You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 44: Mike Benz - The (Deep) State of Global Censorship

Starting point is 00:00:00 Yeah, because we were doing favors for Google. You know, I was called by Google lobbyists to protect them against the EU Digital Services Act. Nine Google lobbyists called me on a joint phone call for how I should negotiate. This has really upended the entire concept of democracy in the West. This very nasty rhetorical sleight of hand that you can do the same thing that we call North Korea, China, Russia, top-down authoritarian, but simply call it whole of society collaboration instead of military control. But the collaboration is only happening because of these carrots and sticks, these threats. They are paying them or threatening them. They are punching them in the

Starting point is 00:00:42 piggy bank. It's the same way the mafia operates. You'll get our protection, but you got to pay the protection money and you can't report us to the cops. What power center in the West will actually ascend? Will it be this Trump-esque anti-Iran or this NATO-esque anti-Russia? Where do we go from here, Mike? How does it get better? Well, the nice thing is we... Good morning from Nashville, Tennessee, United States at the Bitcoin Conference since 2024. I'm very happy to be here with you today. I've got a very special guest, someone who I follow his work for about a year now. I'm sorry that it's not longer, but I discovered you about

Starting point is 00:01:32 a year ago, and since then I was hooked. Mike Pence. Hello. How are you going? Everything's great. Thanks for being here with me this morning. Yeah. That's really cool. I'm going to introduce you for my audience that may not know you, but I do think that a lot of my audience will know you because a lot of my audience for this podcast are freedom fighters and people that have woken up during COVID to a lot of the lies that they've been told throughout the years, including health, but not just health, climate, money, many, many politics, obviously.

Starting point is 00:02:05 So they see a lot of the truth behind a lot of the propaganda that they've been told during the years. And obviously many of them have suffered censorship, which is one of the topics we're going to talk about. So I think they'll be familiar with your work. But in case you're not, Mike Pence is the executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, FFO, right? A nonprofit watchdog dedicated to protecting digital liberties and restoring the free and open Internet. Hallelujah.

Starting point is 00:02:34 During the Trump administration, Pence was in charge of the cyber portfolio for the U.S. State Department, where he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Technology. That is the longest title I've ever heard for anyone. Congratulations. They just stack it. It makes it sound more prestigious the more words they add to it. And then no one really remembers what your title is.

Starting point is 00:03:00 That's so ridiculous. Not the role, the title. That role included formulating and negotiating U.S. policy on Internet diplomacy issues as well as interfacing with private industry and civil society in the big tech space. Prior to his State Department role, Benz served as a White House speechwriter for President Trump and advised on technology policy. Before his time in the public sector, Benz practiced business law as an attorney in New York,

Starting point is 00:03:30 representing technology companies and financial firms. OK, I was exposed to you, as I said, and to your work about a year ago after just before October 7th. And then when October 7th happened, I spoke out about it. And then I saw one of your great videos where you tried to put things into context from your knowledge and experience, which was very, very helpful for me. It kind of, you know, fulfilled some of my my missing pieces of the puzzle. So thank you for that. And let's start with that. What's your take on the war that we're experiencing right now in the Middle East?

Starting point is 00:04:08 And what do you think its true purpose is? Well, you have this long relationship that the United States has had with Israel. There was some rockiness for the first 30 years from the 1940s into the early 1970s. And then I think after the Yom Kippur War, there was this consolidated consensus within Washington that Israel was a useful beachhead for military and diplomatic operations in the Middle East. And there was a sort of synthesis in the same way that countries like Colombia play in South America as a kind of beachhead for influence over other countries in the region. Israel was playing that role for the United States and much of the military aid and things like that went to that purpose. Other countries like Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, all these countries had been sort of adversary. They were involved in this whole sort of OPEC oil politics and oil diplomacy.

Starting point is 00:05:06 After the oil embargo in the early 70s, Israel played sort of a key role in sort of reasserting American influence, frankly, over the region. And that alliance had been pretty much unperturbed up until early 2015 when Obama signed the Iran energy deal. People call it the Iran nuclear deal, but I don't think of it as having really anything to do with nuclear weapons. What it has to do with is the relief of sanctions on Iran. Now, Iran sits on, after the United States and Russia, the world's third and fourth largest supplies of oil and gas, almost totally untapped. And this is a huge, just a huge amount of profit for the taking if it can be opened up. And you had stakeholders from NATO wanting to form partnerships with Iran and by proxy with Qatar to open up this bountiful amount of oil and gas in Iran. And they would be joint partnerships with all these different American and British companies.

Starting point is 00:06:04 And the issue was Israel saw it as a massive security threat. And so the Netanyahu government vehemently opposed the Iran deal. Saudi Arabia also opposed it on commercial grounds. This is actually what was sort of the predecessor for the Abraham Accords. You had Israel and Saudi Arabia, which had been long at odds with each other, coming together because Saudi Arabia was the regional dominant player in the oil and gas space. And having all this new supply opened up from Iran would not only reduce their market share, but it would also reduce the amount of profit even within the limited market share they now have because the supply would go up, which means the price would go down. So it would, you know, Saudi Arabia saw it as an existential threat to them commercially. Israel saw it as an existential threat to them on security grounds, because if Iran were to become super rich by exporting all this oil and gas,

Starting point is 00:06:53 they would be able to 10x the amount of funds that they send to Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis and you name it. All these, you know, the proxies that Israel is concerned about security grounds. So this drew Israel and Saudi Arabia into not only a sort of soft alliance with each other against the Obama administration, but also into a pro-Trump alliance. Folks from the Likud party in Israel and folks from Saudi Arabia were very, very pro-Trump in 2016. And if you remember, his first act in office was getting out of the Iran deal, was breaking that up. And so that persists to this day. At the time, NATO was trying to bankrupt Gazprom in Russia and find alternative oil and gas supplies, especially for Europe. And so this plan was to basically do maximum pressure on Russia and neutrality with Iran, whereas Trump had a reverse policy, maximum pressure on Iran, neutrality with Russia.

Starting point is 00:07:46 And so this now basically puts the Middle East as this kind of linchpin position, the kind of litmus test about what power center in the West will actually ascend. Will it be this sort of Trump-esque anti-Iran or this NATO-esque anti-Russia? Right. And so Israel's role in this is to, in a way, be a lever to kind of move the negotiations to any direction, depending on the administration that is in power in Israel. You're the Voice is brought to you by Trezor, the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company, pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013 empowering individuals with an open source device enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins i find my treasure super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family enjoy my five percent

Starting point is 00:08:38 discount on treasure product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code flat right so that has a lot of significance and importance. So what do you think is the involvement or the push of the current administration and also the Trump administration in influencing the regime in Israel or the regime change in Israel? Yeah, it's a fascinating moment in history that we're in right now because you had Chuck Schumer, who is the majority leader of the Senate, the most powerful person in the United States Senate, who called for new elections in Israel just three months ago, effectively calling for regime change. Yeah. The president United States, Joe Biden, was then asked the following day if he agreed with Chuck Schumer's comments and he said he didn't disagree

Starting point is 00:09:18 with them. So you had the president United States, you had the the head of the Senate, you had Nancy Pelosi just just yesterday, you know, effectively say that Netanyahu's speech was the worst event that ever occurred in the United States Congress. Whatever your opinions on that are, the fact is, is she is a very she was obviously the head of the the House leadership. So you're both the Senate and the House. She's still very, very powerful power player behind the scenes. Many speculate that she played the leading role in pushing Joe Biden out and putting in Kamala Harris as the new sort of Democrat Party nominee. But you think that? Well, I think that there's there's been reporting in Politico and Axios that she made threats behind the scenes. I don't know how effective they were. I don't think she's got enough pull by herself.

Starting point is 00:10:05 But when you add up all the other partners, I think it adds weight. But you have this when when the head of the Senate and the president of the United States and the most powerful person in the House of Representatives are all calling for regime change in a country. It's not like the head of the State Department goes back or the head of the CIA or the head of USAID goes back to their desk with, you know, with a thumb up their butt just waiting for time. I mean, that's there's something going on behind the scenes there. Now, there has been reporting that U.S. aid money has flowed to Hamas groups, that there's been really interesting reporting on the role of the protests at Netanyahu's personal residence being funded by U.S. aid money or through State Department cutouts, which I find very interesting, if true, because these are the sort of tactics that we do in classic regime change operations. There are ties between a lot of the movements, the grassroots movements in Israel that are advancing the protests against Netanyahu, the left-wing kind of protests, and a lot of U.S. organizations, NGOs, etc., that are donating money directly to these people. These are facts. You can see the money flowing. You can see some of those organizations telling you where they're getting their funding from. So Vexler Fund, they're a big donor to some of those movements in Israel.

Starting point is 00:11:24 So the ties are there. Whether they're trying to do a regime change or not, I think you have to be a little bit willfully blind if you think that they're not. It even goes down to the level of when you actually look at the demonstrations on the streets in Israel, right next to my house in Tel Aviv, you see people waving flags and posters saying, Biden save us. Like they're actually calling for, because that's the narrative that they're being fed. They actually think that the left wing in the U.S. is going to save them in some way. You know what I mean? It's so distorted. Well, they might not be wrong.

Starting point is 00:11:59 Yeah, they may not be wrong, but they're not at all aware of what the Biden administration in the U.S. is up for, what they actually want. Right. Like help us, meaning help us take Netanyahu down and put guns or some other clown of the left wing or center politic. They just keep playing the political game, which is completely rigged in Israel and all sides working together in Kahoot. Right. It really doesn't matter. I mean, Netanyahu obviously has his own agenda, but but the left wing is no better. they're just puppets. Yeah, no, they're useful proxies. And this is another, you know, the NGOs that provide, for example, humanitarian aid often play these dual roles in funneling money, which then provides political influence. It purchases you judges, it purchases you journalists, it purchases you all sorts of civil society influence over universities in the region and things like

Starting point is 00:12:54 this. And, you know, this is a classic sort of one-two punch that the State Department, USAID, CIA apparatus on the inside of the U.S. government and the George Soros axis on the outside of government often play in regime change operations dating back to the 1980s. This is a classic trick where we would want to overthrow the government of Poland, or we would want to overthrow any of the dozen countries that we did in the 1980s in the run-up to the full breakup of the Soviet Union. We would have a State Department agenda. We'd flood it with $70 million. Oftentimes that would move through these sort of Soros pass-throughs. And then those Soros pass-throughs would incubate these rent-a-riot mobs that would take to the streets, that would do protests, that would take

Starting point is 00:13:38 over federal buildings, that would camp out in front of politicians' homes. And then media would be on the ground to amplify that and say, well, this is the will of the people. This is democracy. And any attempt by the state to contain those astroturfed, fake, you know, democratic insurgencies, which are just astroturfed by the U.S. State Department or CIA or State Department, are then contextualized as a crackdown on legitimate free assembly. And so it allows them to paint this democracy versus autocracy brush, which then cranks open even more funding and cranks open even more mandate for operations because now you have this authoritarian state cracking down the will of people.

Starting point is 00:14:22 And what's amazing is it totally disregards who the people vote for. It says that the will of the people is the 500 people surrounding this building with signs, not the 5 million people who voted for that government. But by doing that, they're able to sort of channel this idea that the will of the people is being disrespected by the government. And so Big Daddy Uncle Sam has to break open the piggy bank to take U.S. taxpayer money to give it to the protesters so they can topple the government just to install a new government who will be OK with Iran. And getting the sanctions relieved so that a bunch of NATO energy companies can 10x their profits. And we just saw this in Ukraine. You know, the Victoria Nuland, who was the head of the U.S. Embassy for the U.S. State Department, bragged in December 2013, two months before we overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine,

Starting point is 00:15:12 that the State Department in the U.S.A. had pumped $5 billion into Ukrainian civil society, meaning these right sector mobs who overthrew that government, who did the surrounding of the parliament building, the whole Maidan Square riot. I mean, it was effectively January 6th, what we're told January 6th is. But it was organized by the U.S. State Department and USAID and by George Soros groups and CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy. And they overthrew that country right after they rejected an IMF trade deal and sided with a Russian Federation deal.

Starting point is 00:15:45 This is a trick that we see so many times. I find it interesting that Netanyahu and Soros are at such odds with each other. There's this historic acrimony between Netanyahu and Soros. And Soros is deeply invested in this energy transition story from getting rid of Russia. Soros has been at the tip of the spear of privatizing Naftogaz in Ukraine, which is the big Ukrainian state-owned gas company. And he's sort of been the intermediary for the IMF, the International Monetary Fund. And it's planned to privatize Ukraine's whole state economy because Ukraine's whole economy is basically gas. It's the gas transit point for Russia.

Starting point is 00:16:25 And they want to take all that gas architecture and switch it either from an Iranian supply, as we discussed, or now a lot of it is LNG, liquefied natural gas coming from Houston or coming from British companies and then shipped in through Poland. This is a big reason that we wanted to regime change the government of Poland, which just successfully happened four months ago. You know, the Polish government was hesitant about the Ukraine war. They now have a totally pro-war, pro-EU party. But that was because Poland was was then is the new import location from where it used to be coming from Russia, because Poland has these ports. You can just go through the straits there in the Baltics. You can just port them in there and then just pipe it into Slovakia and then into any Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:17:09 It's another reason they were mad at the president of Slovakia, the prime minister who happened to be shot in the face. Exactly. The same way that Donald Trump was. Assassinate. Yeah, sure. You know, and with Netanyahu, regardless of how you feel about him, it's hard to not see the similarities between the lawfare. You know, he was indicted on these corruption charges. Donald Trump was then, you know, two years later hit with 91 felony charges.

Starting point is 00:17:31 This is what they did to Imran Khan in Pakistan, who was also hostile to the efforts against Russia. You know, the coup against Imran Khan in Pakistan happened because of a State Department cable threatening the Pakistani parliament. This was reported by The Intercept. So then they ousted the most popular president that Pakistan has ever had. And because he was so popular and they knew he'd win the next election, they hit him with like 185 charges. And he's now currently in prison. He's barred by law from running again for president. So this is one of these strategies where it comes down to destabilization.

Starting point is 00:18:09 They try to internally destabilize a country that has a secure government they're trying to overthrow because only in that destabilized state can they take the extraordinary action to install a new puppet government. And I suspect that's what they're trying to do in Israel. In Israel. So I just want to simplify and ask for dummies. So you actually are saying perhaps Netanyahu does have the best interest of Israel and he's trying to protect that, and some other forces don't think that he is the right guy to lead Israel right now and someone else will be easier to control? Well, definitely the second one.

Starting point is 00:18:43 I mean, the fact is Netanyahu, I'm sort of agnostic on is he legitimate, is he of the best interest at heart. The fact is he is, you know, I think there is legitimacy to calling him a so-called hardliner in the sense that he does not budge, he does not play ball in the way that I think that a sort of Benny Gantz type would. I think that regardless of whether it's the correct vision for Israel, it is a axiomatic, dogmatic, unshakable vision for Israel. And because of that, you have diplomats in the United States who would prefer to have a more malleable person. And I think that especially when it comes to the oil and gas in the region, when it comes to the Iran. So that's the next thing I wanted to ask.

Starting point is 00:19:31 When that relates back to October 7th and what we've seen happening, how do you think that that's connected? I mean, when I saw that event, for me, it was clear straight away that that's a false flag and that that was allowed to have happened. And that the government of Israel and all the, you know, what you call the blob in the U.S. in Israel have just let that thing happen so that they can justify going into Gaza. And then I started asking myself, why, what do they have to earn by doing that, by sacrificing so many Israeli lives and obviously then Palestinian lives? So how do you think that relates to that? It's hard to peer through the fog of war on this. You know, there's a lot of competing theories around what happened, how much advanced. knowledge there were. You know, it certainly seems like the sort of thing that there would have been.

Starting point is 00:20:20 Yeah, that there would have been something. But this is also not uncommon. You know, I was just covering recently, you know, we had something in the United States around Operation Northwoods, which was this really fascinating moment in 1962 around pretext to war. And the joint chiefs of the U.S. military all unanimously signing a memo proposing a menu of options for pretext to attack in Cuba. There's a curious backstory even around Pearl Harbor. There's something called the McCullum Memo in 1940, two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was called the Eight Action Plan, which was a proposal to the United States president about eight steps that the U.S. could take to get Japan to attack Hawaii, including parking naval ships in Hawaii and doing this

Starting point is 00:21:09 oil embargo that would basically starve Japan out and force them to attack. The whole strategy was to try to make it look like it was totally unprovoked and make us defenseless and sacrifice lives in Hawaii, in the harbor, in order to get the political predicate to take the extraordinary action to enter the war against Japan. We don't know if that's, you know, with certainty, obviously things look, you know, quite strange. But these are the sort of things that it's hard without more

Starting point is 00:21:41 than what we currently have to make a hard determination on it. But it would not be unprecedented. As I said, this is the sort of thing the United States government has done several times. And it's hard to sort of figure out what in Netanyahu's mind, how cornered he feels, because we had a very strange election here in the United States in 2020, where seven states flipped overnight. You had the total destruction it was looking like on October 7th of Donald Trump as a political counterweight to the Obama-Biden foreign policy, which is to say that there was increasingly this pressure. Already, for example, Iran had gone from $8 billion approximately in oil exports

Starting point is 00:22:23 in the Trump era to $80 million in a single year under the Biden administration. The Biden administration allowed Iran to sign a $400 billion oil and gas agreement with China, which is $400 billion to Iran, which is a huge amount of money, which it then flows into Hamas and Hezbollah. And so I think that the Israeli government was feeling extremely cornered and desperate in the run-up to October 7th and felt that time was not on their side. If an extraordinary action to sort of wipe out Hamas from Gaza and reassert political control over territories that were somewhat autonomous,

Starting point is 00:23:01 I could see there being a sort of bizarre calculus from the Netanyahu camp that some unsavory action now might be the only thing that can spare the country in the long run because of how cornered they were. Iran had been totally exiled, a pariah state for decades. And then, you know, Trump sort of put that back on. But now it was looking increasingly like Israel was surrounded. Even the relations with Saudi Arabia started to start to drop out during the Biden administration. And Saudi Arabia just got off the petrodollar. You have this new BRICS alliance. Israel even had this partnership with China on technology grounds that was very robust. And even that seems to be being isolated with China's new partnership with Iran.

Starting point is 00:23:42 So I could see Israel feeling like a cornered animal, at least from the Likud party perspective, in that there may need to be some extraordinary action. It has to be justified somehow. So it's hard to know what to make of that. I'm with you. Can you tell me what you think of Bibi's recent speech at the Senate, which we've just seen a couple of days ago. I mean, I know what I think of it, but both from a speechwriter perspective, because, you know, Bibi is phenomenal. I think it's his speeches. And I'm saying that as an ex-marketeer, also an accountant writer. The guy just knows how to speak and he's great rhetoric. And obviously he lies a lot of time, but he does it really well.

Starting point is 00:24:23 and also from your critical analysis perspective of the things that he's actually saying. I mean, I know we haven't watched the whole thing. It's almost an hour, but we've watched enough to understand the gist of it. Yeah, so Netanyahu is a really sort of interesting public speaker in the U.S. formal settings. You know, he sort of famously brought up to previously to Congress, you know, pictures of a bomb in Iran sort of filling the uranium. And these sorts of things are very theatrical. And I think Netanyahu sort of likes to bring that.

Starting point is 00:24:53 But I think at this moment in time, you really need to speak to American interests. I thought it was actually quite refreshing. For example, in Ukraine, we hear constantly about threats to democracy, threats to democracy. We need to protect Ukraine to protect democracy, even though anyone with a functioning frontal lobe says, well, Ukraine doesn't even have elections anymore. They canceled elections for the past three and a half years. They've banned opposition media. They've totally censored Internet.

Starting point is 00:25:16 They've banned alternate religions. They've banned speaking alternative languages. This is the classic hallmark of everything we call an authoritarian state. How can you call this a democratic one? You have the Azov Nazis freely speaking there. Yeah, in 2014, Congress censured the Azov battalion as a Nazi group, and now we're sending all our money to them. It's like the moment they became geopolitically useful,

Starting point is 00:25:42 they lost the Nazi status, which is just amazing. But it's the same thing that we've done with fundamentalist Islamic groups. This is the same thing with the Mujahideen. It wasn't like we loved fundamentalist Islam in the U.S. State Department. It's just they were willing to go to war with Russia, so we were willing to give them money and weapons. But I think it was quite refreshing when Lindsey Graham came out about two months ago and said, listen, regardless of how you feel about the democracy thing, there's $12.4 trillion worth of natural resources under the soil of Ukraine

Starting point is 00:26:12 between the precious metals, between the rare earth minerals, between the oil and gas. So even if you don't give a fig about democracy, we should still be invested in supporting Ukraine because those minerals will make America wealthy. Now, of course, the unstated sentence in that is, but I thought those are Ukraine's $12.4 trillion. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. They're our 51st state. And they're not really a sovereign country. They're our vassal state. But pitching it in those interests, I think at least says to Americans, hey, actually, for the welfare of Americans, it actually is beneficial to spend our money on foreign aid and foreign assistance and shifting our foreign policy to support this country, which is 7,000 miles away from the

Starting point is 00:26:58 nearest American shore. And I think speaking in those interests is something that is maybe needed again, this was something, an argument that was made in the 1970s, you know, when, as we mentioned, when Israel and the Yom Kippur War happened, and it was suddenly in the, you were able to make a sort of hard-nosed, calculated reason for why you should support Israel, because it supports American interests. They can help the Pentagon's operations there. They can help money flow through from the State Department and USAID side. They can coordinate with local groups in a way That's too difficult for the U.S. intelligence to do logistically. Speaking in those interests, I think, would be more effective for Netanyahu than simply relying on the kind of legacy influence and partnerships that many in the GOP have with the Likud faction.

Starting point is 00:27:49 Because, you know, we're at this really wild moment in history where the DNC platform, I mean, they even said on NBC last, I think, three nights ago that Josh Shapiro may not be considered as a vice presidential candidate for Kamala Harris because he's Jewish. And so much of the DNC now is reliant on, you know, for the swing state of Michigan, there's a lot of Muslim voters. And then you have this, you know, this whole sort of campus movement, which has made that a liability. And that's the sort of thing that's very much changing quickly in American politics. But again, like I said, coming back to just the how does it benefit citizens in the U.S. to support the Netanyahu government is the sort of thing, rather than speaking in values, I think that Netanyahu would benefit from speaking in terms of value. That is, instead of thinking about these ideological, you know, concepts, talk about, you know, the hard cost-benefit analysis of how Americans will have a higher standard of living from supporting the present government in Israel. My opinion is that they're going to try and prolong this war as much as they can so that they can continue. So, first of all, all the people that are criminals, in my opinion, that have allowed October 7th to happen will still be in charge, which is what's happening now for six months, including himself.

Starting point is 00:29:06 None of them resigned. None of them took responsibility so that they can continue their operation in Gaza. And I think that the next stage we're going to see is the rehabilitation of Gaza and recovery of Gaza and end Israel as well, because many parts in Israel are also being torn down and people uprooted. And then they're going to be getting another excuse to start printing more money and keep that fiat machine going so that they can continue justifying, controlling other areas, rebuilding. Then there's all this collaboration with Musk and green energy around these areas. I mean, we see a lot of different agendas coming into play when you look at that small conflict or war inside of Israel and Gaza. It just feels like they just want to prolong it as much as possible. Well, the prolonging issue is interesting because I don't know that there's ever been a U.S. election where so much of U.S. foreign policy on Israel tilts on the result of it.

Starting point is 00:30:02 That is, I could see Netanyahu extending the war until there's a change in administration and then quickly seeking peace because the threat goes away if Trump reasserts sanctions on Iran, takes extraordinary action to effectively cut the money pump to these groups that Netanyahu may feel threatened by. But I think that certainly it will prolong while you have the present foreign policy course in the U.S. But, you know, it's amazing because we've had this thing from Truman until Trump, from the 1940s until 2016. The U.S. has always had this very, you know, unified blob in our foreign policy establishment. You know, there's a saying that politics stops at the water's edge, meaning that we can disagree with each other internally about things domestically. We can, you know, Republicans can say this about abortion and Democrats can say that about abortion. Republicans can say we want high taxes, low taxes. Democrats can say we have high taxes.

Starting point is 00:30:58 And, you know, there will be disagreement internally. But politics stops at the water's edge in the sense that when we do foreign policy, it shouldn't matter what the party is. We should have a consensus. But that is very much not the case right now when it comes to the politics of Israel. And that, I think, is something that Israel is aware of. I think it's something that Iran and Qatar are aware of. I think it's something Saudi Arabia is aware of. We're at this very destabilized moment in U.S. foreign policy.

Starting point is 00:31:26 We've lost pretty much every major foreign policy initiative back to back to back from the disaster in Afghanistan to the loss of territory in Ukraine to Saudi Arabia leaving the petrodollar to China is now the Middle East peace broker. to the loss of several governments that were said to be client states in South America to what's happening right now in Israel. And I think a lot of that has to do, actually, with this breaking apart of the blob around these Middle East issues. But I think it's forcing other countries to make desperate calculus that they did not feel they needed to make when they could rely on a consistent U.S. foreign policy.

Starting point is 00:32:06 Fascinating. Do you think the natural resources around Gaza and Israel have something to do with that play as well? It's quite possible. There's been a lot of talk about that, but I'm not privy to any of the sort of backroom dealings. And there's been very little reporting, for example, on what specific companies, what specific banks have made loans, what specific actions that USAID or the State Department may have taken to back channel or intermediate that. I think as soon as there are leads about the exploitation of those reserves, a whole backstory will spill open that we're not yet privy to. I agree with you. Okay. Free speech. You've been

Starting point is 00:32:46 incredible in shedding light on that topic, which is super important that until recently, people actually thought it was a conspiracy theory that the censorship industrial complex even exists. And we've seen, especially on social media, so commonly that many people are being banned or shadow banned or throttled or just simply being deplatformed for saying the wrong thing by the institution, just stepping outside of the allowed sandbox of messaging or narratives. And so can you share a little bit about your, first of all, your definition for this censorship industrial complex and what has changed in 2016 where we saw that starting to pick up? So the easiest way to define the censorship industrial complex is by their own term, which is called whole of society. Whole of society is this concept that they say at every meeting. It's almost like a incantation. In vocation, they chant it like a mantra.

Starting point is 00:33:48 It's almost like going to some sort of yoga retreat in Nepal, and they're high on a mountain. They say, whole of society, whole of society. And what that means is four categories of institutions constantly working together to do this censorship work. They call it counter-misinformation, a whole-society counter-misinformation alliance. But it's not countering misinformation by putting up their own counter-speech.

Starting point is 00:34:08 It's countering it by censoring it, by doing one of three things, remove, reduce, inform. Remove, reduce, and? Informed, which means remove means ban it, ban the account, censor the tweet, censor the Facebook post, censor the YouTube video. Reduce means throttle it, reduce its distribution algorithmically, shadow banning. There's a million different friction tools to limit the virality, apply a virality circuit breaker. Then the third one is informed. That means fix a fact-checking label on something, put an interstitial click through.

Starting point is 00:34:37 I mean, it's another thing that throttles it. Algorithmically, any time there's a fact check applied to something, it applies a virality circuit breaker. So they don't. So it is just a censorship thing. It's a censorship framework. But whole society means four categories of institutions in constant concert with each other. And those are government institutions, private sector institutions, civil society institutions and media institutions. And this is their framework, their way of thinking about it. So on the government. Do they call it that way? Yes. In fact, they call it that way so much. I have a you know, I have a super cut on my X feed. If you just run a search for my handle at Mike Ben Cyber on X with the term whole of society,

Starting point is 00:35:13 You'll see I have a whole supercut of them. You could do a 10-hour supercut of this. In fact, they say it so much that they sometimes apologize for saying it because everyone's so sick of hearing it. But it's really Orwellian what that phrase allows because we've had this concept of civilian-run media, civilian-run government in the United States since our founding, and this idea that it's not the military in control of our government. It's not the military in control of our media. It's not like what North Korea does or what China does or what you can argue Russia does, where it's top down from the government.

Starting point is 00:35:46 It's bottom up from the people. We know this because it's the people's media, it's the people's government. And the military answers to the civilian run. The president is a civilian who is the commander in chief, the head of the military. So we're not in control by this government overstate. We are a government by the people of the people. But the whole society framework flips that all completely on its head. What it does is it says that media is wrapped up with the government.

Starting point is 00:36:14 The private sectors are wrapped up with the government. Civil society institutions, meaning university centers, NGOs, community groups, nonprofits, foundations, they're wrapped up with the government. The government plays this quarterback role, and what it does is it uses carrots and sticks, carrots meaning rewards and sticks meaning punishment, for people to participate in this whole society censorship alliance. The carrots will come in the form of government grants and government contracts. For example, our National Science Foundation, which is the sort of civilian arm of DARPA, our military, they have a mandate with 15 percent of what they do has to be military, and a lot of what they do is dual use for CIA and DOD activity.

Starting point is 00:36:55 But the National Science Foundation spent $100 million funding these different whole society network groups, you know, 60 different U.S. universities, dozens of NGOs, a bunch of pop-up censorship mercenary firms. You have the DHS, which has grant programs for the whole society members. The Justice Department has grant programs for these members. The State Department does. USAID does. CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy do. They're pumping hundreds of millions of dollars to create this astroturfed censorship mercenary alliance. And then they also do sticks, which is that they threaten these entities if they don't participate in the censorship network. For example, USAID, which is, you know, this sort of weird mutt monster combination of Pentagon,

Starting point is 00:37:41 CIA and State Department activities for funding the logistics for what we do on both overt and covert action. They had a whole sort of disinformation primer they published just weeks after Biden was inaugurated about how USAID can coordinate advertiser boycotts on private sector companies who don't remove misinformation and disinformation from their platforms. And we saw this in the Facebook files where Nick Clegg, the head of public policy at Facebook, said in internal emails that the reason that they were agreeing with Biden administration pressure to censor the man-made COVID origins hypothesis algorithmically and banning these accounts was because, quote, we have bigger fish to fry with the Biden administration.

Starting point is 00:38:22 We need to think creatively about how to be receptive to the responses for takedown requests because we are dependent on them on multiple policy fronts. That is, Facebook needs the U.S. State Department to apply pressure to the EU to protect Facebook's data monopoly in Europe. The State Department gets to send a delegation to Facebook and say, hey, nice business you got there. If you want us to do favors for you, you got to do favors for us. And so this is one of the issues in a globalized world when you have publicly traded companies who are dependent on the U.S. government for access to foreign governments, for exports to foreign populations that are subject to regulations in foreign countries that they need the United States to bring the full force of our diplomatic pressure to influence. That gives the government the ability to then negotiate not just with the foreign governments but with our own private sector companies to get things done. It was a problem we never used to have before, really. I mean, you can imagine all the favors that the U.S. government has done for the oil industry, for example, throughout time.

Starting point is 00:39:22 You know, overthrowing, you can argue, in Iran in 1954 when we toppled, you know, we toppled the Iranian government. And, you know, this was a time when, you know, that government was trying to nationalize, you know, British petroleum at the time. And that was a coup for oil. We've done a million of those. But there was never a situation where the U.S. government did favors for oil companies and the oil companies turned around and cut off the gas pump to half of the United States population who voted for Eisenhower or something. There's been this relationship between big government and big corporations that's always said to have this sort of Reagan-esque trickle-down benefit to Americans. But now you have a situation where the tech companies will do these favors for big government. Big government will ask for censorship favors and requests.

Starting point is 00:40:11 And so you have half the country effectively cut off the pump. But they're the ones funding the government to do it. So when I saw this at State, this is what really motivated a lot of my work after leaving the government. While you were still working? Yeah, because we were doing favors for Google. You know, I sat at the desk that Google called. I was called by Google lobbyists to protect them against the EU Digital Services Act. Nine Google lobbyists called me on a joint phone call for how I should negotiate.

Starting point is 00:40:41 Because we have this whole thing called the U.S. National Champions Policy at the State Department. We define what's best for the American people as what's best for American corporations. These are called our national champions. And Trump even fell victim to this himself. at the same time that I was screaming in the White House that we needed to take on big tech censorship. This is before Trump himself, you know, got censored, before he got taken off the platforms, before he was getting hit with all these fact check labels. If you remember, you couldn't even read Trump tweets for several months. Did they think you're crazy when you were saying

Starting point is 00:41:11 that? At first, at first. But ultimately, you know, it was vindicated when it hit the White House personally. But it was evident to anyone with eyes to see that Trump's base is being totally decimated online immediately after the 2016 election. And the fact that it took until 2020 for Trump to wake up. And at the time he was calling MAGA, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon because of the time he was running on the greatest economy the world had ever seen. And that was reflected in the price of the Dow and the Nasdaq and the, you know, the New York Stock Exchange, you know, then everything going up, up, up. And that was mostly a function of the golden goose of Silicon Valley. It was at that time that big tech was overtaking big oil as the

Starting point is 00:41:51 largest companies. In the 2000s, it was ExxonMobil and Chevron and BP. These were the biggest companies in the world. Now it's Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon. And so, you know, Trump did not, I think, want to go to war with private sector companies, did not want to play hardball with them because they were if you if you threaten them, let's just say you tank their stock price. What if they what if they don't budge? And now, well, now you're taking your reelection chances. I think that's what the calculus that Trump was was looking at from. But I also think he had a very limited view until he was impacted personally about the threat that he was up against. Now, the Biden administration was wise to it from day one, and they immediately

Starting point is 00:42:30 applied the pressure on the tech companies and onboarded them into this whole society alliance. Microsoft, for example, which is hugely dependent on foreign markets, especially places like China, which Biden has a much more friendly relationship with. Microsoft, I think, is the largest proportional profits of any major U.S. corporation for its China market. And Microsoft is now a huge funder of these, frankly, CIA type activities that the government needs top up funding for when they don't have enough congressional allocations. Microsoft now funds these media sustainability funds to help effectively CIA media expand its influence in South America. Microsoft has this whole program called the Defending Democracy Program, which was set up in 2018. And it was

Starting point is 00:43:15 the rollout of these censorship gargoyles like NewsGuard. And NewsGuard has been a huge censorship force on places like PragerU and is, you know, weirdly selectively targeted, not just pro-Trump U.S. media, but also pro-Lakud party media. So it's amazing how consistent it is with targeting any sort of NATO skeptical or NATO critical political faction. And lo and behold, they have on their board of advisors, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former head of NATO, as well as Michael B. Hayden, the General Michael B. Hayden, the former four-star general, CIA director, NSA director, Tom Ridge, the former DHS secretary, Rick Stengel, the former head of the State Department's Global Engagement Center.

Starting point is 00:43:58 So you have this gelatinous blob, this CIA, NSA, military, NATO axis, who is advising this major censorship firm, which is targeting pro-Trump and pro-Lakud party factions. media voices all around the world. And then you have them being rolled out by Microsoft's Defending Democracy program, which launched NewsGuard's first product. Well, NewsGuard's also a party to these CIA cutout meetings. Just last week at the RNC, this faction called the International Republican Institute, which is effectively the CIA wing of the RNC. It rose out of something called the National Endowment for Democracy, which was created effectively in letter from our CIA director in 1983, but you had these CIA cutouts talking about rearranging

Starting point is 00:44:47 the Republican view on foreign policy and who's got to see at the table, it's a representative from Microsoft. So this is this whole society alliance in action. And what it requires is a whole society fight on the other side. As someone who fights for free speech on the internet, you can't just look at it from a silo. Okay, I'm a journalist in the media. Okay, I'm a professor start a university. Okay, I run a nonprofit watchdog. Okay, I am the executive of a platform like X. Okay, I sit in a member of, I'm a member of the legislative branch as a member of Congress at the state or federal level. You need to think of it at the network level because we're under a network attack and it requires a network defense. And that's what Freedom for, Foundation for

Starting point is 00:45:33 Freedom Online does? We educate the American public about threats to internet freedom. So We publish reports about various actors in the space, various developments in the space, and then what people do with those reports are up to them. But in my individual capacity, I try to look at things from that network perspective. And, again, I learned this from them. I'll give you a great example on this whole society phrase because it's really a phrase that everyone should sear somewhere on some brain wrinkle or somewhere in your heart because it's really upended everything that you think you know

Starting point is 00:46:09 about the American government, if I dare say it. I'll give a great example. The University of Stanford is, you know, which sits in the heart of Silicon Valley, is one of the most influential university institutions in this whole society alliance. And about a year ago, they brought over the head of the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency to Stanford to try to bring a perspective to American censorship mercenaries, what lessons they could learn from the censorship state in Sweden. And again, Sweden has a formal government agency called the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency. Seriously? Yes. Yes. And actually the head of it even talked about it at this Stanford speech where he said, we thought about calling it something else because everyone told us it

Starting point is 00:46:51 was Orwellian, but we decided, you know what, we're just going to be honest. This is a biopsychological defense. And when I heard that, I busted out laughing the same way you did because at least they were honest about it. You were pissing in your eyes. But at least you knew the angle. You knew it was piss. You knew it wasn't rain. In the United States, we did the same thing. In 2018, at the Department of Homeland Security, we created something called the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, something its director, Chris Krebs, said, we put security in our name twice because that's how much we care about security. Nothing to do with security. It was a censorship agency. It was a brand new agency created in

Starting point is 00:47:26 November 2018. And what they did is they said, tweets on the internet that contain misinformation are a cyber attack on american critical infrastructure so if you if you if you think mail-in ballots are prone to fraud you are undermining public faith and confidence in the electoral process elections are critical infrastructure so you are committing a cyber attack on x on facebook on youtube on our critical infrastructure of elections by saying you doubt the efficacy of mail-in ballots they did the same thing with covet they had all instruction videos teaching children to report their parents for disinformation on facebook if they thought if They said COVID had the same fatality rate as the flu.

Starting point is 00:48:03 In the U.S. In the U.S. Yeah. That was the same data reported by the CDC. But DHS, I mean, that was a psychological defense agency. Yes. But they lied to the American public by giving it a misleading name. Now, amazingly, when they created a new agency within DHS called the Disinformation Governance Board, that got shut down in two weeks because they made the mistake of calling it what it was.

Starting point is 00:48:25 But, you know, what's in a name, right? It's a whole sort of Romeo and Juliet. Yeah, this is actually there's actually quite a lot in the name because your political prospects live and die by whether you can fool the American public and therefore their representatives in Congress about it. But what was really interesting is when when Stanford brought over the head of the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency, he described the structure of the agency. He said, we are a we're a civilian agency that's run by our military. And he said, now, listen, the thing that distinguishes don't think of us as sort of North Korea or China style thing, because I know, oh, we're run by the military. that's north korea right and he says actually uh it's really not if you think of it through the lens of of a modern concept the whole of society which is that you know this this this idea that

Starting point is 00:49:12 actually there is no distinction between civilian and military yeah there is no distinction between private sector and public sector yeah we can have the military in charge of this and again the military wanted to take out trump this is what the 28 2019 ukraine impeachment was this is what the 2016 Russiagate hoax was. The whole thing was run through the military and our intelligence because the military wanted to seize Eurasia, wanted to seize the $75 trillion in natural resources that stretch between that landmass from Siberia into Turkey and into Central and Eastern Europe. This is something, the Mackinder hypothesis. We've been after this for 100 years. And Trump wanted neutrality with Russia, which would have thrown a monkey wrench in the gears

Starting point is 00:49:52 of that whole war machine. So the military wanted him gone. But you have, so you have, and we can get into that maybe another time, but what I'm trying to say here is this very nasty rhetorical sleight of hand that you can do the same thing that we call North Korea, China, Russia,

Starting point is 00:50:10 top-down authoritarian, but simply call it whole-of-society collaboration instead of military control. But that collaboration is only happening because of these carrots and six, these threats, they are paying them or threatening them. They are punching them in the piggy bank. It's the same way, you know, the mafia operates, you know, you're, you'll get our protection, but you got to pay the protection money or in, and you can't report us to the cops. And so this has really upended the entire concept of democracy in the

Starting point is 00:50:42 West. I mean, they call the votes of individuals, the will of the people, a threat to democracy because they've redefined it to be about institutions. And they say, well, what are democratic institutions? Democratic, because they say, you know, the will of the people can go rogue in a democracy because of demagogues. Demagogues can rile people up. And really the measure of democracy

Starting point is 00:51:01 is not what people vote for. It's about this safeguarding by democratic institutions, such as the media, such as certain government agencies, you know, such as our financial institutions and this collage. Well, this is how they say Ukraine is opposite. The other thing, we know better than you what's good for you and we're going to take care of you. Don't worry. You've got daddy here taking care of everything.

Starting point is 00:51:24 You don't have to think. You don't have to do anything. The state takes care of you. Right. Right. Right. Well, in fact, a great anecdote on that is one of the top funders to the Democrat Party is a guy named Reid Hoffman. He's the founder of LinkedIn. You know, he his group, the Bergeron Institute, which he funds and sits on the board of and which he personally was on the panel for this in 2019, before the 2020 election at the time when his preferred candidates were losing all across Europe to in Italy and France and Spain and Germany. He ran a panel called How Elections Corrupt the Democrat Process, calling for an entirely new way to conceptualize the meaning

Starting point is 00:52:02 of democracy. Hoffman did. Yes, it's on my X timeline. If you just want to search for Reid Hoffman, you'll see. Where did he do that? He did it on YouTube. Well, it was at a Bergman institute conference which is which they then live streamed on youtube and only got like 100 views i was just going through the archives i couldn't believe it they literally had a whole panel what was their idea what do they the idea was we need to redefine what democracy is to make it about the the consensus of institutions rather than the consensus of individuals which is that you know that that in that elections should have a very limited role in determining the policy and politics of a country. There should be certain things that should be designated to

Starting point is 00:52:42 institutions that civilians should not be able to vote on. By the way, this is the Pakistani model. Pakistan has something called hybrid governance, which is this idea that the prime minister who people vote on can decide certain domestic internal affairs, where stop signs are at an intersection, you know, internal tax policy and things like this. But foreign policy and military and intelligence work is this totally separate wing of the government that the prime minister does not have jurisdiction over. Now, that's very convenient for the United States of America because we've had this, we basically propped up the Pakistani ISI, their intelligence service, you know, for 40 years. They were a proxy of the CIA and British banking interests

Starting point is 00:53:27 dating back to the 1970s when they were working with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and helping to sort of train and fund these Islamic fundamentalist groups that we've used not just to unseat the Soviets in Central Asia, but also to unseat Gaddafi in Libya. So there's these, but basically that prevents the Pakistani people from being able to vote against the policy of their own country, which is being dictated essentially by NATO. So it basically means NATO controls the country, not the people. They can have certain limited internal things, But the rest of it is done by the institution of the military, the institution of the foreign policy establishment organizations, the institutions of the NGOs. And they like a proxy dictatorship.

Starting point is 00:54:14 Well, what do you call Ukraine? Ukraine doesn't have elections. They canceled elections two years ago. They've said that they may not have elections again until they've until they've restored territorial sovereignty. Maybe 30 years and maybe three months, but it may be 30 years until Ukraine has elections. Now, part of this is there's another person who's polling higher than Zelensky currently. They don't want to hold elections because a puppet might not win. But, you know, this is what they did to Imran Khan in Pakistan. But they call Ukraine a democracy despite not having elections.

Starting point is 00:54:44 So it's Reid Hoffman's dream come true. And, you know, this is what this whole society censorship alliance relies on, propping up these institutions, calling them the definition of democracy, and then funding with U.S. taxpayer money all of these NGOs to stop threats to democracy. And this is a great example of this. I mentioned the National Science Foundation, which is the top government agency funding all this within the United States. They have this program, this TRACF, Convergence Accelerator Program, at the National Science Foundation to fund all of this. And in the charter documents, they say this explicitly, that misinformation is a threat to democracy because it undermines democratic institutions, such as the media.

Starting point is 00:55:25 They literally say the media, mainstream media, is a democratic institution. And so we need to fund companies and fund monitoring programs and surveillance programs and NGOs in order to flag people who undermine trust in the media. Because if you undermine trust in the New York Times, you've committed an attack on democracy. A cyber attack. Yes. This is fucking ridiculous. But if North Korea did this, we would pass sanctions on them. This is the government propping up its proxies in the media and preventing you not just from criticizing the government, but from criticizing anyone who reports favorably on the government.

Starting point is 00:56:03 OK, where do we go from here? How does it get better? Well, the nice thing is we have we have an absolutely huge amount of momentum because of a fortuitous series of accidents, maybe in 2022, that that led to a lot of this breaking open. You know, I've been on this beat since 2016, and for the first six years, it was like no one would believe you. Even the people who wanted to take action, they felt too isolated. They didn't have enough political capital to take anything, take any serious steps. And also, because there was no mainstream platform to even air these ideas, you couldn't even popularize lectures or get the seeds of knowledge to be able to get people to see the whole complex constellation of it all. But that all began to change in 2022 and where we

Starting point is 00:56:54 have a huge amount of momentum. I mean, frankly, the internet is a much, much freer space now than it was four years ago at every level. I mean, and we should take some pride and heed and allow ourselves to smile and be grateful for the fact that we do have mainstream outlets. X is the biggest politically politically influential platform in the world. It's the smallest if you measure it against, you know, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. But it is the most influential because it has the most content creators. Every time you hit the retweet button, you are a content creator, whereas 99 percent of people who use YouTube don't create content. And also it's real time there's no other platform that allows you to just post text you know let me think about that

Starting point is 00:57:35 if you want to do you know uh educate somebody or break a news story on instagram it needs to be a video or a picture same thing with tiktok it has to be a video and facebook is a walled garden where it's not you know every every profile is insulated so twitter is the only place to really break news and develop you know political ideas or political movements and that is now free as a bird even even voices that Elon, now look, there's some hair on it, but even voices that Elon expressly hates, for example, he is allowed back on the platform. Even people who have gotten terms of service violation policies, they've been temporary bans six months a year rather than being these permanent bans. There's pretty much open transparency about how the algorithm works. It's been effectively

Starting point is 00:58:22 open source. Now the weightings have not, but you can see what the various, you know, you can look at the titles of the various things that slow you down in the algorithm. You can actually, you know, even down to a pretty granular level, you know, how many people can be added in a post before it applies this circuit breaker to it. And so they're under a lot of pressure internationally with various regulatory regimes. And so this has led to a kind of schizophrenic freedom on X in the sense that it's censored a lot more in Germany and in France and in Australia, and particularly in Brazil, and now with these EU laws. But this is all being coordinated by the U.S. State Department, who's trying to do this boomerang tactic of getting foreign governments to censor

Starting point is 00:59:03 the foreign movements in those countries that the State Department opposes. Frankly, I think this has something to do with why places like PragerU have been censored as hard as they have, and others, I think, getting back to the Israel. But we're seeing this now with the EU Digital services act where the you know this new eu law which i fought within state again google lobbyists called me to try to you know influence the development of that legislation but that is being used as a dangle to require disinformation compliance from x so they're between a rock and a hard place but the fact is is that didn't that did not free open until october 2022 it took the disinformation governance board disaster in april 2022 for anyone to even believe that dhs was

Starting point is 00:59:43 running a mystery of truth. And then you also had in November 2022, the turning over of the House of Representatives from Democrat to Republican. And this is what allowed public hearings. The Twitter files were aired in front of Congress. This legitimized it. This allowed mainstream media reporting on it as a legitimate thing. There were also House investigations by the House Oversight Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the House Homeland Security Committee. All of these things involved subpoenas, transcribed interviews. This allowed a lot more transparency about how the censorship sausage was being made. And this allowed a lot more political action to be taken by the platforms, by people in conservative and independent media,

Starting point is 01:00:23 by people even in state legislatures. The states of Texas and Florida have put together these digital bill of rights bills to try to stop censorship. State attorney generals have now taken action. The Texas state attorney general, Ken Paxton, the Missouri state. So there is this whole society effort that has gotten a huge number of victories. And you know they've gotten victories because of how much the censorship industry complains about the golden era and how to get it back that they had from 2016 to 2020. Do you think that the fact that X is centralized is not a problem? I mean, we were looking at how to restore back some freedom around speech, but Then you have one guy or maybe him and his new CEO that are now controlling a lot of that free speech.

Starting point is 01:01:13 So that is a danger now. It certainly is, but it's very complicated. And I'll give you a great example. I mentioned the University of Stanford is sort of the top university cutout of this whole blob apparatus to organize Internet censorship. They did a conference in 2021 where they described how the biggest threat to their agenda of getting total censorship of the American Internet was the fact that platforms had centralized power. And so because of that, there was a limited amount of leverage that they could exert on Facebook, on Twitter at the time, on YouTube. And they plotted various paths to try to break up platform power to allow government leverage to dominate. And this included pitching, effectively, a new congressional bill that would force the tech companies to hand over their algorithm to a consortium of outside experts and outside academics and outside researchers, and that there would be a choice between 10 to 12 different filters that would be applied over people's news feeds in order to control the news that they saw.

Starting point is 01:02:14 And some of these included, you know, NewsGuard, as I mentioned, they were propping up ways essentially to have these middleware entities that they called so that they would be in control of the Facebook algorithm, the X algorithm, the YouTube algorithm instead of the companies themselves. Now, all of these intermediaries are blob cutouts. As I mentioned, the big one there was NewsGuard, and NewsGuard is advised by the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, four-star general, the head of NATO, the head of DHS, and the head of the State Department. I mean, it's just the intelligence community, but it's creating a faux decentralization, right? The problem with centralization from their perspective, there's not so many different points of surface area of attack. They can't bring it down. And so they wanted to break it up, you know, to have a what they call the competitive middleware industry that is instead of having one point of influence or point of control within the company, the company be forced to turn it over to 10 to 12 different centralized algorithm filters. But then each of those would be weak enough to be turned by the IC or turned by the government in order to filter to control the news that an American see. We're kind of relying on Elon's tough back.

Starting point is 01:03:31 If he breaks down for some reason, if they manage to influence him too much or blackmail him or whatever, maybe we lose that battle as well on X, I don't know. Well, I think decentralization will be more attractive when there are more actors in the space who share that ideological vision around free speech on the Internet. I don't think we'd have this single point of failure in Elon if there were 12 other people out there like Elon who are willing to and have shown that they're willing to bite the economic bullet and, you know, flip the bird, so to speak, to the advertisers. You know, when he said GFY, if folks remember what that stands for, that's something that Mark Zuckerberg was not willing to. Mark Zuckerberg gave speeches in 2019 about how he thought censorship had gone too far. But then three months later, he was hit with the change the terms economic boycott, which was partly intermediated by USAID and these sort of shadowy government networks. Yeah, they cost him $60 billion in advertiser revenue. And then he said, OK, OK, OK, never mind.

Starting point is 01:04:31 Forget my free speech things. That hurts too much economically. And Elon has been willing to take the blows. And I think decentralization is sort of almost a necessary evil when there's not a robust enough market. That is why a whole society approach to this is so important. The more people who Elon mentors, brings in, develops within the company, makes partnerships outside the company. You know, Elon is now making partnerships with the state of Texas. You know, Texas could develop its own ecosystem of free speech aligned technology firms and social media service providers.

Starting point is 01:05:08 And, you know, at that point, I think we will be more ripe for decentralization. So I assume that you're familiar coming from a tech background with the whole sector of technology that is being created these days called Freedom Tech. And one of these really amazing inventions, in my opinion, also coming from a tech background of about 20 years working in tech companies and startups is Nostr. And Nostr is a protocol built on top of Bitcoin, which is a decentralized platform. Nostr is decentralized as well. You can have hundreds of clients built on top of that protocol, which will allow you to essentially transfer data and information, whether it's visual or textual. And the first successful, it seems, use case for it is social media. So there are plenty of new applications or clients for social media on Noster.

Starting point is 01:06:04 For example, I'm using a couple of them. The great thing about them is that you can take your follower base, your database with you as you move from one client to another because it's not owned by any one central company or central database and it's not anyone else's, it's yours. You own it and you can move around with your social graph between applications, which is super powerful. And a lot of Bitcoin users are starting to discover that. And so they open accounts on different rostered clients. They cannot be censored. there. Because there is no one nick that you can choke and go and say, take that down. This is wrong. No one owns it. It's the people's. So I think Nostra is a very interesting development

Starting point is 01:06:47 in that sense. And plus, you have the inbuilt payments thing so that content creators can get paid directly from their users or their followers, which is also very powerful. But I think more technologies around that space, what's called freedom tech, is going to be probably the blessing of that new era that we're entering into yeah no that's that's really amazing actually i'll have to check that out quick break to share more about noster i found out about a really cool noster initiative this week some good people decided to invest more time and energy in raising awareness to noster and educating people about it so they set up this traveling noster booth in conferences and a series of special Nostra days in three cities, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo,

Starting point is 01:07:38 and San Salvador. It's a full-fledged community project, and they are crowdfunding for it on Gazer. If you're a supporter of free speech and freedom technologies, your donation would go a long way. The link to the crowdfunding page is in the show notes. Conference booth. We are blooming here at the Nostra booth it's amazing we are meeting amazing people and I can really feel that is a place where you can meet people working on different projects people working on different products why am I bullish on Nostra because I met the most amazing people there I'm bullish on Nostra because of free speech baby two words freedom and fun back to the episode yeah um you On the centralization, decentralization point, it is really interesting.

Starting point is 01:08:33 I was thinking the other day about, you're familiar with Circle, which is the stable coin, which I think is now the sixth largest by market cap. Of the U.S. dollar. Yeah, right, right. And Tether as well, right next to China or whatever in the debt of U.S. dollar that they've got. That's pretty insane, I think. Right. Well, Circle signed a partnership with the U.S. State Department,

Starting point is 01:08:56 I think earlier this year, last year, to provide aid to Venezuelan political opponents. I'll tell you why I'm mentioning this in a second, but sort of gets this sort of centralization versus decentralization. So Venezuela obviously is a country that the United States has been trying to regime change for many years. They sit on one of the largest oil reserves in the world, and there's a lot of everything from lithium. They sit on this totally bountiful, bountiful region that the State Department has wanted to pry open, which requires overturning the government and installing a president who would be more pliant with the foreign policy and sacrificing the sovereignty and security of the country and turning it over. And so the circle has signed this this partnership with with the State Department to have circle intermediate because there's a there's a state run banking system in Venezuela. And so the problem with U.S. aid programs in Venezuela, from the State Department's perspective, is how do you get money to what they call the government in exile? They don't recognize the Maduro government.

Starting point is 01:10:05 They recognize basically a bunch of CIA-backed clients. You go direct to consumer. You go B2C, right? Well, this is what's so amazing is this innovation with, you know, with freedom, freedom money and this idea that because it's decentralized, you can circumvent the state controlled banking system. So the CIA can now run money using U.S. stable coins, using Circle to give to put money in the accounts of, you know, basically the coup faction in the country to circumvent, you know, state control. But it's just it's an interesting example of centralization and decentralization, but also the centralization of decentralization, because. Why do you think that Circle is decentralized? It's not centralized.

Starting point is 01:10:50 It's got a company called Circle and a CEO that make you can choke. That is not Bitcoin. No, that's a great centralized. No, that's a great point. Any stable coin, I think, is. I think I think I'm I'm more looking at the market of Bitcoin. You know, when I go to CoinMarketCap. So that's where the distinction between Bitcoin and everything else, crypto, is essential.

Starting point is 01:11:11 Because when you look at Bitcoin, it's very, very different in its design. The architecture design of the system is so different than anything else you know of. Stablecoins and cryptocurrencies, that's the only, you will not find the nick to choke on Bitcoin. That's why it's so powerful. It belongs to the people. And when you look at stablecoins, what they're doing in Venezuela, and they're going to be doing that in Argentina as well. And Taylor is going to be helping the U.S. government to continue to globalize the dollar and print more fiat thanks to those stable coins, in my opinion. And I think that that is so different than what the news and the blessing of Bitcoin is around the world.

Starting point is 01:11:50 So I totally agree with you that that's a perfect way of taking a cryptocurrency or a digital currency and, you know, hiding behind the narrative of we are giving you free tech and decentralized money. And it's actually not. Right. So one of the point of failures, as I see on Bitcoin, is is the price simply because it relies on, you know, market adoption and people having an interest in using it and that having some stability or at least not tanking. And when I look at CoinMarketCap and I see Tether is number three and Circle is number six and they're fast rising, I see the liquidity for Bitcoin running through these stable coins in a significant way. And that if you wanted to cripple Bitcoin, you could cripple its liquidity rises and falls on the basis of these stable coins, which are, again, intermediated by the U.S. government and are, as you mentioned, sort of on the tether side, propping up the U.S. dollar on the circle side being used for CIA operations. and i just so i want to make sure i understand what you're saying you're saying if you're starving quote unquote the stable coins you think it will hurt bitcoin because you will not have enough liquidity to pass on to bitcoin well maybe you can educate me on this because um my my

Starting point is 01:13:11 understanding is so much of bitcoin's liquidity sort of runs through the fact that tether and They allow you to exchange without having to take it off platform and run up fees. And so there's this relationship between Bitcoin and the stable coins. I think what's important to remember about Bitcoin is that it's got a fixed supply. And its supply is based on the amount of Bitcoin that you can mine, which is every four years cuts down in half. And when you look at how much Bitcoin we have in the market, and that is determined by how much we can mine, which is all predictable and algorithmically set up in advance. So you're able to not just know what you have right now and what you had in the past, but also predict what you're going to have for the next 110 years or so until we're going to finish mining all the 21 million Bitcoins. That principle that is fixed and cannot be changed, a very, very low probability of that changing, there's always going to be only 21 million Bitcoin and the amount that you can mine is fixed.

Starting point is 01:14:17 That principle is key in Bitcoin because the only thing that can then change for the market of Bitcoin is the price. When you have fixed supply and the supply is going down all the time, it's a deflationary currency, you can only raise the price in order to meet the demand. And demand will continue growing as it becomes more scarce and more rare, which it is all the time. And that's why you see the prices going up on a zoomed out perspective. When you look at the 15 years that Bitcoin exists, the price is only going up. In the short terms, you have volatility, which is something that characterizes a new entity, a new currency. It was the same thing with gold. And so I think that the liquidity of stablecoins, and I am not the expert on that, I'm not a financial expert, but from my studying, I know that the liquidity of any other fiat-based currency, because stablecoins is a fiat-based currency, does not have anything to do with impacting the supply of Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:15:19 OK, its supply of Bitcoin is completely detached from that. It may influence the price. And I do think that you're right in terms of some of those financial institutions or governmental institutions coming into the Bitcoin play right now, being able to influence the price of Bitcoin by inflowing a lot more demand from ETFs, etc. They can play around with the prices a little bit, which is what's going to influence people whether to buy Bitcoin or not. And hence, how quick or slow the market's going to grow. But they can never influence how much Bitcoin there is. They cannot change the supply of it, which is a key concept here.

Starting point is 01:16:01 Right. I was more reacting to the market value swings that they can induce. They can. And then even within Bitcoin, you know, it does. But then whoever understands Bitcoin knows that that's not the most important thing about Bitcoin, the price. It may take longer for it to go up significantly, which is OK. We'll wait. We have patience. If you really understand Bitcoin, you understand that the biggest incentive of it is your freedom and the fact that you don't have to be in that fiat system and that you can have a peer-to-peer digital money

Starting point is 01:16:31 that does not rely on any government or central bank or commercial bank to be there to give you permission to use your wealth. Right. I was reading Roger Ver's Hijacking Bitcoin book, And he made some interesting points about the centralization of miners and how that has its own sort of political and pricing impact on the development of Bitcoin. And I think just to circle back to this whole centralization versus decentralization issue, from my perspective, I'm a freedom maximalist. And I'm not necessarily a decentralization maximalist. When decentralization advances freedom, I'm pro-decentralization. When centralization advances freedom, for example, I don't think we would have freedom of speech on X without the centralization there. I think having the X power structure be so decentralized under Jack Dorsey.

Starting point is 01:17:21 Jack Dorsey did not want to do all those censorship activities. He had a trust and safety team, which it was delegated to. That whole place was infiltrated because it was decentralized and therefore weak and not able to have a single veto from a powerful person where the buck actually stopped. In a way, by the way, just to plug that in there, I think that Jack Dorsey is trying to kind of fix his problematic past in that in being one of the leaders of Noster, which is what I told you about. Is that right?

Starting point is 01:17:54 That's right. That's really interesting. He gave a really interesting interview to Pirate Wires where he gave a lot of inside baseball on some of the decision-making at Twitter. And he even said that it was a business decision to get rid of Trump's account, that he didn't necessarily want to do it, but they were going to destroy the company if he didn't.

Starting point is 01:18:14 I think he's now trying to really kind of correct his actions from those days by doing what he's doing with Nostra. You should follow that for sure. You're going to find a lot of interest in that. Good for him. Whatever he's smoking in Nepal at these retreats, I got to get some of that.

Starting point is 01:18:30 Okay, okay. We're coming down to the hour. I don't want to take too much of your time. I wrote down one comment here for myself regarding free speech and all of that. And I didn't want to interrupt you before, but that was classic for when you were talking about all these people that hold the truth. Melissa Fleming, do you know who that is? She's the director of global communications for the UN. And there is this one interview with her on the World Economic Forum in Davos, I think, a couple of years ago, where she says, we own the science and we need the world to know it.

Starting point is 01:19:01 And she's talking about climate change and how when you Google climate change, you get all these funny results. And so we partner with Google in order to fix that. Because we own the science and we need the world to know it. Like, it's that blunt. Yeah. And people... Partner. We partner. We partnered with Google, right?

Starting point is 01:19:17 North Korean government partners with local news institutions. I just had to plug it in because it was, like, crazy. Okay. So what are you going to talk about now here at the conference? So the panel that I'm participating in is relating to government capture. And so essentially this issue around free speech money, which is really what sort of drew me into the Bitcoin realm in the first place. I had sort of been interested in part of this whole network. People were very interested in Bitcoin 2015, 2016, 2017.

Starting point is 01:19:53 And I was attracted to it initially because of this promise of free speech money. Obviously, free speech and free speech money are hopelessly interlinked. The fact is the best way to shut someone up is to shut off their ability to monetize or to shut off the banking services, to shut off their credit card processing. This is something that was very new to the experience of the American civilian in 2017, where your opinions on the Internet could get you cut off from having a YouTube channel. can get cut off from. And so, you know, the promise of Bitcoin as free speech money because it did not rely on the government or it didn't rely on these private sector financial firms was very attractive to me. I got skittish when I started to look into things like the Tether situation and, you know, Catherine Austin Fitz has sort of talked about this whole concept of

Starting point is 01:20:44 building a Bitcoin prison and things like this. And so I think what my remarks are going to be covering is is flushing out some of those dynamics of the the bitcoin prison so to speak and the role of you know this strange relationship between um the state-owned banking systems or state intermediate banking systems and the use of states to essentially co-opt aspects of the bitcoin market or the the cryptocurrency market yeah for use in state warfare like this is for example you know we talked about this Venezuela anecdote, because I think you're going to be seeing this more and more and more. Circle claims this was the first time they ever did this partnership. It's brand new. Ukraine just rolled out this new app called Dia, which basically does something similar to be

Starting point is 01:21:27 able to control the individuals within Ukraine by having, you know, this, you know, this digital, you know, this digital ID. And I think this is. And that may actually be the CBDC without calling it CBDC, right? Right. Right. But again, the USAID, Samantha Power, again, USAID is just, just CIA. I mean, that's all it is. It's just overt funding for what's going to be used for covert action. And this is the, you know, USA developed this app to be able to control the internal politics of Ukraine and Colombia and Zambia. And this test pilot program is now in its early stages, but it's growing quickly. And they've partnered with these public firms, like, you know, Google is doing the IT infrastructure for it. Visa is doing the transactions on it.

Starting point is 01:22:08 But, you know, in the Venezuela example, the fact is, is, you know, the crypto is often sold to people as being a way to get around the state control of the banking industry. But you have the state, the Central Intelligence Agency, using crypto to get around the state control of the banking industry in Venezuela. Well, and I think that these kind of anecdotes, especially seen as a constellation around the world, sort of highlight like that there's a larger proxy war that we're in the middle of right now, which is states versus states, oligarchs versus oligarchs. And that while we need to sort of hold true to this vision of free speech money, if that is what we really believe in and be able to identify, you know, threats to that vision, hijacking it and effectively building that Bitcoin prison because you're now surrounded by institutional actors who you've

Starting point is 01:23:08 been championing because they're a part of the greater ecosystem or they're propping up the market price or they're making the stock price go higher because now the treasury is pushing it. You know, now you have state actors. It's great that USAID is using, you know, Bitcoin or is using Tether or is using... They will never use Bitcoin, but yeah, Tether. Sure, yes. I mean, it would be really cool news if they used Bitcoin. No, that's totally true. But I think a lot of people conflate that, you know, when they go to CoinMarketCap and they say, oh, look, the total value of crypto is way, way... But that is also how infiltration happens. It's when you get surrounded by these new players and these outside players, and they end up becoming the ecosystem

Starting point is 01:23:45 rather than the thing that, you know, that you're in it for. I'm with you. And I think that people should definitely follow your work on that. And I think we should definitely put the emphasis on the distinctions between Bitcoin and everything else. And with that, last, last word from you. What gives you hope, a message of hope from you to my audience? Well, we're winning now more than we've ever been winning, frankly, even though it might not look like it. I think if it doesn't look like we're winning now than we've ever been before, I think it's partly because the unveiling of so many of these authoritarian structures is a relatively new thing. So you simply never knew the system you were really up against. You never knew,

Starting point is 01:24:24 for example, how much state control there was over media in the 20th century. The fact that all three of our major broadcast news stations were back channeled by CIA or Pentagon. The fact that you never knew that, you know, universities were propped up in large part for Cold War activity. The fact that you never knew how corrupt the Justice Department was in shielding various criminal networks or doing politicized things. All this has sort of broken open with many of the recent political developments. But again, I see actors in the space like Elon Musk. I see the changing of the, for example, the Republican Party, which was totally controlled by George Bush and Mitt Romney and John McCain and these permanent war hawk types. That is all changing

Starting point is 01:25:10 and changing quickly. And you see these new alliances. You see the rise of folks like Bobby Kennedy. You see a much more robust reporting and media structure now than we've ever had. And even in the face of advertiser boycotts and social media censorship, these media firms have found ways to sustain themselves through switching to subscriber models. And hopefully as Bitcoin develops, it will have the services to be able to support that even further. But we have a whole-of-society freedom coalition in its infant stages now. Several years ago, it hadn't even been born yet. Now, it's a precarious path to get a young bird from its infant state to being a mature animal in flight, but that's what we're building now.

Starting point is 01:25:56 And it's exciting. It's a very exciting moment to have that opportunity, that vision for a future that before I didn't even think was possible. And thanks to people like you, I think that this is possible today. And so I thank you so much for your work. You are just phenomenal, and I'm going to keep following you. I'd love to have you on again in the future. And thank you so much. Thank you for your work and your time.

Starting point is 01:26:21 It was a lot of fun. Pleasure. Thanks. Thank you.

You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 44: Mike Benz - The (Deep) State of Global Censorship

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