The defining fact of the United
States is freedom of speech.
To the extent this country is
actually exceptional, it's because
we have the First Amendment to the
Bill of rights. We have freedom
of conscience. We can say what we
really think.
There's no hate speech exception
to that. Just because you hate what
somebody else thinks, you cannot
force that person to be quiet
because we're citizens, not
slaves.
But that right, that foundational
right that makes this country what
it is, that right from which all
other rights flow is going
away at high speed
in the face of censorship.
Now, modern censorship bears no
resemblance to previous censorship
regimes in previous countries in
previous eras.
Our censorship is affected
on the basis of fights against
disinformation and malinformation.
And the key thing to know about
these is they're everywhere.
And of course, they have
no reference at all to whether
what you're saying is true or not.
In other words, you can say
something that is factually accurate
and consistent with your own
conscience, and in
previous versions of America, what
an absolute right to say those
things.
But because someone doesn't like
them, or because they're
inconvenient to whatever plan
the people in power have, they can
be denounced as disinformation,
and you could be stripped of your
right to express them, either in
person or online.
In fact, expressing these things can
become a criminal act and is.
And it's important to know, by the
way, that this is not just the
private sector doing this.
These efforts are being directed by
the US government, which you pay for
and at least theoretically own.
It's your government, but
they're stripping your rights at
very high speed.
Most people understand this
intuitively, but they don't
know how it happens.
How does censorship happen?
What are the mechanics of it?
Mike Benz is, we can say with some
confidence, the expert
in the world on how this
happens. Mike Benz had the
cyber portfolio at the State
Department. He's now executive
director of Foundation for Freedom
Online, and we're going to have a
conversation with him about a very
specific kind of censorship,
by the way, we can't recommend
strongly enough if you want to know
how this happens Mike
Benz BENZ
is the man to read.
But today we just want to talk about
a specific kind of censorship and
that censorship that emanates from
the fabled military industrial
complex, from our defense
industry, and the foreign policy
establishment in Washington.
That's significant now because we're
on the cusp of a global war.
And so you can expect censorship to
increase dramatically.
And so with that, here is Mike Benz,
executive director of Foundation for
Freedom Online. Mike, thanks so much
for joining us.
And I just can't overstate your
audience how exhaustive
and comprehensive your knowledge is
on this topic.
It's almost it's almost
unbelievable.
And so if you could just walk us
through how
the foreign policy establishment
and defense contractors and
DoD and just the whole
cluster, the constellation of
defense related, publicly funded
institutions strip from
us our freedom of speech?
Sure. You know, one of the easiest
ways to actually start
the story is really with the story
of internet freedom and
its switch from internet freedom to
internet censorship, because free
speech on the internet was an
instrument of statecraft almost
from the outset of the privatization
of the internet in 1991.
We quickly discovered, through
the efforts of the
Defense Department, the State
Department in our intelligence
services, that people were using
the internet to congregate on blogs
and forums, and free
speech was championed
more than anybody by the Pentagon,
the State Department, and our
sort of CIA cut out
NGO blob architecture
as a way to support dissident
groups around the world in
order to help them overthrow
authoritarian governments, as they
were sort of billed. Essentially the, internet
free speech allowed kind of
instant regime change operations,
to be able to facilitate
the foreign policy establishment's
State Department agenda.
Google is a great example of this.
Google began as a DARPA
grant, by
Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they
were Stanford PhDs.
And they got
their funding as part of a joint
CIA, NSA program
to chart how, quote, birds of a
feather flock together online
through search engine aggregation.
And then one year later, they
launched Google and then became
a military contractor quickly
thereafter. They got Google Maps by
purchasing a CIA satellite software,
essentially, and the
ability to track to
use free speech on the internet
as a way to circumvent
state control over media,
over in places like Central
Asia, or all around the
world, was seen as a way
to be able to do
what used to be done out of CIA
station houses or out of embassies
or consulates in a way that
was totally turbocharged.
And all of the internet free speech
technology was initially created
by our national security state.
VPNs, virtual private networks
to hide your IP address.
Tour the dark web, to be able to buy
and sell goods anonymously
and to end encrypted chats.
All these things were created
initially as DARPA projects
or as joint CIA NSA projects,
to be able to help intelligence
backed groups to
overthrow governments that were
causing a problem, to
the Clinton administration or the
Bush administration or the Obama
administration.
And this plan worked magically
from about 1991 until
about 2014,
when there began to be an about
face on internet freedom
and its utility.
Now, the high watermark of the sort
of internet free speech moment was
the Arab Spring in 2011,
2012, when you had this
one by one.
All of the adversary governments
of the Obama administration, Egypt,
Tunisia, all began to be toppled
in Facebook revolutions and Twitter
revolutions.
And you had the State Department
working very closely with the social
media companies to be able to
keep social media online during
those periods. There was a famous
phone call from Google's Jared Cohen
to Twitter to not
do their scheduled maintenance so
that, the
preferred opposition group in Iran
would be able to use Twitter, to
win that election.
So it was, free speech was an
instrument of statecraft from the
national security state to begin
with. All of that architecture, all
the NGOs, the relationships between
the tech companies and the national
security state had been long
established for freedom.
In 2014, after
the coup in Ukraine,
there was an unexpected counter
coup where Crimea and the
Donbas broke away and
they broke away with essentially a
military backstop that NATO was
highly unprepared for at the time.
They had one last Hail Mary
chance, which was the Crimea
annexation vote on,
in 2014.
And when the hearts and minds of the
people of Crimea voted,
to join the Russian Federation,
that was the last straw for
the concept of free speech on the
internet in the eyes of NATO as
they saw it, the fundamental nature
of war changed at that moment.
And NATO at that point
declared something that they first
called the Gerasimov doctrine, which
is named after this Russian
military, a general,
who they claimed made a speech that
the fundamental nature of war has
changed. You don't need to win
military skirmishes to take over
Central and Eastern Europe.
All you need to do is control the
media and the social media
ecosystem, because that's what
controls elections.
And if you simply get the right
administration into power, they
control the military.
So it's infinitely cheaper than
conducting a military war to simply
conduct an organized political,
influence operation over social
media.
And legacy media and industry
had been created that spanned the
Pentagon, the the British
Ministry of Defense in Brussels
into a organized
political warfare outfit,
essentially infrastructure that was
created, initially stationed
in Germany and in Central and
Eastern Europe to create
psychological buffer zones,
basically to create the ability to
to have the military work with
the social media companies, to
censor Russian propaganda,
or to censor domestic
right wing populist groups
in Europe who were rising in
political power at the time because
of the migrant crisis.
So you had the systematic targeting
by our State Department, by our ISI,
by the Pentagon, of groups
like Germany's AfD, the
alternative for Deutschland there,
and for groups in Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania.
Now, when Brexit happened in
2016, it was
that was that was this crisis moment
where suddenly they
didn't have to worry just about
Central and Eastern Europe anymore.
It was coming westward, this idea of
Russian control over hearts and
minds.
And so that was
Brexit was June 2016.
The very next month at the Warsaw
Conference, NATO formally
amended its charter
to expressly commit
to hybrid warfare as
there as this new NATO capacity.
So they went from, you know,
basically 70 years
of tanks to this explicit
capacity building for
censoring tweets if they were deemed
to be Russian proxies.
And again, it's not just Russian
propaganda.
This was these were now Brexit
groups or groups like Matteo
Salvini in Italy,
or in Greece or in Germany
or in Spain with the Vox party.
And now at the time, NATO was
publishing white papers saying
that the biggest threat NATO faces
is not actually a military invasion
from Russia.
It's losing domestic elections
across Europe in
two. All these right wing populist
groups who, because they were mostly
working class movements, were
campaigning on cheap Russian
energy at a time when the U.S.
was pressuring this energy
diversification policy.
And so they made the argument
after Brexit.
Now the entire rules based
international order would collapse
unless the military took control
over media, because Brexit would
give rise to "Frexit" in France,
with Marine Le Pen to "Spexit" in in
Spain with a Vox party to "Italexit"
in Italy, to "Grexit"
in Germany, to "Grexit" in Greece,
the EU would come apart, so NATO
would be killed without a single
bullet being, being
fired.
And then not only that, now that
NATO is gone, now there's no
enforcement arm for the
International Monetary Fund, the IMF
or the world Bank.
So now the financial stakeholders
who depend on the battering ram of
the national security state would
basically be helpless against
governments around the world.
So from their perspective,
if the military did not begin to
censor the internet, every
all of the democratic institutions
and infrastructure that gave rise to
the. World after World War Two would
collapse. So you can imagine that
we.
May I ask.
Later. Donald Trump won the 2016
election.
So you well, you just told a
remarkable story that I've never
heard anybody explain as
lucidly and crisply as you just did.
But did anyone at NATO or anyone
at the State Department pause
room and say, wait a second, we've
just identified our new enemy
as democracy within our own
countries. I think that's what
you're saying. They feared
that the people, the citizens of
their own countries would get their
way, and they went to war
against that.
Yes.
Now, you know, there's a rich
history of this dating back to the
Cold War. You know, the Cold War in
Europe was essentially a
similar, a similar struggle
for hearts and minds of people,
especially in Central and Eastern
Europe.
You know, in these sort of, you
know, Soviet buffer zones.
And, you know, starting in
1948, the national security
state was really established.
Then, you know, you had the 1947
act, which established the Central
Intelligence Agency.
You had, you know,
this new world order that had been
created with all these international
institutions.
And you had the 1948
U.N. Declaration on Human Rights,
which forbid the territorial
acquisition by military force.
So you can no longer run a
traditional military
occupation government
in the way that we could.
In 1898, for example, when we took
the Philippines, everything had
to be done through a sort of
political legitimization process,
whereby there's some ratification
from the hearts and minds of people
within the country.
Now, often that involves simply
puppet politicians who are groomed
as emerging leaders by our State
Department. But the battle for
hearts and minds had been something
that we had been
giving ourselves a long moral
license. Leash, if you will.
Since 1948, one of the godfathers
of the CIA, George Kennan, at,
12 days after we rigged the Italian
election in 1948 by
stuffing ballot boxes and working
with the mob, we published a memo
called The Inauguration of Organized
Political Warfare, where he said,
listen, it's a mean old world
out there. We at the CIA just rigged
the Italian election.
We had to do it because if the
communists won, maybe there'll never
be another election in Italy again.
So.
But it's really effective, guys,
we need a department of dirty tricks
to be able to do this around the
world. And it's essentially a new
social contract we're constructing
with the American people.
Because this is not the way we've
conducted diplomacy before, but we
are now forbidden from using the War
Department. In 1948, they also
renamed the War Department to the
Defense Department.
So, again, as part of this, this
diplomatic onslaught for political
control, rather than looking like
it's overt military control, but
essentially what ends up happening
there is we created this
foreign domestic firewall.
We said that we have a department of
dirty tricks to be able to rig
elections, to be able to control
media, to be able to
meddle in the internal affairs of
every other plant of dirt in
the country. But this sort of sacred
dirt on which the American homeland
sits will,
they are not allowed to operate
there. The State Department, the
Defense Department and the CIA are
all expressly forbidden from
operating on US soil.
Of course, this is so far from the
case, it's not even funny.
But, but that's because of a number
of laundering tricks that they've
developed over 70 years of doing
this. But essentially, there was
no moral quandary at first
with respect to the creation
of the censorship industry when
it started out in Germany and
in Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia
and in Sweden and Finland,
there began to be a more
diplomatic debate about it after
Brexit.
And then, it was
it became.
Full throttle when Trump was elected
and what little resistance there
was.
Was washed over by the rise
and saturation of Russiagate,
which basically allowed them to not
have to deal with the moral
ambiguities of censoring
your own people.
Because if Trump was a Russian
asset, you no longer really had a
traditional free speech issue.
It was a national security issue.
It was only after Russiagate died
in July 2019,
when Robert Mueller basically choked
on the stand for three hours and
revealed he had absolutely nothing.
After two and a half years of
investigation that the foreign
to domestic switcheroo took place,
where they took all of this
censorship architecture spanning
DHS, the FBI,
the CIA, the DOD,
the DOJ, and then the thousands
of government funded NGO
and private sector mercenary firms
were all basically transmitted
from a foreign folk, from a foreign
predicate, a Russian disinformation
predicate to a democracy
predicate, by saying that
disinformation is not just a threat
when it comes from the Russians,
it's actually an intrinsic threat to
democracy itself.
And so by that, they were able to
launder the entire democracy
promotion regime change toolkit,
just in time for the 2020 election.
It I mean, it's almost
beyond belief this has happened.
I mean, my own father worked for the
U.S. government in this business in
the information war against the
Soviet Union.
And, you know, was a big
part of that. And the idea that
any of those tools
would be turned against
American citizens by
the U.S. government was, I think
I want to think was absolutely
unthinkable and say, 1988.
And you're saying that it's there
really hasn't been anyone who's
raised objections.
And it's just it's absolutely turned
inward to manipulate and rig our own
elections, as we would in say,
Latvia.
Yeah. Well, as soon as the democracy
predicate was established, you
had this professional class of
professional regime change artists
and operatives.
That is the same people who argued
that, you know, we need to bring
democracy to Yugoslavia.
You. And that's the predicate for
getting rid of, you know, Milosevic
or any other country around
the world where we basically
overthrow governments in order to
preserve democracy.
Well, if the democracy
threat is homegrown now, then
that becomes, you know, then
suddenly these people
all have new jobs moving
on the US side, and they can go
through a million examples of that.
But one thing on what
you just mentioned, which is that,
you know from
their perspective, they just
weren't ready for the internet.
2016 was really the
first time that social
media had reached such maturity
that it began to eclipse legacy
media. I mean, this was a long time
coming. I think folks saw this
building from 2006
through 2016.
You know, internet 1.0 didn't even
have social media.
From 1991 to
2004, there was no social media
at all. 2004 Facebook came out
2005, Twitter, 2006
YouTube, 2007 the smartphone
and so.
And in that initial period of social
media, nobody was getting
subscriber shifts at the level
where they actually competed with
legacy news media.
But over the course of being,
you know, so initially, even these
dissident voices within the US,
even though they, they may have been
loud, in moments, they
never reached 30
million followers, they never
reached, you know, a
billion impressions a year type
thing as a uncensored,
mature ecosystem
allowed citizen journalists and
independent voices to be able to
outcompete legacy news
media.
This induced a massive crisis
both in our military and in our
State Department and intelligence
services. And I give you a great
example of this.
In 2019, at a
meeting of the German Marshall
Fund, which is, you know, an
institution that goes back to
the US, basically,
and I'm don't want to say bribe, but
the essentially the soft power
economic soft power projection in
Europe as part of the reconstruction
of European governments after World
War 2, to be able to essentially
pay them, with Marshall
Fund dollars.
And then in return, they basically
were under our thumb in terms of how
they reconstructed.
But the German Marshall Fund held
the meeting in 2019.
They held a million of these,
frankly, but where they, where
a four star general,
got up on the panel and
said that that
the what happens, he posed
the question, what happens
to the to the US military?
What happens to the national
security state when the New York
Times is reduced to a medium sized
Facebook page?
And he posed this thought experiment
as an example of
we've had these gatekeepers,
we've had these bumper cars on
democracy in the form
of a
century old relationship
with legacy media institutions.
I mean, our mainstream media
is not in any shape or form,
even from its outset, independent
from the national security state,
from the State Department, from the
War Department.
You know, you had the initial,
all of the initial, broadcast
news companies NBC, ABC and
CBS were all created
by Office of War Information
veterans from the from the War
Department's effort in World War II.
You had these
operation mockingbird relationships
from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Those continued it through the
use of the National Endowment for
democracy and the privatization
of intelligence capacities in the
1980s under Reagan.
There's all sorts of CIA
reading room memos you can read,
even on CIA.gov about those
continued media relations throughout
the 1990s.
And so you always had this backdoor
relationship between The Washington
Post, The New York Times, and
all of the major broadcast media
corporations.
By the way, you know, Rupert Murdoch
and Fox are part of this as well.
You know, Rupert Murdoch was
actually part of the National
Endowment for democracy coalition
in 1983 when it was formed as
a way to do CIA
operations in an above board way
after the Democrats were so
ticked off at the CIA for
manipulating student movements in
the 1970s.
But essentially there was no
CIA intermediary
to random citizen
journalists, there was no Pentagon
backstop.
You couldn't get a story killed.
You couldn't have this favors for
favors relationship.
You couldn't promise access to some
random person with 700,000
followers who's got an opinion on
Syrian gas.
And so this induced and
this was not a problem for the
initial period of social media from
2006 to 2014, because
there were never dissident groups
that were big enough to be able to
have a mature ecosystem on
their own. And all of the
victories on social media had gone,
in the way of where the money
was, which was from the State
Department, and the Defense
Department, and the intelligence
services.
But then as that maturity
happened, you now had
this situation after the 2016
election where they said, okay,
now the entire international order
might come undone.
70 years of unified foreign policy
from Truman until Trump are
now about to be broken.
And we need a the
same analog control
systems. We had to be able to put
bumper cars on bad stories
or bad.
Political movements through legacy
media, relationships and contacts.
We now need to establish and
consolidate within the social media
companies.
An initial predicate for that was
Russiagate. But then after
Russiagate died and they used
a simple democracy promotion
predicate, then it gave
rise to this multi-billion dollar
censorship industry that joins
together the military industrial
complex, the government, the
private sector, civil society
organizations, and then this vast
cobweb of media allies
and professional fact checker groups
that that serve as this sort of
sentinel class that surveys every
word on the internet.
So, can you
give us a, and thank you again for
this almost unbelievable explanation
of why this is happening.
Can you give us an example of how
it happens?
How just and just pick one
among I know countless examples
of how the national security state
lies to the population,
censors the truth, in
real life.
Yeah. So, you know, we have
this State Department outfit
called the Global Engagement Center,
which was created by a guy
named Rick Stengel, who described
himself as Obama's propagandist
in chief.
He was the undersecretary for public
affairs, which is essentially the
relationship which is the liaison
office role between
the State Department and the
mainstream media.
So this is basically the exact nexus
where government talking points
about war or about diplomacy
or statecraft get synchronized
with mainstream media.
And I, may I add something to that
is someone I know, Rick Stengel, he
was at one point a journalist.
And Rick Stengel has made
public arguments against the First
Amendment and against free speech.
And, oh, yeah, he wrote a whole book
on it. He published an op-ed in
2019. He wrote a whole book on
it. And he, you know, he made the
argument that that we just, you
know, went over here that
essentially,
the Constitution was not prepared
for the internet.
And, we need to get rid of
the First Amendment, accordingly.
And, you know, he described himself
as a free speech absolutist when he
was the managing editor of time
magazine.
And even when he was in the State
Department under Obama,
he started something called the
Global Engagement Center, which was
the first government
censorship, operation
within the federal government.
But it was foreign facing, so it was
okay. Now, at the time, they used
the, the homegrown
ISIS predicate threat for this.
And so it was very hard to argue
against the idea of the State
Department, having this
formal coordination partnership
with every major tech platform,
in the U.S.
because the, you know, at the time,
there were these ISIS attacks
that were and we were told that ISIS
was recruiting on Twitter and
Facebook.
And so the Global Engagement Center
was was established essentially
to be a State Department,
entanglement with the social media
companies to basically put bumper
cars on their ability to,
to platform accounts and to
and, and one of the things they did
is they created a new technology,
which it's called natural
language processing.
It is a artificial intelligence,
machine learning, ability
to create meaning out
of words in order to
map everything that everyone says
on the internet and create this
vast topography, topography
of how communities are organized
online, who the major influencers
are, what they're talking about,
what narratives are emerging or
trending, and to be able to create
this sort of network graph,
in order to know who to target
and, and, and how information
moves through an ecosystem.
And so they began plotting the
language, the prefixes, the
suffixes, the popular terms,
the slogans that ISIS,
folks were talking about on Twitter
when, when Trump won the election
in 2016,
everyone who worked at the State
Department, was expecting
these promotions to the white House,
National Security Council under
Hillary Clinton, who I should
remind, viewers, you know,
was also secretary of state under
Obama, actually ran the State
Department, but these folks were all
expecting promotions on November
18th, November 8th, 2016
and were unceremoniously,
put out of jobs by a guy who was a
20 to 1 underdog, according to the
New York Times, the day of the
election and when when that
happened, these State Department
folks took their special set of
skills coercing governments,
to, for sanctions
in the State Department led the,
the effort to sanction Russia
over the Crimea annexation
in 2014.
These State Department diplomats did
an international roadshow to
pressure European governments to
pass censorship laws, to
censor the right wing populist
groups in Europe, and as a boomerang
impact to censor populist groups
who were affiliated in the U.S..
So you had folks,
you had folks who went from the
State Department directly, for
example, to the Atlantic Council,
which was which was this major
facilitator, between the
government, between government to
government censorship. The Atlantic
Council is a group
that was one of Biden's biggest
political backers.
They bill themselves
as NATO's think tank.
So they represent the political
senses of NATO in
many respects. When NATO has,
civil society actions that they
want to be coordinated to,
to synchronize with military action,
a region the Atlantic Council
essentially is deployed to
consensus, build and make that
political action happen within a
region of interest to NATO.
Now, the Atlantic Council has seven
CIA directors on its board.
A lot of people don't even know that
seven CIA directors are still alive,
let alone all concentrated on
the board of a single organization.
That's kind of the heavyweight in
the censorship industry.
They get annual funding from the
Department of Defense, the State
Department, and CIA cutouts like the
National Endowment for democracy.
The Atlantic Council in January
2017 moved immediately
to pressure European governments to
pass censorship laws to create a
transatlantic flank attack
on free speech in exactly the way
that Rick Stengel essentially called
for to have US mimic
European censorship laws.
One of the ways they did this was
by getting Germany to pass something
called NetzDG in August
2017, which was which, which
was essentially kicked off the era
of, of automated
censorship in the U.S.
what NetzDG required was
unless unless social media
platforms wanted to pay a $54
million fine for each
instance of speech, each post left
up on their platform for more than
48 hours that had been identified
as hate speech.
They would they would be
fined basically into bankruptcy
when you aggregate 54 million over
tens of thousands of posts per day.
And the the safe haven around
that was if they deployed artificial
intelligence based censorship
technologies, which had been again
created by DARPA to take
on ISIS, to be able to
scan and ban speech automatically.
And this was a this gave no.
I call these weapons of mass
deletion.
These are essentially the ability
to censor tens of millions of
posts with just a few
lines of code.
And the way this is done is by
aggregating
basically the field of censorship
science fuzes together two
disparate groups of study, if you
will. There's this sort of political
and social scientists who
are the sort of thought leaders of
what should be censored.
And then there are the sort of
quants, if you will.
These are the programmers, the
computational data scientists,
computational linguistics.
Every university, there's over 60
universities now who get federal
government grants to do this.
Censorship, the censorship
work and the censorship preparation
work, where what they do is they
create these code books of the
language that people use the same
way they did for ISIS.
They do this, for example, with
Covid, they created these these
Covid lexicons of what dissident
groups were saying about mandates,
about masks, about vaccines,
about high profile individuals like
Tony Fauci or,
were,
Peter Daszak or any of these others
protected VIP and individuals whose
reputations had to be protected
online. And they created these code
books. They broke things down into
narratives. The Atlantic Council,
for example, was a part of this,
this government funded consortium,
something called the Virality
Project, which which mapped
66 different narratives
that dissidents were talking about
around Covid, everything from Covid
origins to vaccine efficacy.
And then they broke down these 66
claims into all the different
factual sub claims.
And then they plugged these into
these essentially machine learning
models to be able to have a
constant world heat map
of what everybody was saying about
Covid. And whenever something
started a trend that was bad
for what the Pentagon wanted or was
bad for what Tony Fauci wanted,
they were able to take down tens of
millions of posts.
They did this in the 2020 election
with Mail-In ballots.
It was this week.
I'm sorry. I just got to have
there's so much here and it's so
shocking.
So you're saying the Pentagon,
our Pentagon, the
U.S. Department of Defense censored
Americans during the
2020 election
cycle?
Yes, they did this.
They oh, they did this through the
so so there's the
two most censored events in human
history, I would argue to date
are the 2020 election and
the Covid 19 pandemic.
And I'll explain, you know, how
I arrived there.
So the 2020 election
was determined by mail in ballots.
And I'm not weighing into the
substance of whether mail in ballots
were or were not a legitimate or
safe and reliable form of
a voting. That's a completely
independent topic from
my perspective and the censorship
issue. One but the censorship
of mail in ballots is
really one of the most extraordinary
stories in our American
history I would argue. What happened
was, is you had this plot
within the Department of Homeland
Security.
Now this gets back to what we were
talking about with the State
Department's Global Engagement
Center. You had this group within
the Atlantic Council in the foreign
policy establishment, which
began arguing in 2017 for
the need for a permanent domestic
censorship government office
to serve as a quarterback for what
they called a home of society.
Counter misinformation, counter
disinformation alliance.
That just means censorship.
The counter missed this info, but
whole of their whole society model
explicitly proposed that
that we need every
single asset within society
to be mobilized in a whole of
society effort to stop
misinformation online.
It was that much of. An existential
threat to democracy.
And so it but they they
fixated in 2017 that it
had to be centered within the
government because only the
government would have the clout and
the coercive threat powers and
the and the perceived authority
to be able to tell the social
media companies what to do, to be
able to summon in a government
funded NGOs form, to create that
media surround sound, to be able
to arm in a, you
know, an astroturf army of of fact
checkers and to be able to liaise
and connect all these different
censorship industry actors into
a cohesive, unified whole.
And the Atlantic Council initially
proposed with this blueprint called
forward defense.
It's not offense, it's forward
defense guys.
They initially proposed that running
this out of the State Department's
Global engagement Center, because
they had so many assets there who
were so effective at censorship
under Rick Stengel Steed, and under
the Obama administration.
But they said, oh, we we're not
gonna be able to get away with that
because we don't really have a national
security predicate, and it's
supposed to be foreign facing.
We can't really use that hook unless
we have a sort of national security
one. Then they contemplated parking
at the CIA and they said, well,
actually, there's two reasons we
can't do that.
CIA is foreign facing, and we can't
really establish a counterintelligence
threat to bring it home domestically.
Also, we're going to need
essentially tens of thousands of
people involved in this operation
spanning this whole society model.
You can't really run a clandestine
operation that way.
So they said, okay, well, what about
the FBI? They said, well, the FBI
would be great. It's domestic.
But the problem is, is the FBI is
supposed to be the intelligence arm
of the Justice Department and
weak. And what we're dealing with
here are not acts of lawbreaking.
That's basically support for Trump.
Or if, you know, if a left wing
populist had risen to power like
Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, I
have no doubt they would have done
in the UK, they would have done the
same thing to him there.
They targeted Jeremy Corbyn and
other left wing populist NATO
skeptical groups in Europe.
But in the U.S.
it was it was all Trump.
And so essentially what they said
is, well, the only other domestic
intelligence equity we have in the
US besides the FBI is the DHS.
So we are going to essentially take
the CIA's power to rig
and bribe foreign media
organizations, which is a power
they've had since the day they were
born in 1947.
And we're going to combine that with
the power, with the domestic
jurisdiction of the FBI
by putting it at DHS.
So DHS was basically
deputized.
It was empowered through this
obscure little cyber security,
agency to have the combined
powers that the CIA has abroad with
the jurisdiction of the FBI at home.
And the way they did this, how
did a cyber and an obscure little
cyber security agency get
this power was they
did a funny little series
of switch ruse.
So this little thing called CISA
the and call it the Disinformation
Governance Board. They didn't call
it the censorship agency.
They gave it an obscure little name
that no one would notice, called the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency, who its founder
said, we just security, we care
about security so much it's in our
name twice. And everybody sort of
closed their eyes and pretended,
you know, that's what it was.
But it was created by act of
Congress in 2018
because of the perceived threat that
Russia had hacked the 2016
election, had physically hacked
it. And so we needed the cyber
security power,
to be able to, to be
able to deal with that. And
essentially on the heels of a CIA
memo on January 6th, 2017,
and a same day, DHS executive
order on January 6th, 2017,
arguing that Russia had interfered
in the 2016 election and a DHS
mandate, saying that elections are
now critical infrastructure.
You had this new power within DHS
to say that cyber security attacks
on elections are now our
purview.
And then they did two cute things.
One, they said
so they said, miss this.
And information online
are a form of cyber security
attack. They are a cyber attack
because they are happening online.
And they said, well, actually
Russian disinformation is
we're actually protecting democracy
in elections. We don't need a
Russian predicate after Russiagate
died. So just like that,
you had the Cyber Security Agency
be able to legally make the argument
that your tweets about Mail-In
ballots, if you undermine public
faith and confidence in them
as a legitimate form of voting,
was now you were now conducting
a cyber attack on US critical
infrastructure by by
articulating misinformation on
Twitter.
And just like that and now what they
did then is they.
So in other words, complaining
about election fraud is the same as
taking down our power grid.
Yes, you could literally be on your
toilet seat at 9:30 on
a Thursday night and tweet,
"I think that Mail-In ballots are
illegitimate." And you
were essentially then caught up
in the crosshairs of the Department
of Homeland Security, classifying
you as conducting a cyber
attack on U.S.
critical infrastructure because you
were doing misinformation
online in the cyber realm and
misinformation is a cyber attack
on democracy when it undermines
public faith and confidence in
our democratic elections
and our democratic institutions.
They would end up going far
beyond that. They would actually
define democratic institutions
as being another thing that was a
cyber security attack to,
to undermine.
And lo and behold, the mainstream
media is considered a democratic
institution.
That would come later.
What ended up happening was in
advance of the 2020 election,
starting in April of 2020, although
this goes back before. You had this
essentially Never-Trump neocon
Republican DHS
working with essentially
NATO on the national security side
and and essentially the DNC,
if you will, to to
use DHS as the launching
point for a government
coordinated mass censorship
campaign spanning every
single social media platform on
Earth in order to pre
censor the ability to
dispute the legitimacy of mail in
ballots. And here's how they did
this. They aggregated four
different institutions: Stanford
University, the University of
Washington, a company called
Graphika, and the Atlantic Council.
Now all four of these institutions,
the centers within them, were
where we're essentially Pentagon
cutouts.
You had, you had at the Stanford
Internet Observatory.
It was actually run by Michael
McFaul.
If you know Michael McFaul, he was
the U.S. ambassador to Russia
under the Obama
administration.
And he personally authored
a seven step playbook for
how to successfully orchestrate a
color revolution that is, in
part of that involved maintaining
total control over media and
social media, juicing up the
civil society outfits,
calling elections illegitimate
in order....
All of these people were
professional Russiagaters,
professional election
de-legitimizers in 2016.
So
Stanford University, the
Stanford Observatory under Michael
McFaul was run by Alex Stamos,
who was formerly a Facebook
executive who coordinated with
DNI and the, with respect
to, Russiagate,
you know, taking down Russian
propaganda at Facebook.
So this is another, liaison
essentially to the national security
state and under Alex Stamos at
Stanford Observatory was
Renée DiResta, who started her
career in the CIA and wrote
the Senate Intelligence Committee
report on Russian
disinformation.
And there's a lot more there that
I'll get to at another time.
But, the next institution
was was the University of
Washington, which is essentially the
Bill Gates University in Seattle,
who is headed by Kate Starbird, who,
is is basically three generations
of military brass who got her PhD in
crisis informatics, essentially
doing, you know, social media
surveillance for the Pentagon and
getting, you know, DARPA funding
and, and working essentially
with the national security state
then repurposed to take on mail in
ballots. The third firm, Graphika,
got $7 million in Pentagon
grants,
and got their start as part of the
Pentagon's Minerva initiative.
The Minerva initiative is the
psychological warfare research
center of the Pentagon.
This group was
doing social media spying
and narrative mapping for the
Pentagon until the 2016 election
happened and then were were
repurposed into a partnership with
the Department of Homeland Security
to censor, you know, 22 million
Trump tweets, pro-Trump tweets
about Mail-In ballots.
And then the fourth institution, as
I mentioned, was the Atlantic
Council, who's got seven CIA
directors on the board.
So one after another, it is
exactly what Ben Rhodes described
it during the Obama era as the blob,
the foreign policy establishment.
It's a it's the it's the Defense
Department, the State Department, or
the CIA every single time.
And of course, this was because they
were they were threatened by Trump's
foreign policy.
And so while while
much of the censorship looks like
it's coming domestically, it's
actually by our foreign facing
department of dirty tricks, color
revolution blob, who are
professional government topless,
who were then basically descended on
the 2020 election.
Now they did this.
They explicitly said the head of
this election integrity partnership
on tape and
my foundation clipped them.
And it's been played before
Congress. And it's in, you know, a
part of the Missouri v Biden lawsuit
now, but they explicitly
said on tape that they were set
up to do what the government
was banned from doing itself.
And then they articulated a
multi-step framework in order to
coerce all the tech companies
to take censorship actions.
They said on tape, the tech
companies would not have done, but
for their pressure, which involved
using threats of government force.
Because they were the deputized arm
of the government, they had a formal
partnership with the DHS.
They were able to use DHS as
proprietary domestic disinformation
switchboard to immediately talk
to top brass.
All the tech companies for
takedowns, and they bragged on tape
about how they got the tech
companies to all systematically
adopt a new terms of service speech
violation band called
delegitimization, which meant
any tweet, any YouTube video,
any Facebook post, any TikTok
video, any discord posts,
any Twitch video, anything
on the internet that that,
undermined public faith and
confidence in the use of mail
in ballots or early voting dropboxes
or or ballot
tabulation issues on election Day
was a prima facia,
Terms of Service violation policy
under this new delegitimization
policy that they only adopted
because of past through government
pressure from the Election Integrity
Partnership, which they bragged
about on tape, including the grid
that they used to do this and
simultaneously invoking threats of
government, breaking them up, or
government stopping doing favors for
the tech companies unless they did
this, as well as inducing crisis PR
by working with their media allies.
And they said the government, DHS
could not do that themselves.
And so they set up this basically
constellation of State Department,
Pentagon, and
I.C. networks to run
this pre censorship campaign,
which by their own math, had 22
million tweets on Twitter alone.
And I think it's on 15 platforms.
This is hundreds of millions of
posts which were all
scanned and banned or throttled
so that they could not be amplified
or they exist in a sort of limited
state purgatory, or had these
frictions affixed to them in the
form of fact checking labels
where you couldn't actually click
through to thing or you had to.
It was is an inconvenience to be
able to share it.
Now, they did this seven months
before the election because at the
time they were worried about
the perceived legitimacy of a Biden
victory in the case of a so-called
red mirage blue shift
event.
They knew the only way that Biden
would be able to was would win
mathematically, was through
the disproportionate Democrat use
of mail in ballots.
They knew there would be a crisis
because it was going to look
extremely weird if if
Trump looked like he won by seven
states and, you know,
and then three days later it comes
out, actually, the election
switched. I mean, that that would
put the election crisis of the
Bush Gore election, on
a level of steroids that the
national security state said, well,
the public will not be prepared for
it. So what we need to do is we
need to in advance we
need to pre censor the ability to
even question the legitimacy
this took out.
Wait, wait, wait. May I ask you to
pause right there.
So what you're saying is...
What you're suggesting is
they knew the outcome of the
election seven months before it was
held.
It looks very bad.
Yes, Mike, it does look very bad.
You know, and especially when you
combine this with the fact that this
is right on the heels of the
impeachment, the Pentagon-led,
CIA-led impeachment.
You know, it was, Eric
Ciaramella from the CIA, and it was
the Vindmans from the Pentagon,
who led the impeachment of Trump
in late 2019
over, you know, an alleged phone
call around withholding Ukraine
aid. This same network,
which came straight out of the
Pentagon, hybrid warfare
military censorship network created
after the first, you know, Ukraine
crisis in 2014,
were the lead architects of
the Ukraine impeachment
in 2019 and then essentially came
back on steroids as part of the 2020
election censorship operation.
But, you know, from their
perspective, I mean, it
certainly looks like the perfect
crime.
These were the people DHS
at the time had actually federalized
much of, of the national election,
administration through this January
6th, 2017,
executive order from outgoing
Obama DHS
head Jeh Johnson, which
essentially wrapped all 50 states up
into a formal DHS partnership.
So DHS was simultaneously in charge
of the administration of the
election in many respects, and the
censorship of anyone who challenged
the administration,
of the election. It's just like,
you know, putting essentially the
defendant, of a
trial, as the judge
and jury of the trial.
But you're not describing democracy.
I mean, you're describing a country
in which democracy is impossible.
What I'm essentially describing is
military rule.
I mean what's happened with the rise
of the censorship industry is
a total inversion of the idea of
democracy itself.
You know, the democracy sort of
draws its legitimacy from
the idea that it is,
rule by consent of
the people being rule.
That is, it's not really being ruled
by an overlord, because the
government is actually just our will
expressed by our consent with who we
vote for.
The whole push after the 2016
election and after Brexit
and after a couple of other, you
know, social media run
elections that went the wrong way
from. What the State Department
wanted, like the 2016 Philippines
election, was to
completely invert everything
that we described as
being the underpinnings of a
democratic society in order to deal
with the threat of free speech on
the internet.
And what they essentially said is
we need to redefine democracy from
being about the will of the voters
to being about the sanctity of
democratic institutions.
And who are the democratic
institutions? Oh, it's us, you know,
it's the military, it's NATO,
it's the IMF and the World Bank.
It's the mainstream
media, who it is,
the NGOs.
And of course, these NGOs
are largely State Department funded
or IC funded.
It's essentially all of the
elite establishments,
that were under threat from
the rise of domestic populism
that declared their own consensus
to be the new definition of
democracy. Because if you define
democracy as being the strength of
democratic institutions rather
than a focus on the will of the
voters, then what
you're left with is essentially
democracy is just the consensus
building architecture within
the democratic institutions
themselves. And from their
perspective, that takes a lot of
work. I mean, I mean,
the amount of work these people do.
I mean, for example, we mentioned
the Atlantic Council, which is one
of these big coordinating mechanisms
for the oil and gas industry
in a region for the for the finance
and the JPMorgan's in the
BlackRock's in a region, for the
NGOs in the region, for the media,
in the region. All of these need to
reach a consensus.
And that process takes a lot of
time. It takes a lot of work and a
lot of negotiation.
From their perspective, that's
democracy.
Democracy is getting the NGOs to
agree with Blackrock, to agree
with the Wall Street Journal, you
know, to agree with,
you know, the community and activist
groups who are onboarded with
respect to a particular initiative.
That is the difficult vote building
process from their perspective.
At the end of the day, a bunch
of, you know, populist groups decide
that they like a truck driver
who's popular on TikTok more
than the, you know, carefully
constructed consensus of
the NATO military brass.
Well, then, from their perspective,
you know, that is now an attack
on democracy.
And this is what this whole branding
effort was. And of course, democracy
again, has that magic regime change
predicate, where democracy
is, is our magic watchword
to be able to overthrow governments
from the ground up in a sort of
color revolution style, whole
of society effort to toppling
a democratically elected
government from the inside.
For example, as we did in Ukraine,
Viktor Yanukovych was democratically
elected by the Ukrainian people,
like him or hate him.
I'm not even issuing an opinion
there. But the fact is, is we
color revolutioned him out of
office, we January 6th'd him out of
office. Actually, to be frank, I
mean with respect to... you had, you
know, a State Department funded
right sector thugs and,
you know, $5 billion worth of
civil society money pumped into this
to overthrow a democratically
elected government in the name of
democracy.
And they took that special set of
skills home.
And now it's here,
perhaps potentially, to stay.
And this is fundamentally changed
the nature of American
governance because of the threat of,
you know, one small voice becoming
popular on social media.
May I ask you a question.
So into that, that group
of institutions that you say,
now define democracy, the NGOs,
foreign policy establishment, you
included the mainstream media.
Now, in 2021,
the NSA broke into my private
text apps and
read them and then leaked them to
the New York Times against me.
That just happened again to me
last week.
And I'm wondering how common
that is for the Intel
agencies to work with
so-called mainstream media like the
New York Times to hurt
their opponents.
Well, that is the function of these
interstitial, government
funded non-governmental
organizations and think tanks.
Like, for example, we mentioned the
Atlantic Council, which is, you
know, NATO's think tank.
But other groups like the Aspen
Institute, which draws the lion's
share of its funding from the State
Department and other government
agencies. You know, the Aspen
Institute was busted doing the same
thing with the Hunter Biden laptop
censorship.
You know, you had this strange
situation where the FBI
had advance knowledge of the pending
publication of the Hunter Biden
laptop story, and then, magically,
the Aspen Institute, which
is run by essentially former
CIA, former NSA,
former FBI, and then a bunch
of sort of civil society
organizations, all
hold a mass,
stakeholder censorship
simulation, a three day,
conference. You know, this came out
and Yoel Roth was there.
This was a big part of the Twitter
file leaks. And it's been mentioned
in multiple congressional
investigations. But somehow
the Aspen Institute, which
is basically an
addendum of the national security
state got
the exact same information that
the national security state spied
on journalists and political
figures to obtain and
not only leaked it, but then
basically did a joint coordinated
censorship simulator
in September, two months before the
election, in order, just like
with the censorship of mail in
ballots, to be in ready position
to pre censor anyone
online amplifying
a news story that had not even
broken yet.
The Aspen Institute?
So I mean, which is, by the way,
I've spent my life in Washington'...
Walter
Isaacson, formerly of Time Magazine,
ran it, for former president
of CNN.
I had no idea it was part of the
national security state, I had no
idea its funding came from the US
government.
This the first time I ever heard
that. But given assuming
what you're saying is true, it's a
little weird that Walter Isaacson
left Aspen Institute to
write a biography of Elon Musk.
Strange?
Yeah.
I don't know. I haven't read
that book.
I from what I've heard from
people, it's a relatively fair
treatment.
I, you know, just total speculation.
But I suspect that Walter Isaacson
has struggled with this issue and
may not even firmly fall in one
particular place, in the
sense that, you know, Walter
Isaacson did a series of interviews
of Rick Stengel,
actually, with the Atlantic
Council, in other settings,
where he interviewed Rick Stengel,
specifically on the issue of you
know, the need to get rid of the
First Amendment and the threat that
free speech on social media poses to
democracy.
Now, at the time, I was very
concerned. This was between 2017
and 2019 when he did these Rick
Stengel interviews.
I was very concerned because
Isaacson expressed what seemed
to me to be a highly sympathetic,
view about the Rick Stengel,
you know, perspective on killing
the First Amendment.
Now, he didn't formally endorse
that position, but it left me very
skittish about Isaacson.
But what I should say is, at
the time, I don't think very
many people, in fact, I know
virtually nobody in the country,
had any idea how deep
the rabbit hole went when it came
to the construction of the
censorship industry and
how deep the tentacles had grown
within the military, in the national
security state, in order to Bouie
and consolidated much of that,
frankly, did not even come to public
light until even
last year.
You know, frankly, some of that was
galvanized by Elon Musks acquisition
in the Twitter files and the
Republican turnover in the House
that allowed these multiple
investigations, the lawsuits
like Missouri v. Biden in the
discovery process there.
And, you know, multiple other things
like the Disinformation Governance
Board, who, by the way, the interim
head of that, the head of that, Nina
Jankowicz, got her start,
in the censorship industry from this
exact same,
clandestine intelligence
community censorship network created
after the 2014 Crimea situation.
Nina Jankowicz, when her name came
up in 2022, is part of
the Disinformation Governance Board.
I almost fell out of my chair
because I had been tracking Nina's
network for almost five
years at that point, when her when
her name came up as part of the
UK inner cluster cell
of a busted clandestine
operation to censor the internet
called the Integrity Initiative,
which was created by the UK Foreign
Office and was backed
by NATO Political Affairs
unit, in order to
carry out this thing
that we talked about at the
beginning of this, of this dialog,
the NATO, sort of psychological
inoculation, and,
the ability to kill so-called
Russian propaganda or rising
political groups who wanted,
to maintain energy relations
with Russia at a time when the U.S.
was trying to kill the Nord Stream
and another, pipeline relation.
Well, they did that.
Nina Jankowicz was a part of this
outfit.
And then who is
the head of it after Nina Jankowicz
went down. It was Michael Chertoff,
and Michael Chertoff was running the
Aspen Institute Cyber Group, and
then the Aspen Institute then goes
on to be the censorship simulator
for the Hunter Biden laptop story.
And then two years later, Chertoff
is then the head of the
disinformation governance board
after Nina was forced to step down.
Of course, Michael
Chertoff was the chairman at BAE
I'm sorry.
And Michael Chertoff was the
chairman of the largest
military contractor in Europe,
BAE Military.
So you've
blown my mind so many times in this
conversation that I'm going to need
a nap directly after it's done.
So I've just got two more questions
for you. One short, one a little
longer.
The short one is, for people who've made it
this far i- an hour in - and want
to know more about this topic.
And by the way, I hope you'll come
back whenever you have the time
to explore different threads of the
story.
But for people who want to do
research on their own, how can
your research on this
be found on the internet?
Sure. So our foundation is
FoundationForFreedomOnline.com.
We publish all manner
of reports on every aspect of the
censorship industry
from what we talked about with the
role of the military industrial
complex in national security, state
to what the universities are doing
to, you know, like I sometimes refer
to as digital MKUltra, there's
just the field of basically the
science of censorship and how
and the funding of these
psychological manipulation methods
in order to nudge people into
different belief systems, as they
did with Covid, as they did with
energy and every
sensitive policy issues, what they
essentially had an ambition for.
But my
FoundationForFreedomOnline.com
website is one way.
The other way is just on X.
My handle is at Mike Benz Cyber.
I'm very active there and
publish a lot of long form video and
written content on all this.
I think it's one of the most
important issues in the world today.
It certainly is. And so that leads
directly and seamlessly to my final
question, which
is about X.
And I'm not just saying this because
I post content there, but I think
objectively it's the last big
platform that's free or sort
of free or more free.
You post there too.
But, you know, we're at the very
beginning of an election year
with a couple of different wars
unfolding simultaneously in
2024. So do you expect
that that platform can stay free
for the duration of this year?
It's under an
extraordinary amount of pressure,
and that pressure is going to
continue to mount as the election
approaches.
Elon Musk is a very unique
individual, and he
has a unique buffer, perhaps
when it comes to the national
security state, because the national
security state is actually quite
reliant on Elon
Musk properties, whether that's for
the, the electrical,
you know, the sort of the green
revolution when it comes to Tesla
and, and the battery technology
there when it comes, when it comes
to Space X, the State Department
is hugely dependent
on, on space,
because of its unbelievable,
you sort of pioneering and
saturating presence in the field of
low Earth orbit satellites
that, are basically how our
telecom system runs
to things like Starlink.
There are dependencies that the
national security state has on Elon
Musk. I'm not sure he'd have as much
room to negotiate if he had
become the world's richest man,
selling, you know,
at a lemonade stand.
And if the national security
state goes too hard on him by
invoking something like CFIUS to
sort of nationalize some of these
properties, I think the shockwave
that it would send to the
international investor community
would be irrecoverable at a time
when we're engaged in great power
competition.
So they're trying to kill, you know,
they're trying to sort of induce a,
I think, a sort of corporate regime
change through, a series
of things involving a sort of death
by a thousand paper cuts.
I think there are 7 or 8 different
Justice Department or SEC
or FTC investigations into Elon
Musk properties that all started,
after his acquisition of
X. But then what they're trying to
do right now is what I call the
transatlantic flank attack 2.0.
You know, we talked in this dialog
about how the censorship industry
really got its start when a bunch of
State Department exiles, who were
expecting promotions, took their
special set of skills in coercing
European countries to pass
sanctions on themselves to cut off
their own leg despite themselves,
in order to pass sanctions on
Russia. They ran back that same
playbook with doing a road show
for censorship instead for
sanctions. We are now witnessing,
you know, transatlantic flank attack
2.0, if you will, which is
because they have lost a lot of
their federal government powers
to do this same censorship operation
they been doing from 2018 to 2022,
in part because the House has
totally turned on them, in part
because of the media, in part
because Missouri v.
Biden, which won a slam dunk
case actually banning government
censorship at the trial court and
appellate court levels, is now
before the Supreme Court.
They've now moved into two
strategies.
One of them is state
level censorship laws.
California just passed a new law
which the censorship industry
totally drove from start to finish
around...
They call it platform
accountability and transparency,
which is basically forcing
Elon Musk to give
over the kind of narrative
mapping data that these
CIA conduits and Pentagon cutouts
were using to create these weapons
of mass deletion, these abilities to
just censor everything at scale
because they had all the internal
platform data.
Elon Musk took that away.
They're using state laws like this
new California law to crack that
open. But the major threat right now
is the threat from Europe,
with, with, you know, something
called the eU Digital
Services Act, which was
cooked up in tandem with folks
like Newsguard, which is run by,
you know, which has has a board of
Michael Hayden, head of the CIA,
NSA, four star general.
Rick Stengel is on that board.
You know, from from the State
Department's propaganda office.
Tom Ridge is on that board from
the Department of Homeland Security.
Oh, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen is on
that board.
He was the, the general secretary of
NATO under the Obama administration.
So you have NATO, the CIA, the NSA,
four star general, DHS, and the
State Department working with the
EU to craft the censorship
laws that now are the largest
existential threat to X
other than potential advertiser
boycotts, because there is now
disinformation is now banned as
a matter of law in, in
the EU. And the EU is a bigger
market for X than the US.
There's only 300 million some people
in the U.S. there's 450 million in
Europe.
X is now forced to comply with this
brand new law that just got ratified
this year, where they
either need to forfeit 6% of their
global annual revenue to the EU
to maintain operations there or
put in place essentially the kind
of, you know, CIA bumper
cars, if you will, that I've
been describing over the course of
this, in order to have an internal
mechanism to censor anything
that the EU, which is just a proxy
for NATO, deems to be
disinformation.
And you can bet with 65 elections
around the globe this year,
you can you can predict every single
time what they're going to define
disinformation as.
So that's the main the main fight
right now is, is dealing with the
transatlantic flank attack from
Europe.
I said this five times, but that's
just one of the most remarkable
stories I've ever heard.
And I'm grateful to you for bringing
it to us. Mike Benz, Executive
Director of the Foundation for
Freedom Online.
And I hope we see you again.
Thanks, Tucker.