. He did some study about just manipulating Google search results. And I guess his conclusion was that people use Google to search like what's the closest burger stand or which way is north from here or two plus two equals what and this kind of like simple factual stuff all the time. And the first result is just taken as truth. And it usually is like is it raining right now or is it. it about to be or something you know well i don't know whether's a bad example but you know what i mean um

and then so people are trained like that to just accept the first result as essentially the answer to whatever they're looking for so then if they start searching for candidates and he tried i guess he did the test over and over and over again and he skews the test for democrat names uh he ends up getting a much more positive result in terms of i forgot what it was later how he measured their support for the different candidates or what uh how they ended up voting or whatever it was but anyway um and same for the republicans if he just switched it and made it where the first few results all showed republican candidates that that essentially because people are so well trained to just take that as a factual answer like where's the closest gas station kind of

which is the candidate for my district oh it's this guy and then that that just the power of suggestion there was immeasurable he said well not immeasurable but measurable but very high and so i guess the idea was that they go yeah great we just do that and we'll derank you and we'll rank him up and de-boost that and unfollow this and shadow ban over here and tweak this a little bit and they know that ultimately you know they can to a great degree influence if not outright control the narrative all over the place well that's interesting and alarming and i mean i agree with you what you were saying that that google has become less useful i think it's a direct result of this kind of push to, you know, have it reflect, quote, unquote, authoritative sources or quote

unquote trusted sources, which, I mean, it's just evident, you know, when you, when I look at Google now, when I look something up, you know, if it's something to do with anything news, anything political, I'll be greeted by, you know, pages upon pages of kind of basically the same story being rewritten in different ways by the New York Times. NPR, Washington Post, so on and so forth, really telling me the same things over and over and over again. Whereas the old Google, you would have that, but you would also have a mix of kind of more alternative sources

that you could kind of, you know, you could maybe learn something new there. That doesn't mean that the alternative sources were always completely accurate or, you know, that everything in them was exactly what one would agree with. But you would find some interesting alternate information. I mean, I guarantee you now, if you went on Google and you looked up, you know, Is Azov Regiment a far-right group or something along those lines? I'm sure that the top results would be the spate of articles from quote-unquote authoritative sources,

you know, the Telegraph, or Doshweld or other outlets saying, oh, you know, Azov has really changed its stripes. Now it's not really a far-right organization anymore. And, you know, my piece for Jacobin, which is a comparatively little known and not as well-resourced left-wing publication, which really goes into the evidence of, you know, has Azov really changed, I'm sure it would be, you know, driven to the second page because it's not considered a, quote-unquote, authoritative source. Yep.

Well, in fact, I just Google it, and one of the first ones, it's much Azov about nothing. The Ukrainian neo-Nazis canard. And then they have Al Jazeera profile and mapping militants. I'm going to read this one later. That looks interesting. And, you know, it depends on from what time period stuff comes up. Anything from, you know, up until last year or late last year will tend to have some pretty bad stuff in it. And then this year they had to start rewriting it all.

Say, look, this real-ass Nazi torchlight parade in the middle of the night in honor of Steppen Banderah, oh, that's nothing like those terrorist university kids in Donald Trump golf uniforms with their team. cheeky torches. That's some real terrorism there, you know, but these guys who are you know, look straight out of some black and white footage from the 30s, never mind them.

Anyway, yeah, it is, it's really amazing to see the way that they're able to do it. And, you know, I don't know. You ever at this guy, John Robb, Global Gorillas? I haven't had of him. Okay, so he's like,

former military guy and some kind of strategist during Iraq War II, although by his own account, maybe not the best one, but it's an interesting book he wrote anyway. But he's kind of a futurist and particularly on like fourth generation warfare and all this and that. And here he's like arguing that essentially the Twitter swarm makes even nation states obsolete, where it's just, it's not, the power isn't even in Biden's hands to negotiate with Putin right now. It's really whether the girl from who's the boss and her friends approve or not, and their moral judgment of whether this is, you know, Chamberlinian appeasement of Hitler or this kind of thing and how the way he puts it, all media, all everything, all political, all party politics, everything is all downstream

from Twitter and, you know, the madness of this swarm. And it's the same people who, you know, went around doing all the Me Too and the cancellation over, you know, this or that transgression. or whatever. Now they've moved to this. They were the COVID hysterics, you know, and the rest. And how his take, I guess, essentially is there's no stopping them. I guess your take is, well, but the government has the ability and other forces too, I guess, but especially the government has the ability to really push and direct and manipulate this swarm and get them essentially chancing whatever Bellingat says or whatever it is that they need.

need. By the way, that's one of the first things that came up on the front page is their take on Azov, which I know has changed recently. You know, they used to say, hey, these guys are pretty dangerous, but then they quit saying that. Anyway, that's what John Rob is about, is that, like, it's the madness of the Twitter mob now that we're even sort of like the empire itself. It's just out of control. Nobody can drive this ship. It's just a free-for-all of corruption and violence. well i mean i think we saw that with the uh the the progressives incredibly mild letter suggesting ever so generally that diplomacy not be a good idea um to prevent us or from you know dying in a nuclear war let alone you know to have this war continued grinding on for ukrainians

to just keep dying and dying um and what happened i mean it was it was overwhelmingly the response, I would say, on Twitter, that led the progressives to withdraw that letter, which, by the way, I don't think they should have done. I think that events that followed shortly after showed very clearly they could have stood by what they had done and, you know, held their own. But whatever, I mean, it does show you how it does have an impact. And remember, I mean, as you said, it's a global resource. It shapes discourse everywhere. certainly in English-speaking countries, at shapes as it was, it has already, to a great degree. I mean, the discussion I see on Twitter as regards to the war in Ukraine, the possibility or even desirability of nuclear war is in an entirely different universe to when I speak to normal people who aren't on the platform.

So it's a very dangerous thing. And it's because of the fact that there's such a global reach and the fact that the US government has such a direct line into the decision making of what happens at these firms, the other governments do not. I mean, certainly the Russian and Chinese governments don't, but not even European governments have that kind of control. I mean, that is a really extreme power for anyone to have to be able to kind of decide what. can and can't be said on a global platform that shapes, you know, what is and isn't allowed in public discourse across multiple countries around the world. Yeah. Hey, by the way, I just want to work in parentheses here. I'm glad you guys are publishing Daniel Lazare over there, Lazar, because I really like him, but he is just way too communist to write for us at

anti-war.com anymore, but we had our differences, but I still think he's really sharp and and a lot of his takes on foreign policy are just so great. So I'm glad he landed somewhere. Well, we're a... Yeah, well, you know, we're a broad tent. We publish a lot of different people at Jacobin. And we do too at anti-war.com. We include all the way to the left and pretty damn far to the right

as long as it's good on war. Of course, you've been a regular for a long time, and we featured him for a long time, but eventually we just had our differences. But the point is, though, I still really like him. And so I was happy to see his byline on the right-hand margin there, as all. Yeah, well, you know, I think it's important when it comes to war, certainly in foreign policy in the U.S., it's good to have a little bit of cross-ideological work on that front because it's such a massive and powerful entity that's kind of being, you know,

thought that, you know, I think ideological silo isn't, aren't helpful on that, on that particular issue. Yeah. It's funny, because as we're talking, a guy on Twitter is accusing me and I guess then all libertarians of being Marxists because I said something about what we're against is essentially the power elite, right? The consolidated power of the corporate elite and the national government. And that doesn't mean that I want a centralization of power, the nationalization, of property or any kind of thing like that, I'm arguing for radical laissez-faire in opposition to that.

But all the right-winger can hear is, oh, if Wall Street is bad, then that makes you a communist, this kind of thing. My point really is that, and this is how I felt about this since I was even a teenager, was that all of my right-wing friends and all my left-wing friends

are essentially broke and powerless, relatively, and that that's the American people, right? That's everybody. And then there's the ultra-power. who control the biggest firms, especially the arms industry and all that, and the national security state, you know, the national government, the most violent corrupt parts of the national government, like the Pentagon and the FDA and things like that, and how it should just be not a right-wing or left-wing war at all. It could even be a libertarian one, but just an American truly 99.99% against the actual evil corrupt power that's got this country. and a stranglehold, man. And that's something that we should all be able to agree on doing without having a

communist revolution or a right-wing reactionary one or even my total paradise of total decentralization and laissez-faire economics, but just absolutely put an end to these intolerable violations. I mean, in the 1990s, it was even the know-your-customer regulations. I said that every bank has to snitch on every customer to the feds now with no warrant, with no nothing. They just have an open door into everybody's bank account. Well, what in the hell is that? And of course, everything

Snowden revealed and the rest, VALT-7 and the rest of that just makes snow your customer pale. No one remembers that. No one remembered that after September 11th even. But the thing is, out here in the country, it should be the case that all of us can be united against corruption on Wall Street,

corruption in the military-industrial complex, in pharmaceuticals, in agriculture, and in government, in the national security, state and all their wars, and then especially all of their evil electronic police state that the worst science fiction meth out madman could have never dreamed of that they have been able to establish with the National Security Agency, the FBI, and the CIA against the people of this country, DHS2. Now all their influence, even in censorship over how we're allowed to talk

and communicate with each other over the internet, all this dialing down. shadow banning and and and fake swarms and all this crazy everybody ought to be against this just like everybody ought to be for you know assuming you support the status quo this constitution whatsoever then don't you think we should have like free and fair elections that with like easily recountable ballots and these kinds of things like no matter where you come from on the spectrum think we should have elections every two years still right and that we should have ballots that people can trust and whatever. All this basic stuff,

this should be for everyone. I mean, obviously us libertarians are the ones who got it really straight, but all the rest of you were invited to to oppose all the worst things about our government. And isn't that the great realignment, the people versus the power? How could it be anything but that?

And if it's the 99% or the 99.99%, well, that's not just the radical left. That's got to be like, yeah. And we're not against everything. against these bankers getting free money from the government at our expense. We're against these arms manufacturers lobbying to expand NATO and start a war so they can sell fighter jets and all these obvious things. You guys, as Bill Hicks would say, in your hearts, you all know the arguments.

Everybody knows what we're talking about here. Everybody does, right? I have no doubt that, you know, on a variety of issues we will have disagreements. But, you know, on certain things, I think there's a lot of overlap. but, you know, whether you're conservative, liberal, socialist, libertarian, whatever. You mentioned DHS. I mean, that's one area where I think a lot of different people's interests overlap in terms of kind of restraining that particular agency

because DHS is not just involved in this particular thing that we're talking about here. There's been a spate of stories of the last, I know, three, four months about how DHS is basically start acting as a domestic, surveillance agency. I mean, DHS is supposed to exist to, well, sure, it maintains the security of the United States, and it's sort of supposed to uphold immigration laws and maintain the border and that kind of thing. But in the pursuit of those goals, it started to, you mentioned geolocation data. Well, the DHS is now, you know, a major customer of these private firms that collect and store all this geolocation data that we're constantly unwittingly picking around.

And so it has just a massive trove of information on basically every adult in the United States and where they've been, what their movements are like. It does the same for a variety of other private firms that collect information. So, for instance, firms that have information around utility bills, DMV records, a whole bunch of stuff that reveals, again, a stunningly vast amount

of intimate information about not just the people that they are ostensibly targeting, but every adult American, basically. And I think that's really worrying. I mean, we saw what happened with the HHS during the protests

in last, sorry, in 2020, against police brutality, in Portland and other places, the way that suddenly American streets began to look like, you know, a street in Morton, Iraq or something, the way that these kind of armored DHS officers were, you know, walking around, patrolling, even seizing people off the sidewalk and shunning them into vans. And, you know, so I think if you're a libertarian who's worried about the government kind of treading on you and trampling your rights and doing all sorts of scary authoritarian stuff. Or if you're a liberal or any kind of lefty who's worried about the way that these agencies have expanded their role

and the way that they target immigrants, the way that they kind of break apart families, all this kind of stuff. I think regardless of what side you're coming from, you have an interest and a motivation to try. and kind of restrain the what is to me just a rapidly broadening remit for this um this this colossally wasteful and opaque uh agency in the united states yeah man all right well listen i'll let you go and have a rest of a good weekend i hope but i sure appreciate your great writing and uh your time on the show as always bronco thanks god i appreciate what you guys are doing an anti-war as well Right on. Thanks, man. All right, you guys. That is Bronco Marchteach. He's at jacobin.com.

And this was called the quiet merger between online platforms and the national security state continues. The Scott Horton show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.