#132 Mike Benz - Inside the Censorship Industrial Complex

Mike Benz is a former official with the U. S. Department of State, known for his work in international communications and digital freedom. He has played a significant role in advocating for internet freedom and the protection of online expression. Benz is the founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, an organization dedicated to promoting free speech and digital rights around the world. His work focuses on countering authoritarian censorship and supporting the rights of individuals to access and share information freely. His background includes expertise in foreign affairs and digital policy, often emphasizing the importance of a free and open internet as a fundamental human right. Through his advocacy, Benz has sought to engage policymakers and the public on issues related to digital governance, censorship, and the implications of technology for democracy. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://preparewithshawn.com https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/the-old-man https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Mike Benz Links: FFO Foundation - https://foundationforfreedomonline.com X - https://x.com/mikebenzcyber IG - https://www.instagram.com/MikeBenzCyber Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Mike Benz, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Man, I have been looking forward to this for a long time. I first saw you, I think, on Glenn Beck. Is that correct? May have been. Yeah, I think I first, you first popped up on my radar on Glenn Beck, and then I saw you on Tucker a couple times, and I've been trying to get in contact with you. And finally, we got you. So, thanks for coming. I really. Thanks for having me. You have the most epic studio I've ever seen, so. Well, that means a hell of a lot. Thank you. You've been, you've been around at some really cool studios, so that, I appreciate that. I don't know if you ever pan it, but, uh, everyone is watching this yet to see this. It's a museum here. Only the guests get to see it.

• 1:50Shawn Ryan?

  Classified, then. Yeah. Script from the record. Well, we'll, uh, we'll start throwing some of the stuff out for the, the masses to, to see, because there's some pretty historic stuff in here. But, but, um, well, I'm dying to talk to you about the stuff that's going on in Brazil right now, and all the censorship stuff. You're the guy to talk to. And, um, so, before we get, before we get into the weeds, everybody gets an introduction and a gift. So.

• 2:21Shawn Ryan?

  Here we go. Mike Benz. Previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Technology at the U.S. State Department from fall of 2020 through 2021. Served as White House Speech Writer for President Trump and advised on tech matters. Served as a Speech Writer to Housing and Irving Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson and was a Policy Advisor on Economic Development. You're the author of the unpublished Monstrosity: Weapons of Mass Deletion. Today, you seek to provide nonpartisan insights and assistance to all peoples taking a stand

• 3:02Shawn Ryan?

  for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the free exchange of ideas online through FFO, Foundation for Freedom Online, which you founded in 2022. Why did you found that? What prompted that?

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Well, I think it was a natural continuation of the spirit of what, you know, I felt our federal government needed to do while I was in it, which was bring to light and try to educate people around what's really driving internet censorship, the forces behind it, the abuses of government. The fact is, is several years ago, it was a sort of unsubstantiated thing in many people's minds that the U.S. government was putting pressure on the tech platforms to censor speech, all these open First Amendment questions about it. And I felt like there needed to be a venue to provide nonpartisan insights, to educate

• 4:02Speaker 03

  people so that they had the language, they had the background, they had the stories, they had the ability to understand the world around them as it pertains to internet censorship.

• 4:12Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Well, I'm glad you're doing that. So I have a Patreon subscription account. They've been with us since the beginning. It's grown into quite the community and they're the reason that I get to sit here and you. And so one of the things that they get the opportunity to do is ask each guest a question. And so this is from Stephanie Jordan. The First Amendment is quickly dying. How much time do we as Americans have in comparison to countries like the UK and Brazil?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Well, the story of what's happening in the UK and Brazil is very tightly connected to our own. We'll get to this when we talk about some of the international issues happening right now. But the US State Department is actually putting pressure on foreign countries to enact their own censorship laws. So I don't really see what's happening in the UK or Brazil as being distinct from the US. But in terms of how much time we have left, this is one of these spaces where there's a lot of two steps forward, one step back, three steps back, one step forward. You can lose and lose badly even for a number of years and then begin to make inroads again. There was, for the first six years of me doing this, I've been involved in this space for eight years now. Just dedicated my whole life to it.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  And for the first six years, there was no traction at all. It was one loss after another. And that does make you feel hopeless, but you just keep putting one foot in front of the other until you start to get victories. And then we've had a lot of victories on the free speech space in the past 18 months. And go through them if folks are interested, but...

• 5:55Shawn Ryan?

  I think it would be good to go through them just for the positivity aspect.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Totally, totally. So coming into the year 2022, you had the censorship industry was completely invincible. And what I mean by the censorship industry is... This whole of society framework that our government uses for its counter misinformation work, which ties together four different stakeholder institutions: government agencies, private sector companies, civil society institutions, like universities, NGOs, researchers, and then media institutions. And all four of them, government, private sector, civil society, and media, all work together to achieve a common censorship outcome. So they can each pull their own levers in order to achieve the censorship of a narrative, or of an account, or kill someone's advertising revenue, whatever needs to be done in any

• 6:45Speaker 03

  particular case. And from 2016, when this was all really getting established in the US, until 2022, there was never any piercing of any one of those four quadrants. No government agencies were under scrutiny. Most people didn't even know there was a government role. All the social media companies were completely under this pressure, and there was no one willing to break the alliance. You know, you had Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, who was being threatened by the federal government in terms of Facebook's bottom line. Jack Dorsey was totally pliant to these. YouTube was an avid censor in that regard. And so

• 7:27Speaker 03

  in 2022, a number of things happened that began to really change the turf of this. So first, there was this scandal with the Disinformation Governance Board. I don't know if folks remember this. This was this Ministry of Truth, is what people were calling it, at the Department of Homeland Security. You know, they made the mistake, for once in their lives, of publicly calling it what it actually was. You know, when the Disinformation Governance Board happened in April 2022, it was the first time that Republicans in Congress leapt to life and said, "Oh, my God, there's a government censorship agency. It's the Ministry of Truth." What they didn't know is that the Ministry of Truth had already existed within DHS for three years before that. It was just given a much more boring,

• 8:10Speaker 03

  mundane name. It was called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. But what they did is they said that Because their mission is critical infrastructure security and elections are critical infrastructure and COVID deals with public health and public health is critical infrastructure. Any tweets that contain misinformation about elections or about COVID or about any number of sensitive policy issues were a cyber threat actor, were a cyber attack on critical infrastructure. And so DHS had this giant web apparatus to censor First Amendment protected speech using a cybersecurity predicate. But at the time, that was almost too fantastical for people to believe.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  It wasn't until DHS's censorship operations became so sprawling and so massive and had so many touchpoints that they needed this dull, boring bureaucratic management layer, the Disinformation Governance Board, to manage what DHS, CISA, and the intelligence wing of DHS, DHS INA, was doing. And so it was only then that you had Chuck Grassley and Josh Hawley and all these different Republican members of Congress say, holy, wait a second. We've heard rumors about internet censorship being directed by the US government. Maybe they're true because, look, they have this Disinformation Governance Board.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  That same month, Elon Musk announced his intended acquisition of X and that he was spending $44 billion to set the bird free, to get rid of the censorship policies that had existed essentially from 2016 until 2022. In November of 2022, the Republicans took control over Congress. In October of 2022, Elon Musk completed his acquisition. And Republicans in Congress began to break much of this open, as did Elon Musk through the Twitter files. And so there began to be all these public hearings on government pressure on Facebook, on Amazon, on YouTube, on Twitter.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Weaponization Subcommittee, got us the Facebook files, which showed that Facebook was only censoring COVID-19 because they felt beholden to the Biden administration and folded under that pressure in order to... Be receptive to their cause to censorship because they have bigger fish to fry on multiple policy fronts, meaning they needed the Biden State Department's help to defend their rights in Europe, and they needed the Biden administration's protection of their data rights and their advertising revenues. And so you start, when Elon kicked the door open with the Twitter files and there began

• 10:57Speaker 03

  to be congressional support in Congress, many of these federal agencies started to clam up and I won't say close down, but they had to reorganize in ways that added a lot of friction to what they did, and they became a lot less powerful because now the public awareness had grown and anytime they did something, they would be hit with subpoenas, people would be brought in for transcribed interviews, there'd be public hearings, there'd be lawsuits, there've been many private sector lawsuits. We've had this major Supreme Court case that just sort of, in my view, was wrongly decided, but it's still a preliminary decision, so that may still play out favorably in the future. But there's been legal pressure, there's been congressional pressure, there has been

• 11:39Speaker 03

  the prying open of Twitter, which is the, you know, X, it's the largest political thought incubator of all the social media platforms because everyone's a content producer on there, unlike YouTube, as soon as you hit the retweet button. And that has also given cover to folks like Mark Zuckerberg to lessen censorship at Facebook and on Instagram. And this is one of the things the censorship industry has been apoplectic about is that they accuse Mark Zuckerberg of riding Elon Musk's free speech coattails and removing a lot of the liaison tentacles that previously were backchanneled by US intelligence or by, you know, political operatives involved in the censorship industry.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  And so the internet now is much freer than it was several years ago in the US. So the blob has a new strategy involving bringing international pressure on the platforms as well as state pressure within individual states in the US. Wow. So we did get some wins. We're winning at the level the battle was being fought from 2016 to 2020. If we had now what we, if we had then what we have now. We'd be in a totally different world. The issue is, is as we're winning at the current level, they've moved the battle upstream to things that are existentially much more terrifying. Just straight up international laws banning First Amendment speech.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  We're seeing this with this new EU censorship law, the Digital Services Act, which adds a disinformation compliance component. And that forces X to censor anything NATO wants to censor, or else they lose their European market, which is a larger market than their US market. And so they have a whole bag of tricks that are the new frontier for fighting this. But if they hadn't escalated that, we would be winning quite dramatically right now.

• 13:35Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. Let's get into the weeds on all of this. I just wanted the wins to start with, but everybody gets a gift.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  All right, can I open it now?

• 13:45Shawn Ryan?

  You can open it right now. A little something for the flight home.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 13:51Shawn Ryan?

  Gummy bears.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  I'm actually a sucker for gummy bears.

• 13:53Shawn Ryan?

  Nice, you'll love those. You'll love those. But, so let's do the... You had a couple of topics you wanted to cover, and that I want to hear about very much. So let's talk about the big picture roadmap of censorship and free speech.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  The main thing for people to understand is that free speech is caught in this proxy war between what I call the blob, and I didn't coin this term, I'll go over it, the blob versus populism. So it's not Democrats versus Republicans. It's not right versus left, or liberals versus conservatives. It is the blob. And what I mean by that is the foreign policy establishment of the US, the UK, and NATO. This was a term that was coined by President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, when the Obama administration, in its final years,

• 14:49Speaker 03

  was frustrated with this entrenched, immutable, alien-like, all-powerful form within Washington that appeared to be more powerful than the White House itself. So this term, the blob, again, came from the Obama White House to describe forces that the White House felt it couldn't take on.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  And I find it to be a more useful term than something like deep state, because it really encompasses this whole society concept, that what the government does stretches its tentacles into the private sector and into civil society and into media organizations. So the blob really has its sort of central locus within the diplomacy, defense, and intelligence worlds. So it's the State Department, it's the Pentagon, it's the CIA and the IC, and then sort of spandrels out from there into all of the different political actors on both sides of the aisle, into all the different universities and NGOs and allied media institutions. And it's transatlantic.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  It's the sort of conjoined foreign policy of the US, the UK, and NATO. And we have empowered this blob apparatus to be able to do dirty tricks on the world stage to protect national interests. Right? So since World War II ended and we set up this rules-based international order, we have needed a capacity to influence the course of events in foreign countries to make them more suitable to US interests. Right? In 1948, we had the UN Declaration on Human Rights, made every country a sovereign territory. It was forbidden by international law to do war by military means.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  You can just militarily, I'm sorry, to do territorial acquisition in a straight military conquest. You can just march into Canada, take it over. That would be, you know, just as a purely military, Empire 1.0 type thing that was done from the medieval period through the Industrial Revolution all the way up until World War II. We had this concept of democratic sovereignty. So the lust for empire never ended. After 1948, we needed a new mechanism to maintain empire, not by military means, but by political vassalage. Now, this is often supported by military means

• 17:19Speaker 03

  or it's accomplished at its outset by military means. Oftentimes, we'll create a predicate for military activity and then we will set up our political vassal state from there. But what I'm driving at is... I'm not anti-blob, and I want to make this totally clear at the outset. Even though the blob, this foreign policy establishment, is the antagonist, it's sort of the villain in the internet censorship story, it's, we do perhaps need it. That is, we can't make pencils in the United States without getting the gum from trees in Malaysia, without getting graphite from mines in South America.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  What happens if Malaysia nationalizes the gum trees? Or the unions go on strike? Or the national government of Bolivia decides to box out US corporations? Well, then Americans don't have pencils. So we have this Department of Dirty Tricks capacity, which spans this interagency foreign policy establishment, to influence the course of foreign events, to support a particular political leader, to change or get past certain laws within foreign countries. And this is why it was often called in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, the Department of Dirty Tricks, because we had this ability to do things to foreigners, to foreign countries,

• 18:41Speaker 03

  to foreign governments, that we, that the Constitution forbade from doing to US citizens, because it was supposed to redound to our national interest. Even if it's not a national security threat. If it, if it supports US national champions on the corporate side, or it allows Americans to have cheap gas so they can afford middle-class homes and middle-class lifestyle, it's possible that our whole, you know, 20th century magic of, of the American dream was only made possible because we have this capacity through our foreign policy establishment, the blob, to do these dirty tricks abroad. The issue is, is with the advent of populism, really starting in 2016, with the events

• 19:24Speaker 03

  of the Philippines election in 2016, the events of Brexit, and the events of Donald Trump's election, followed in short succession by Bolsonaro in Brazil, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Marine Le Pen's rise in France, the Vox party's rise in Spain, AFD's rise in Germany. You had these foreign policy establishment institutions who felt threatened that the entire rules-based international order would collapse because everyone's pursuing their own nationalism. And so, all of these international entanglements, these international financial relationships, this international influence over national events would all fall away, and it was only happening because of free speech on the internet.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  So they brought to bear this very powerful censorship apparatus, really starting in 2014. And it started with the military and the intelligence and the diplomatic corps. These same blob institutions created this architecture, initially to stop Russian propaganda after Crimea in 2014. NATO developed this doctrine called "from tanks to tweets," that NATO was no longer primarily about tank warfare, it was about controlling tweets, because tweets are how people get elected. And at the time NATO was saying that the biggest threat to NATO was that people would

• 20:48Speaker 03

  vote their way out of NATO, or would vote to not give funds for foreign wars. That was a bigger threat than Russian aggression. So what they did is they said anyone who supports Russia, or is NATO critical, or is against the foreign policy establishment at the domestic level, is effectively operating, they're helping Russia. And so, even if they're not doing Russian disinformation, we can still use our national security powers, our national interest powers, to get them censored because they are helping an adversary state. And once that apparatus was put in place, they began to apply it to everything, to COVID, to election disinformation, to climate disinformation. And it grew to be this very all-powerful tool until, you know, as I mentioned, two

• 21:31Speaker 03

  years ago, the tide started to turn, both within the US government through Congress, and the US private sector through new freedoms on Twitter and YouTube, and the rise of, I'm sorry, on Twitter and Facebook, and even the rise of somewhat robust

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Youtube alternative ecosystem like Rumble. So now they've escalated that and they're putting pressure on countries like Brazil and regions like the EU. And all over, 140 countries now, we have these counter disinformation programs which are purely designed to stop the rise of domestic populists who might challenge the foreign policy establishment.

• 22:11Shawn Ryan?

  How many countries are falling in line with this so far?

• 22:15Speaker 03

  I mean, it's hard to give a rough estimate. Certainly, all of the countries in the EU, probably about half the countries in Latin and South America. I don't have full vision into much of Africa. I know that the disinformation programs are there and robust and they're crying for more funding. But I would say at least one to two dozen have fallen under this. Another one or two dozen they're frustrated by, I'll give you an example. So, thanks to US government funding, many of these spun out, cut out civil society institutions

• 22:59Speaker 03

  who receive funding from the Pentagon or the National Science Foundation, the sort of DARPA civilian arm, or through the State Department or USAID, do these stakeholder conferences where they will bring together their assets in the censorship industry in all the different countries. And a few months ago, they did a public Zoom call that I happened to capture, where they talked about how they brought together their Brazil ecosystem and their Philippines ecosystem. And they were frustrated that the folks in the Philippines were not willing to go as far as the folks in Brazil in terms of the counter disinformation laws they were lobbying for, the different techniques that they were willing to apply. But they brought together these multi-stakeholder

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Players from a dozen different countries censorship ecosystems, all backchanneled essentially through USAID funding or through a sort of university front, where they will, you know, literally get everyone on the same page like a magnet, so that they apply these censorship, you know, best practices to stop the rise of populist political candidates in their region. Wow. And this started in 2014, you said? 2014 is when NATO began this in Central and Eastern Europe. That was really, if you will, the sort of Agent Zero. That was sort of the, you know, if this was a sort of Ebola outbreak,

• 24:30Speaker 03

  that was sort of the lab in which it was incubated, or the monkey, you know, that first bit a human. And this was, you know, from their perspective, the State Department, USAID, the military pumped $5 billion into Ukrainian civil society to topple the democratically-elected government of Ukraine in 2014. This is Viktor Yanukovych's government. And I'm not even weighing in normatively about whether that's a good or a bad thing. But the plain fact is, is we did overthrow that government, which was democratically-elected by the Ukrainian people. We did it through the same means that were done on January 6. This was just a straight-up riot to take to the main parliament building square

• 25:11Speaker 03

  and overrun it through violence and seize control over governments. Everything that was accused of January 6 protesters, but our US embassy did it. Victoria Nuland was handing out cookies and water bottles to the militias that the State Department and USAID and all these different CIA-backed channels had been funding with billions of dollars. But they were not expecting what came next, which was this counter coup. The entire eastern side of the country declared itself to be a secessionist breakaway state.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Militarily backstopped by Russia. Crimea voted in an independent referendum to join the Russian Federation. And so the State Department, the Pentagon, NATO threw up their hands and said, "We pumped $5 billion into Ukraine and we still couldn't budge anyone living in the eastern flank, anyone in Crimea, to side with our propaganda over Russian propaganda." And so, we needed, this is, this is part of the issue with winning through propaganda. At a certain point, you can't, it starts to backfire. If, you can only turn your knob up so mu, so much on your own propaganda before people go, "Ah, that hurts my ears. I don't trust this." So this new tool had to be developed to turn down the opposition.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  So there's no way to create a sort of robust political thought leadership, to spread narratives, to circulate potentially damning or humiliating diplomatic incidents that can be exploited for political purposes. We need a censorship mechanism at the technological level, and we needed a censorship ecosystem of, of personnel who could back-channel between the tech companies and the blob, you know, the diplomat, diplomatic defense intelligence apparatus. And so these were both developed effectively in tandem in 2014. The Pentagon was already working on these AI censorship super-weapons to stop ISIS. You know, this was a technique called natural language processing, which is this ability

• 27:13Speaker 03

  to basically scan the entire internet, all tweets, all Facebook posts, all YouTube videos. Because everything we say on YouTube, since 2009 or whatnot, has gone into closed captioning at YouTube. So there's a transcript, where the AI can read that transcript and it can scan for keywords, and they can do sentiment analysis to, to evaluate through, essentially AI pre-crime analysis, whether or not you support or oppose the thing you're talking about.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  And/or whether you're talking about something that's sensitive from NATO's perspective. Some Ukrainian oligarch who's on CIA payroll does something embarrassing and Russian YouTube videos or Facebook posts or tweets are amplifying that. Well, that can all be turned down so that nobody knows about the story because the AI is now reading it. They developed that in the counterterrorism space because if you recall, beginning in 2014 in the US, there was this threat of homegrown ISIS threats. There began to be these terrorist attacks like the Garland attack in Texas, which turned out to have its own quite peculiar elements.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  But there was this threat that Americans may be being recruited on Facebook and on YouTube and on Twitter by ISIS propagandists. So we needed a technique to be able to scan the internet for all pro-ISIS phraseology, the terms they use, the prefixes, the suffixes, the slang, the hashtags. And so that began to be coordinated out of something called a newly set up wing of the US State Department, really its first ever formal censorship subdivision. It was called the Global Engagement Center. And I bring this up because it plays into the story later on here. And this is set up by a guy named Rick Stengel, who was the undersecretary for Public Affairs,

• 29:06Speaker 03

  bragged that he was Obama's chief propagandist. It's basically the interstitial between state propaganda from the US State Department and the media. And they began to use these technologies to scan and ban ISIS. But then after the Crimea incident, this began to be all sort of Russian propaganda. But then anytime a populist candidate began to win or gain popularity in Europe, they said Marine Le Pen is advantaging Russia with the plank she's running on. She wants to get rid of the US sanctions on Russian energy. So we can scan and ban for all sentiment that supports Marine Le Pen, as well as any

• 29:44Speaker 03

  US citizens who amplify Marine Le Pen in the US and give her political support there. So everyone got caught in the crossfire of this effectively military complex that was bent on achieving its goals.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 31:03Shawn Ryan?

  How is the... How exactly are we influencing all these other countries to... to jump on board with this?

• 31:10Speaker 03

  A number of means, so...

• 31:12Shawn Ryan?

  Do they know that we're influencing them?

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Well, certainly the... the connective touchpoints certainly do, because... I'll give you an example. Brazil. So, Brazil has this tyrant judge, de Moraes, right? This is the current war between Elon and this... you know, the head of Brazil's censorship court. It's called the TSE. It's a sub-court of Brazil's Supreme Court, the STF. And so, a lot of people see the actions of this one tyrant judge, who basically has this ability to issue an edict, and then anything... anything posted online becomes instantly criminal. Sitting parliamentarians in Brazil call the current president, Lula, a thief. And the judge says, "You're not allowed to say that."

• 31:59Speaker 03

  The person faces criminal judgment for demeaning the current president. Going after journalists, going after politicians, going after ordinary civilians by any edict. But there's a whole censorship substructure to what de Moraes is involved in. There is advisory councils, there is a whole coterie of flaggers who propose the things to be flagged, who do the technical work of the AI scanning, who do the narrative network mapping. If they want to, say, anyone who challenges the results of Brazil's 2022 election, well, they need these outside institutions to create this whole narrative network map.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Well, these are US-funded and US-backed channel institutions who provide the entire substructure to the head of the snake. The analogy that I've been giving on this is it's a Brazilian spider, but the spider web was laid by the US State Department, USAID, the National Down for Democracy, and go through all their roles, and the fangs of it are star-spangled spangs. This is the US trying to take, the US State Department trying to take out its political opposition in Brazil. They went to war with Bolsonaro, they called him Trump of the tropics, they're waging the same campaign against Bolsonaro that they did through this, through their own intermediaries

• 33:25Speaker 03

  to take out Trump during his term, to censor him on the internet there, and that they're using to censor Trump today through their work with the EU. They're just doing that in Brazil to stop Bolsonaro. This story goes back at least six years to the US State Department's involvement in censoring Brazil. So, almost all Bolsonaro supporters in the run-up to the 2018 Brazilian election were

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Deemed to be populist by the US State Department. Populism, again, is this watchword where this Department of Dirty Tricks power that I laid out all hinges on this word democracy. We have this concept that democracy is this set of democratic institutions and that if the popular will opposes these democratic institutions, we call that an attack on democracy because even if the people want it, it still violates these safeguards that are held in place. This is how we say we don't let another Adolf Hitler rise to power is because we don't allow demagogues appealing to the masses to take democracy outside of the bumper cars of the bowling lane.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  And so this is our sort of special set of skills the blob has. If we can't get them on terrorism grounds or military grounds, this is part of how we waged the Cold War. Communism, even if a country is minding its own business, we said that, well, it's a communist structure that's depriving the people of their yearnings for democracy. And so we get to play God, we get to use our CIA and our State Department and our USAID and our paramilitary-backed channels to do a top-down military coup, as we did in Brazil in 1964, or a bottom-up color revolution, as we did in Ukraine in 2014 and dozens of other countries. But populism is the new communism.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Populism is the new counterterrorism. This is something I think that a lot of conservatives who may be listening really need to process because this CIA, State Department, USAID military apparatus had the support of the Republican Party throughout the entire 20th century as it was toppling left-wing socialist, left-wing communist governments. It was not until Trump won in 2016, or Brexit, four or five months before that, and then the rise around the world of these right-wing populist politicians from Abe in Japan to Modi in India to Bolsonaro in Brazil to that whole European axis I laid out that stretches all the way from France into the Baltics.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  That there became this flip. The CIA, the State Department, they still oppose left-wing socialism, communism. But the biggest threat that they see is right-wing populism. Neoliberalism, the blobs sort of, you know, financial motto can be flanked from either side, from its left-wing socialist flank or from its right-wing nationalist flank. And so this is why they went after Bolsonaro and tried to stop him from winning in 2018. Bolsonaro supporters were censored on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, all the major platforms between 2017 and 2018. So they started to take to end-to-end encrypted chats in order to circumvent that censorship. So that's WhatsApp and Telegram are the main players there.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  And also, for folks who are familiar with this alternative social media platform, Gab, which was one of the sort of early pre-parlor, you know, social media alternatives, one of their first early demographic bases, other than people in the US, were Brazilians because they had nowhere to go because they were censored because of all this government pressure on them in Brazil. But they took to WhatsApp and Telegram, and I did a report on this two and a half years ago, my foundation published it, about this strange web in 2018 that was established, funded to the tune of millions of dollars jointly by three government and quasi-government

• 37:32Speaker 03

  agencies, the US State Department, USAID, and the National Down for Democracy. You know, the State Department is, formally sets, you know, US foreign policy for the region. You have USAID, which is supposed to be this independent agency, but it's essentially logistical support for the State Department. It's sort of plausibly deniable support for either the State Department, the Pentagon, or the CIA. You know, many times USAID has been busted as a CIA front, and we can go through that if, you know, if your audience is curious. It's a, it's kind of an incredible tale of how much, I'm actually curious if you in your time, either in the SEALs or as a contractor, ever ran into USAID as a strange player in

• 38:16Speaker 03

  some of the, some of the side stories. But the fact is, is these institutions pump millions of dollars into, in the US, into

• 38:27Speaker 03

  Brazilian institutions. So they pump the money into Brazilian university centers, who do thought leadership on countering disinformation. Into legal scholars in Brazil, who formulate policy and help develop the legislative anti-misinformation laws, or anti-fake news laws. Who serve on the advisory councils. Who essentially help make this consensus decision about who should be censored by the Brazilian TSE. And even many of the partnered flaggers to actually target who should be censored in Brazil are US State Department and USAID-funded, or US National Endowment for Democracy-funded institutions. Like the Atlantic Council, for example,

• 39:12Speaker 03

  which actually serves as one of the trusted flaggers of the Brazilian TSE court. De Moraes, his court has about 70 of these trusted flaggers in his program. And one of them is the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its board. It receives annual funding every year from the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. Annual funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a CIA cutout. It receives millions of dollars from US taxpayers. It was also partnered with Burisma, by the way, this NATO think tank. It has seven CIA directors on its board.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  And lo and behold, it is serving as the deputy arm of De Moraes in Brazil. Even creating network maps of who to be censored. Same thing with institutions like the Wilson Center. Same thing with institutions like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which, by the way, is the institution that was run from 2014 to 2021 by a man named Bill Burns. You may be familiar with that name. Bill Burns is the current director of the CIA. He left the Carnegie Endowment to run the CIA. And the Carnegie Endowment is, you know, has its fingerprints all over the, this Brazil censorship situation. And it gets worse than that. We have formal government programs now that, that

• 40:36Speaker 03

  are essentially coordinated, quarterbacked by the State Department, but are sort of run at the operational level and funded by, by the State Department, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy, which is this CIA cutout, you know, basically created in 1983 when our then CIA director was complaining that the CIA had lost too many powers after the Church Committee hearings in 1976. So we needed to do CIA work through a non-CIA entity called the National Endowment for Democracy. Hunter Biden was on the chairman's advisory board, by the way, of the DNC branch of that. It's called the NDI, which plays a major role in the Brazil censorship situation. They created this network called the D4D, Design for Democracy in Brazil, where they sprawled

• 41:21Speaker 03

  into a spider web dozens of these high-level censorship thought leaders, advocates, activists, legal scholars. Again, this is backed down by a CIA cutout in order to, to get these censorship laws passed and provide this, the political and media support for them to take the heavy-handed action that they did. And again, just to, you know, put a button on some of this, because we can go a lot deeper into this. But if folks recall, just ahead of the 2022 election, where Bolsonaro lost in a razor-close, nail-biter, you know,

• 42:01Speaker 03

  election, very similar to our, to our own in the previous, in the 2020 cycle, all three, all three wings of the blob, the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon, all went down to Brazil to intermediate that election. The State Department pulled strings to Taiwan Semiconductor to stop giving semiconductor supplies, stop prioritizing the United States, and give those supplies to Brazil so that, so that essentially Brazilian election officials could use three to four times more voting machines than they'd ever used. Bolsonaro said, "I don't trust these voting machines." The State Department had just spent US taxpayer dollars and deprioritized our access

• 42:45Speaker 03

  to semiconductors during a semiconductor crisis shortfall to give it to a foreign country so that they could have electronic voting machines for their election? Why is that in US national interest? Why should truck drivers making 50K a year have to pay their income tax for electronic voting machines that the Brazilians didn't even ask for? Then Bill Burns, the CIA director, went down and personally threatened Bolsonaro not to, quote, "cast doubt" on the electronic voting machines that the State Department had just rammed down their throat. And then Lloyd Austin, the head of the Pentagon, went down to Brazil to talk to the Brazilian military to say, "If there's a disputed election result, don't you dare side with Bolsonaro because there'll be military repercussions. Much of your Brazilian military supplies and infrastructure and training comes from

• 43:30Speaker 03

  the US." Wow. So that was just at the technical level of the election. What I'm describing is all the censorship that went into that and that happened in the aftermath as part of this transitional justice campaign to stop Bolsonaro's reemergence. Who is the head of all of this? Where does this all come from? Well, there's a peculiar government program that's called the... again, this is all intermediate through the interagency, right? So there's going to be some National Security Council vision for what to do in the Western Hemisphere and what to do in Brazil in particular because you have all these different elements. You have the Pentagon elements, you have the State Department elements, you have the USAID elements. All these are different permanent seats on the National Security Council.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  They need to be coordinated through the NSC process. So technically, I would say it's, you know, it's the NSC Western Hemisphere, folks. But to make this sort of really simple, there's a formal government program. It's called the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening. Say that again. Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening. How nice. How quaint. How understated. And, you know, this has been a US government, State Department program, which is co-funded and largely funded by USAID, in order to help foreign countries develop more robust election, you know, election infrastructure.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  And to make sure their own internal political systems are strengthened democratically, which effectively means to make sure they're more of a vassal of the US State Department, so that anything that happens in that country's internal politics do not undermine the State Department's vision for the development of that region. Now, starting in 2021, SEPS, the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, began to really, really add this censorship disinformation component to its international diplomacy toolkit. This idea that where we previously said, you know, democracy and political process

• 45:37Speaker 03

  strengthening meant providing voice to minority, you know, minority factions in that country's government, who were underrepresented by the will of majority or protections for the press. Now, of course, all these things are quite cynical. Oftentimes, the State Department will be working with those, you know, particular identity faction groups, or it will be funding, you know, USAID-funded media, or US Agency for Global Development-funded media to influence that. So we make sure there are press protections, there are civil society protections. Again, all of this is to protect our own control over that country. But they began to say that as part of this political process strengthening, you have to have robust counter-disinformation, counter-misinformation measures in your country in order

• 46:21Speaker 03

  to be in line with best practices for democracy. And so SEPS has this sprawling Brazil program, which coordinates with the National Endowment for Democracy, you know, this NDI, where Hunter Biden was the chairman's advisory committee, this Design for Democracy Coalition that I was just talking about. All these different university centers, all these different government-funded media ecosystem players, all these different fact-checkers, all these different AI scan and banners, all these different disinformation flaggers, all these different legal scholars, are all in this umbrella network under SEPS, and this is playing out as the House Foreign Affairs Committee has done absolutely nothing.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  They had just took out a US national champion, X. The State Department's job is to protect the welfare of US citizen interests, US corporate interests, and US national interests in the region. They just see Starlink's assets, that's a major component of our military, frankly, in terms of its interface with telecom. They just banned our soft power projection of X into the country, but that is because X is caught in a proxy war between the State Department and Bolsonaro. You can bet if Bolsonaro had banned Twitter 1.0 because too many Lula supporters

• 47:43Speaker 03

  were using Twitter and were outflanking Bolsonaro on Twitter 1.0 in 2021, if he had banned X, how fast Brazil would have been kicked off the dollar? How fast? International sanctions, blockades to their trade supplies, trade embargoes, private sector retrenchment of investments. The whole litany of our Department of Dirty Tricks toolkit would have been crammed down Bolsonaro so fast if he had done that. But that's because they wanted him to lose. They wanted Lula to win. It's as simple as that. What's happening in Brazil has really much less to do with free speech

• 48:25Speaker 03

  as it has to do with the State Department and the blobs designs for who needs to win that election, and they also need to do it cheaply. It's very expensive to constantly manage each new election. And so they have this policy of transitional justice and stabilization so that after the State Department overthrows a country or runs tens of millions of dollars to a political opposition and they barely win an election, we have this new policy of transitional justice where we arrest all the opposition leaders. Bolsonaro right now is under countless indictments, just as Trump is here. And they censor all the forces around that

• 49:06Speaker 03

  so they prevent the mobilization and the coordination of that party's resurgence. They can't get their messaging out, their media is all banned. And so that way, it's cheap to manage. You might need to spend $50 million, $100 million to rig it in 2018, but in 2020, because after the stabilization process plays out, you might only need $10 million because their polling's so low, because all their media is banned and all their politicians are arrested. This is a very nasty playbook.

• 49:34Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think the US is more concerned with the censorship of other countries at this particular point in time than it is on the US itself?

• 49:44Speaker 03

  No, but both are happening in tandem. We're doing this with foreign countries in order to contort the economics of the US platforms, to force them to put the pre-22 censorship mechanisms back in place. And so, you know, I call this the boomerang tactic. There's two ways that the blob can get you. One is with a knife. They're foreign policy institutions. State Department's not allowed to operate at home. CIA is not allowed to operate at home. USAID is not allowed to operate at home. The Pentagon is not allowed to operate at home. They are intelligence, they're national security, they're supposed to project outwards for the benefit of US citizens. But they can knife you in a couple of ways.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  For example, you can totally invert this intelligence restriction on doing intelligence work against your own citizens, simply by putting the word "counter" in front of it. You say, "It's counterintelligence. This is what they did to Trump. This is the whole, you know, Peter Strzok, the head of counterintelligence at the FBI, and all the indictments and tens of millions of dollars in legal fees that that incurred." Is they say, "Well, we're not allowed to, you know, we're not allowed to go after you for what you say, but if you are connected to Russians, or we think or suspect you might be, we can open a counterintelligence probe into you, so we can spy on you, just like the CIA spies on foreign citizens, just to see if you're working with foreign spies."

• 51:13Speaker 03

  And there's several other of these sort of, you know, knife tactics where they can get you directly at home. But what the other weapon they have is they can fashion a boomerang. You know, a boomerang is a toy, but it's also a weapon. You know, you can put the blade on it, and you can send it out, and then bring it back. And this is what they're doing in all these foreign countries, to bring X to heel, and to put pressure on Facebook to make sure they continue their censorship work. Which is that, in order to, because we're restricted by the First Amendment here, and there's only so much that you can do politically, there's only so much leverage that you can actually apply, given the economics of the social media ecosystem.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  And this is why, by the way, they started it this right away, right away after the 2016 election. And I've gone over some of these lectures in my own subscriber lectures that I've done, where I've gone into these 2017 consensus building meetings that were being done in early 2017 about how to stop Trump's, how to kneecap Trump politically and stop him from getting reelected by changing the economics of the news industry, by making sure that advertising revenue can't flow to unfiltered alternative news websites, and that tech platforms are held accountable for misinformation so that they themselves get hit with billions

• 52:38Speaker 03

  of dollars in boycotts, or advertiser withdrawals, or regulatory pressure, or crisis PR, in order to ban Trump's representation in the US on social media. Because their whole autopsy was that Trump only won because of social media. He didn't get a single print media endorsement, you know, he was, you know, 97 to 3, disfavorable coverage on TV, but David Brock and Cher Blue published this January 2017 autopsy that they only lost the election because of unfiltered alternative news on the internet. And so, very quickly after that, you started to have these major blob figures, you know, some of them, you know, like one of the conferences I went over was a conference that was held in Bratislava.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  It was held in Slovakia at the Globsec, Global Security Conference, and it involved Michael Chertoff and a guy named, you know, Christopher Walker. At the time, Walker was at the National Doubt for Democracy, which is the CIA cutout, and is currently at USAID, which is CIA funding conduit and State Department funding conduit. And Michael Chertoff is, you know, he was the first head of DHS. DHS was the first government agency to establish the censorship infrastructure, as I mentioned at the start of this, through CISA, and then the Disinformation Governance Board, and they played the quarterback of what the state, you know, everything from the State Department to the FBI, to the Pentagon, there was this whole, whole of government,

• 54:06Speaker 03

  whole of society thing that DHS quarterbacked. But you had the first full-term head of DHS. By the way, Michael Chertoff was also the head of Freedom House, this major State Department, sort of CIA free speech NGO, which was doing, I think, noble work up until it switched to censorship, because it would try to pry open foreign countries so that... US-funded media or US-supported media could flourish there. But Michael Chertoff was also the chairman of BAE Systems, the largest military contractor in NATO. This is a major, major, major node of the military industrial complex, teamed up with the soft power arm of the CIA, and they bring into the room with them the heads of public

• 54:50Speaker 03

  policy, so the censorship policies, for Central and Eastern Europe, from Google and Facebook. And they basically threaten them in this, in so many words, in sort of veiled cloak terms, that, that US, effectively, you know, USAID and the National Down for Democracy and DHS and the military complex, and this is the pedigree they're bringing to this, that these companies better start censoring unfiltered alternative news. That was the literal descriptor they used, because it was giving rise to populism, both in the US with Donald Trump, in the UK with Brexit, and with the rise of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe, and most especially at the time, in Eastern Europe, where NATO

• 55:31Speaker 03

  feared that everything from Ukraine to Georgia to Moldova to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, were all falling under Russian influence, and Russia was secretly, or not secretly, you know, supporting or redounded to their interest to have these populist parties rise to power, who didn't want to give the money to NATO, or who wanted to have cheap energy from Russian gas instead of expensive LNG from North America. And so, you have this US government plot, right out the gate, explicitly to contort the economics of the American news ecosystem, to make it inhospitable, to make it bankrupting to the bottom line for Facebook not to play ball, for Twitter 1.0 not to play ball, for

• 56:14Speaker 03

  YouTube not to play ball, lest the full force of the US government, either directly or through these cloak-and-dagger back channels that they represented, would make it economically impossible for them to avoid falling under the government boot heel. And lo and behold, in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg tried to reverse a lot of this. He was, Facebook did a lot of censorship in 2018 and 2019. 2017, 2018, and 2019, Mark Zuckerberg starts giving public speeches that he thought censorship on Facebook was going too far. But then he got hit with a $60 billion advertiser boycott. That is, Facebook lost $60 billion in market cap in 48 hours from this boycott. So then he folded like a lawn chair and gave them everything they wanted.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  That was five years before his letter, just weeks ago, to Chairman Jordan, that he regretted folding to government pressure. That's how long he had misgivings about this.

• 57:09Shawn Ryan?

  Real quick, how was the, so how was the government controlling the ad spend, the advertisers?

• 57:16Speaker 03

  Well, part of this is known, and part of this can be, the full answer can be easily obtained by our representatives in Congress. I'll give you one example of this. In 2021, I believe it was February 2021, about a month into Biden's term, literally, brand-new, you know, seat barely warm at the State Department, USAID desk there. USAID put out this 97-page disinformation primer about how to coordinate their whole of society counter-disinformation assets, their censorship tentacles into the whole of society. Again, the government tentacles into their private, into the tech platform personnel,

• 57:59Speaker 03

  their tentacles into the civil society organizations, their tentacles into the media. And 31 times in this 97-page document, they cite advertisers and external engagement to advertising companies and advertiser, you know, revenue spend pools and advertising exchanges in order to cut off the money flow to social media platforms and independent websites who don't take the counter, the best practices counter-disinformation, you know, codes that they lay out. So you have a, now... That was obtained through a lawsuit from America First Legal.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  But that's a formal US government program dedicated to killing news websites, to killing their advertiser revenue. And it's all there in black and white that you have the US government contorting the private sector flow of dollars between independent arms-length parties, news websites and tech platforms, and advertisers. And by the way, all these advertisers are almost wholly dependent, I shouldn't say wholly dependent, but they are hugely dependent on US government contracts. Four of the-- How so?

• 59:16Speaker 03

  Well, take for example, there are four major advertising agency conglomerates. These are places like Publicis and Omnicron. And they all have billions of dollars in government contracts for their advertising spend. That is, so one of them has a $4 billion Pentagon contract to do all the different advertising spend for US Army recruiting. They have billions of dollars in contracts for HHS to do the government-- they have billions of dollars in programming for the Department of Education. If they don't play ball with the government demands on one side of government,

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  they can potentially lose to a competitor advertising agency for those contracts. And we know that these agencies are concerned about this because-- and thank Jim Jordan for this. Jim Jordan, a few months ago, got the Facebook files, the sort of Congress subpoenaed equivalent of the Twitter files that Elon Musk disclosed beginning in 2022. And in the Facebook files, Nick Clegg, who is the head of public policy at Facebook-- His internal communications with the lieutenants at Facebook were concerned about these Biden administration demands to censor all Facebook speech about COVID origins,

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  or COVID orthodoxy, or COVID, you know, rollout, enforcement rollout. And Nick Clegg, the head of censorship policies, is telling his censorship policy team, "Listen, I know we don't want to do this, I know it's ugly, but we need to be receptive, we need to think creatively about ways to be receptive to the Biden administration censorship pressure here, because we have bigger fish to fry with the Biden administration on multiple policy fronts." Meaning, and as I mentioned, this is because they need the State Department's help. I got these calls when I was running the cyber desk at State. I got a call one day from nine Google lobbyists, who told me, nine of them on a call with me,

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  telling me that the EU Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act is the number-one existential threat to Google's business model over the next five years. And so to represent U.S. national interests, the State Department should consider, you know, reformulating U.S. negotiating posture or policy asks to our EU counterparts in order to protect Google's business model. This happens in every region all over the world, and it is mission-critical. Again, Google said that was the number-one existential threat to their business model, and they needed big daddy governments' help to protect them. So Facebook is quelling the internal rebellion about losing sovereignty of their own free-speech policies to the U.S. government despite our First Amendment.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  And the head of the team is telling them, "Listen, we gotta do it, because we need their help on multiple policy fronts that have nothing to do with COVID. And those are bigger fish to fry, so we will censor this in order to get that." Now, I don't have, for example, the USAID, you know, communications. They actually attach, as an appendix in this primer, examples of external engagement to the advertising companies. We don't have that as a public document. Hey, Jim Jordan, if you're listening. Hey, James Comer at Oversight, if you're listening. Hey, House Foreign Affairs Committee, who oversees USAID, if you're listening. Representative Michael McCaul.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  Get those documents, subpoena them, bring these people in for transcribed interviews, hold the hearings. The American people have a right to know about how their own news is being controlled by their own US federal government, despite what we are supposed to be told is the protection of the First Amendment.

• 1:03:12Shawn Ryan?

  Do these representatives know this is all happening?

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  Certainly, some of them know some of it.

• 1:03:18Shawn Ryan?

  Who knows what?

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Well, there have been, I think, about three hearings in House Weaponization on government's role in censorship. There have been, I believe, two or so hearings in House Oversight. There have been two or three hearings in House Homeland Security. Those are all domestic-facing. Those are about what DHS is doing on censorship, what FBI is doing on censorship, to some extent what the National Science Foundation is doing on censorship, because that's a major funding artery of this. But no one has yet touched the State Department, or USAID, or the National Endowment for Democracy, or this censorship mercenary army of soft-power NGOs, our swarm army of the blob, in order to influence the course

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  of domestic politics in foreign countries, doing it to our own.

• 1:04:10Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Mike, you're going a little too fast for me to comprehend. I want to go back to the advertisers, the advertising agencies. I believe you said there's about four of them?

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:22Shawn Ryan?

  And so, I do understand government contracting, so they bid on the government contract to advertise for the Army or the Navy, or whoever, whatever recruiting. What about all the other advertisers that are in there? What kind of advertisers are we talking? Are we talking about major corporations like Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe's, like these kind of advertisers?

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  Well, it's unclear the extent to which individual advertisers are...

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  Backchanneling or are beholden, because these are things for the House Foreign Affairs Committee to turn up. What we know is that many of these blue-chip corporations play a significant part in the private-sector quadrant of the whole society. So again, getting back to this whole society framework, that's not my framework, by the way. That is the US federal government framework. Two years ago, I posted, everyone can see this on my X account, it's @mikebencyber, simply run a search for my name in the phrase "whole society." I did like a two-and-a-half-minute supercut of just government officials citing the whole society doctrine. Sometimes they cite it so often, they apologize at the conference because everyone's so sick of hearing this. But what it means is government, private sector, civil society, and media.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  So they get private-sector partners to help the government censorship goal. They get the universities to help the censorship goal. And so, for example...

• 1:05:46Shawn Ryan?

  So all these advertisers are on board with what's happening? Because my question is, is the pool of, how do I frame this? As the pool of content, or whatever you want to call it, platforms, content, voices that they can advertise on, it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller, correct?

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:06:14Shawn Ryan?

  And so, you would think that some of these private-sector advertisers, like some of the companies that I just called out, would be, they gotta be tired of this shit because they're losing places to advertise.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  Well, this is, yes, well, this is one of the open questions, is how many of these are willing participants and enthusiastic? How many are completely against it and only doing it because they feel economically beholden? And how many are sort of neutral and don't know? But I'll give you some examples to sort of fill in the gaps here. So the State Department works with these entities like the Global Disinformation Index, who folks may have heard of, you know, which basically does, you know, ratings of all the different independent news sites and gets them blacklisted from the advertisers. NewsGuard is a major player in this space. NewsGuard, you know, developed this, you know, news nutrition labels to sort of do

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  for, uh, do for websites what nutrition labels on milk cartons do. You know, they give you the breakdown of how much fat and carbs and protein is. And they, they, they said that they set themselves up to do news nutrition labels for, uh, for new, food nutrition labels for news so that advertisers would be able to have a sense of how high information integrity this news site was and if it was a misinformation website or a misinformation social media account. So that, and they, and they announced this before they even launched their first commercial product, is that the intent of this was to deprive advertising revenue.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  They literally created a for-profit censorship product of vast databases, over 10,000 websites, might even be 20,000 at this point, websites all ranked by whether or not they are misinformation or not. You can guess where that falls. Literally spin the globe and I can tell you who in that, which country's media, you know, is, is going to be, have a low, you know, a low rating by NewsGuard simply by who the State Department wins the election. Literally run a Google search for threat to democracy, you know, with the name Bolivia, Denmark, you name it and you can, you can see who will be, who will be censored.

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  And NewsGuard, its whole business model is selling censorship whitelist labels to the advertising conglomerates to stop advertising revenue from flowing to websites like Breitbart or OAN or, you know, or any number of pro-Trump websites here in the U.S. or pro-Brexit websites in the U.K. or pro-Vox Party websites in Spain or pro-Mateo Salvini websites in Italy. You can, the AFD party, what, you can go through the list. It is as predictable as a clock.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

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• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  Now, but who's, who's on NewsGuard's Board of Advisors? Let me give you a list. General Michael V. Hayden, former head of the CIA, former head of the NSA, former four-star general, Anders Fog Rasmussen, the former head of NATO from 2009 until Crimea in 2014 during the Obama administration. Rick Stengel, the guy who founded the Global Engagement Center at the State Department that I just, that I just, you know, mentioned earlier, that this, this, this start of the censorship spider web at the State Department. And Tom Ridge, the former head of DHS. So on the Board of Advisors of, of this key institution who is get, who is doing the, the white label censorship database

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  so that advertisers can't provide advertising revenue to, to you or to anyone who, who they deem, you know, effectively a populist, it's being backchanneled by the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, a four-star general, the head of NATO, the head of DHS, and the head of the State Department censorship web. Back in the day, we used to call this Operation Mockingbird. And by the way, a few years ago, they got a $750,000 Pentagon grant. Now nominally, that was for foreign-facing work, but the Pentagon contractor, they have the apex predators of the CIA, the NSA, the State Department, DHS, and NATO itself. And they are determining

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  whether or not Breitbart or Gateway Pundit can get...

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  can get access to a arm's length independent transaction with a random advertiser. But again, if you understand it through the lens of the blob, and again, just go back to what I just said about 2017, when representatives from USAID, National Down for Democracy, DHS, NATO military contractors were all lining this up and saying, this has to be done to preserve the liberal rules-based international order because of populist rise in the EU, we're going to have Brexit's going to give rise to Fregxit and Gregxit and Italyxit and Spexit, so the EU's going to come undone, so NATO's going to come undone. And as I've said, it's, they described it like if unless this CIA, Pentagon, State Department back

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  channeled sprawling censorship apparatus is set up, it would be like the ending scene in Fight Club where the credit card companies all come crashing down and everything's reset to zero because none of the international institutions are supported by any of the countries who are formerly a party to it. How far along are we here?

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  We're in the late adolescent stage. When I started crying about this in late 2016, early 2017, it was the bait, it was the infant stage. And there were things that could have been done now to stop this that would prevent it from having taken the maturity that it did. And it grew from that infant stage into this sprawling network as it became funded by the Pentagon, as it became funded more and more by NATO and by the State Department and USAID and by all the different domestic government agencies. And it grew to this adolescent size. And now it's getting pushed back. You know, there's a little bit of arrested development domestically right now since Elon acquired it, since there's been congressional

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  pressure, since there's been civil legal pressure, and since there's been media pressure with more and more people being educated about some of these drivers. But as I said, they have these They're trying to usher it along to full maturity by going beyond the forebounds of the continental United States. They are now bringing in their global pressure ecosystem in order to stop these global social media platforms from being able to operate internationally unless they bend the knee. Give you an example, this EU Digital Services Act, which NATO has been the main thought leader behind, because NATO thought the biggest threat to NATO was the wrong people winning

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  elections within NATO countries, and so they pushed the EU to pass this through. They have this, they have this sort of safe harbor, if you will, to get out of the existential punishment to X and Facebook and YouTube and TikTok and any large social media platform that operates there. Because the punishment is, if you do not go through with our stipulated disinformation compliance, you either are forced out of the EU, we will ban your app from the, you know, from the, people won't be able to use it there, or you have to pay 6% of your global revenue to the EU. Global?

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  Global revenue, global revenue, yes. Now, you know, most SMP companies don't operate at a 6% profit. You can imagine what a, you know, or barely operate at that. So you can imagine what a 6% tax on global revenue does. It's bankrupting. Uh huh. And so you either have to pay the bankruptcy, the fee that bankrupts you, or you have to do disinformation compliance. Well, how, what does the disinformation compliance component look like? Well, one of the safe harbors is by providing, essentially delegating it to these independent experts, independent researchers, you know, who are all counter disinformation experts and academics.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  I probably don't need to tell you if folks have been following, you know, to this point, who those people are and who they are connected to and whose interests they represent. This is why you see so many CIA analysts, when they leave the agency, there's now a brand-new career track for them. You know, they used to go on to be university professors, or maybe they'd, you know, um...

• 1:15:57Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go through for the people that haven't been following.

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  Well, this field of counter, of disinformation studies is what they call it. Because the main point that I'm driving at here is Elon fired, you know, everyone said, Elon, you fired 85% of the company. How is it still working just as well, in fact, even better than it worked? How can any major company fire 85% of its workforce and actually do better than it was doing before, let alone not suffer any setbacks or hiccups? Well, the answer is because so much of the ranks of Twitter 1.0 were all of these back channels, all of these trust and safety filter mechanisms, all these different touchpoints to all these different stakeholder interests for influencing the algorithm.

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  And it turns out, if you're just a free speech company, you don't need them. But the problem is, is, and in their own words, and my foundation, FFO, you know, published a huge report on this a few months ago, where five of the major censorship industry insiders were all on a Zoom call, and they complained that when Elon took over X, and then Zuckerberg followed to some extent with some of the changes he made at Facebook and IG, that they lost the relationships it took years for them to develop. They lost the hooks into those companies to make sure that this narrative about mail and ballots gets censored, this narrative about COVID gets censored, this narrative about climate gets censored, this narrative about the Ukraine war gets censored.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  Personnel is policy.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  Whatever your, you know, a social media company says its policy is, it doesn't matter if they don't have the personnel to enforce it. In fact, even the policies themselves are set by the personnel. And so this is why you see so many former CIA, you know, agents or analysts in the ranks of these content moderation teams. Because part of what the CIA does is counter disinformation. Part of what the special forces, why you see so many, you know, former military people or former State Department people is controlling the information environment. And again, that used to be primarily through propaganda, turning up the knob. But since this El Dorado goldmine of soft power influence through censorship has opened up to the IC and to the State Department,

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  to the military, this is now, you know, where the game is. Because you win by default. You don't need to, you don't need to worry about whether you're win or lose because the other side can't even, can't even print a media story, let alone get a million people to see it. So this is why you have folks like, you know, Aaron Berman at Facebook, you know, huge CIA figure. This is why you have, you know, so much of this all across. And, you know, even all the way down to Reddit. You have the content moderation teams being run by Atlantic Council people, which again, seven CIA directors on its board. DHS's disinformation flagger for both the 2020 election and COVID-19 was, was the Atlantic Council, one of these core four.

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  The Atlantic Council, again, with seven CIA directors and annual funding from the State Department Pentagon. Grafica is a huge player in this space, was also partnered with DHS. Seven million dollars in Pentagon funding. It's actually incubated in the Minerva Initiative, which is the Psychological Operations Research Center of the Pentagon. So you have this whole back channel that took years between 2016, 2014, 2016, and 2022 for the Pentagon, for the CIA, for the State Department to all get in place so that the right people could be trusted to censor the right narratives or to adjust the algorithm in the right way. And bit by bit, in the past 18 months, they have been losing all of that. But the EU is their, is their savior here.

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  And this is why, again, my foundation published this several months ago. They said they'd be, they'd be in full-blown panic. For what's happening right now between Congress and the legal pressure on Elon Musk, but they can panic responsibly because they have a trick up their sleeve, which is that the EU Digital Services Act will force the restaffing of those fired representatives. It will make sure that the back channel stays in place unless the whole company gets bankrupted and shut down. And this is what they're doing in Brazil. The State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, they don't want to kill X. This is not like WikiLeaks. They don't want to just shut down the operation. Twitter, X is an essential instrument of US statecraft for US government, USAID, US

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  State Department-funded proxy groups or political groups to mobilize across the world. But they need to destabilize it because Elon is not playing ball. They need to existentially threaten its business model. They need to Balkanize the world, and so it loses its place as this multinational company. It gets confined to the tiny island that stretches between California and Florida, whereas all the other platforms are international who play ball, so they lose market share. And the whole thing goes into crisis. The whole thing goes into bankruptcy. Elon is a triple-digit billionaire, at least for now, and so he's been able to sustain

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  more vicissitudes than Mark Zuckerberg, who folded as soon as the first $60 billion advertiser boycott hit him. But they are doing this death by a thousand paper cuts, this same destabilization strategy they do when they want to financially bankrupt an authoritarian government while pumping up the assets that will take its place. So they want to corporate regime change Musk. They want to regionalize the conflict by going after Starlink assets in Brazil and potentially going after Tesla assets in Germany. I would not be surprised if something like that comes next. Until Elon's will is broken, or until they can regime change him and put someone else on the platform, and then just like that, the advertisers will come rushing back.

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  Brazil will let X back into the country. The EU will stop sending threatening nasty grams because the back channel will have been reestablished, and all is well now in the world of the blob.

• 1:22:07Shawn Ryan?

  How are the people of Brazil reacting to this?

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  Well, I think that much of this still needs to be articulated. You know, I have had some reticence about publishing some of this and doing some of the video details with the technical information because, you know, this is something that the House Foreign Affairs Committee should be taking lead on, and I've been trying to popularize this, drop as much as I can without sort of showing everything, because I'm afraid that, I mean, imagine if the FBI announced six months before they, you know, seize someone's electronic devices, whose devices they were going to seize.

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  I have had this happen multiple times where DHS and the National Science Foundation will delete evidence, they'll take down videos, now I've archived all of it, but this is something that should be pride open by House Foreign Affairs, and there's a process, I think, right now, and it could be weaponization, it could be any number of members of Congress. This is really something Congress needs to take the lead on, and so I have been, you know, I've flashed these network maps all over social media, I have been describing it in general terms, I've been naming these agencies, and I've been sort of hoping that this would be popularized through that, but I think to date, a lot of people in Brazil

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  don't know that this is happening because the media and the legal and the congressional investigation has not yet been robust, but I believe that that will change in the month after this episode airs.

• 1:23:48Shawn Ryan?

  Have you been in touch with the House Foreign Affairs Committee?

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 1:23:52Shawn Ryan?

  Do you need contact?

• 1:23:54Speaker 03

  I've been hoping. I, you know, I mentioned Elizabeth Bagley, the US Ambassador to Brazil, on the Tucker Carlson interview that I did, and I did 200 tweets naming the US Embassy in Brazil and all this as it's breaking out, but... This should not be on the civilian class to carry this torch. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, the House Intelligence Committee frankly, needs to understand this because this is soft power. You know, a lot of this is State Department, USAID, but I have no doubt, I don't have a security clearance, I can't prove this, but I know the CIA cut out outlets who are all doing this, and I know that they have purview to coordinate with the IC.

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  But a lot of this is control over the information environment. It is, you know, it is this counter disinformation work that is bread and butter of the CIA. House Intelligence should have ongoing investigations into the role of this blowback on American free speech, on American platforms. House Appropriations needs to get involved. The fact is, is the censorship industry would be shut down in a day if the hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding subsidizing this, the government funding from the Pentagon, the government funding from the National Science Foundation, the government funding from DHS, the government funding from the Justice Department, the government funding from the State Department, the government funding from USAID, and about

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  a dozen others collectively are providing hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize a censorship mercenary army. And if you don't have those mercenaries, you don't have those operations, which means you don't have that censorship. The American people are subsidizing their silence, and this goes away the moment our Congress, or a court, should the Supreme Court case go up and all this is adequately explained to nine justices, that so much of what we're seeing is really not ideological. It's just, it's operational, and it's operated through money. Because since, this is why I always call it the censorship industry.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  It is a censorship industrial complex. That's true, and you can understand it as such, or just call it the whole society. The whole society counter disinformation, the whole society censorship framework. But more than emphasizing the complex side of it, I emphasize the industry side of it. Before 2016, you could not get a full-time job getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to censor what other people say on the internet. The content moderation jobs were about getting rid of spam and child porn, and a little bit of compliance for other countries that had like hate speech laws.

• 1:26:40Speaker 03

  But it has become an industry. It has become a career track. And it is supplanting other career tracks that used to be soft power influenced jobs. If you wanted to work, you know, at the heart of the action a generation ago, you'd go to Georgetown and you would study political science, political science, or international relations. And you'd get a job on the Hill and you'd work your way up through NGOs or civil society institutions. Or you'd, you know, tag your star to a member of the House or the Senate and you'd quietly work your way up the ladder until 10, so 10 years later, you're in the action. Well, with this new advent of disinformation studies,

• 1:27:22Speaker 03

  and it's folded under so many different programs, it'll make your head spin. The communications departments have this. The applied physics departments have this for the AI censorship software component. The sociology departments have this. The psychology departments have this. The computer science programs at universities have this. The linguistics programs have this. This broad field of disinformation studies is now an advanced track golden ticket to be at the heart of the action in terms of high level, high impact, foreign policy blob positions. Because it doesn't just put you at the heart of Washington and in its own secular interests. It puts you right at the heart of a big government, big, big business and big tech.

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  Big tech is a, is surpassed Big Oil a decade ago in terms of the most moneyed lobbying interests in Washington. Google's the largest lobbying firm. The wealthiest companies in the world are all what Trump called MAGA. Something I had to fight against when I was in the, in the Trump White House. I'm saying these, they're, they're censoring the people who voted for this government. How can this government continue to support these private sector companies with all these contracts and, and, you know, just no accountability? Well, at the time, Trump was calling... And I'm not knocking this, this could have just been not knowing what's going on, but MAGA was Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon.

• 1:28:50Speaker 03

  Because that was driving the stock market. That was a lot of what Trump, I think, was re-electing on. I don't know, I'm just sort of saying this from the outside, that I suspect maybe that was one of the reasons there was less pressure on them. But the fact is, is you get fast-tracked right to the heart of this. Right at the heart of the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the, you know, the Washington DC Beltway Insider, and Google, and, and Facebook, which, you know, which is number five or seven by market cap, and, and YouTube, second most-trafficked website on the, on the entire internet, and Twitter, and Amazon, and Twitch, you get fast-tracked right at the heart of this. So, so this is now something that is a career track.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  And you invest your career in it, which means it's, you need, you want it to be an expanding pie. You want more and more power to dis, counter-disinformation work. More and more funding, because, hey, how are you gonna afford a mortgage? That, you want to advocate for more funding. You want to advocate for more delegated, delegated functions of these outside civil society institutions. You want to advocate for more of these CIA cutouts, and State Department grantees, and, and Pentagon contractors doing counter-disinformation work to do it. You hitch your star to the future of the field. And so, a message has to be sent now. It should have been sent six or seven years ago.

• 1:30:15Speaker 03

  Because if this field reaches full maturity, it will become a lobbying arm as powerful as the military-industrial complex itself. Where you need war, or else, how are you gonna afford private school?

• 1:30:30Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. If you...

• 1:30:35Shawn Ryan?

  Have you had any headway on this in Congress?

• 1:30:37Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, on many aspects of it.

• 1:30:41Shawn Ryan?

  Who's helping you?

• 1:30:42Speaker 03

  Well.

• 1:30:43Shawn Ryan?

  Who are the good guys?

• 1:30:43Speaker 03

  You know, what I would say is, places like House Weaponization and House Oversight and House Homeland Security have done very good, honest efforts within their own secular fiefdoms about abuses, abuses from DHS or the National Science Foundation or whatnot. They've done, now Weaponization is a very, very noble committee. You know, it was set up to, from what I've heard, is sort of a church committee 2.0, you know, abuses by the government, but you know, that was, the church committee in 1975,

• 1:31:23Speaker 03

  1976, went after the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the IRS, those are the four main, but it was, you know, it was mostly set up because the CIA was busted doing things like infiltrating left-wing student movements to stop the domestic anti-war movement. That's exactly what's happening right now on the other side of the political aisle. It was left-wing populists who the CIA and the Pentagon and the State Department wanted to quell because they were undermining Vietnam War funding, they were changing the minds of representatives who were getting skittish on the Vietnam War, and so, in order to avoid losing the political domain of war, we subverted our, you know, those political populist factions

• 1:32:06Speaker 03

  from the left wing who undermined that war effort. And now this is just happening from the other side of the equation. You know, it's not political. If, I mean, you can bet if, you know, if Donald Trump gave them everything they wanted on foreign policy, how quickly so much of this would dry up. You know, it's, and this is why I think, for example, Ron DeSantis does not get tarred with the same IC, Pentagon, you know, dirty diplomat fervor that Donald Trump does, because even though Ron DeSantis, he goes harder than Trump in many ways on certain domestic left-wing issues, you know, going after wokeness and DEI and all these sort of somewhat partisan issues, he, his foreign policy vision, as he's articulated, is much more in line with the blob.

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  So, so it really does come down to that, but this is where I'm getting at with. Weaponization has its hands somewhat full, I think, with everything it's taking on with the Justice Department. Which, by the way, there's this whole Justice Department element to this blob activity, if we have time for, can touch on. But what I'm getting at is, you know, weaponization is taking on, you know, everything from, you know, this ongoing COVID inquiry, to abuses by the FBI, to abuses by the Justice Department, to abuses by a dozen different government agencies. And they all have to be educated on the layout, the constellation architecture of the dark heart of it all, which is the foreign policy establishment.

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  So this is really something that we should have had a dedicated committee on six years ago. But the issue is, is, you know, it's, I do think that there could be an element of capture here. If you've seen the movie Big Short, you're familiar with that scene where, you know, the person is talking at the pool to someone from Moody's, or S and P, you know, the bond rating agencies, and the person's saying, hey, have you looked at these AAA ratings being given by the banks on these mortgage-backed securities? And the person who's tasked with oversight and accountability, I guess at the SEC, of those debt instruments, is saying, we don't really look at those anymore. Actually, I'm floating my resume to, you know, to these banks. And the person says, shouldn't this be illegal?

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  You're supposed to be oversight and accountability of the banks. So it's sort of, are you rubber-stamping these garbage mortgage-backed securities and giving them a perfect AAA rating? Because your own financial future is hitched to the star of this financial network? I have concerns about that relationship between the people who are supposed to be overseeing the blob, and the people who are funded by the blob, and who are invited to the blob cocktail parties, and who do their Aspen ski retreats with fellow blob compatriots. I understand it is a delicate, delicate tango dance, because what you're talking about is something... That has potential huge diplomatic blowback.

• 1:35:03Speaker 03

  So much of US diplomacy hinges on free speech. Because this is our cudgel to pry other countries' countries open with. This is our open society doctrine. One of the reasons that George Soros and the Open Society Foundation is such an active and effective co-sponsor of State Department or USAID activity. This notion of open society is what allows our US national interests to penetrate the region and influence the internal politics. And I'm not even saying, I don't, there's different schools of thought on that. I'm not weighing in on whether that's good or bad. I want free speech on the internet. And I want Americans to be able to determine our own elections and our own social and cultural and political discourse.

• 1:35:47Speaker 03

  And I don't want to be caught in a proxy war any longer between this foreign-facing Department of Dirty Tricks and our domestic speech at home. But what I'm getting at here is, I think what needs to be offered to people who are, who meanwhile, on both sides of the political aisle, I'm not just talking about Republicans, although they happen to be predominantly the ones who have taken this issue up, is you have to be able to articulate a firewall between the capacity to do this in other countries and its blowback on American citizens here and American platforms that are used internationally. Because I don't think you can get the political will to do heavy surgery to this, at least

• 1:36:31Speaker 03

  in the beginning, because we have this Moody's, S&P, Goldman Sachs problem, where the people who are tasked with accountability and oversight are all in good standing with these institutions. They don't want to embarrass their friends. They don't want to cause a diplomatic incident that prevents us from, you know, overthrowing a dictator in Belarus or, you know, stopping infringements on women's rights in Iran or Afghanistan. I'm not trying to tramp, I'm not trying to have the elephant trample, you know, the whole, you know, the whole wheat field here.

• 1:37:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Speaker 03

  But this specific network has to be stopped. This specific aspect, I mean, isn't propaganda enough?

• 1:37:19Speaker 03

  What really changed in 2016? Brexit happened. Trump won the election. Did... What else called for such a dramatic change in our diplomatic toolkit to tack on censorship as an entire subfield of democracy promotion? That can be taken out now without too much structural damage to our soft power work. That's not going to dramatically undercut, for the time being, what Special Forces is doing. Dramatically undercut, you know, what Voice of America is doing, or, you know, or Internews, or any of these other giant spiderwebs of US propaganda.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  But it is getting to that point, as these censorship institutions develop the tree root of linkages with all the different university centers. We have over 60 US university centers getting $100 million from the US government, funding their disinformation studies programs. So already, this tree root is vast. You cut off the National Science Foundation funding, 60 universities are going to have people saying, "Oh, my God, what am I going to do about my mortgage? Oh, my God, what about my, you know, what about my college fund for my kids? I've hitched my career to this." And it's tied into our computer science program, and our applied physics program, and our communications, and our sociology programs.

• 1:38:47Speaker 03

  And this is going to make it difficult for judges to want to rule in favor of the First Amendment, because they're going to be peripherally aware of the collateral damage they're doing economically. I saw this, again, when I was at State, and I remember seeing a stakeholder memo arguing at the time, Trump was, you know, not even really peripherally aware of all this censorship industry ecosystem, but he was aware of censorship generally, and he was trying to... Pass through reforms to Section 230, if you remember this. This is this liability safe harbor for tech platforms where if you are a neutral platform, instead of a publisher like the New York Times, you're not subject to defamation

• 1:39:29Speaker 03

  or libel lawsuits, so that you're not responsible for what every person does. You know, basically the thing that Pavel Durov, the Telegram founder, got arrested for. They said he's liable for everything on the platform. This Section 230 protection has protected Facebook and YouTube. It's what allows us to have social media. And Trump was trying to get changes done through that. He would do these all caps tweets, repeal Section 230. And I remember seeing a stakeholder memo arguing that there were about 100,000 jobs in content moderation at that time in 2020, in the content moderation space. And the economic impact of repealing Section 230 or doing dramatic changes to, you know,

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

  to the content moderation industry ecosystem would be like shutting down a coal mine in West Virginia. You know, even if you're trying to switch to green energy, look what you're going to do to Appalachia. That's the argument they were making in 2020, four years ago, about the censorship industry. So it's a lot worse now. And so, but you have to sunset these programs. Fine, you want to pass something that say, all right, it's already so vast, we already have so many in-process regulations. Okay, you got 18 months. Find a new career in 18 months. We're phasing it out. There's any number of solutions that can be pitched, but this education process has to start, and I'm grateful to be able to talk to you and your audience to help advance

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  that, because this is going to take a long time for those interests to all be represented within the Republican Party, within the elements of the Democrat Party that are amenable to this. I think Robert F. Kennedy and the Democrat faction he represents is very much on board with this. But they all are going to have, you know, one faction is going to say, well, listen, my donors are primarily coming from military contractors and, you know, we love our military. We do. We don't want the military to be handcuffed because the counter disinformation work it does there is essential to shaping the information environment. Okay, so there might be some concessions you need to make there around the sunset period or the funding or the firewalls.

• 1:41:40Speaker 03

  State Department, the IC, the private sector companies are all going to have their own stakeholder input, but these talks, the strategic imperative has to be airtight agreed to in the process that may take months or, you know, a year and a half or something for it to finally, you know, get ironed out because it's everywhere now. The roots are in all these government agencies, all these civil society institutions. So it's a huge task that we have before us, but if I can offer a sort of white pill, a sort of good news on this is I remember so vividly in early 2017, when this tone that I have now

• 1:42:24Speaker 03

  is the tone that they had when they set this up. When you had these USAID administrators and these National Endowment for Democracy folks and these major NATO military contractors and these US ambassadors and all their private sector and financial stakeholders all in rooms saying, how are we gonna, how are we gonna put this censorship apparatus in place? What we're up against is so big. These tech companies are so powerful. They're, you know, they're practically their own private empire. They have this culture of free speech. You know, they have this culture of libertarianism. We're helpless. And you would have the US, you know, these US ambassadors talking to people in Greece and in Spain and in Germany

• 1:43:06Speaker 03

  and these German regulators and these Greek regulators are saying, Google's bigger than us. We can't stop them. The US ambassadors are reassuring them to say, listen, it's gonna be a long road. It's not gonna happen overnight, but we need to begin to take the steps. We're building our consensus. We're doing it multi-stakeholder. It's whole society. It's, you know, we don't need to, you know, win the war in a day, but there's, but everyone can do their part, pull their lever, secure the buy-in, and we can bring these tech companies to heel. They will fold to us with our powers combined. We just need to start the process of combining them and the rest, you know, will fall into place or we will call an audible as we go. And I watched that process. They were doing that in 2017, talking about how

• 1:43:51Speaker 03

  they might not be able to and, you know, we really need to make this urgent. We need to pour all our effort into it. And it did take years. It did take three years for them to put in place between 2017 and 2020, the apparatus they would use for the 2020 election. And it didn't all happen at once. A little bit in 2017, a lot of it in 2018. The 2019 stuff was built on that architecture from 2018. It's the same process for dismembering it. We need to do the same thing they did to put it in drive, to put it in reverse. And it can be done, but it will be slow and painful.

• 1:44:26Shawn Ryan?

  Do you... Do you have any idea who you need to talk to? I've never seen anybody unveil it like this before.

• 1:44:33Speaker 03

  I do.

• 1:44:34Shawn Ryan?

  Who do you need to talk to?

• 1:44:38Speaker 03

  I can perhaps... Uh, let's go for a beer after this and I'll give you the full list of names.

• 1:44:43Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 1:44:46Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a quick break.

• 1:44:50Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to The Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave The Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 1:45:11Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Mike, we're back from the break. We're... I can't even remember where we left off, man. It was like drinking from the fire hose here. But, um, but what I do want to ask, are you... How many people are gonna lose internet in Brazil due to this, this attack on free speech?

• 1:45:27Speaker 03

  Well, Brazil has 200 million people and, um, X is the most popular news app in the country, even now, after the ban came down because of how many people are using, you know, using a VPN despite the threat of fines if you speak misinformation while, while using the VPN.

• 1:45:49Shawn Ryan?

  Well, the reason I'm asking is because, I mean, part of the problem that Starlink was trying to solve was all the people that live in rural communities throughout the world that don't have internet, correct?

• 1:46:03Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:04Shawn Ryan?

  Well, so what's gonna happen when all these people lose internet? And there's no other provider?

• 1:46:11Speaker 03

  Well...

• 1:46:14Speaker 03

  There's a very strange ominous case scenario, which I've talked about a little bit just on my X account, which is that China is, has just launched this new SpaceX competitor that just recently put its first constellation of its satellite mega project in play. And this Starlink competitor, Starlink market killer, is something that I would not be surprised if Brazil pursues as a Starlink substitute. Lula hitched his star to China. Bolsonaro was very hostile to Chinese soft power

• 1:46:59Speaker 03

  and Chinese investment in Brazil. And Lula, who again was backed by the US State Department, they wanted him to win. They sick the State Department, the CIA and the DOD on Bolsonaro to warn him against questioning the election. They didn't do that to Lula. And again, this whole censorship apparatus was set up by the State Department and USAID to kill Bolsonaro's political support. So they wanted Lula to win. And Lula has reversed decades of China hostilities. And immediately, as soon as he got into office, declared that effectively China is the linchpin of Brazil's new economic development plan, that they're going to be a long-distance part of China's Belt and Road Initiative.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  And they're, so they are now hitching their star to China, which means they're going to need China's, they're going to need to do favors for China, for China to do favors in kind. I would not be surprised if part of what's happening right now with taking out Starlink is an attempt to do either a favor, directly or indirectly, for their new Chinese partners or to supplant Starlink altogether with this new Chinese competitor, who is looking to get market reach and capturing the 10th-largest economy in the world would be incredible as a beachhead,

• 1:48:27Speaker 03

  not just in Brazil, but also in all of South America. But this also begs very strange questions about why it is the US State Department so vociferously backed Lula when Lula so vociferously backs?

• 1:48:43Speaker 03

  China.

• 1:48:44Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, this is wow. That's even that makes this even more alarming than it already is if I mean, with China and all the data collection that they're doing and.

• 1:49:00Shawn Ryan?

  So do you think we're going to start to see this? The Chinese, what's the name of the company?

• 1:49:05Speaker 03

  I forget, everyone can look it up. If you just literally Google China Starlink competitor, you'll see. I don't want to butcher butcher it, but I think it actually even sounds similar to Starlink.

• 1:49:15Shawn Ryan?

  But so if they get if they get more countries to do this, they're all going to start using Chinese Internet.

• 1:49:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the Huawei strategy, you know, which, you know, with capturing the IT and the 5G market.

• 1:49:26Shawn Ryan?

  So that's how bad the US wants to censor us is our number. They would they would rather have the entire world on Chinese Internet, our number one, our number one adversary. Rather than

• 1:49:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:49:40Shawn Ryan?

  than let people have free speech and use Starlink and X.

• 1:49:45Speaker 03

  It's very strange at a moment when Tim Walz was just selected as the vice presidential candidate of our current vice president running for office, meaning if Kamala were to win and something were to happen to her, Tim Walz would be the president of the United States, the commander in chief. And Tim Walz has been to China over 30 times. He's been, you know, there's an article from him in college where he said he brought so many gifts home from China. He couldn't couldn't carry them all. You know, he's frequently speaking at these Friends of China events and, you know, his whole his whole since college has been tied to these Chinese networks seven ways from Sunday. And then you have the State Department literally sicking the CIA,

• 1:50:30Speaker 03

  the State Department, USAID, the Pentagon, and in a hundred US government funded soft power swarm army influence institutions in order to pull the strings to soft rig the election for for Lula, when Lula. Pre-announced, you know, how China was going to be the linchpin of the strategy, has completely reversed Brazil's diplomatic posture and giving them everything and is now kicking out Starlink at the exact moment that Starlink's Chinese competitor comes online. It makes you wonder if the blob's diplomatic apparatus that we use both to influence foreign

• 1:51:15Speaker 03

  countries and also as a department of dirty tricks against our own citizens, if that is, if there's an element of it not being just organic evil.

• 1:51:28Shawn Ryan?

  Very interesting. Let's talk about the Atlantic Council Cooperative Agreement.

• 1:51:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this institution we've now mentioned a couple of times, this is, the Atlantic Council is NATO's think tank is what it's known as. But that's really the best way to understand it, is it's sort of the plausibly deniable civilian consensus building apparatus for NATO's geopolitical agenda. So if the US military and the UK Foreign Office and Brussels and the CIA want to do something in a certain region, but the civilians there need to pass, they need to pass laws

• 1:52:18Speaker 03

  to make that happen, or it would help the effort, or the different civil society players, you know, can help in some way, it's intermediated by the Atlantic Council. This is why the Atlantic Council gets annual funding every year from 11 different US government agencies, including the US Department of State, the Department of Defense, including separate allocations from the Army, the Marines, and the Navy.

• 1:52:49Speaker 03

  As CIA cut out, it's like the national down for democracy and it has seven CIA directors currently, as we speak, on its board of directors. I say this a lot, but a lot of people don't even know that seven former number one heads of the CIA are still alive, let alone all clustered on the board of a single entity that also happens to be this primary coordinator of internet censorship in all over the world, effectively from the US to Brazil to the EU. But another strange aspect of this is you have to understand how this diplomatic defense intelligence apparatus interacts with chamber of commerce companies and energy companies in particular.

• 1:53:32Speaker 03

  Energy companies are highly dependent on the battering ram of the Pentagon to secure and protect gas pipelines or oil resources. Wars for Oil, folks may be familiar with that sort of theme song that Democrats complained about during the Bush era. So the Pentagon often is this sort of battering ram of oil and gas companies. The State Department often has to play a role in negotiating or brokering energy deals. And the CIA plays a highly active role in order to do the sort of political subversive work or the soft power and plausibly deniable soft power influence work that goes into

• 1:54:15Speaker 03

  shaping those political outcomes in terms of conceding to the State Department's demands or potentially destabilizing a country so that the military can secure those energy resources. And so it's not unusual for the Atlantic Council to have these relationships with the energy companies. In fact, they are funded by many energy companies. But what you're referring to here is on January 19th, 2017, one day before Donald Trump took the oath of office in 2017, there was a very peculiar partnership inked between the Atlantic Council and an energy company. Because that energy company was Burisma, the famous private, largest private gas company in Ukraine.

• 1:55:01Speaker 03

  And I've been making the point now for many years that the reason Hunter Biden is untouchable and the Burisma scandal could not be brought to light and the FBI interfered in the 2020 election and told Mark Zuckerberg not to publish anything about a leaked story about Hunter Biden and Burisma. Remember, the FBI specifically mentioned Burisma to Mark Zuckerberg in the context of that laptop story. It's because Burisma is at the dark heart of the grand Ukraine energy play. I mean, we could go really deep on this. I mean, the short version of it is it has

• 1:55:40Speaker 03

  been a central plank of US statecraft in seizing Eurasia, which has trillions of dollars in natural resources. Russia alone, it sits on $75 trillion worth of natural resources. For context, the US only sits on 45 trillion gross. So, and then you have, you know, Uzbekistan, you know, you have the whole Caspian Sea, you have the whole Central and Eastern Europe arc of Eurasia. It is, it is the, where most of the world's resources are. And so that has been the long range plan since the Cold War of politically acquiring those companies, those countries. And the expansion of NATO has solidified that, you know, since 1990,

• 1:56:24Speaker 03

  you know, and the early 90s when we told Gorbachev NATO wouldn't expand one inch to the east, but we've acquired all those territories over time. So I'm going with the long version now, just because we're just gonna do it. Stop me at any time. In the 1990s, Russia was basically a US vassal state. It was, it was our, it was like Greater Alaska. Boris Yeltsin was our puppet. He was literally giving real time updates to the National Endowment for Democracy, our big CIA cutout. In 1993, when he was bombing his own parliament building, who were filled with nationalists who were opposing Yeltsin for going through with the shock therapy privatization to Western stakeholders. You

• 1:57:06Speaker 03

  had $2 trillion worth of wealth held by the government of the Soviet Union when they turned into a capitalist state, you know, when they transitioned from the communist government to a democratic one with elections, you know, of Yeltsin and then Putin.

• 1:57:25Speaker 03

  As part of that becoming a democracy, the State Department, the Harvard Endowment, Wall Street banks, the George Soros financial firms, the Bill Browder financial firms, all of these different whole of society, you know, international financiers and business interests descended on Russia to buy up at fire sale prices, all of these previously state-owned assets. This is a big part of our diplomatic toolkit. When we transition authoritarian government, we will privatize their gas companies, their oil companies, their diamond mines, their copper, whatever it is that's being held in trust for the people, so that whatever grows out of them, you know, whatever grows

• 1:58:09Speaker 03

  out of their soil, whatever flows from their Nile, whatever is in their caves and mountains, it's no longer for those people, it belongs to ExxonMobil, it belongs to De Beers, it belongs to Monsanto. And so those companies work with the State Department, they are part of these stakeholder negotiations within the blob, and so privatization is always, always, always on the table whenever we topple a government, and we work, we have many back channels to accomplish that, might be a little bit outside the scope unless you're super interested. But effectively, in the 1990s, Russia was our vassal. In fact, we even, you can watch a movie called Spinning Boris. It's a Hollywood movie with Jeff Goldblum, you know, from Jurassic Park, but it was,

• 1:58:54Speaker 03

  this movie was about basically the US efforts, the US government efforts to rig the 1996 election for Boris Yeltsin, because his own people hated him so much for giving their country to the United States and selling them out and handing it all over to, you know, George Soros and the Harvard Endowment and Wall Street and London banks, that they wanted him out. So the US had to send in a Hollywood team, had to send in political consultants, had to send in, you know, TV advertisements, had to fund all these civil society institutions to astroturf some sort of political semblance for their puppet. This is a problem we ran into in Afghanistan, for, you know, for example, with people upset at Hamid Karzai.

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  This is a very common thing, is we, you know, invade a country or we take over political control, the people have nothing, and they're unhappy. That's why we want people to have nothing but be happy. When they're unhappy, they go against us and they might depose us from power. But... Effectively, when the Russian stock market crashed and finally there was no gas left in Yeltsin, Putin rose to power. And the big way that he reasserted Russia's emergence, reemergence on the world stage was through what our State Department called "energy diplomacy." Or basically, soft power influence using Europe's dependency on Russian oil and gas, particularly the gas.

• 2:00:19Speaker 03

  Because a couple decades ago, 100% of Europe's natural gas, practically 100% of it almost, came from Russia. And this is just the natural result of the economics of gas. Natural gas is very cheap. You take it out of the ground, you put it in a pipeline, you take it to the other point, and the other country is gas. The only real alternative to that is something called liquefied natural gas, LNG, something folks may have heard a lot about because it's a major, major part, you know, it's this, much more new technique than simply gas pipelines. But essentially, what it involves is you can do it over much longer distances, you can do it, you can do pipelines over whole oceans, because, or not pipelines, because it doesn't require a pipeline.

• 2:01:03Speaker 03

  You liquefy the gas when it comes out of the ground, you store it in a container, you ship it to any point on Earth, or to Mars hypothetically, and then you deliquefy it. But that's very expensive. It's much, much more expensive, and so countries naturally wanted to buy Russian gas rather than much more expensive North American LNG. And because of their dependency on Russia for that, when Putin took power and began to rest himself off of the sort of Yeltsinite, sort of NATO-friendly relations, he used

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  Europe's dependence on Russian, dependence on Russian gas to trade that for favors, to get more Russian political influence over Central and Eastern Europe, to increase trade ties, to increase political ties, to create this sort of Russian soft power influence over the internal politics of countries stretching from Germany, you know, all the way into the Baltics.

• 2:02:08Speaker 03

  And around 2005, 2006, this begins to be a problem for the State Department. Because at that point, Russia was using a lot of hardball tactics. In Georgia, they turned off the gas. It was going to be a cold winter in these Central and European countries unless they gave Russia what it wanted on its trade terms and its security terms and its political influence terms, because they were dependent on Russia for gas. And so, when this started happening time and again, the State Department developed a counter-strategy. Again, this is 16 years ago. The State Department, with assistance from CIA and Pentagon and the whole diplomatic

• 2:02:49Speaker 03

  toolkit of energy NGOs and things like this, in order to get off of, get Europe to get off primarily hydrocarbons, at the time that was the main advantage that Europe had, is sort of before the fracking revolution really took off, but also to go through what it called "energy diversification," which meant that as part of America's security guarantees for Europe, as part of our diplomatic and financial support and guarantees for Europe, they would have to buy more expensive gas from the West than gas from the East. Now, you can only do so much before a country goes broke, unless they have an alternative

• 2:03:33Speaker 03

  gas supplier, and this is where Burisma will come back into the picture. So these countries went through about a decade of diversification, milestone-ing. They went from 100% to 80%, to 70%, to 60% Russian gas, as the State Department continually applied pressure for them to give their taxpayer dollars to Americans and British companies like Shell, instead of from the Russian Federation via Gazprom. So the State Department has seen Gazprom as an instrument of statecraft for Russia, again, for 16 years now. And there was a time when Gazprom was the largest company in the world in the early 2000s, just to give perspective for how influential this was, before this energy diversification

• 2:04:16Speaker 03

  program cut back on a lot of their profits. But the key to this was Ukraine, because all of this gas pipeline architecture is already pre-existing. There's the...

• 2:04:31Speaker 03

  There's the natural gas pipelines that go directly from Russia into Ukraine and then on into Europe. And then there's an alternate pathway that was established years ago called Nord Stream 1, which was directly into Germany. And then Germany, you know, as the folks know the tale, tried to develop Nord Stream 2 with Russia. And what happened to that, happened to that. But this, this State Department, CIA, Pentagon strategy of killing gas prom and replacing the gas market with Americans, Canadians, Brits, has been this long-range plan that has been the bane of American statecraft because their inability to get it down to

• 2:05:15Speaker 03

  zero, their inability, you know, there's, it's two steps forward, one step back, three steps back. As, as different rising politicians in Central and Eastern Europe want what's best for their people, what they are responsible to their constituents, their people want cheaper energy. Russia's offering the cheaper energy. So absent the ability to provide a cheaper commodity product, the people organically have wanted that Russian gas and so they had to constantly suppress populist political groups in Central and Eastern Europe who might run on a platform or who are running on a platform of buying energy from Russia, as, you know, countless of these have. And so this has been part of the State Department manipulation of all these different elections

• 2:05:58Speaker 03

  in order to kill the right-wing populist party who's running on buying, buying Russian energy. Now, where Burisma comes into the picture is, actually, if I can lay out one quick thing first, which is, you have to also understand, what was the John McCain quote about how Russia is just a, you know, a gas station with a standing army or just a gas station with a military? It's this, you know, famous quote that Russia doesn't have a robust technology sector or retail sector or, you know, they're basically just a giant economy built on the fact that the world's number two and three respectively, resource for oil and gas. They export that for profit and they use that profit to build up a giant military that,

• 2:06:42Speaker 03

  you know, that can rival NATO. And so they're a gas station with a military. Well, what happens if you kill the gas? There's no military, which means all of Eurasia falls, bit by bit.

• 2:06:57Speaker 03

  Take Ukraine, you know, take the whole Caspian Sea, take the whole Black Sea, you know, take Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, take, take, take Africa. I mean, Africa, Russia and the United States are, and as well as France, are locked in this proxy war. You know, China's also a player over, over Africa. This is a point that I made on, you know, Tucker Carlson recently is that you have, just in the past year, you know, you've had the Ivory Coast, Mali, Chad, Niger, all of these, you know, Francophone countries that have been, split the baby between US interests and French interests in those colonial regions, have all been toppled in coups, military coups,

• 2:07:42Speaker 03

  backed by the Russian army, where they are burning French flags and raising, raising Russian flags. And Russia is providing the small arms munitions. If you remember, Obama tried to invade Syria. Why did he get repelled? Because Russia militarily backstopped Assad and gave them the anti-aircraft missile defense systems that prevented us from doing a bombs over Baghdad strategy. So all over the world, Russia is militarily backstopping the, the folks in the crosshairs of the Pentagon, and all of that comes crumbling down if you kill Gazprom and Rosneft, the, the oil company. But all of this can be done by simply killing the Nord Stream pipelines in Germany and

• 2:08:25Speaker 03

  killing Russia's control over two, the two regions in Ukraine, the Donbass and the Crimea Black Sea region. And this is what they were doing in the years before the 2014 coup, you know, that our embassy did in Ukraine. Between 2011 and 2013, Chevron signed a, a $10 billion deal with the other major player in this with Burisma. And I'm Apologies for the long version, but I think it all makes sense at the end. Burisma is the largest private sector gas company in Ukraine. Naftogaz is the big state-owned one. And Naftogaz collects all the transits from all the Russian gas that goes through into the rest of Europe.

• 2:09:09Speaker 03

  So Naftogaz has this spider-like gas pipe architecture that goes all into Europe. And Burisma essentially feeds then into Naftogaz. It's the easiest simplified way of thinking about it. Now, Burisma held these mining rights in the Donbass and these mining rights in the Black Sea Crimea region. This is important because those are the precise two places that fell to Russian control in the post-2014 coup. But in the run-up to that, all of these NATO energy stakeholders bet the farm on this grand Ukraine energy play of kicking Russia out. That was part of what the coup in 2014 was.

• 2:09:51Speaker 03

  Because Yanukovych was dragging his feet on privatizing Naftogaz and dragging his feet over signing this trade deal with the US and the IMF. And he went with this Russian customs deal. And you had all of these US and British energy companies, in the two, three-year span before that, sign multi-billion-dollar deals with Naftogaz, Burisma feeds into, because they were skating to where the puck was going. Chevron signed a $10 billion deal with Naftogaz. Shell, which used to be Royal Dutch Shell, but now it's just London-based, so Shell signed

• 2:10:36Speaker 03

  a matching $10 billion deal with Naftogaz. Halliburton, Dick Cheney's company, where he was the chairman and CEO, owns the refining rights to it all. And if all of these major stakeholders were set to make huge windfall profits the moment Naftogaz was privatized, so they got all the profits coming through, and to extract all of the shale that was sitting in the mountains of the Donbass and offshore in the Black Sea. So we overthrew the government of Ukraine, but then in the counter-coup, all of those assets were lost. So these billions of dollars of investments... We're now sitting in Russian territory. So the only way to get them back is to have US taxpayers pay the CIA and the Pentagon

• 2:11:19Speaker 03

  and Ukrainian paramilitaries to take that military territory back by force. And if I can just say, you know, one more thing on this is Burisma was part of this. One of the reasons Hunter described what he was doing with Burisma as a patriotic, you know, he was serving his country by making, what, 50 grand, 60 grand a month on the board of a Ukrainian private gas company is because he was pitching. We now know, as of a few months ago, this came out in documents that were publicly published, that Hunter Biden's own law firm was pitching to the State Department that

• 2:12:01Speaker 03

  Burisma was an essential instrument of US statecraft, and so the State Department should take action to secure its licenses, to protect it from prosecutors, to, you know, to basically bulk it up because it was a beachhead against Russian gas. And we know that Hunter Biden was putting pressure, or that he, the State Department actually published this a few weeks ago, was having conversations with the US ambassador in Italy so that the US ambassador in Italy could put pressure on the Italian government for rights that are shared between Italy and Greece. What I'm saying is, is there was this Pentagon CIA plan to kill Gazprom and put the substitute

• 2:12:44Speaker 03

  supply of the gas supply coming from two different sources. LNG from North America and from Britain, so like, you know, Houston is one of the reasons that the Dick Cheney, George Bush mafia hated Trump. You know, the part of this was this Houston LNG was going to ship out and it was going to be a NAFTA gas, you know, it was going to basically be the new supply chain for Europe as we're seeing it now is in the past few years. It was just why they've all made record profits as this war has gone on. But Donald Trump's neutrality and threatening to withhold military support, remember that's what he was impeached over in 2019, threatened to throw a monkey wrench in this private profit cabal.

• 2:13:25Speaker 03

  So there are only two ways to get that gas supply to where Europe needed it. One is LNG coming from North America, but the other one is building up Ukraine's endogenous gas supply because Ukraine sits on Europe's third largest unexploited volume of shale. So, and then add to that all the, all that in the Black Sea. So, so Ukraine could have a very robust, independent, like sort of Ukrainian version of Gazprom if they could simply be weaned off of it and the expensive investments were all made by the companies to get it off the ground and rolling. But that means you need to make sure the Ukrainian government does not do this. You know, this is, this is a hard process that's much more expensive than simply going

• 2:14:09Speaker 03

  with Russia because you have to set up with this new infrastructure, you have to transfer all the ownership. Ukrainians don't make money from it. These are not going to be held by Ukrainian companies. They're held by American stakeholders and Wall Street in London. So they're the ones mining the gas, but their people are not the ones who are getting the profits. And then this is like, you know, if you, I mean, this was the people, the problem people had in the Panama Canal in the 90s, you know, the Panamanians. We have this Panama Canal, but you know, it's owned by, this is just a common problem people have.

• 2:14:42Shawn Ryan?

  Is it good, is it? This makes a lot of sense.

• 2:14:46Speaker 03

  Well, so the, the goal was to build up Burisma and, and, and at the same time you're privatizing NAFTA gas because that alleviates the otherwise diplomatic torture you need to do to countries from buying all this expensive LNG from North America. You have an endogenous, cheap gas supply. That you can just take out of the Donbass and Crimea. And so it's a very elegant solution to the diplomatic problem. But the problem is, is you need a diplomatic Department of Dirty Tricks to kick Russia out to make half of Ukraine's population, which is, which are Russian ethnics and Russian speaking, go along with it. So you need to overthrow the Ukrainian government if Yanukovych equivocates, which he did and which

• 2:15:31Speaker 03

  they did. And it, when Russia backstops it with little green men, you need the Pentagon, you need NATO, you need British Special Forces, you need Canadian Special Forces to take the country back. And if, if Russia then doubles down by militarily invading, well, now you need basically a full-scale proxy war. And the problem is, this is a trillion-dollar market. And these are companies that have already made multi-billion-dollar investments. And neutrality with Russia, as Trump was talking about, throws a monkey wrench in all of it. It's already a fragile, sensitive operation that only has a 50% chance of, of working. It, Trump could ruin the Bush dynasty.

• 2:16:13Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:16:17Shawn Ryan?

  This makes a lot more sense than I did.

• 2:16:20Speaker 03

  And the Soros dynasty. Soros is an investor in Halliburton and a major part of this, uh, this NAFTA gas privatization effort. This is one of the reasons that foreign policy synchronized in 2014 with, um, on Russia after the Crimea annexation.

• 2:16:35Shawn Ryan?

  So I just wanna, for the audience, so basically, the portion that everybody's fighting over is the big, is big gas.

• 2:16:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's the main, that's the main artery. Now, look, there's, there's, you know, trillions of dollars in, in other sort of critical minerals. There's a whole sort of wheat agriculture element of it, but the main...

• 2:16:56Shawn Ryan?

  But it disrupts, it disrupts Russia's pipeline into Europe.

• 2:17:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:17:01Shawn Ryan?

  Because now we'll be coming from Iraq.

• 2:17:02Speaker 03

  We can retake Chad and Niger, we can invade Syria. You know, the world is ours if you simply, you know, of course... You know, this is part of where China comes back into this because everyone expected Russia to die when we did this. You know, when we kicked them, started this process of kicking them out and sanctioning everything, but they're evading the sanctions by going through India. And now they just set up this giant power of Siberia pipeline with China. So they're rerouting from Europe to China, so it doesn't solve this military objective. But, you know, which again gets back to the strange question of why are they not trying to stop the power of Siberia pipeline? Are they beholden to the, you know, are there other conversations being had with the Chinese?

• 2:17:45Speaker 03

  Why is China not being threatened with sanctions if they really mean, you know, what they say about sanctions evasion on Russia?

• 2:17:54Shawn Ryan?

  Well, why do you think? I mean, probably because we can go after Ukraine or China. What's the easier target?

• 2:18:04Speaker 03

  Well, that's the best case scenario. You know, the worst case scenario is that there are financial interlinkages between our political class and the incredible economic lever that China has that is influencing policy. But I do want to say a few more things about Burisma because I'd feel remiss if I didn't. It's important to keep in mind that Hunter Biden, as I mentioned, was on the Chairman's Advisory Board of the NDI, the National Democratic Institute, which is the DNC branch of this prolific CIA cutout, the National Democrat for Democracy, which again was created in 1983 because the CIA wanted an NGO constellation to do the kinds of soft power influence work

• 2:18:49Speaker 03

  that it used to do as a clandestine operation. But by doing it as a public-facing democracy promotion operation, you can scale it much better. It doesn't seem like it's a big infraction on civil liberties. It's not a diplomatic incident if someone gets caught because the US just straight up announces we are promoting democracy in the region. And that may mean funding the political opposition. That may mean funding media that, you know, goes against one candidate and for another. So this is a CIA cutout. That Hunter Biden is on the, was on the Chairman's Advisory Board while he was doing this Burisma work. You don't get on the Chairman's Advisory Board of NDI unless you have some sort of,

• 2:19:29Speaker 03

  at least informal, relationship with or linkages to intelligence. Because you are doing intelligence work through a, through this intelligence backchanneled NGO. And literally, both the founders of the National Endowment for Democracy have outright come and said that they formally do now what the CIA used to do and lost its license to do. Then you have the fact that we have the CIA interfering in Hunter Biden's IRS case. If you remember, when the DOJ tried to talk to the guy who paid Hunter Biden's taxes for the past five years, the entertainment lawyer in LA, at least according to the congressional

• 2:20:10Speaker 03

  whistleblower, you know, with a formal sworn affidavit, the CIA intervened and told the Justice Department not to question Hunter Biden's chief financier. So you have, you have these CIA interlinkages directly with that affiliation. You have the CIA waiving the Justice Department off of who's funding Hunter Biden, who was on the Board of Directors at Burisma right next to Hunter Biden. If you recall, there was another person from the United States. It was Kofa Black. Kofa Black spent 30 years in the CIA and also won a State Department Distinguished Medal Award. But he was 30 years in the CIA, and in fact, you can read all about this, he was Mitt

• 2:20:53Speaker 03

  Romney's Sherpa to the CIA, to the intelligence community, when Mitt Romney ran for president against Barack Obama in 2012. So he was the guy that the presidential nominee in 2012 turned to, to get the support of the CIA from the inside. And by the way, who's Mitt Romney on the Board of Directors of? The IRI, the International Republican Institute, the GOP branch of the National Endowment for Democracy, the GOP branch of the CIA. So you have this one-two punch of the Democrat wing of the CIA and the Republican wing of the CIA, both represented on this tiny little Board of Directors of the exact private gas company that is literally being pitched to the State Department as an instrument of statecraft against

• 2:21:39Speaker 03

  Russia. Well, by the way, what is the CIA's job? It's to do plausibly deniable soft power influence work that advances the State Department agenda. So the moment the State Department agrees, yeah, it is an instrument of statecraft. You bless all of these CIA activities to do the corporate espionage, to broker deals, to do money laundering in order to make these things happen. CIA calling people off of the Justice Department to avoid looking into the sources of those funding. This is why Hunter has been protected, at least until now, is he was a Wears Waldo figure in this, in this web of intrigues around, around the perception of Russia as an instrument

• 2:22:20Speaker 03

  of statecraft and the serendipitous windfall profits that comes from using the battering ram of our Pentagon and CIA and State Department to secure lucrative energy deals for Chamber of Commerce energy companies. And the Atlantic Council signed a, a deal with them the day before Trump was sworn into office. So you can imagine how those seven CIA directors felt, you know, when Donald Trump was making that phone call to Zelensky about potentially holding up military aid. And of course, they played a very active role in, in setting up the censorship industry in the first place. It was actually Atlantic Council meetings where many of the very first global disinformation conferences were run out of.

• 2:23:04Speaker 03

  It was the Eurasia Center out of the Atlantic Council specifically, and the Brent Scrooge Center, as well as what was called the Digital Forensics Research Lab. The Digital Forensics Research Lab at the Atlantic Council was actually one of the first movers in the whole censorship industry before the 2016 election even. It was, it was NATO's sort of, one of their first spawn of architecture censorship institutions after Crimea in 2014. I think they were set up in like 2015 essentially and began sort of doing this network mapping of pro-Russia political movements and these sorts of things. And then all this was, was added on. But again, what is an institution getting Pentagon funding and State Department funding with seven CIA directors doing, intermediating this whole, this whole network?

• 2:23:47Shawn Ryan?

  I do have a question. And this could obviously go really bad and take us into World War III, which we'll get into in just a second, but.

• 2:24:01Shawn Ryan?

  I'm trying to think this through, but, oh, man. I've, I've, I gotta be honest, with the way...

• 2:24:16Shawn Ryan?

  As messed up as it is, it seems like if that plan would have actually worked, it would have been in our best interest.

• 2:24:23Speaker 03

  This is...

• 2:24:24Shawn Ryan?

  Because we're selling, what was it? Liquid natural gas?

• 2:24:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. Liquified natural gas.

• 2:24:30Shawn Ryan?

  Liquified natural gas. We would be exporting it to Europe in conjunction with Europe no longer getting their gas from Russia.

• 2:24:41Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:24:41Shawn Ryan?

  Which, if I remember correctly, Trump actually warned Europe about getting all of their gas from Russia, so... Which would, which would potentially, maybe not destabilize, but it would be a major punch to, to Russia's bottom line.

• 2:25:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:25:02Shawn Ryan?

  And so...

• 2:25:06Shawn Ryan?

  Why is this a bad thing?

• 2:25:08Speaker 03

  I don't get into the question of whether it's a good or a bad thing, because I can see both sides. You know, I can see people saying, "Well, this is great for US interests, in theory. Our major oil and gas companies, you know, make these big profits. You know, that's going to spill into our economy. It's going to this trickle-down, you know, economy impact, so that people will be able to buy more homes and afford, make college more affordable and have, you know, 401Ks and pensions." And that's, that's one argument. You know, the other argument is, is you are, you know, the sort of left-wing, anti-imperialist argument is this is NATO playing god over the democratic sovereign states in Central and Eastern Europe.

• 2:25:51Speaker 03

  You're not achieving this plan because you're offering a better gas product. You're not offering to sell Europe the energy, the commodity energy, meaning it doesn't matter really the quality of the product, gas is gas. You're not offering it at a cheaper price. You know, these, these companies aren't taking a haircut on the profit margins they're, they're selling to them. In fact, if they're forcing Russia off, they can hike the price way up, which they've done, because now they're completely dependent. So their argument is, is this is basically, you know, US imperialism and it renders, you know, American democracy promotion a total, you know, hypocritical joke because

• 2:26:34Speaker 03

  you don't believe in democracy if anyone challenges you in enacting the grand Ukraine energy play. You coup them out of office, just like you did to Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014 and just like you're threatening to do in Slovakia and Serbia and all these other countries.

• 2:26:50Shawn Ryan?

  Well, then on top of that, you also have all of Europe, because you had mentioned that it would be under US companies' control.

• 2:26:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:26:59Shawn Ryan?

  Crimea. So then you have all of Europe beholden to US companies' natural gas on top of our own exports.

• 2:27:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:27:08Shawn Ryan?

  Which, does it, so...

• 2:27:11Speaker 03

  So I avoid the question of whether it's a good or a bad thing to pursue the grand Ukraine energy play, because I can see both sides of it, and that's not my fight. My mission is free speech on the internet. And the problem is, is they believed, because of how sensitive this was, because of how much money was at stake, because of how much was at stake geopolitically and militarily and diplomatically and in terms of intelligence work, and how it impacted reconstruction banks and major chamber of commerce companies. And because there was already so much resistance from the Central and European countries and

• 2:27:53Speaker 03

  from Russia, it was already a plan that did not have a guaranteed certainty of success. So you have to stack the deck in its favor as much as possible. And they believed, beginning in 2016, and you can go back and listen to Anders Fodg Rasbys, the former head of NATO, or Michael Chertoff, or any of these other folks who were involved in this whole thing, and the way they were talking about in 2016, just go back and run a Boolean search to timebox this, to the contemporaneous YouTube searches or Google results from this time, and they were complaining that the problem was, is people were not believing NATO propaganda, they were believing Russian propaganda all over, from Germany to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Moldova.

• 2:28:40Speaker 03

  The whole region was falling under the ambit of Russian propaganda. They weren't believing NATO. And also, it's not just Russian propaganda. Anyone who supports the political party in power or opposition party who wanted Russian gas could also be contextualized as being a Russian puppet. So, free speech got caught in this proxy war. Because in order to stack the deck, to increase the odds of this thing being able to be pulled off, they had to censor the internet. They had to censor the internet first in Central and Eastern Europe, which, if it had been confined to there, you may have never heard my name.

• 2:29:20Speaker 03

  When this started off, you know, in Riga, Latvia, you know, with these NATO STRACOM Centers of Excellence and these NATO censorship centers that sprawled out from there and into Lithuania and Germany, I would have been state a corporate lawyer. But the fact is, is when Brexit happened in 2016, they said, "Oh my God, it's hit Western Europe. We need to, the State Department has to start funding London-based censorship firms. We have to start funding a sprawling web of London NGOs and London universities from Oxford and Sheffield and Cambridge. We need to start funding these censorship mercenary firms in London. We need to start working with London Members of Parliament in order to censor misinformation,

• 2:30:05Speaker 03

  anything that supports the Brexit party or supports any sort of détente with Russia after the sanctions push in the UK." And then the Trump election happened in the US in November 2016, a few months later. And the idea that this was just a sort of military operation confined, controlling the information environment, all the way out in Central Eastern Europe, everything dropped out. US citizens, US news companies, US social media platforms, we all got caught in the crossfire. And now, how much is the grand Ukraine energy play worth? Is it worth the First Amendment? Is it worth having the government control the? Why weren't they just honest?

• 2:30:49Speaker 03

  Honest to who?

• 2:30:51Shawn Ryan?

  You're the only one I've heard talk about this.

• 2:30:54Speaker 03

  Oh, you should go to their YouTube channel. They, they, they talk about it more plainly than I do. This is one of the things that was so funny when I was, when I was getting involved in this in 2016, 2017 is I'd be watching eight hours worth of these censorship industry conferences.

• 2:31:09Shawn Ryan?

  No, no, no, I'm not talking about.

• 2:31:10Speaker 03

  Energy conferences.

• 2:31:11Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not talking about the censorship. I'm talking about the gas. I'm talking about the reason we're there. I've not heard this. Everybody, it's never discussed.

• 2:31:25Speaker 03

  Well, uh, if you spend a minute in their world, in their own conferences, at, at their own meetings, I mean, you can go to their YouTube page right now. Just go, go to the Atlanta Council's YouTube page. Go to, go to GlobSec's YouTube page. Uh, you know, go to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's YouTube page. Go to the Wilson Center's YouTube page.

• 2:31:47Shawn Ryan?

  Any of, uh, even in, in Putin's statements, he's not talking about the gas, is he?

• 2:31:54Speaker 03

  He was.

• 2:31:56Shawn Ryan?

  He's talking about the US taking Crimea for gas.

• 2:32:01Speaker 03

  He talks about that stuff. I mean, he talks about this play of them trying to, you know, go through with this energy diversification somewhat frequently, I feel. This, I mean, he, they, they said that we are the ones who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines. But then, you know, I believe he told Tucker Carlson, well, because Tucker Carlson asked, hey, why don't you talk about the Nord Stream pipeline if you think we, we blew it up? Why don't you make your case on the, on the world stage? And if you remember what he said is, he said, the US owns the propaganda apparatus. It's basically futile. You know, we have diplomatic communications and everyone knows what's up, but we can't compete with the media. So, you know, what can we say? That, you know, they, the, the US did it.

• 2:32:46Speaker 03

  We said that. With what infrastructure, you know, can we amplify that, that message other than Russia Today, which is under sanctions and has to register in FARA and all this and so? So they do, but you know, part of the issue is, is. There is less hollering about it from Russia than you might expect because Russia has actually recently, and this is another bane of the blob's existence, is that Russia has actually gotten around these sanctions and some of these cloak and dagger moves by our foreign policy establishment by rerouting the gas into Europe through places like India.

• 2:33:29Speaker 03

  This is one of the reasons the State Department has such a big censorship operation against Modi in India. If you may remember from the Twitter files, why it was that the Atlantic Council was flagging like 35,000 accounts of pro-Modi accounts on Twitter. What was that about? They want to get rid of Modi. They consider Modi to be, you know, a sort of economic lifeline to Russia, among a few other reasons involving nationalism populism. But, so Russia is still, in fact, I don't know if this is still the case, but a couple of months ago, they actually retook the US as the largest natural gas exporter to Europe because of, because all these different countries that were rerouting the gas and that the sanctions weren't being enforced about. That's why there's this constant sanctions whack-a-mole

• 2:34:13Speaker 03

  against countries. But the problem is they're doing it with large countries like India and China, who, we don't have the kind of sanctions clout we do against a country like Iran or Venezuela, because these are large, huge economy, huge population, huge forces on the world stage alongside us. So, part of the reason that, you know, you may not have heard as much about it from Russia's side is because they are, it hasn't hurt them all that much. They had to pay a markup when they go to China. They had to pay a markup having to go to India because you're rerouting it. But they've been offered a deal that they can, that they can live with. And, you know, it's mostly, the countries that are

• 2:34:53Speaker 03

  getting hurt are actually the ones now that, that are NATO countries who are funding Russia's war. This, this, this play to kill Nord Stream and to kill cheap Russian gas to Germany has killed Germany's economy, has killed Germany's industrial sector, has killed their ability to even fund, you know, the Ukraine, the war. So, but remember, a lot of this started before the invasion. This, this has been in play now for, for a long time. So, yeah, if that's helpful.

• 2:35:29Shawn Ryan?

  You've put a lot of things into a new perspective for me. But what do you think the probability of this is going to turn into World War III?

• 2:35:39Speaker 03

  It's hard to say because I think we may flirt with World War III ever more in a deliberate attempt to avoid World War III. And what I mean by that is we have this technique called destabilization. When we're trying to negotiate with a foreign government and they're being uncooperative, or we sense they're willing to make a deal, but we don't have leverage. And so you can only get leverage through carrots or through sticks. Offering them something or hurting them with something and threatening to make the pain go away. And I suspect that what's happening right now with Ukraine's escalation against Russia, you know, this new incursion into Russian territory,

• 2:36:24Speaker 03

  and long-range missile attacks against targets hundreds of miles into Russia proper. One way to look at it is it puts us on the path to World War III. I actually suspect there's something a little bit more moderate happening in the background, which is that my sense of it, and I don't have any insider knowledge whatsoever. This is just my speculation based on public things I read, is that the NATO senses that Ukraine is losing by more and more by the day inside of Ukraine. And the political frailties around sustaining the funding level are very difficult. But the problem is, is they don't want to strike a peace deal

• 2:37:09Speaker 03

  that includes giving the Donbass or Crimea back to Russia. They would be okay if the war ended and we simply reset back to early 2014 and just wound back the clock. But the problem is, is Russia will not agree to that, given how much they are winning by on the battlefield, and the perception that in the long run, time is on their side when it comes to consolidating that political control over eastern Ukraine and Crimea. And so, in order to bring Russia to the negotiating table to have a peace, I call it a peace fire.

• 2:37:51Speaker 03

  It's sort of a combination of a peace deal and a ceasefire, but the emphasis is on fire. Because I believe that even after the State Department strikes this hypothetical deal, we will continue to do CIA or plausibly deniable special operations work to take eastern Ukraine back and take Crimea back just by having rogue paramilitaries do it, who happen to be trained by Pentagon advisers. The same thing we were doing from 2014 onward, where it was Ukrainian paramilitaries from Kiev who were going into eastern Ukraine and taking back these shale regions, but they were funded by the US, they were trained by the Canadians.

• 2:38:32Shawn Ryan?

  It's a face.

• 2:38:33Speaker 03

  Right. But we want to reset it to that, to this sort of minsk peace period, but Russia won't agree to it. So, we are trying to present the threat that World War III might happen, that the daughters of your high-level officials may be assassinated as they're rioting in their car, we will be striking at your infrastructure inside Russia. If 100,000 Russians die in Moscow or St. Petersburg, that could foment an anti-war movement within Russia to strike that peace deal on favorable terms to US interests. And so, I think they have felt that simply playing defense and grinding down Russia's

• 2:39:18Speaker 03

  economy has not worked, as Russia has done the sanctions evasion that we just talked about. So now, they are trying to do it the other way, which is by causing enough Russian casualties that this steading back to 2014 will happen because Russia will want to make the blood flow stop.

• 2:39:39Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:39:43Shawn Ryan?

  I could talk to you all day, Mike. I'm having fun.

• 2:39:46Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 2:39:50Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I hate to close it out, but you've got a flight to catch. We've got about eight minutes before you gotta jet. So, man, do you have any, uh, any closing remarks or anything that you, that you wanna get out there?

• 2:40:01Speaker 03

  I would just encourage people to be optimistic in this in, in a lot of ways because as much as it feels like we're up against the weight of the world and some of these forces are so dark and powerful and nefarious in so many ways. This was the world before you could read about it. You know, this was, this was, this was the United States in the 20th century too. You just, you know, didn't have access to Twitter accounts or Facebook posts or YouTube videos to learn about it. And we have a level of freedom currently because of Elon Musk and X, because of, you know, what the folks over at Rumble are doing, because of, you know, some of our, our champions

• 2:40:43Speaker 03

  in, in the, in Congress and in the legal world and, you know, the, the new sort of media architecture who's able to, you know, amplify all of this. There is a moment to, to truly have the, you know, the will of the people respected in this, but you, you just, so don't get depressed when you read about this. If you're new to this, you will go through your five stages of grief. You know, you will have your, you know, your denial and your anger and your bargaining and then your depression and then you will finally get to the point of acceptance and things might still piss you off, but you can sort of see this as our inheritance. You pointed this out when you said, "Well, maybe some of this is a good thing. Maybe it's the reason we had cheap gas and, you know, and, and affordable homes because

• 2:41:28Speaker 03

  this is..." So this, this is our inheritance. So it's more like getting to know an uncle than it is about, you know, trying to vanquish some arch enemy. But you can follow my work, uh, online. I'm on X at Mike Benz Cyber. My foundation is Foundation for Freedom Online. It's the same name, FoundationForFreedomOnline.com. And, uh, Sean, you're doing the Lord's work and I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today.

• 2:41:53Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you, brother. All those links will be below. And, uh, one last thing. If you had three recommendations for the show, who would they be?

• 2:42:02Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 2:42:05Speaker 03

  Have you talked to Chris Pavlaski from Rumble?

• 2:42:07Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:42:08Speaker 03

  I would say Chris Pavlaski from Rumble. Lynda Yaccarino would be really interesting from X. And I would say a member of Congress like Dan Bishop or Jim Jordan, if you haven't had him on. From my perspective, all three of those people would be really interesting for their take on what they're doing against and about censorship issues, you know, from the independent platform side, from the sort of, you know, ex-leadership side and from the congressional side. Because we need these stakeholder conversations on the side of freedom. They can't just be on the censorship side.

• 2:42:47Shawn Ryan?

  We'll reach out. Mike, that was a fascinating interview and a ton of information. And, man, I really hope to see you again here.

• 2:42:59Speaker 03

  Likewise.

• 2:43:00Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 2:43:00Speaker 03

  I'll come back to the museum anytime.

• 2:43:02Shawn Ryan?

  All right. Cheers.