Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/29/24 Mike Benz on the American Censorship Regime

Episode Date: March 3, 2024

Scott is joined by Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online. They discuss Benz’s background and how he came to become an expert in the federal government’s efforts to censor and control the internet. They then go through some of the more pressing censorship threats from the establishment playing out right now. Discussed on the show: Foundation for Freedom Online Tucker Carlson Interviews Mike Benz Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine A Good American (IMDb) Mike Benz is the founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online. He formerly worked for the State Department. Follow him on Twitter @MikeBenzCyber This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. 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: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 2004. 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 show all right you guys introducing mike bends he uh runs the foundation for freedom online and um that is foundation for freedom online dot com and

He is an anti-censorship crusader, but used to be an employee of the State Department, which is how he knows so much about censorship, interestingly. And you might have seen his incredible interview with Tucker Carlson last week. Welcome to the show, Mike. How are you doing? Doing great, Scott. Thanks for having you. Really appreciate you joining us on the show here today. So I've seen bits and pieces of the stuff that you're doing on Twitter over the time, and I meant to have you on, but then you just laid it all out for Tucker Carlson last week in a way that is just really crystallized so much of, you know, what I already knew, what we've learned from the Twitter files and all of that kind of thing, but just you put it together in one solid narrative for us. I thought it was really interesting the way that you started off by saying that in order to talk about censorship online, we first got to talk about free speech online. That was always a CIA plot too or a national security state plot too is how you started the thing.

So I guess, but one thing that he didn't ask you that I'd like to ask you to start was if you could talk a little bit about your jobs at the State Department and what it was that you did, how long you were there. and your role in, you know, that end of the regime change machine that has obviously given you such insight into how it works now fighting against it from our side. Yeah, Scott. And so thanks for that. And actually, before answering that about the State Department, just a funny note, I'm glad that you picked up on that sort of deliberate chronology of that Tucker segment. of starting out with the national security state's role in free speech before it turned to censorship

because, you know, my foundation, foundation for freedom online, I agonized for a long time about putting the word freedom in the name of a civil society institution focused on internet issues because all of the major NGOs or institutes or foundations that have the word freedom in their title are now explicit censorship advocates. They were all, you know, the, you know, there's this codery of probably 20 to 30 different, you know, NGOs that have the word freedom in their title that were all set up in the 1990s and funded by the State Department and the Pentagon in the 1990s that were all about free speech. And so that's why freedom is in their name. But then after the sort of events between 2014 and 2016 from the Ukraine situation into

the Trump election, they all, you know, switched to this. censorship model. So I actually was hesitant to name my foundation foundation for freedom online because I didn't want to be mistaken for being a censorship organization with the word freedom in the name. I mean, this is just how bad things have gotten in that respect. You know, it's fine. I'm writing a book right now about the new Cold War with Russia. And I've been studying a lot about the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003. And a big part of that was run by a Soros front group called the Liberty Institute, which is almost the exact same name as my institute, the Libertarian Institute.

And it's just funny that I'm sitting here writing about all of this stuff. And they're essentially pretending to be for what I'm for, which is liberty. Right. But it's purely tactical, you know, just for the purpose of prying open a country, overthrowing its government and then essentially looting it. I mean, it's like it is nothing to do with the actual principles of freedom itself. Freedom is the last thing they want. You know, this is why they, you know, in Ukraine, for example that you know there wasn't an election after the coup in 2014 yes new york was installed

you know they uh they it's it's you know it's a managed blobocracy not democracy but you know they need the patina of that to have uh you have this sort of international recognition that's necessary under the new the new rules of war but um to you know to go back to the state department so you know i was there in 2020 when um you know at basically at at the desk that sat at the center of big tech and big government. It was in the Economic Bureau, which is, you know, essentially our soft power projection on economic issues abroad. And, you know, the Internet is a massive vehicle for that, you know, the economic interests of our so-called, you know, U.S. national champions. These are companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter at the time, but also

Microsoft and Apple. All of the big tech companies have larger markets. on the global stage than they do on the home front. That is, you know, there's eight billion customers around the world versus only about 300 million here in the U.S. and the two in order to maintain captured markets in order in some cases to maintain markets at all, it requires pressure from the State Department on foreign countries in order to make sure that business conditions are operating in a way that's favorable to U.S. national champions. And this is something that has been, you know, uncontroversial, essentially, in American statecraft for, you know, coming up on two and a half centuries. I mean, we were, we were doing this in Latin

America in the 1800s under the Monroe Doctrine. We were doing this, you know, in Europe, under the Marshall Plan doctrine. We were doing this all throughout the Cold War under our sort of, you know, empire building under the democracy predicate. But, you know, this is, you know, the idea has always been that if the State Department does favors for big business, Well, big business is, you know, is essentially the American middle class. This is how, you know, you have pensions. This is how you can afford a home. This is how you have, you know, the sort of, you know, the middle class miracle of, you know, the American economic prosperity of the 20th century. You know, I think the problem is, is by sometime around, by the, by the mid to late 90s, the disconnect between globalism and national interests, you know, global multinational corporations and their financial class and the you know that sort of trickle-down philosophy it's you know it's interesting because a lot of conservatives you know who embrace Reaganism sort of you know who-poo liberals who don't accept trickle-down economics and there's a

funny situation sort of happening right now where the shoe is a bit on the other foot where you know those same conservatives are now being told and they don't have like it, I should add, that they should basically go along with globalism because there's a trickle down effect on the U.S. economy, but they're not seeing that. And in fact, the incentives are now so far misaligned that there's good reason they're not seeing that. You know, you could make the argument that, you know, in the 20th century when all of our manufacturing was still in the heartland of this country, that when the State Department threatened country X, Y, Z in order to do what's best for the steel companies there. The steel companies were still

employing U.S. labor. So in theory, the government was doing favors for big business, but those big businesses were employing the Americans who voted for that government. There was as morally dubious as you can argue these inherent aspects of statecraft art. There was at least you could argue it was for the benefit of the citizens of the homeland. Now it's essentially all the spoils just go to the managers of the American Empire, our foreign policy establishment. And that, you know, that trickle down is gone. People can't afford houses. People can't afford college. People can't afford, you know, medical insurance. You know, it's, and there's not even, it's not even a plan to course correct. Our money is, is, you know, the biggest thing we're

spending the money on in the midst of this economic collapse on a relative scale, the places like China is on foreign wars for that purely and exclusively benefit, you know, the donor and drafter class of the foreign policy establishment. Yeah. So now in the, well, let's go back because on the free speech part, because, you know, obviously the censorship part is very important, but you talk about how from the very beginning of the internet, really, in the early 90s. that the national security state saw it, that free speech, whatever double-edged sword was going to swing back at them in terms of American descent was tolerable if they could use the internet to undermine foreign governments that they wanted to overthrow.

And so you have them, you know, messing around in Slovakia, in Croatia, and then Serbia, and then the more famous color revolutions of the W. Bush years in Georgia and Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and so forth. and then later the Arab Spring. So, you know, essentially these are, not all of them are quote-unquote color-coded, but they're all pretty much the same thing, right? Where the U.S. and these NGOs, NED and IRI and NDI and all those Soros groups and whatever, they use free speech to circumvent the oppressive structures of some of these governments that they want to overthrow and use liberty and anarchists. sense to their advantage there to get what they want and do their regime change. So I think the way

you're explaining it to Tucker was, you didn't say this part, but it sounded like what you're saying was they were willing to tolerate free speech by Americans as long as they could use the internet to help them accomplish coup after coup after coup overseas. But then what happened was it started blowing back on them and social media stopped being so reliable at helping accomplish state department ends, and that's when they kind of panicked and decided to clamp down on us like this. So can you talk about, I guess, the first part of that first and then the second? Yeah. So it's a good question. You know, were they willing to tolerate free speech by Americans? Because, you know, it's been my contention that if Pat Buchanan had won the presidential election

in 1992 on the basis of a, you know, massive popularity of, you know, from blogs and forums after the internet after the worldwide web was rolled out in 1991 that we never would have had a free and open internet to begin with that is if a sort of populist you know and i'm not even you know endorsing all of uh you know buchan's you know ideas or or sort of grand sort of theory of the world but he was a populist challenge uh in a sort of proto trump way to the uh you know to the sort of George, you know, George H.W. Bush and Clinton sort of axis that echoed the very same Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, you know, flank that Trump defeated from his right and left in 2016. But I do believe that if this had happened earlier in time during Web 1.0, you know, social media

didn't come out until 2004 with Facebook and then 2005 with YouTube, 2006, Twitter, 2007, the smartphone, which put it all on steroids and whatnot. But for the first 13 years of the internet, it was all blogs and forums. And, you know, there was not the speed and scale that social media on centralized platforms allowed. I don't think that the foreign policy establishment anticipated a domestic threat from the internet really at all in the beginning. you know, that was, there was a lot of open questions for the first seven, eight years of the internet, whether it would even take off at home. You know, if you remember, Paul Krugman had a famous quote where, I think this is in 1998 or something, where he said, I mean, it was in the

19, you know, late 1990s, I believe, where he said, in the end, you know, I think it'll, it'll show that the internet had no more, you know, no greater impact on, on American. society or commerce than the fax machine i mean this was uh and then there was the you know the big dot-com boom at the end of that bust at the end of the 1990s where a lot of people thought okay now the internet's really dead you know there were a lot of fits and starts with respect to the domestic internet uh but the whole time it was being piped into countries around the world to circumvent uh state control over media in countries that we were looking to either destabilized to bring in the negotiating table or outright regime change

You know, there's a great book on this by Yasha Levine called Surveillance Valley, which sort of goes country by country through this. Now, now he doesn't apply the same analytical lens, which I thought was, you know, which was something, you know, that was, you know, he sort of put all the stars in place with respect to that free speech story in the book, but he never actually sort of connected to them to say, you know, with some of the other, you know, I think information that maybe if, you know, he is. had a different background might have might have seen quite easily. But, you know, there's, there's a, for anyone who's looking for a factual citation for the role of the national security state in the, in the free speech, diplomatic and intelligence infrastructure that we're talking about here, I would recommend that book. And, you know, if this, if this analytical lens has helped to read it with, you'll, you'll see what I'm talking about immediately. Well, I mean, and we know, like from the examples from the early color revolution,

in the Clinton era that the internet as primitive as it was then was very useful for example getting around censorship in Serbia and that you know they had to do radio from Hungary right and then but the internet they could run from all over Belgrade and they could essentially just circumvent the old airwave based media and go around it and plot really overthrow you know overthrow the government there. Did you ever see, I bet this is still on there somewhere, the onion had a thing years ago

where it was like a fake Sunday morning news show where they're all sitting around talking about how the CIA has this really cool new invention called Facebook. And what it does is we fooled all the people of America and the world, these idiots, into all mapping their own networks of who all knows and his friends

and does business with each other. They're doing all of our workforce. us and we'll completely pown them and control all of their lives forever now and whatever you ever see that one i have not but i'm adding that to my cube because yeah it's a good one yeah there's a lot of people who we do talk about you know this connection this sort of strange perhaps coincidental you know you've probably heard of this liflog uh you know sort of theOD project that supposedly sort of closed up right before i i don't know enough about that to be able to wait into it's always been on my sort of to-do list. I'm also writing a book as well. And, you know, this is one of these sort of open

research issues around that. I, but, but, you know, the fact is, is, you know, I did mention in that Tucker interview, you know, the sort of strange origin story of Google growing out of the DARPA grant at Stanford, that joint CIA NSA program that DARPA was funding that gave, you know, gave money to Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were at Stanford one year before they started at Google. And that project was, you know, basically taking search engine aggregated results to map how so-called birds of a feather flocked together online so that they could so that they could do that mapping of political groups with around the world with how they were searching for things on the internet.

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Just click the link at the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Now, so you mentioned 2014 as the year of Ukraine's loss of Crimea after the coup there, but something else that was very important in 2014 was Israel's massive bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip. I believe that one was cast-led. And that was the first one, I know from Twitter, and at the time we covered this and remarked upon it, that was the first time the American people ever sided with the Palestinians. And that was because the stranglehold lock of the, old legacy airwave media over and even cable TV news media was broken and people could just look on Facebook and on Twitter with their own eyes and see what the people of the Gaza Strip were going through while the Israelis cry victim and they're just killing you know at that time hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people and I don't remember exactly what the numbers were but it was certainly the first time that the American people sided with the Palestinians and the thing and I know I remember saying at the time, oh boy, they're going to flip out over this at the State Department

because as you're talking about, this was a State Department tool. It was their tool to use. And now here it was blowing up in their face. Too much free speech. The same thing happened with the cop thing, too. I know there was a lot of kind of top-down effort around that. But it also was the case that Facebook, and I guess this is before a lot of algorithm tweaks, we're talking about going back 10, 15 years. I had people who are not political people or just regular people that I know in the world would say to me what is up with the cops

killing people these days, man? And what it was was every time the cops killed somebody Facebook made it a national news story whereas before it was just local news. Well, cops shot a guy. They always do that. But when it's a national news story,

every local police shooting is a national news story and it's just day in, day out. Oh my God, look at this guy running away And they put two in his back. And then it's just they keep coming. They really radicalize a lot of people. And then again, I think the Gaza War 2014 cast led, you know, it really got through to the government that, uh-oh, this is backfiring now. And now it's time to rein this thing in.

Yeah, it's interesting. There's a lot there. I mean, you know, Israel, you know, obviously has, you know, a very close connection with the State Department and, you know, both the U.S. and the sort of UK foreign office. But there has been a pretty big split that's grown between the Israeli government and much of NATO that really actually started right after 2014. With the passage of the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, which is more of an Iran energy deal than it was a nuclear deal, there was a very significant falling out between, you know,

I think much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and in particular, the Netanyahu government, you know, in Israel, you know, Israel has, you know, its own sort of censorship, you know, ecosystem, architecture. You know, they don't, they don't come into their society with a presupposition of free speech. You know, they have a formal censorship office. You know, they don't, they don't have a First Amendment. It's not even really an aspirational goal. And, you know, there's not the same level of censorship coordination between the U.S. and in Israel, you know, what Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs might do with respect to Internet speech. And Nathali Bennett, actually, you know, interestingly enough, was actually the architect of a lot of the censorship technology. He spearheaded. He gave presentations in 2016, 2017 on all of the new sort of speech detection techniques that were being developed by the Israeli. military. To my knowledge, those were not adopted in the U.S. I know that there was parallel efforts, very, very extensive parallel efforts here in the U.S. and across NATO. But, you know, starting in 2015, there became this really proxy war that we're still living through between much of NATO and the Netanyahu government in Israel. You know, this is not to say that the two

are at war with each other. But there's a conflict now, a conflict of interest, on economic grounds, a conflict of interest on security grounds with respect to Iran and Qatar and the sort of and Saudi Arabia. There's a, you know, the, this Iran, the Iran deal, I think in 2015, really set off an era of discord between NATO financial and energy stakeholders and and the Israeli government that has almost, I'm trying to think of a comparable analogy since, you know, or anecdotes since 1948 where there's been this much tension for this long. It's, you know, but I raise that to say that, you know, my focus is primarily on the NATO side because there is actually now a fair amount of daylight between the interests of NATO and the Israeli government

that is causing friction in a way that was not really there before. And so in terms of coordination of censorship or speech on the Internet that impacts Americans, I don't know that the Israeli government, now there was pressure that the Israeli government, I believe, is putting on Facebook with respect to, you know, I mean, you can argue that that's happened with, with, with mosque to some extent, but, you know, more coming through the ADL. But, you know, I mean, when it comes to formal governments, what NATO is doing right now is so sweeping. I mean, this EU Digital Services Act is absolutely existential to the soul of the Western world. And I didn't, you know, Israel doesn't really have a hand in that.

That's coming straight from the EU, which is coming straight from NATO. And that takes what was already the European censorship mindset where hate speech is effectively illegal in every, essentially every NATO member state except the U.S. I mean, a criminal offense to speak a hate speech. But that is now being, that base of not having a First Amendment, a Jenga tower is now being. constructed over top of it for so-called disinformation. So under this new EU Digital Services Act, the NATO censorship law that just passed last year and its rules are currently being codified as we speak over the next several months, it'll come into effect sometime before the 20-24 election.

Being a social media platform and hosting disinformation per NATO's definition is going to mean you're not going to be able to operate in the EU. The EU has a larger market than the US. There's 500 million people in the EU. It's existential to the operation of any tech platform on planet Earth to be able to operate in Europe. And under these new rules, NATO will define, you know, it gets to define disinformation. And if you host disinformation, you're booted out of the entire European market unless you pay a penalty that's equivalent to 6% of global annual revenue, which, you know, to my understanding, is essentially higher than the entire. profit margin of most tech companies. So this basically makes, you know, NATO the king

arbiter of all speech on the internet unless the State Department pushes back on them. And the bind we're in right now is that the State Department is not going to push back on them. The State Department pushed this. And you're saying under this law, they'll be able to say, hey, we don't like Scott Horton and Mike Ben's being on Twitter. And you got to kick them off because everything they say is disinformation. And as long as you allow them on Twitter, you're banned from the EU. And Moscow have no choice. It'll be American edge lords versus the entire European market. Yes. Yes. And now those rules are the, the specifics of the rules are being codified. You know, this is like a standard, you know, a bill gets passed. And now something is

law but now there's the there's the regulatory interpretations and this and the you know the specifics of it but you know what with the EU the NATO censorship law says is that you know is that you cannot operate in Europe unless you obey the disinformation compliance requirements now what constitutes disinformation the network of NGOs who are designated to be the trusted flaggers and the arbiters, you know, the, the specific remedial steps you might, you know, take the safe harbor provisions. All of that is currently being, currently being developed, but the law is already passed. All they need to do is just finalize the regs. There's nothing more to vote on. It is law. They just need to, you know, put the specifics of it, which is just, you know, which is just basically

committee meetings. And I should add, you know, who is helping doing those laws. The EU has formally engaged NewsGuard to help write those rules. I know them. Yeah, they extort me all the time. You know who's on the board of NewsGuard? Tell us. Well, let's see. The former head of the CIA, NSA, four-star general, DHS, State Department,

the former head of NATO. So you have General Michael V. Hayden, who was the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was the guy who was the boss of the NSA on September 11th. 2011 and was never held accountable for his criminal negligent homicide of 3,000 Americans that day in any way whatsoever was only promoted after that. Sorry, continue, please. Yes. And also, on that note, there's a great documentary about his time at the NSA, called the Good American about Bill Binney, the NSA whistleblower. Towards the end of that movie, there's an incredible reveal about Michael B. Hayden's role in the NSA's construction of the domestic. bulk surveillance collection to map the lives of all everyday Americans, you know, for counterintelligence purposes, but essentially to create this vast domestic spy apparatus that became essentially,

you know, the subject of so much scandal during the Snowden era so many years later had its origin in Michael B. Hayden's stewardship of the NSA. But Michael B. Hayden was the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, and a four-star general. Who else is on the board of News Guard? Well, You've got Anders Foe Grasmussen, who is the head of NATO from 2009 to 2014. That is for the Obama term into the Crimea annexation. The entire global head of NATO is on the board of news guard. So then you have Rick Stangle. Rick Stengel described himself as Obama's quote, propagandist in chief.

He was the Undersecretary for Public Affairs at the State Department in the founder of the state department's first ever censorship office. called the Global Engagement Center, which was set up initially to censor ISIS groups to help the social media companies censor ISIS groups on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, but then transitioned for domestic purposes to help censor the 2020 election and help censor COVID-19. They did this foreign to domestic switcheroo. And Rick Stengel, you know, is, you know, is a guy who was formerly the managing editor of Time magazine who described himself as a free speech absolutist. And then when Trump on the 2016 election and he was kicked out of the State Department. He wrote a whole book

and also an op-ed. You can look up in the Washington Post calling for an end of the First Amendment because the First Amendment, free speech on the Internet is what allowed Trump to be elected. So he went from being a free speech absolutist calling for an end of the First Amendment because of social media letting people vote for the wrong person, letting people, you know, popularized person who the blob doesn't want elected. And then you also, Tom Ridge on the Board of News Guard, who, you know, was the first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. So, again, I still have my duct tape and plastic sheeting. No, go ahead, sir.

But again, so the EU is, you know, its rules are effectively being written by, you know, these censorship gargoyle blob monsters like that the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, four-star general, head of NATO, head at DHS, and the head of the State Department. Well, listen, I'm afraid, Mike, you and I are a little bit too. eye to eye on this so I already know what you're talking about but the audience might not know news guard are the self-appointed arbiters of who's a disinformationist or not and they go around essentially extorting every news website into jumping through their hoops in order to get a green happy face and if you don't get a green happy face google is going to downrank your website everybody's going to downrank your

website it's going to hit your social credit score big time and this is something that has You know, like, for example, Reason Magazine gloats that they have a perfect score. While Grayzone told them, go to hell. And I told them, you got nothing on me, man. So, you know, I got like a C plus at the Libertarian Institute. And I think anti-war.com as well because, you know, I want to tell them to just go to hell. But then again, I also want people to ever click on my website again. And they do have that power over me.

What can I say, Mike? Yeah, they do. They set this up on purpose. purpose. You know, my foundation has done a ton on this. And if you just literally, so everybody in the audience, you know, if you want to sort of find me and all my stuff on this, just go to my Twitter handle on X at at Mike Ben Cyber and then type in my handle at Mike Ben Cyber in the word NewsGuard. And it will open up an entire cinematic universe of everything about NewsGuard. Great. Probably done 50 videos on it, dozens of reports. It's a massive story. I mean, they are the top gargoyle. the censorship industry on a sort of damage basis. And it's actually, you know, Scott, what you're saying about, the Google down ranking is bad enough on its own.

But, you know, it's so much worse than that, too. You know, they explicitly set themselves up for the purpose. And on the Foundation's website, we've got the clips of them in 2017 talking about how the purpose of what they were doing was to bankrupt alternative news by killing their so-called programmatic ad revenue. NewsGuard is a formal partnership with the world economic. The World Economic Forum has a subgroup called GARM, the Global Agency for Responsible Media. That is the pool of international, all of the blue chip multinational groups,

their advertising pool of money that goes towards so-called programmatic ads. This is the way almost all websites were monetized, monetized eyeballs on the Internet. This is what allowed the modern news model, business model of online news. there's about $2.6 billion in programmatic ad revenue that passes through GARM, and NewsGuard has killed all $2.6 billion of that through this filter that they've had GARM install that says if you don't have a certain NewsGuard rating, you get kicked out of the ad exchanges for programmatic ads. So you can't monetize your website unless you have a one-to-one, you know, You can no longer have passive income through ads if you don't have a, that's what you need to do sort of manual partnerships.

You know, you need to, you know, like a common thing that's happening now on the right is, you know, people are going to like, you know, a, you know, a sort of Mike Lindell type person and having a one-on-one, you know, having a one-to-one, you know, formal advertising contract because no, no, you know, no vaguely heterodox or anti-war institution can qualify for, for the, for ad, any past through money through, through passive ad exchanges, you know, the automated, ad process because newsguard has killed them on man it sounds like it's illegal i guess but nobody has standing to sue the supreme court's never going to stop them this is the core of the empire right well there's there's definitely a lot of a lot a lot a lot a lot of potential plaintiffs withstanding you know the question is is you know it's got you know it's got to be done right and um and you're you're going to be up against you know you're not suing newsguard when you sue NewsGuard. You know, NewsGuard is

Stephen Brill and Gordon Krovitz. You know, they hold themselves out as two mainstream media journalists who just wanted to fix the problem of fake news. So that's the front they hold out. You don't see NATO behind them. You don't see the CIA, the NSA.

I'm sorry, shame on Brillis, especially. That guy used to publish a magazine that had investigative reporting in it and stuff like that. You know, what a bastard. Not that he was the best or anything, But he was a real journalist before. Scott, didn't you do a debate with Bill Crystal?

I did, do it. Yeah, I'm afraid. So there's a great, there's a great interview that Bill Crystal did with Gordon Krovitz when they were setting up NewsGuard. And Krovitz is basically pitching Bill Crystal on this brilliant new idea they have. And Bill Crystal, you know, I don't want to say to his credit because that's like a sentence. I almost never want to come out of my mouth. But, you know, he had a funny instinctual observation that even Bill Crystal, you know, is sort of, you know, observed in real time as this monstrosity apparatus was being set up. He said, well, you know, gee, Gordon, you know, isn't this just establishment people saying that they like establishment news?

Of course. That line basically, you know, I mean, it's a lot darker than that, right? Because, you know, it's not, again, NewsGuard is not just establishment journalists. It's the CIA. in the NSA, in the Pentagon and NATO and the State Department and DHS, as well as the, you know, this whole coterie of, you know, State Department funded NGO representatives and donor and drafter class folks. Well, and as we've seen, too, completely cloaked in secrecy, right? Like this, if it wasn't for Musk turning over all those files to Matt Taibi and his friends, and if it wasn't for those lawsuits by those Southern governors, we would know much less about this

combine they had this whole kind of spider web of NGOs and in groups all essentially tracing back to the pentagon here that was completely unreported a year a year and a half ago right well you know a lot of it was available open source so i've been working on this for eight years you know i started writing weapons of mass deletion and making a movie about it in august 2016 you know the thing is is these people actually do need to brag about what they do publicly in order to out compete each other for government funding. And so, you know, I'm very strange that way. You know, I basically sacrificed, you know,

almost most of my, you know, adult life at this point, basically lurking in these people's Zoom calls and knowing them better than I know most of my own friends. So, you know, I don't think it actually required a lot of these recent reveals, you know, to know about this. But, you know, being able to actually get public awareness because of that, you know, what's been useful about this is those receipts being validated in such formal channels

make it much easier for people to accept a common set of facts of what they're up against. And, you know, one other thing I should just add real quick before we move on from the NewsGuard point is, you know, one thing that I found, for example, in 2019 is, you know, while VHS was setting up its internal censorship office that ended up censoring 22 million pro-Trump tweets for the 2020 election in a scandal that, you know, has been broken open now for, for some time. And there's been multiple hearings about and lawsuits about. But, you know, they had an actual document in the Department of Homeland Security in 2019 where they called for a whole society. This is the federal government writing about a plan to get the private sector, the civil

society and and uh and partnered media institutions to support news guard in 2019 this is this is dhs you know this is a government plan to prop up a non-governmental you know uh but cia stacked censorship organization to do the dirty work that dhs would not be able to do itself yeah well and that goes back to you know i guess there was the the argument you'd have heard from even some so-called libertarians missing the point on this. Like, oh, these are private companies. They can do what they want. But no, this is entirely a government program from beginning to end here.

And these private companies, so-called, are just subcontractors for the Pentagon, the FBI, DHS, et cetera, at this point, correct? And News Start's a great example. That New Star got a $750,000 grant from Pentagon. They also got some State Department funding. But, yeah, so this is like saying, listen, you know, know, in the 1980s, when the CIA was, you know, basically running crack into Miami to fund the, you know, the Nicaraguan. Yeah. Hey, Ricky Ross is a private company, man.

We're saying that the shrimping company that they were using, you know, as a front to put on speedboats to run into the Miami ports, you know, that that shrimping company is just a private company selling trips. What are you talking about? Right. Literally a pass-through for the CIA, you know, for the intelligence, you know, organizations. And by the way, I should add this. If you get money from the State Department, you are now, you're now a state company, okay? Like, I mean, that them should be the rules. If you're libertarian-minded, you should really sort of adopt that mindset that if you

are getting, if you want to not be a government company, if you want to be a private sector company, then you can't, you know, you can't have a formal partnership with the government. Yeah, you can't have, you can't have funding from the government. Be, if you, if you want us to think of you as a private company, you need to be truly invariably private. Yeah. If you have a, if you are public, private, you are now, guess what? You're now public.

That's like saying, you know, I'm an Italian restaurant with a formal partnership with the local branch of the Sicilian mafia. Am I, am I, am I an Italian restaurant anymore? Or am I, you know, basically, am I a mob shop? You know, the moment you get in business with the government that way, you are no longer a strictly private entity. And unfortunately, you know, for reasons that I think have somewhat to do with the fact that we require this level of double speak and we require this level of sort of, you know, strategic stupidity in order to get away with laundering all this. But then partly, I think just the American people have not adapted to the speed of these new developments in time to build a new vocabulary and a new sort of mental constellation of how their own world works, you know, to sort of, you know, nuance those distinctions around private sector and public entities. Yeah. Well, so what always helps me is to think of the chronology of the thing and how it evolves over time.

So I think one of the narratives that's been really important that you talked about is how this is, you know, typical. Speaking of libertarianism, it's a government program that just keeps growing and finding new excuses for itself. So first, Bush, you know, empowered the Shiites through Iraq War II, and then everybody decided that was a big mistake. So then they had to do the redirection, which included backing al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria for years, for two years, until the Iraqi-dominated. faction broke off and conquered eastern Syria. Instead of focusing on Assad, they focused on eastern Syria and called themselves the Islamic State. And then a year later, they rolled into Western Iraq and conquered all of that, which Bush had left, you know, open, stateless territory and wide open for such a thing. So then, in a way that the Mujahideen never succeeded

in this way during Iraq War II. And I guess it was social. media was the difference that in iraq war three, ISIS was able to make themselves a really big deal online and recruit, I don't know how many thousands of Europeans and Americans and of course Chechens and whoever else, Uyghurs and Afghans and everybody else, to come and fight with them there. So then the Democrats said, oops, not that they would ever admit their responsibility, but they built the Islamic State Caliphate for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi with their billions of American tax dollars in conspiracy with the Israelis, the Turks, the Saudis, the Qataris, etc. And so then they said, now we have to implement this massive censorship regime in order

to try to prevent ISIS from recruiting online through YouTube, through Twitter, through Facebook, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then, as I think you talked about in the Tucker Carlson interview, that once a rock war three was over, and that had mostly faded out. And then Trump got elected instead of Hillary Clinton, we had all of these, you know, job holders needed work. So they just made Donald Trump the next ISIS. And they just all went and got jobs at Twitter and at Facebook and I guess FBI agents by the dozens just went and, you know, and they framed him up for treason with Russia. And then they adopted this whole censorship regime in order to enforce that narrative to unperson all the Russiagate dissenters off of the internet. That was what really got

anti-war.com downranked and all that was when they did the completely ridiculous. And we know it was Michael Weiss from the Daily Beast and the Atlantic Council, who was the front, you know, the guy behind proper not accusing everyone who was good on Russia of being a Russian agent and demanding that Google take us off the damn internet, Mike. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Well, there's a couple funny things there. You know, I think starting from from the front of what you said, you know, there's kind of no small irony on ISIS's role in the internet. You know, are you familiar with the $500 million that the Pentagon paid the London PR firm Bell Pottinger to, to, to, to produce ISIS propaganda videos on the on the internet? This is, it's kind of amazing. You can Google this. It was

widely reported in The Guardian and the Independent and all over. There was a little over 500, million dollars that the Pentagon paid to produce ISIS propaganda videos. Now, they said this, we did this because, you know, every video came with essentially an IP address tracker so we could determine who was watching ISIS propaganda videos that we produced. So it's basically a sort of spy device is how they build it. That was half a billion dollars producing Hollywood-style ISIS propaganda from our own Pentagon. But that's exactly right. And, you know, the common banner, I mean, this is something that was very, very, very shocking to me in 2017, 2018, when I was watching this all unfold in real time. And I was, you know, in these people's disinformation conferences and just thinking myself, what the hell are so many counterinsurgency people. You know, there, this, this, there were so many veterans of exactly what you were just saying, the Iraq, Afghanistan, counterinsurgency people.

Yeah, the coininistas, they called themselves when they were championing, tripling the Afghan war. which they lost anyway right right right well they took that special set of skills of uh of grousing and and and managing you know foreign populations under a military occupation to the united states of america you know they took that back home and they parked themselves to the department of homeland security to say well you know this is what we did to shape the information environment when we were dealing with an insurgent threat like isis you know there's all this domestic extremism happening here. There's there are these threats to democracy that are happening here. And, you know, then that just meant the populist right. This is, this is years before even,

they even had, you know, the sort of January 6th type, you know, hysteria to try to hang this on. You know, it was, you know, it was, it was the same people. It was these empire managers whose special set of skills is literally subjugating people who we, you know, who were upset that we were militarily occupying them and stealing all of their resources and installing their government and, uh, you know, owning their entire courts and legal systems and education systems. We're all posh tunes now, Mike. We are. This is why I say, you know, it's from, you know, it's all, you know, they're treating Boston

like it's like it's Baghdad, you know, it's just there's, there's no distinction. Well, listen, man, um, here's a good one for your file on national public radio shortly after January the 6th. They interviewed Robert Grinier, who had been, he's the author of 88 Days to Kandahar. He had been the CIA station chief in Islamabad at the dawn of the terror war and kind of inadvertently showed how they helped let bin Laden escape. But anyway, Grenier was interviewed on NPR and it's this great little double entendre of cool stuff going on. Because what he does is he explains outright admits that's right we let osama bin laden go we decided forget al qaeda we don't want to get the guys what hit us and killed our people we want to go after the sort of milieu of extremism in which

they were thriving which meant a regime change in Kabul while bin laden and iman al-zawahari you know, moonwalk across the border, unhindered and unchased by Delta Force, who wanted only to kill them. And he, Grinier, explains, this is the analogy now. He outright admits their treason in helping bin Laden get away. But then he says, that's smart. And that's what we're going to do now. See, the January 6th rioters, the insurrectionists, their al-Qaeda in this scenario. And what we want to do is not so much focus on them as we want to focus on, you know, that sort of broader milieu of extremism in which they're thriving, by which he meant the American right, the entire American right, the pro-Donald Trump MAGA movement, are the Taliban.

And we're going to regime change their ass because of what al-Qaeda did at the Capitol that day, he said. Yeah, I'm looking at this right now, actually. in New York Times opinion, how to defeat America's homegrown insurgency. You know, and let me just add to this, actually, just because, you know, I'm one of these sort of weird guys who spent way too much time in DARPA grant, you know, looking through all the DARPA grants for this type of stuff, but how they actually make the sausage for censorship, I am willing to bet a bagel that Robert Grenier did not come up with this sort of hypothesis about how to manage the homegrown. insurgency by doing it targeting the middle rather than you know that then you know leaders or whatnot on his own this is that is what you just said is strikingly similar to the DARPA funded uh domestic censorship grants that that were that were done that were given out to you know 60 some universities between 2016 and 2020 um there's uh there's one that immediately comes to mind

called slaying the online hate hydra which uh which basically positive that, you know, if you were against open borders, you were, you were effectively, you know, engaging in sort of, uh, identitarian hate speech. And, uh, you know, they were using the same sort proxy in Europe for, for groups that were, that all happened to be, you know, peace with Russia parties or anti-war parties because they tended to be working class and wanted cheap energy from, uh, from, you know, improved Russian economic ties. And so, of course, the CIA was in the state department were plotting to kill all those or politically subjugate all those political parties and they often would use these hate speech predicates to do it and what was really you know fascinating about

for example just this one you know think just as a reference for the audience that they want to look this up slaying the online hate hydra this is a DARPA funded uh DARPA funded censorship research grant which looked which examined four different ways to go about ideally censoring the internet in order to take out, you know, basically people who had, you know, the wrong-thinking opinions when it comes to things like immigration. And the first way, you know, was like the classic top-down type thing. Like, you know, you kicked on, this is back in 2018, I think is when this grant was. This is like three years before Trump was actually kicked off Twitter.

They said, you know, well, we could kick these people. We'd kick, you know, the leaders off of the social media companies. But the problem is, is, you know, there's often this kind of martyr effect. and it sort of feeds into the same issue we have with insurgency, where, you know, we kill one, you know, high-profile person, but that act of martyrdom creates 100 new insurgents because they're all mad that their leader has been taken down. So they said, okay, well, what if we don't do top-down censorship

and what if we topographically map the network of connections that the leaders have to their, say, lieutenant class, you know, who are the top 20 lieutenants who are not as high-profile, who are not household names, who tend to be the key, amplifiers of the leader so that when the leader you know sort of tweets something out or makes a youtube video or a facebook post it doesn't have that same level of virality because they had their the other their top sort of you know second in command type the the sort of lieutenant class

amplifiers are gone you know that's that's one way we could do it that would minimize the martyr effect another way is we could keep you know keep the leaders and we could keep a lot of the like lieutenants but we could do a sort of we could we could topic topographically map the whole network and we could just sort of slowly or randomly or partially ban or or throttle or suppress this the sort of great unwashed middle who you know who so that that way you know everybody still can't our nobody is notices that censorship is happening because the highest profile people still have their accounts and so do the the sort of semi-celebrity people who amplify them but they're just not it just looks like they're organically not having any traction not having any

amplification because the people who don't have a voice to defend themselves are the ones who are getting uh who are getting you know kicked off the internet these people are evil man how do they these are americans yes well okay so let's talk about and you should by the way scott you know you should see i have all this by the way on my on my twitter page i've gone over this yeah like ben cyber and just you know i think if you type in either darpa or slang the online hate hydra you'll see this the mathematical equations that they actually sketch out to do this are a true sight to behold i mean it's it's almost like you know it looks now i'm not you know a sort of math quant guy but you know the the the level of computer science engineering that they propose to go into creating this vast

system to do exactly what you were just saying Robert Renier was was proposing but for for internet censorship in 2018 mind you I mean it was a level of technical proficient you know technical precision that is uh you know that is that is truly shocking you know and shows that the depths that they'll go to to pull to actually execute this oh they can't keep Rosie the porn spam bot off of my page though you know she replies to every single thing that I post on Twitter. Hey, Scott, you know what? If Rosie starts talking bad about, you frame more funding,

I guarantee you Rosie will be taken care of immediately. Yeah, exactly. Do me a favor, young lady. Hey, you guys, did you know that I don't just write books? I publish them. Well, the Institute does, and I'm the director, so yeah. 13 of them now, including my four. We published five more in 2023.

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Okay, so listen, so this goes to, and we're almost out of time here, but this goes to something that you guys were talking about. I used to just joke about this. Yeah, democracy is when the Democrats win. Otherwise, they'll frame you for treason and, you know, all of this stuff. But then the thing is, is that's really right. That's what you're talking about with Tucker Carlson the other day, is they got a whole new damn definition of democracy,

which is they got a whole new damn definition of democracy, which is they get to keep their jobs. And the American Empire, especially most of what you described as democracy means American hegemony in Europe, especially, and then the rest of the world, if they can swing it. And has nothing to do and, in fact, is the polar opposite of the will of the people at all. And now, you know, it's funny because democracy is always their excuse for intervening wherever they want. But democracy always just means the American national security state gets their way. And essentially it's just no different here in the United States either. And even look, if you go back eight years, and I want you to talk about the future this year, this campaign with Trump and everything too, if you can.

But you go back eight years where here's a major party candidate for president in the United States. And they framed him for treason. They had no shame. This is like one hair to the left or to the right, however you would frame. of shooting the guy in the face in Dallas. It's absolutely as outrageous as it could possibly be, no matter what you think of Trump. I'd have gone to bat for Bernie Sanders

or even Hillary Clinton the same way if this secret police framed her for treason. And then, of course, the censorship regime to enforce it. But these guys are way out of line here. And, of course, Biden has only empowered them and has made it clear. He wants the Justice Department to rid him of this meddlesome opponent.

before it even comes to an election in the fall anyway. So I guess if you could just talk about a little how completely feverish it's gotten up there in D.C. where they think that they can do that to a major party candidate and then even sitting president of the United States and then what you think they're going to do to them now, other than all the trials they have them going on. Yeah. Well, with those trials, I mean, there is a slow motion Dealey Plaza bullet, you know, moving straight at Donald Trump. He's facing 700 years in prison.

That's, you imagine. That's an assassination. Well, an Illinois judge just decided to throw him off the ballot yesterday. I says, Joe Kennedy, eat your heart out, man. You think ballot box stuffing in 1960 was something. That's nothing. Yeah. You don't need to stuff the ballots if your opponent can't put in the, you know,

can't put his name in the ballot. You know, it's, you, that stuff's it, you know, the back down. In fact, she even said that the write-in votes wouldn't count. would have to be quote suppressed. You know, that's a, but, you know, we are in a place that the country has never, has never been in before. We are in completely uncharted territory in that respect. You know, I, I made a few videos on my, on my, on my ex account about six months ago about

this, which is that, you know, in a way, in assassination, we've had, you know, several presidents assassinated at this, at this point, what, three, two, three. We've never had a president indicted, let alone convicted or even kicked off. We've never had the system. You can make an argument when Lincoln got assassinated or when JFK got assassinated that there's sort of a diplomatic framing of it where you can say, well, you know, damn, a rogue actor took this person out and it was highly destabilizing for a short period of time. but our institutions came in and it didn't really fundamentally change, you know, the,

the American, you know, system of governance. You know, we've got, but, you know, even if it was fundamentally forces within that government who were responsible for, you know, for orchestrating that, you know, assassination, you could argue on paper that the system didn't do it. This is the first time that the system, in 250 years, that the system is doing it and saying, this is what we do now as a system, we swallow the people who challenge us. And make no mistake, Trump is winning and has been winning according to all polling at this point for the past two months in all seven battleground states. He's right now on the election were held today, according to the, you know, the RCP

polling average, which aggregates every poll left and right across the country. He'd win the electoral college by something like 90 points. He is way ahead and he is facing an assassination if the Justice Department is not stopped. If Joe Biden's Justice Department, while you have on record, according to our paper of record, the New York Times, who published that Joe Biden was putting direct pressure on Merrick Garland to prosecute Donald Trump months before Merrick Garland did it. So, you know, this is a, that's Merrick Garland's boss in the White House. and of course you know i know that scott you probably covered merrick garland's uh you know uh seasoned history

from the 1990s uh in his uh role in various other uh i know that he told the judge objection don't let that guy talk about john do number two anymore i don't care how many times the witnesses say they saw mcvay's best friend with him we're not going to have that in this courtroom your honor i know he's guilty of that right yeah exactly you know him and eric holder were both uh you know it's amazing yeah that the the all-star team from that came both uh went on to be attorney generals but uh perhaps you know topic for another day but basically you have you know you have this situation right now where the the american empire has never been as you can you can argue um that there is a political fragment fragment fragmentation

that's occurring right now at a time when america is losing a great power competition to bricks countries that i think is forcing america in the eyes of the blob into a kind of formal military rule you know i mean one of the reasons you can argue that we've had a first amendment for so long is because our geographic you know privileged position on the world map combined with the industrial sort of of miracle of the 1800s and the special economic advantages that the U.S. had as well as in our transatlantic partnerships with London sort of allowed us the luxury of a largely free speech society. Free speech is kind of the first casualty of war because the things that undermine consensus for the war are deemed to be, you know, without that whole society consensus, you

you fall apart very quickly, it can also be exploited, yada, yada. Now, this is what they argue to, you know, to basically indict, you know, everybody under the sun. But the point that I'm driving at is, I'm not, I can't see through the fog of war for 2024. There's, there's too many wild cards. You know, I, I was one of those people who bet very heavily on the 2016 election for Trump, even when polls were saying that he was, you know, a three to one, four to one underdog. It was very, very obvious to me, you know, just from just an allay line of sight that there were, that there was this huge, huge online presence that was going to convert in a way that was totally under-counted, you know, by the traditional polling.

I was not able to see through the fog of war for 2020 and did not make any predictions about this. I can't, you know, there's, there's so many wild cards about 2024, and there's, there's so many crisis events that may happen between now and then. What's happening right now with the Ukraine funding is, is in some sense as existential to the, to the fate of sort of parapolitics in this country as the presidential election. Let's just say Mike Johnson as House Speaker rejects all, and I don't think this is going to happen, but let's just say he rejects all funding, you know, in this new Ukraine spend because Biden refuses to budge on border security or whatnot. I made a video about this yesterday on Twitter that's got, you know, I don't know, almost a million

views right now, which basically made the argument that, you know, I would not put it past. They might burn the Republican Party to the ground if the MAGA wing sort of wins. you know, Mitch McConnell just yesterday announced he was stepping down. Mitch McConnell is, you know, is the blob's sideman. But in the same way that, you know, he's a part of the mafia, the thing that the mafia offers you is protection from other mafias. And, you know, I don't know if Mitch McConnell has, is sort of aware that has been made apprised of what may befall a truly populist Republican Congress,

House, you know, I think that, you know, if, if House Republicans hold the line on that, they're going to, they're going to rushagate Mike Johnson and they might rush again, you know, Jim Jordan and everybody else. I mean, they, they indict with all of Trump's lawyers. They indicted Trump himself, you know, Rudy Giuliani, Jeff Clark, you know, the, the whole, the whole gamut, you know, I think that the new Russia gate for 2024 is probably going to be the mother of them all. Yeah, man.

And you know what? Sorry, just to go back one step that I left out of my whole ran about the government program expanding thing was how the wars, especially Iraq War III, but all of the Middle East wars had led to the giant refugee crisis in Europe, which had led to the rise of the populist right in Europe to Brexit and the election of a lot of populist writers to the European Parliament. And then that was a huge part of this censorship regime kicking in over there too, where remember they pretended to believe. that Russia was behind Brexit and was behind all of the votes for the right-wingers for the European Parliament in France and Germany, which both of those intelligence agencies later said was actually not true at all, of course. But that was the big narrative was that, you know, the only reason that people are objecting to thousands and thousands of Afghans and Syrians moving to their town all at once was because Putin made him do it. Yeah, you know, it's actually amazing you say that because there's a whole unpublished story, which is something that sort of forms part of the guts of the book that I've been writing for so long. But Andrew Spode Rasmussen, the former head of NATO from 2009 to 2014, who is now on the Board of News Guard, actually, you know, organized this thing called the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity,

which is one of the, basically this formal NATO election censorship cabal to censor ease. parliamentary elections, which actually partnered with Joe Biden in 2018 before Joe Biden, while he was basically retired, you know, before he decided to run for president. And after he had been in the D.P. slots as a form of partnership between Joe Biden, Andrews v. Rasmussen, but they held this conference. And Andrews Rasmussen, you know, was reflecting on the populist threat. And he acknowledged that, you know, that the rise of the populist right in Europe was because of this migrant crisis, you know, in the putting after the Gaddafi assassination and the you know in this this rush of refugees into Europe and the threat that that posed to their identity leaning them towards populist politics

and those populist national politics going up against the sort of globalist institution set of NATO and and it was very interesting this is a speech from 2018 where he sort of goes through the strategic analysis from NATO's perspective of how to handle this including the possibility of maybe sort of giving them, of containing them through counterinsurgency tactics, but maybe also placating them a little bit by either reframing or scaling back after 2016, you know, some of the, some of the open borders into Europe, you know, from that. So it's a very interesting sort of deeply nuanced speech at a time when NATO was very much in crisis because at that point, the French election had not yet been decided. They thought if Marine Le Pen won, that Freed,

exit might happen and Speggs that might happen with the box party in Spain and it'll exit in Italy and gorexit in Germany. I mean, they were freaked out at the time. And we're, you know, strategizing about how to stop the rise of the populist right the same way that with Operation Gladio and the other various CIA and UK foreign office efforts to stop this over the other. The communist left from, you know, for the same reasons, we have played out all across NATO countries in uh in the 20th century so they've gone from you know from turning the blobs department of dirty tricks against fascism in the run to world war two to turning it against you know global communism in uh in the 20th century and now it's against domestic populism you know just that it's department

of dirty tricks have been fully turned in words against us the people they're supposed to serve yeah you know i know obama don't give a damn but he's probably paying some attention but the real funny part to me is how W. Bush doesn't even care, right? All these years later, he's just sitting in his bathtub, painting his toes, completely oblivious to the world

that he made as the first leader of the world empire in the third millennium. It's just unbelievable in a way. It's the perfect kind of irony from a storybook or something, you know, that like, this is the guy who set us

down this path. Yeah, although, you know, but again, it's, it's, I totally agree with that, you know, Obama is actually not a passive player in this. You know, it was Obama who did a, you know, you know, an hour long speech and then a five hour panel at the Stanford University's internet internet internet, internet observatory, the Stanford internet observatory, which is basically a big CIA state department cutouts run by Michael McFall and has basically a bunch of CIA and state department people there. But it's, you know, and it was the. topic was disinformation is a threat to democracy. Obama basically said free speech on the internet is the number one threat to democracy and, you know, called for this whole society model to censor populist political speech. He's done multiple, not just speeches on that, but the Obama Foundation has a ton of people that are getting funding through the Obama Foundation for AI censorship through the AI ethics and responsible media programs there and the emerging leader programs of people working on that issue space.

So, you know, Obama's got a very curious background himself through the community organizing and through, you know, his mother's role at USAID and, you know, various other sort of very interesting aspects of his foreign policy resume. But he's not, you know, I'm not saying that he's any sort of mastermind or architect in this. I don't think that he is. But, you know, he is playing essentially a diplomatic, a sort of senior. your elder statesman role in providing this sort of, you know, clean, formal, almost, almost, you know, shadows state department type, you know, diplomatic PR campaign to support internet

censorship. So he's very much being wheeled out for that. And you'll see actually George Bush is from time to time as well. George Bush actually also, you know, did remarks on disinformation as a threat to democracy and how the fire is coming from inside that house and it's not just on the foreign side. So, you know, they're willing out all, you know, all the Hall of Famers to all support this PR push to censor the American people. Well, I think if there's a difference there, it's that nobody gives a damn about W. Bush anymore. But for Barack Obama, his important role there, as you're saying, it's really the psychology of telling other center left liberals and progressives that this is what we're all about. And our great former president that we wish was still here says it's that we're doing the right thing and this kind of thing. Whereas if he was saying, geez, guys, this is America, we don't want to go that far, then they would, it would mean something to them.

I don't know. Right. Because, you know, puts you at odds. I mean, imagine being in the left coalition. And, you know, and then now, you know, you're going against, you know, Barack Obama if you are for free speech on the internet. You know, that's a hard, it's a hard thing on a number of levels. Yep. So, yeah, that's an important, very important rubber stamp from him of, you know, as a former president.

of the United States, former liberal Democratic president of the United States saying that this is great, this is right, we should keep doing it. And you guys are doing a great job and should keep working harder. And all the rest of, that's hugely important, you know. It's not like he was forced out by scandal like he should have been or anything. You know what I mean? He's not Richard Nixon. They love him. They think he's great. And so they take what he says to heart big time. So anyway, I'm sorry. I'm so over time. I can talk to the rest of the afternoon here. I have, I took so many notes. on from what I've been reading on your website and the Carlson interview and what you've already been saying today and I we're going to do this again soon please don't be a stranger Mike this been great great thanks Scott I really appreciate it thank you very much all right you guys that is Mike Ben's BNZ that is and you can find him online on Twitter he is um Mike Ben's cyber at Mike Ben's cyber on Twitter and his foundation is called the foundation for freedom online and that's website foundation for freedom online dot com

the scott horton show an anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scot horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org