#340 - Mike Benz: DARPA & USAID are Weaponizing Music to Control Human Behavior

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Mike Benz is a former State Department official and current Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, a free speech watchdog organization dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet. SPONSORS https://mizzenandmain.com - Use code DANNY20 for 20% off. https://www.amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJ22 for 22% off your first order. https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/DANNY - Use code DANNY and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS Mike's YouTube channel: @MikeBenzCyberOfficial https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber https://www.instagram.com/mikebenzcyber https://foundationforfreedomonline.com FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Music diplomacy 17:17 - USAID is funding shadow diplomacy 19:41 - Dua Lipa is pop propaganda 26:14 - Bono's liveaid scam 35:32 - Taylor Swift & The Gerasimov Doctrine 49:08 - NATO & Graphika censorship 01:05:03 - The Minerva Initiative 01:12:15 - Taylor Swift is a military disinformation asset 01:22:28 - Digital Censorship Act: how the EU can censor American speech 01:36:55 - Newsguard, middleware & social media censorship 01:48:47 - YouTube's settlement with Trump 01:57:12 - Google's 'Project Owl' 02:07:05 - Section 230 is a distraction 02:19:28 - Aftermath of Charlie Kirk's death 02:24:04 - The federal vs. state censorship crisis 02:39:02 - Who benefits from the censorship industry 02:44:39 - WEF push for digital ID's 02:51:09 - Elon Musk & the digital control grid 03:03:22 - Future of freedom of speech 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.

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• 1:44Danny Jones?

  All right, Mike Benz, thanks for coming, man. I've been a fan of yours for a long time. I told you I was deep diving your stuff on the music diplomacy like over a year ago. And I'm a huge fan. And a big shout out to Julian Doyle for hooking this up. Yeah. And like I told you before we started, I don't know how you know more about this topic than I know about my own life.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  No, it's absorption and thanks for, thanks for having me. The music diplomacy stuff is fascinating. We were just talking about this a little before. It's, you know, music is everywhere. We were just talking about the Ali G clip with Trump. And Trump, you know, Ali G asked Trump, what's the most popular thing in the world? Cause he's trying to sell him some like no drip ice cream. And Trump just says music.

• 2:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  And, you know, music really sets the vibe for the background of so much of cultural affairs, social affairs. It's what kids do, you know, to go to concerts. It's what's, you know, it's kind of the, the aligning magnet of so many things. And the reason that I talk about like music in diplomacy and music in intelligence work and music in the military field is because it's, it's one of these unexpected areas where the penetration is just deceptively deep. And when you, you understand how deep it is in the music industry, you begin to appreciate how it can be so big in academia, in unions, in the legal field.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  When it's all the way down to something like music, you, you see these recurring patterns and how structures of influence are set up.

• 3:18Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's crazy because it's ubiquitous and it's everywhere. And, uh, you know, I always thought when I would hear things about this or, you know, see like things in documentaries about people in the music industry being compromised by different agencies or being used as useful idiots, whatever you want to call it. I always just thought like brushed it off, like can't be serious, which is why I was so just enthralled when I started reading that Twitter thread that you did about the, about the, the history of all of this stuff. It's just completely nuts, dude.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Should we go through it for folks or?

• 3:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we should. How does, so how, what is the history of this stuff? Did it all start in Cuba or?

• 3:54Speaker 03

  So the relationship between the State Department and CIA and the music industry.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  I sort of started in the 1940s with jazz diplomacy. This was this period where the, you know, the World War II had just ended and we are now in a fight for geopolitical control over all the different neutral countries in the world against the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union has this communist government and they're making appeals to Africa, among other places, saying that the capitalist society in the West is racist, they're discriminating against black people, there's all this class injustice, so African countries should sign economic partnerships with the Soviet Union. They should have their governments be more aligned with the Soviet Union because they're more egalitarian.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  And so this was a lot of how the J. Edgar Hoover, Hoover FBI was sort of calling a lot of folks who were pro-civil rights, they were calling them communists and Soviets because the Soviet Union was amplifying these kind of, you know, there's racial discrimination against African-American, you know, stuff on their own media channels. And so, so in Africa, what the State Department did is it took, who were very popular at the time, these black jazz musicians, Louis Armstrong and the like, and would fly them, you know, as essentially music diplomats to Africa and making the point to African diplomats

• 5:25Speaker 03

  and African civil society organizations that actually the West is, you know, is does not discriminate, the Soviets are wrong. And so you had these musical ambassador types of being flown around by, you know, on taxpayer dime. And then with the, with classical music, around the same time, the CIA started something called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which is this big arts and literature and music hub. It's basically hundreds of poets, musicians, thought leaders in the arts space, in the culture space, in the music space. Gloria Steinem was a part of that with the, with the feminist movement.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  But among that were classical musicians. So at the time, Shostakovich and these kind of Russian classical composers were seen to be superior to like Western classical musicians. And so even in the classical music hub, the CIA organizes these conferences through the like musical conferences, musical exchanges, musical concerts in Rome, in Paris, in Germany, through this CIA-funded cutout, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, in order to show that actually Western classical music is, you know, competes on par and is better than Russian classical music. And then you had the whole rock and roll movement where you had this

• 6:47Speaker 03

  export to essentially behind the iron curtain, you had this anti-authoritarian, you know, challenging the government, you know, rock music space. And a lot of this stuff was sponsored by the US government, sponsoring rock concerts by the Berlin Wall that try to, you know, show that we're against the, you know, the big government of the Soviet Union and against Big Brother. Then you had this in the rap space, you mentioned Cuba. So in the, in the early 2000s, the CIA, USAID, the State Department really began to turn attention to the rap and hip hop space as it, you know, achieved this kind of cultural

• 7:31Speaker 03

  saturation and did this in a bunch of countries. So a very famous one is this group called the San Isidro Collective in Cuba. In 2009, this CIA cutout called the National Endowment for Democracy, it was conceived of by the CIA director in 1983. The CIA gets a copy of every single grant that they, that they give. This was disclosed in 1986 in the Washington Post. Its founder says, "We were created because the CIA used to get in trouble in the 1960s and 70s." I'm sorry, groups seen as subsidized by the CIA were scandalized by that. So our endowment, NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, was set up so that we could fund the groups that the CIA.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  They'd be too scandalized to get from the CIA. Meanwhile, CIA gets a copy of every single one of their grants. So it's just an empty cutout for it. So in 2009, they write this memo. They have this in-house journal called the Journal of Democracy. We pay for it as taxpayers. And in this 2009 memo, they're talking about how their attempts at regime change in Cuba have been unsuccessful and they should try a more targeted Afro-Cuban strategy. Because the Afro-Cuban population is actually was hot is higher, I think, than it's like the highest, highest, most popular demographic in Cuba. And yet they're underrepresented in the Cuban government and there are grievances that can be inflamed in Cuba on that basis.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  And they, and they did this demographic survey, and this is a CIA cutout doing this. And they say, okay, well, the Afro-Cuban population is disproportionately unemployed, prone to using drugs and, and has cultural salience communicated through rap and hip hop music. A year later, they begin funding, together with USAID. So it's USAID, which is a giant CIA money funnel, plus the CIA's effectively proprietary cutout, begin funneling money and aid to this rap collective called the Santa Cedro Movement, who pens this anthem about taking to the streets to rebel against the government.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  At the same time, USAID sets up a fake Twitter in Cuba. It's called Zunzineo. This is a big scandal where humanitarian funds were earmarked for Pakistan by USAID and then they were diverted through Cayman Islands banks to set up a Twitter knockoff. Cause in 2009, 2010, this is when the Arab Spring was going on. Right. So you had these CIA social media revolutions and so they wanted to bring a Cuban Spring there. So they get, they have these insider documents that end up leaking a couple of years later, where they say that the goal is to attract people, because Cuba at the time had banned Twitter. And so they wanted to make this look like this was by Cubans

• 10:21Speaker 03

  for Cubans. So they, so USAID got these two unsuspecting business executives to set up this Twitter knockoff. The plan was, according to the USAID documents, to get them, to attract them with, by advertising a social media website that would emphasize sports, music, and hurricane updates. And then, once they hit 100,000 subscribers, they would switch to anti-government political messaging. And so, this group, by the way, the Santa Siedra movement, and their anthem they penned to try to, you know, get people to take to the streets in a color revolution, you can still see odes to this in Art Basel in Miami. I live in Miami. You still see this. Miami was the biggest CIA hub for the whole Cold

• 11:06Speaker 03

  War. There was a station, JM Wave, the Miami station was the largest CIA hub in the world. And because Miami was so close to, you know, it was a giant port city, and it's the Caribbean, it's Central America, you get the South America tip. So, anyway, even, even today, in 2024, the Biden administration overthrew the government of Bangladesh. They did so in part through Ned Grants, this CIA cutout, grants to Bangladeshi hip-hop artists. And even, these documents leaked, where Ned actually wrote back to the State Department that they funded these two rap and hip-hop videos that were designed to get people to take to the

• 11:49Speaker 03

  streets, to sow distrust in government, to inflame tensions between the youth and unemployed people, and the government not serving them. And the Biden administration at the same time opened up this brand new center called the Music, the Global Music Diplomacy Bureau within the State Department. And the State Department is what coordinates CIA and USAID. So I think in 2024, they brought 22 rap and hip hop artists from 14 different countries for a three-day training session at the State Department. And they're training them how to mobilize youth, how to get people to the streets. And this is another big thing with these concerts. They simulate street mobilization.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  When you get all these people together in the street, you get them in the practice of taking to the street and they put aside all the differences they might have with each other on grievance grounds. Like, for example, there was an underground rock scene that the CIA and State Department worked with in Yugoslavia in the 1990s when they were backing something called the Oat Pour Movement, which is kind of the origins of this like iron fist for all these color revolutions. And the whole purpose is the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You have all these groups who don't necessarily like each other, but when they are infighting, they can't form a unified front to win an election or to rally behind like an opposition

• 13:18Speaker 03

  candidate who will take the place of the leadership. So having the backdrop for organizing being music everyone likes rather than, you know, abortion when half of the people might not, you know, have religious differences, so they might not want to organize about that. Or, you know, tax policy when half of the people you might want to recruit are business owners of the like. Or, you know, energy policy when half of the people might like cheap fossil fuels, half of the people might like, you know, renewable energy. But the music cuts through all of that. We're all together, we have one thing in common, which is that we hate this government. But now we're all marching together, we're all in the streets together, we're all vibing to the same music.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  And so, you know, you see this all the time. And this is also another thing like Bono, for example, who's been kind of my like, you know, bet noire on some of this USAID stuff because, you know, Bono's out here talking about how USAID has the cuts to USAID have killed 300,000 people so far. And it's like, Did he say that? He did. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He's citing this Boston University study, which is complete garbage. Even in the study itself, it's like, well, we don't count duplicate deaths. So theoretically, if someone dies from dysentery, AIDS, Ebola, SARS, Zika and MERS, we count that as 12 deaths. And none of these things, nobody's

• 14:45Speaker 03

  auditing this. Like, you know, basically, a lot of people see me as like a force behind this USAID shutdown. And, you know, that was a major blow to the capacity of a lot of these intelligence operations, these covert influence operations. As I just mentioned, USAID is running the rap game in many countries, let alone, you know, what it's doing in terms of impacting markets, what it's doing in terms of impacting governments. So there's a, there's a lot of people who are very angry at that, but they can't really think of a good reason to keep it in, in light of the fact that you don't see a lot of foreign

• 15:25Speaker 03

  leaders complaining about the USAID being shut down. Like, when, when Trump announced the shutdown of USAID, the president of Mexico came out and said, thank God. President El Salvador came out and said, thank God. The heads of the drug commissions in Peru said, thank God. Because when Bolivia banned USAID, they find, they finally got cocaine under control. Turned out the USAID cocaine programs were responsible in large part for keeping the cocaine going, which is a common story here because, you know, you saw the same thing in Afghanistan, you saw the same thing in Syria, you saw the same thing, the

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Golden Triangle, the Golden Crescent, in, in Colombia and the like. But anyway, I think the music stuff is so interesting because. You know, you have like the military, I think in 2023 began this massive sponsorship of South by Southwest in Miami, where I live, the largest music performing arts center. It's called the Adrian Arsh Center. Adrian Arsh is the is one of the top five largest donors to the Atlantic Council, which is seven CIA directors on its board. It's funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, and is it bills itself as NATO's think tank. And, you know, the benefactor for that is doing the, you know, the largest performing arts center in Miami. And a lot of this is because politics is downstream of culture.

• 16:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  And so, you know, you, if you can influence the culture and influence the mythology, you effectively set the bounds for what's politically possible.

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• 18:30Danny Jones?

  or anything? Or is it all foreign?

• 18:31Speaker 03

  So it's all supposed to be foreign. The justification is, is for the legal is, it's supposed to be foreign, but the issue is they get around that by. The fact that these are, you know, global distribution capacities. And what they'll do is they'll fund an organization to do global work. But then it also does domestic work. Like, for example, um, take something like the Tides, the Tides Center, which is this big, um, you know, international NGO. It's closely associated with George Soros. So a lot of Republicans and conservatives, uh, you know, take a lot of umbrage with the Tides Center because it, it funds Black Lives Matter.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  The Black Lives Matter formal legal entity, their 501(c)(3). Uh, it, it how, it gives the 501(c)(3) to the Soros prosecutor managers. This group called FJP, Fair and Just Prosecutions. But, um, so the Tides Center operates domestically with these Soros prosecutors and BLM and all of these different groups, anti-Pho-related groups, climate-related groups, all these groups that do like street paramilitary action. But they get all this money from USAID. I think they got $27 million, uh, worth of grants, just in the ones that I found on USAid.gov.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  And like of that, that I found in the past couple of years, that 27 million, like 22 million were for grants to, quote, "secure concrete commitments from foreign governments on civil society matters." So like they are being paid by USAID to secure formal, concrete commitments from foreign governments to the American government. They're basically being paid as an intermediary for the US government to do shadow diplomacy on behalf of the US government. So that's like funding their coffers. So that allows them to essentially hire people, have institutional clout, have these giant network connections, and then they can leverage that

• 20:40Speaker 03

  in an in-kind way when it comes to all their little housed domestic products. And so with something like music, you've got this global distribution, right? So like this is one of the things they did with the Santa Seidra movement in Cuba, is this was a local, you know, island hip-hop collective. But by teaming up with USAID. And teaming up with the Assistant Secretary of State for the US Department of State. They got distribution in America. They got distribution globally. They get all these awards and at award ceremonies. You know, I talked about this just because it's so funny, but like even someone like Dua Lipa.

• 21:17Danny Jones?

  I was gonna say, I was gonna ask you about her.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  You know, it's so funny because I love to, I think the music's great. I think she's got a really cool vibe. It is funny to me when you look at the fact that she won the Atlantic Council Distinguished Leadership Award. I think it was like 2022 or 2023.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  Now, the Atlantic Council, as I mentioned, has seven CIA directors on their board. They're funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, the UK Foreign Office, USAID, NED, the CIA cutout. And what are they doing giving a distinguished leadership award to a, you know, hip, to like, you know, a pop music princess?

• 21:55Danny Jones?

  Did Victoria Nuland hand her the medal?

• 21:59Speaker 03

  You know, it's, she should have. And of course, Victoria Nuland now is on the board of NED, is on the board of the National Down for Democracy, who is the one that I mentioned was funding the Santa Siro movement, the hip hop collective in Cuba and was funding the Bangladeshi hip hop artists ahead of the coup in 2024. So she is involved in that. But the, so Dua Lipa, you know, has this kind of like Serbian, you know, Kosovar heritage and Serbia is one of these lynchpin. We fought the whole, NATO did its first offensive action in its entire history. It was formed in 1949,

• 22:40Speaker 03

  never fired a bullet despite being the Western world's military, military alliance for 46 years until 1995, when the first, you know, bombings of, you know, Yugoslavia happened. And so we broke up. Yugoslavia with the overthrow of Milosevic, we chopped into all these different smaller countries. We created Kosovo, you know, out of, you know, out of, you know, a province effectively in Yugoslavia. And so it was created effectively by our blob, by our State Department CIA apparatus. Her dad is like a music organizer in Kosovo. And the State Department has this big problem right now with the Serbian government because they're one of these

• 23:26Speaker 03

  places that is trying, that is slipping out of NATO's grasp. There are a couple of countries in Europe that are providing problems for the foreign policy establishment currently. Belarus is one of them. We tried a color revolution there in 2020, it didn't work. Moldova was giving us problems and then this election just happened yesterday as at the time of this recording. So they appear to have solved the Moldova problem. They almost had a, they almost had Romania problem and then they canceled that election and through the lead candidate in jail. But Serbia remains this kind of neutral state that folks believe is tilting towards Russia. And so what Dua Lipa has been campaigning on is this kind of

• 24:09Speaker 03

  truth and reconciliation committee type thing to throw, they call it transitional justice. Whenever there's a transition to democracy, you impose the justice system on the previous administration so that nobody, they can't win an election again because everyone's in jail. This is, this is like this State Department checklist strategy. Cause it's very expensive to run a revolution. What you want is a country that's on autopilot. You know, you rig the election once or you overthrow the government once and then it's achieves the state of what they call stability, democratic stability, which you know, basically means it's like a one party rule. This is what the CIA tried to do with the Christian Democrats throughout the Cold War. The Christian Democrat Party, which is presence in Germany and all over

• 24:54Speaker 03

  central and eastern Europe. But so the cheapest way to make sure you win forever is that everybody from the opposition, even if they're more popular with the people, they're just in jail. And so Dua Lipa has been campaigning on transitional justice to try to get essentially the State Department's enemies thrown in jail and, you know, using her platform for this and so you know, but.

• 25:17Danny Jones?

  So how do those conversations go with Dua Lipa? Like, does she, is she aware of what she's doing?

• 25:23Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know about. I mean, obviously.

• 25:25Danny Jones?

  Agent caller up and be like, yo, uh, we may have to send this tweet, the copy and paste this or like.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  It wouldn't need to be. And there's a lot of different examples here because we can talk about Bono, which is like, like one of these just very clear cut cases. Or you can talk about the Taylor Swift side where it's, where these forces see Taylor Swift as a weapon, but I don't know to what extent Taylor is clued into it. Uh, and then I, you know, I see Dua Lipa as being probably somewhere in between those, although this is speculation. I have no idea what her conversations are with her management or what's happening at the distribution level. You know, there's a lot of these weird relationships between like creative artists. You know, uh, you know, like the, the CIA type, uh, you know, agencies and their role in music distribution.

• 26:15Danny Jones?

  I always wonder, I always think about that because like, you know, obviously there's everybody online. I don't know if you've noticed, but every podcast host is compromised by a certain government or an intelligence agency, including me. I'm paid for by the CIA. Um, but like,

• 26:31Speaker 03

  yeah, me too. I didn't get my check this month.

• 26:37Danny Jones?

  And like, I always wonder like, you know, how many USAids are there in other countries that are trying to fund like media in the US? Or like, does the media, does the US intelligence actually fund US like podcasters? You would think like they've definitely thought about it, but like, what would that be like? Like it would be too risky to like overtly do that. You would almost want to like, do it in a way where they're not aware of it.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  Well, NATO, for example, I think it was published last year that they had just, uh, they have this, what do they call it? Societal resilience grant fund where I think there was like 26 Tik Tokers that they pay through this, uh, you know, social societal resilience fund to generate pro NATO messaging. So it's very easy. For example, if you want that in the US and you can't legally do that through USAID or the US State Department, because those are supposed to face outward, you simply go to one of these international bodies like NATO that the US.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  Spends more than 50% NATO funding comes from the US. Right. So it's those TikTok influencers are being paid by US taxpayer money, but it's doing it through NATO rather than through USAID. Okay. And you have all sorts of these. Every country's got an international development office, you know, the UK does, you know, for example, like on the Bono story. Yeah, Bono was, was a guy who was teamed up with Jeff Sachs. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not throwing shade at Jeff, Jeffrey Sachs here. I think that he's had a really interesting evolution. But Jeffrey Sachs was a Harvard economist in the 1990s who led the

• 28:18Speaker 03

  State Department CIA economic carving up of Russia. This is what people call the, the economic of Russia. This was when we just won the Cold War and Russia trusted us to transition their economy to a market capitalist economy. And what ended up happening was USAID gave tens of millions of dollars to the Harvard Institute for International Development. So the US Agency for International Development took taxpayer funds and gave them to Jeffrey Sachs's Harvard Institute for International Development, which is basically a bunch of these Harvard economists, Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Summers, who go over to Russia to advise the, the Russian ministers, the economic ministers

• 29:01Speaker 03

  and all the different like, uh, you know, oligarch government feeder heads on how to transition their economy to capitalism by taking, you know, it was effectively like almost $2 trillion worth of publicly held Soviet Union. You know, cause in a communist government, the government owns the wealth. When you transition to a market economy and that's held by private investors, you have to sell off all of those nationally held assets. This is what, you know, the privatization process. We put, we put every country through this. We're putting Ukraine through this right now. We're privatizing all their state held industries off to Wall Street in London. And who makes the money from that? You're getting.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  Bargain basement discount prices buying up dirt cheap assets from the government. And so Jeffrey Sachs was leading this in the 1990s. And they end up essentially destroying the entire Russian economy. You know, their, their market crashes like 95%. This is what created the grounds for Putin to rise to power is that everybody got so pissed off during the Yeltsin years at the poverty, the, so anyway, but Bono links up with Jeffrey Sachs in the, in the nineties and actually a little bit before that, uh, doing this, you know, international development work. Now Bono, of course, is, you know, U2, he's the front man.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  He's this international like sex symbol at the time and, you know, giant selling out stadiums. He did this, these, uh, you know, big kind of USAID fundraiser conference, uh, concerts, Band-Aid and Live Aid, uh, to raise money for AIDS. The BBC later reported that of a hundred million dollars raised for, um, hunger relief in Somalia at, uh, at Band-Aid, 95 million of it went to CIA backed warlords to buy guns. So this is like another one of these things where you think you're raising public awareness.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Oh, there's a, there's hunger in a hunger problem in Somalia, in Eritrea, uh, in Ethiopia. But there's also a civil war where you've got the CIA taking sides in that civil war. Right. And these groups need weapons, logistics, supplies. And so when you've got USAID vans coming in that are saying, said to be carrying medical supplies or they're doing hunger relief and you, but you can't open that box because then the food will expire. You can't open these medical packages because then the therapeutics will evaporate. It's very easy to hide guns in them. And so when you see these scandals where all this

• 31:37Speaker 03

  money is going not to make the world a better place and kumbaya and we're bringing food and medicine, but you're bringing guns. And then USAID got busted in Venezuela on this in 2019, where USAID medical trucks were caught with guns. And who runs the supply for like the AIDS relief, they're like all the therapeutics and treatments for for the PEPFAR program for USAID? It's Kemonix. Kemonix is the the group that the head of Kemonix said he started Kemonix because he always wanted his own private CIA. And the so what you see is is like, while Bono's doing these kumbaya, you know, love, love the world, heal the world, you know, concerts,

• 32:17Speaker 03

  the money is being diverted for CIA covert action to actually kill people, not save people. Right. And and so Bono was formally knighted by the, you know, by the British Crown. And he met with the UK ambassador after he helped put down the Irish revolt against the British Crown. If you remember Sunday, Bloody Sunday? Mm hmm. No more, no more war. It's like this guy with the with a, you know, you look at it now, he's got the Ukraine emoji in his in his bio and the whole thing is war against Russia, but don't no war against the British Crown. And oh, I'm being knighted by the British Crown. I'm now Sir Sir Bono because I helped put down that war. But it's, you know, but you see this.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  And what you end up doing is you end up bringing a lot of people into a perceived cause who aren't even necessarily signed up for it. I go, okay, so Bono does this AIDS fundraiser type thing, or he does this raise money for Ukraine concert. You're gonna have 100,000 people come to this concert, whether they care about Ukraine or not. But now they now the public sees 100,000 people for for Ukraine. They just did this in Brazil. The Biden administration ran this giant CIA USAID State Department operation to oust Bolsonaro from Brazil and install this guy Lula.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  There was this big, um, they, Brazil had this version of January 6th that they call January 8th. It's basically a very similar type strange event that happened in Brazil around the time of that election. And so what, what they did in Brazil is they did this big music concert about a month and a half ago to rally against amnesty for these January 8th prisoners. Brazil's trying to do with, through their parliament, what Trump did for the January 6th folks, you know, all the folks who were, who were nonviolent on January 6th, you know, got like a commutation of sentence and sort of pardon. And so they're trying to do that in Brazil. So what, what Brazil did is they organized this giant music

• 34:19Speaker 03

  conference, you know, against the amnesty to try to, to try to get the, the, the, stop the senate from passing this amnesty of folks. And then the head, the head of the, uh, or one of the ministers on the, on the supreme court there who's, you know, completely on the side of Lula, you know, says, look, there are like 300,000 people who came out to this anti amnesty event. The democ, the people's will is that there's no amnesty. And it's like, okay, well, you had all the top performing music, music artists in Latin America and South America. These people, you can't say these people were there for the amnesty. They were there for the music. They were there for the music, you know, and

• 34:58Danny Jones?

  Oh my God.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  But this then becomes a, you know, self fulfilling prophecy.

• 35:03Danny Jones?

  It's like the, uh, Kamala, uh, campaign where she had the Beyonce concerts. Everyone came to see Beyonce.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Right. It's, it's, it's that every time.

• 35:13Danny Jones?

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• 36:57Speaker 03

  And you see this, like, the Taylor Swift thing?

• 36:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  Do you mind if we just keep hitting this for a little bit?

• 37:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm down, yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  Because the Taylor Swift thing is so funny. So, all right, so this all started about two years ago, I was doing like a private livestream for my subscribers, and I was going through the NATO Psychological Operations Center YouTube page. This is a fabulous place. I encourage everyone to mine this for content before they-

• 37:25Danny Jones?

  The NATO Psychological Operations YouTube page?

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. So, um, so it's technically called the NATO StratCom COE. The StratCom stands for Strategic Communications, and the COE is the Center of Excellence. But it was set up in 2014 after NATO lost control over Crimea and the Donbass in Ukraine. So Victoria Nuland and, you know, the blob overthrows the democratically elected government in Ukraine. Fuck the EU, right. You know, they install Yats and Yook, but then they don't expect the counter coup when the entire eastern, I'm going to fuel up too, actually.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  So they don't expect the entire eastern half of Ukraine to just completely break away and say, we're not going to respect the newly installed, you know, government that no one voted for.

• 38:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  And they don't expect Crimea to vote in an independent referendum to join the Russian Federation. So they blame this on what they called, well, first they called it the Durasimov Doctrine.

• 38:30Danny Jones?

  Durasimov Doctrine?

• 38:31Speaker 03

  This is, this is a hilarious story, actually. So there's this NATO scholar named Mark Aliati, who in, after the counter coup in Ukraine in 2014, he, he writes, he, he finds this quote from this Russian general named Valery Durasimov.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Durasimov wrote, "The nature, the fundamental nature of war has changed. We no longer need to deploy militaries and tanks to defeat an opponent. All we need to do is control the information ecosystem."

• 39:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  And especially social media now, now that that's emerged, you know, with this Arab Spring phenomenon. And if we control the information system, then that determines who gets elected. And then the elected government will simply use the military however we want. So it's actually much cheaper, easier and more effective to win the military war, simply through winning the information war and getting the right person elected, rather than having a head-to-head military confrontation. So this was called the Durasimov Doctrine. Russia is controlling social media and media. And that's why they voted for the Crimea referendum to join Russia. That's why the Donbass broke away.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Now, three years later, Mark Aliati would, would write a oopsie poopsie article. I think it was in Foreign Affairs. And he wrote, it was called, "I'm Sorry for Creating the Durasimov Doctrine." And what he writes in this, and you can look this up. This is like literally, you can just type in, "I'm sorry for the Durasimov Doctrine, Mark Aliati." And what he writes is, "I actually, silly me."

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Durasimov wasn't talking about the Russians when he said that. I sort of took it out of context. He was talking about what the United States and NATO do. He was talking about what we did during the Arab Spring. But by that part, point, like, the horse had left the barn. We had already begun between 2014, 2017, we spent billions of dollars on this concept of what we now call hybrid warfare. Yeah, here we go. I'm sorry for creating the Durasimov doctrine. And I actually was with a friend who texted, texted Mark Galliotti about this. And so I've

• 40:51Danny Jones?

  I was the first to write about Russia's infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem, it doesn't exist.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  Yes, right. But this, when, when he wrote that, that created this industry of what, what NATO would later call its tanks to tweets doctrine. It's right. When it went from tanks to tweets. Because they were like, well, the Russians see this. So it's just, this justifies us doing it. Have you ever seen that, um, that South Park episode where, um, they want to kill deer, but there's the state law in Colorado that the deer or that, you know, the animal before they hunt it has to present some threat to you. So they have to yell, it's coming right for us.

• 41:32Danny Jones?

  I know, that's hilarious.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  So anytime, you know, in order to shoot, you know, shoot something, you have to yell, it's coming right for us, for a video beforehand. And so like, this is what they did for the military to get into the business of social media censorship, of all this like behavioral modification bullshit. They had to be like, well, it's coming right for us. The Russians, the Russians are doing it. Right. And so, so that's so at that moment, when the Durasimov doctrine was, you know, spiked, they were like, well, we need a dedicated information warfare center in order to, in order to do psychological operations to counter the Russian psychological operations. And so they set this up in Riga, Latvia. It's called the NATO STRATCOM Center of Excellence and STRATCOM is Strategic Communication.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  So this is control over the information sector, control over social media and control over protecting NATO narratives. This is like NATO's legitimacy was in question, especially in 2016 when Trump was running. And Trump ran on potentially bailing on NATO or cutting back NATO funding and he was running on neutrality with Russia and this is the whole Russiagate stuff kicking off.

• 42:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  And so, so this YouTube page is, is all about like the center's work in psychological operations online in manipulating strategic narratives in order to favor NATO over not just Russia, but any domestic political government or movement within NATO countries that are seen to be pro Russia.

• 42:59Danny Jones?

  Whose idea was it to put this stuff on a YouTube channel?

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Well, this is the thing. They're competing in the marketplace of ideas.

• 43:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  And so there, this goes out to all their different civil society partners. This all works through these giant network of networks type things. Like you have a thousand different NGOs attached to this. You have 500 different university centers attached to this. You've got, you know, five or six dozen private for-profit companies or pop-up, you know, consultancy firms or PR firms and they all need to kind of drink from the common trough. And so you need to have some level of public facing information distribution for this. And also because it's not structured as an intelligence operation, like you,

• 43:45Speaker 03

  there's some level of transparency that's put forward to, you know, give this patina that this is civil society coming together.

• 43:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  So, anyway, I'm, I'm doing this lecture in, uh, last, two years ago, on the origins of the censorship industry and I'm talking about this, you know, psychological operations center out of NATO. And I, I'm going through their YouTube channel and this is, I think, like June 2019-ish or something. And I'm, I'm showing the, the presentation, it was, it was three people who all had these very strange links to the intelligence world, presenting to a bunch of military generals. Um, I could even pull the video if you want to see it. It's, it's very funny. You could also just.

• 44:27Danny Jones?

  How do we find it?

• 44:28Speaker 03

  If you go to my X account. And you just type in Taylor Swift, I think, I think you'll see this, this blew up, dude. You have no idea, this really, like,

• 44:40Speaker 03

  this created a giant firestorm.

• 44:41Danny Jones?

  Oh, this might have been the first threat, when was this? Oh, this was recent, or more recent?

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Uh, well, this was, well, this is, uh,

• 44:49Danny Jones?

  Scroll down?

• 44:50Speaker 03

  Scroll down, there's probably a lot of, okay. There's a lot of these, but if you go to the media, you'll probably see the video, or if you.

• 44:57Danny Jones?

  Media tab. What year, what year was it again?

• 45:00Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, this one, this, this 257 one.

• 45:03Danny Jones?

  Top right?

• 45:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, top right. Um, now, there's a lot of curse words in this, okay, but here, yeah, yeah. So, so, yeah. So, this was, this is, I believe, from 2019.

• 45:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  So, just to give a little background here, you have, you have three people who are presenting to NATO on how they can win the information war at a time when NATO's political legitimacy was, was in question. Actually, before we watch this,

• 45:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  if you, if you open up a new tab and just Google the term, uh, will a populist wave wash away NATO? I think it was probably like 2017.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Wash away NATO, yeah. I think this may have, let's see.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  Uh, scroll down, scroll down. Or scroll up, yeah, there you go.

• 45:54Danny Jones?

  NATO homepage?

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is on NATO's website, okay?

• 45:56Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  By Mark Galliani, the same, the same author of the, of the, uh, you know, the Derasimov Doctrine. And this is in January 2017, this is two weeks, January 6, 2017. Now, this is two weeks before Trump is inaugurated for the first time. Now, January 6, 2017, I always call this the other January 6, because two things happened that day. So, the CIA, that's the day that the CIA came out and said Russia interfered in the, in the 2016 election. This is the big day, January 6, 2017. Just hours after the CIA endorsed Russiagate and said, actually, the 2016 election was not legitimate because Russia interfered. I read that memo the day it came out on January 6, 2017,

• 46:40Speaker 03

  and it was complete bullshit. From start to finish, it was a joke. They didn't cite anything. It's like a 15-page memo, like five of the pages are intentionally left blank. The whole thing relies on this exhibit at the end, this Exhibit A. And there's nothing in the Exhibit A. It just says, like, Russia today had, like, a 10 times more increased engagement. So did Sputnik. It's like, well, these are public-facing. Right. Say what you want, but that's like saying the BBC had higher engagement. This is, that's not an intelligence operation. That's, that's organic, like, like it or not. Right. But anyway, and then the bots and troll stuff came after that. That's just hours after the CIA put that on January 6th.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  DHS, our Department of Homeland Security, declared that elections are critical infrastructure. And, and so that federalized elections, it said, actually, DHS doesn't just get to protect, you know, our subsea cables and our low Earth satellites and our, you know, public health hospital. They actually get to protect the metaphysical concept of elections, which means misinformation online that undermines the public faith and confidence in the election system is now a DHS capacity to neutralize. So, so January 6th was the day that the government got to get around the First Amendment to be able to censor tweets and Facebook posts and YouTube videos. Wow.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  But that, so the same day, Mark Aliati, you know, writes this, "Will the populist wave wash away NATO and the EU? Anti-establishment populism is undeniably on the rise across the West. From Donald Trump's election pledge to drain the swamp in Washington," why would that be a threat to NATO? Right. "Through Brexit to the ascendancy of movements such as Italy's Five Stars on the Left and Germany's AFD on the Right, a rejection of old orthodoxies and with them political elites and institutions is proving a powerful appeal." So what they're worried about at the time is this Brexit, Fregxit if Marine Le Pen wins in France, Gregxit if AFD wins in Germany, Spexit if the Vox Party wins in Spain. So the EU is going to wash away, which means there's effectively, the, the commercial

• 48:46Speaker 03

  bridge to NATO is completely severed, so NATO is going to fall apart. So there's no enforcement arm for the IMF and the World Bank. It's, you know, like, the end of the world is what they're worried about if people simply... Win elections organically in a fair and square democratic fight. So this is what forces them to have the military, you know, this Gerasimov doctrine, hybrid warfare, military control over media. Right. So, so this is what's in the background of all this. And so in 2019, um, if you, if you go, go back to the, the tab. Now this, I have to warn you is, is got a lot of F bombs in it. That's okay. We can find the original video for this too. But so what you're, we're going to see here, before we watch this, just a little bit more

• 49:31Speaker 03

  table setting. So there are three people. One of them was 77th Brigade from the Brits. That's a British military intelligence and psychological operations, folks. You had this other woman who started her career in the CIA and then, uh, was part of the Stanford Internet Observatory that worked with DHS to censor the 2020 election and COVID-19 narratives. Now this woman speaking right here, the media, so when, when there was a huge amount of media blowback on me for, for posting this clip and, uh, you know, shame on me for finding what's on a frigging NATO YouTube page. But so, you know, this woman here, at the time she was at the Johns Hopkins, uh, you

• 50:13Speaker 03

  know, I think it was a school of international, uh, School of Advanced International Studies, which is like this, she, or maybe it was like some physics. She was, she was at Johns Hopkins doing AI social media work. But at the same time, she was also at Grafica. Grafica, this is what people left out. The Wall Street Journal, everyone called me for comment about this because the Pentagon had to issue like two denials of what I, what I say here.

• 50:41Speaker 03

  And, and which is like hilarious and, but, but what they leave out is she was also working for Grafica at the time. Now Grafica. has gotten over $7 million in Pentagon contracts for AI social media for for AI based social media narrative monitoring.

• 50:58Danny Jones?

  Oh my god.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  So Graphica started off as this essentially like CIA DOD contractor to help our intelligence and military folks identify ISIS propaganda on social media, identify, you know, Boko Haram presence on social media to ident- what they do is they create these keyword maps of the linguistic way of talking, the slogans, the the keywords, the leaders, and then they create this topographical network map. It looks like a big ball of yarn with nodes and network links between them so that you can, yeah, it looks it looks like this. And so, this is

• 51:39Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Wait, wait, zoom out a little, let's, you want to see what these guys did with, by the way?

• 51:45Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  Oh, you, okay, all right, just run it in a Google search for Graphica, April 2020. This is bonkers what this what this group did here. I think if you type in like Infodemic Graphica, April 2020. Now, they worked directly with NATO for this. They worked with with the NATO STRATCOM COE, Graphica did. The info, second, second link there. Yeah, yeah, right there. Boom. Yeah. All right. Yeah. And click download now. All right. Yeah. Yeah. If you click download now, it'll actually, it should just open it up.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  No, it wants me to register.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  You have to register now?

• 52:26Danny Jones?

  Oh, shit. Fill out the consent form.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  No way.

• 52:31Danny Jones?

  Full content. Wait, wait, to access full content. No, it should download it.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Just just click, just try that. Yeah, yeah. Open a new tab.

• 52:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 52:42Danny Jones?

  No way. Check your download tab.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  This always happens. Every time I talk about something, because I I've covered this a couple of times.

• 52:48Danny Jones?

  They said Mike Benz's fucking out of form on that website now.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  DHS deleted a bunch of pages over this. The Arizona State University censorship center shut down its website. The.

• 53:01Danny Jones?

  All right, just fill it out, Steve. We'll keep riffing.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  Okay. All right. So, but, but, um, well, why don't, why don't we start with the Taylor thing?

• 53:08Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  And then, and then we'll come back to this so you can see the kind of stuff that they're involved in.

• 53:12Danny Jones?

  Perfect.

• 53:14Speaker 04

  So, so I just, uh, I just registered and now they want, thank you for your submission. Oh, okay. I got it in my email.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 53:22Danny Jones?

  Okay, cool.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  Okay, well, if you, if you, okay, well, if you got it, let's, let's just, let's knock this out because it's, it's a good, it's good background for seeing what they're going to say about Taylor Swift here.

• 53:31Danny Jones?

  Okay, okay.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  Sort of see their, uh, their way of seeing the world. But so just a little bit of background on this. So Grafica, again, they do this AI social media monitoring. And so they create essentially the hit list that NGOs and governments can use to tell platforms to take this down.

• 53:48Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 53:48Speaker 03

  So Grafica is one of the partners. Remember how I mentioned how on January 6, 2017 DHS got a get out of First Amendment free card by saying anything that questions elections is, uh, is a DHS capacity to neutralize as a cyber threat.

• 54:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  Cyber misinformation threat actors are a threat to elections. And so, um, so Grafica was partnered with DHS to censor the 2020 election. Anyone who questioned mail-in ballots, if you got kicked off of YouTube for questioning mail-in ballots or early voting drop boxes or electronic voting machines, it's because Grafica drew you in a big ass network chart. They ingested 859 million tweets and said 22 million of those tweets were misinformation because they delegitimized the election process. So then, this is like their business model. They're a for-profit company.

• 54:37Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  And so, so if you start, start at the top here, you'll see what they did. Now, now here's, here's a crazy thing here. All right. If you, actually, if you start on page one, and then I'll just guide you with Ctrl F's on this. So, all right. So this was published in April 2020, but they started on this right away. Now, understand again, Grafica, they're, they're a contractor for DoD and CIA.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  Doing this first for terrorist groups, then for domestic political elections and then then for the pandemic. According to their own website on graphic.com, they said that they started ingesting data to create this report on December 16th, 2019. The pneumonia-like symptoms in Wuhan were first reported on December 12th, 2019. So according to their own report, they started creating the global network map of misinformation about the origins of COVID-19 the week that COVID-19 started.

• 55:41Speaker 03

  A DoD CIA contractor to censor opponents of the DoD and CIA, according to their own website, started this censorship project over to censor the origins of COVID-19 the week it was discovered. Now, when I published that on my foundation site, they said, no, no, no, no, no. We actually started on January 16th, 2020, and we backdated the data to December 16th, 2019. I said, okay, well, even if that's the case, you started within a month. It wasn't even called 19 at the time. It was still the COVID virus.

• 56:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  So within a month of the breakout, you have this, you know, contractor for CIA narrative monitoring, monitoring domestic politi... So if you look at this, if you scroll down now, you'll see, so this is a, this was a joint thing they did with the NATO StratCom COE. And if you, if you look at this, you'll see, like, you know, this is like their disinformation map. If you go down and you'll see conspiracy communities, Zero Hedge, Bill Gates and George Soros.

• 56:46Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 56:47Speaker 03

  So, and, and this is crazy. If you see, it's a pro Kremlin voices, so...

• 56:52Danny Jones?

  Anti-CCCP activists.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  So like, run a Ctrl+F for the word conservative, for example. Just, just Ctrl+F.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, yeah. So, okay. And like, and you scroll up a little bit, because what, because I think right wing will also get a bunch of these. Okay, a few key analytical highlights. Okay. So what they, what it shows is that the conversation became flooded with information sources in March and these, you know, all these, the large mega clusters of US right wing accounts. And then if you scroll down, so this is targeting domestic political communities, partnered with NATO, which the US government funds, they've gotten, again, at that time, over $7 million in Pentagon grants for this work, and they're targeting US domestic conservative groups. Grafica's decade fires disinformation map seeded on disinformation specific hashtags reveals that while conservative groups have a larger total presence than liberal groups,

• 57:48Speaker 03

  the combined volume of activity from conservative groups is 27% compared with 8% from left-leaning groups. It wasn't just the US, they also looked at Italy, France, all across the EU, Latin America. This indicates that not only are more right wing accounts involved in the conversation, but these accounts are more active in their engagement than left. This is about disinformation. Wow. So, like, uh, so if you, how many times does conservative appear in this report? 35 times, it says? Is that what that says? It says eight. Okay, try, try right wing, right, right dash wing. Yeah, 54 times. The French right wing, the Italian, a global heat map partnered with NATO. Scroll through it, see what else you can find. No, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just, just keep keeping the down button.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  US right wing accounts, French right wing have been, oh my God, dude.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  Anti CCP and US right wing clusters include videos of Guo Wang Guai. Right, it's like, but think about this, it's like- Corona is a bioweapon. They're calling them anti CCP groups, I mean-

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Like, is Pentagon supposed to be?

• 58:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, and it has, it has this crazy map for every month with color coded.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  The heat map they used, did you see this thing where Susan Wojcicki, the head of YouTube, you know, just because, you know, YouTube just apologized, they just paid Trump 25 million dollars for banning him, and then they apologized, oh, the Biden administration made us censor all these videos and, you know.

• 59:14Danny Jones?

  I want to talk about that. Yeah, we'll go into that.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  Susan Wojcicki claimed that she, they took down a million videos that were, that went against Orthodox, a million videos on YouTube alone. This is where they sourced this stuff from.

• 59:25Danny Jones?

  And she died.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, she died. Yeah, right. But you see, this, it's, and all of these nodes are us. It's you and me.

• 59:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  And we're putting in the CIA Pentagon contractor, working with the exact NATO stratcom, the video we're about to watch, they're getting the heat map right at the start of January 2020.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  So if you just hit enter a bunch of times and you'll see like what they do, you know, with, you know, just, just how, how deep this is. Um, but like for example, put in, like, put in Bill Gates, put in Gates.

• 59:57Danny Jones?

  Because didn't Bill Gates have some crazy conference in New York in the, right in November or?

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  Bill Gates, the Gates Foundation sponsored event 201.

• 1:00:06Danny Jones?

  Event 201, that's what it was.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  Event 201, which had Avril Haines, the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who then became the Director of National Intelligence, the head of the entire ODNI throughout the, the all of, they had her, they had the, one of the heads of Chinese intelligence, and they did a, you know, this multi-day simulation of how,

• 1:00:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  you know, of a, of a bat born Corona, uh, from China, uh, coming from a, a wet market. And then the, the fourth segment was how to censor the internet to stop it. They had a tabletop simulation for how to call this, you know, questions about the origins, disinformation.

• 1:00:44Danny Jones?

  And this was before he broke out?

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  This is October 2019. This is right beforehand.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  And the Gates, you know, Gates who's invested in all these companies and but but what you see is NATO is literally mapping out everybody who criticizes. How much would you need to pay a PR firm? To get the power of NATO, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon? To map everyone who criticizes you on social media? So that those posts can be censored, so that your reputation can be pristine, so that all the policies you you call for go unchallenged? They did this with Bill Gates. If you type in Soros, you'll see like they did, you'll see the right wing, left wing. They got everybody covered.

• 1:01:25Danny Jones?

  This is insane, man.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  You see sixteen times.

• 1:01:27Danny Jones?

  This is so fucking scary.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  Soros, yeah, yeah. And so twenty-three times, mapping everyone who challenges George Soros. Now again, all this stuff, Soros is invested in all these pharma companies, by the way. The Soros Management Fund is neck deep, they are ass to elbow deep in like Abbott Labs.

• 1:01:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  You know, AstraZeneca, they made a huge bet on AstraZeneca ahead of the, the AstraZeneca, which ended up being recalled, by the way, you know, and it's but like by that point, you already had the full force and credit of the US government, you know, telling everyone, get every, whatever thing becomes available, shove it up your butt, doesn't matter which one it is, could be Pfizer, could be Moderna, could be AstraZeneca, could be J and J. Twenty-three times, you know, and and so Soros, when you see Soros co-investing in these CIA operations like he did when in in the nineteen eighties, when he was partnered with USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy and they're destabilizing all these Central European governments and then the Soros New York Management Fund. The hedge fund is betting on the

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  foreign currency speculation, they're betting on the Forex markets on the direction of these governments while they're on the ground. Essentially insider trading on, you know, national security secrets, our covert operations. But you see this, Soros does this everywhere and you know, he does this in Mongolia, he does this in Latin America. And so you'll you'll always see Ned and Soros co-funding things. But just so you don't have to take my word for it, type in, type in Grafica and NATO StratCom COE. In fact, you can probably go to YouTube and do this. I've I've seen their YouTube videos together.

• 1:03:07Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  Like new tab.

• 1:03:11Danny Jones?

  Grafica, NATO, StratCom.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, NATO StratCom COE, yeah.

• 1:03:21Danny Jones?

  You type in COE.

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  Try COE.

• 1:03:23Danny Jones?

  After.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then and then type in like, you know, COVID or something after that, too. And you'll see you'll see this. There you go. Well, wait, wait, scroll up. You'll see right there. NATO STRACOM COE is partnered with social media analysis firm Grafica to analyze and counter disinformation. There were they're literally joint partners. And if you type in, you'll see that they did this with this very report.

• 1:03:43Danny Jones?

  What is the state of this shit now? Is this still happening? Or is there they pulled this back or what? What's going on?

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  So here you go. You'll see this. You'll see all that stuff there. And if you go to YouTube, you'll you'll see it. If you just click like click video, you'll see a bunch of these like joint videos that they've done together. Yeah. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. There's a million of these.

• 1:04:01Danny Jones?

  But because we were a victim of this all throughout this time, like our YouTube channel. We got we got put in purgatory many times. And now like we're to the point where we're terrified to talk about it. This episode is brought to you by PrizePix. You and I make decisions every day, but with PrizePix, being right can get you paid. Don't miss out on the excitement this season where it's good to be right. I've used other apps before, but with PrizePix, I actually understand why people use this app. It's just clean, fast and simpler than all the others. You can pick more or less on your player projections, throw a couple of your favorites into a lineup and you're good to go. That's it. It's daily fantasy without the clutter. This week I'm looking at Saquon Barkley. Can he punch in more than one rushing touchdown? Can Joe Burrow sling more than two and a half touchdowns? Or can Josh Allen get over 270 passing yards?

• 1:04:45Danny Jones?

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• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  We've made huge headway at the US federal government level. So for example, Grafica was incubated in the friggin Minerva Center of the Pentagon. The Psychological Operations Research Center of the Pentagon. Look, this, go to my, uh, I don't know if they still have this up on their website. But um, if you just like open a new tab there and uh, like go to my X handle.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, keep that one. Yeah, yeah. And just type in Grafica, you know, you know, with the K there. And you'll see I pulled the screenshots in case they took it down from the website and scroll down, scroll down. Or if you type in Minerva, actually, do do Minerva. M I N R V A.

• 1:06:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah. M I N R V A. No E.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, no, no, no, you're no with an E.

• 1:06:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, with an E. With or without Grafica?

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, without Grafica.

• 1:06:22Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. All right. So this is, so just pull that first image. Okay, so here is, you know, the grants that Grafica gets, okay? So, so you'll see it's the Senate Intelligence Committee. So that's the committee that oversees the CIA. DARPA, the Knight Foundation, who we just, my, my foundation just published a big report about the Knight Foundation has given over a hundred and seven million dollars in disinformation grants to to all these NGOs and private companies to flag disinformation, over a hundred million dollars. Well, I just, we just published this report this week.

• 1:07:02Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  But the Knight Foundation, they funded the Stanford Air and Observatory, they funded, um, like they're Georgetown now, they fund all the, and the Knight Foundation is huge in Miami, by the way. They fund all these performing arts centers in Miami while they're, while they're partnered with the CIA, DARPA, back to this music thing. Uh, but you'll see at the bottom left there, it says Minerva Initiative. Because Grafica was, was partnered with the Pentagon's Psychological Operations Research Center to study Russian disinformation, create these network maps. It was all Trump supporters. They were like flagging like Alec Baldwin, like Adam Baldwin, you know, as like a, as a Russian. But so if you, if you. Go to the next one, like you'll see there's a Minerva Research Initiative,

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  which is the DOD's Social, Cultural, Behavioral, and Political Forces. So this is shaping culture, behavior, and politics through our War Department. And if, and if you like, and this is, this has had some controversy associated if you go to the next image. But let me show you a couple of things from it, actually. So if you go back to the, just click the X button and scroll down. Uh, yeah, scroll down, scroll down, scroll down one more. Yeah, okay. So like right here. Okay. So this is the kind of stuff that, that Minerva Initiative was funding. Okay. Cause you, you asked what, what's the state of this? Yeah.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  The Minerva Initiative ceases to be. It is an ex-Minerva Initiative. Everyone should thank Pete Hegseth for that. This, uh, this, uh, we've gotten so many wins at the, at the US federal level. And among them is Grafica's main, you know, government partner for so many years. That does the psychological operations work is now shut down. So, so this is, so like one of their grants, post-conflict security structures and citizen buy-in. This project seeks to understand how to stabilize those precarious moments when the state needs to re-establish itself as the accepted authority and create citizen buy-in.

• 1:09:08Speaker 03

  So, so this is the Pentagon farming out psychology research for how to make citizens buy in to the government.

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  This is what they're doing with COVID policy. Citizen buy-in to establish the government as the accepted authority. And I pulled a bunch of these other grants. If you hit the X button, or even if you, yeah, like scroll down. Or wait, yeah, okay. So here's another one, like climate change and alternative governance. So if you scroll down. So this project answers key questions about how different actors contribute to or impede climate governance from long-term challenges to crisis response, how these actors compete or cooperate as governors, how these connections impact actors legitimacy and authority, and how civilians interact with them and attribute responsibility negatively or positively

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  for climate management. So this is basically the Pentagon, which is effectively our Department of Energy as well. You know, this is whenever we do Pentagon stuff, the oil and gas folks.

• 1:10:13Danny Jones?

  This is just billions of dollars going into creating the Truman Show for the citizens of the United States.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  Exactly what it is. This is literally the Pentagon's Psychological Operations Center, Research Center, giving grants to Texas A&M, by the way, which is like, you know, I've described the pre-Donald Trump era, like, from Truman until Trump, politics in Washington was always like Texas A&M versus Yale. It was like, you know, the Cowboys versus the Yankees. It was the George Bush, you know, military and oil and gas mafia against the New York, you know, hedge fund world. And so you had, so I just think this is funny. You know, this is where like the Bush Intelligence School is at Texas A&M. But what they're doing is they're creating heat maps of anyone who challenges the US government-installed

• 1:11:03Speaker 03

  energy policies in foreign countries so that they can neutralize any citizen who's got more legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry than the public. And if you, I've got a bunch more of these grants if you go to that whole thread, but, but, you know, come in, come in back, if you, like, if you scroll down, maybe, just in that, or in the thread there on the right. You'll see this, manerva.d Defense.gov. Okay, so like, okay, click this, the second image there, maybe? Yeah, try that. Oh, yeah. And you'll see, like, so what they're doing here, this is, this is the US Army Counterinsurgency Manual from 2014, I believe, that I pulled here. So this is all of our small war stuff. This is people like, well, why is the Pentagon involved in this? That's so weird. And it's not when

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  you understand that in the 1960s, when JFK, you know, moved towards this Green Beret model, and we moved towards small wars rather than big ones, the whole thing became about... The hearts and minds of the people, rather than about, you know, like, big tank-to-tank type stuff, or plane-to-plane type stuff. Hmm. And so, you know, because we're running insurgencies to topple governments, or we're doing counter insurgencies to stop an upstart movement from deposing one of our installed dictators, like Afghanistan. Right. And so, you'll see this in our counter insurgency guide. Legitimacy is the main objective. You know, counter insurgency forces may achieve this objective through military and non-military

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  means, so the whole goal is to, you know, what did the World Economic Forum say? You'll have nothing and you'll be happy. Right. The problem is, is when we install a puppet government and they loot everything, like Yeltsin in Russia, they just sell off all of the assets that were held by the people. Or installed government in Africa, they'll just sell off the oil, the gas, the diamonds, the gold, the aluminum, the copper, the lithium. The people will be unhappy with their government. They will see the government as illegitimate, so they will start to revolt. So how do you put down that revolt? How do you, how do you take everything from the country, but then make them happy with nothing? Right. And that's like the big, you know, play that's, and they have a whole strategy on how to do that. But Grafica plays into this through neutralizing.

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  They call it, what is it? Shape, clear, hold, build, transition is the five-step counter insurgency manual. And the second step of that is, well, the first step is shape. You shape the information environment first. The second is you get rid of everyone from the insurgency in a big purge. They call that the clearing process. And then you hold against the residual, and then you build, and then you transition off to a rule of law. But, so Grafica is in the first two phases of that. Hmm. So you see, this is the exact place. This is the literal center of excellence that we just talked about. At the time, this is in 2019, and what this woman from Grafica, from the exact place,

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  partnered with the NATO Center of Excellence on disinformation, and what she's going to pitch to them, and I didn't even know this at the time, we were just going through this because I was giving a lecture on AI censorship, because this was about how to use, you see, an identification, they've got these Grafica-style network node maps. Yep. And segmentation, how to, so she's giving this talk about how NATO needs to spend more money on these AI-based censorship firms, and that's the key for NATO winning the information war. But buried in the middle of this, excuse the F-bombs that may come flying out of this. You'll see, and just, you know, maybe we'll just start with, with the punchline, so it's not missed there.

• 1:14:37Speaker 03

  And that, and the, if you zoom into the goal example, um, you, you see that right there?

• 1:14:44Danny Jones?

  Top right.

• 1:14:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, top right.

• 1:14:45Danny Jones?

  You punch in on that, Steve?

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  You'll see what, what she's telling this room full of NATO generals is to identify key actors to train and spread desired messaging. And that is a picture of Taylor Swift, as you will heal her, as you will hear her confirm. So, so, so the US government is funding this conference. The US government is, leading NATO is, you know, trying to get solicitations from these outside experts on how to win, how NATO can win the information war, and how can put down domestic revolts in their own countries from these right-wing populist parties who are running on neutrality and cheap energy with Russia. And so, the goal is to get people like Taylor Swift to train and spread desired messaging.

• 1:15:28Speaker 03

  The example, encourage opinion leaders to share counter information operation and content. But the risk is that opinion leaders may not want to share content, uh, or may accidentally share misinformation. So anyway, listen, listen to her, go through, go through this.

• 1:15:40Danny Jones?

  Okay. Let's run it, Steve.

• 1:15:42Speaker 05

  And the most, um, most common is working with famous people, um, or main influencers to share, uh, information or particular message. So I include Taylor Swift in here because... Are you fucking kidding me? NATO, NATO Psychological Operations Unit? It's on the screen! Center of Excellence, the NATO Center of Excellence. In 2019, Taylor fucking Swift, who I've probably rage posted about...

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  1400 times about as a geopolitical instrument of statecraft because her goddamn IP discography was purchased by the fucking Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group, the private equity arm of the Iraq War with Dick Cheney on its board and the entire Halliburton, Texas, West Texas oil mafia. They were the literal funders and profiteers of the entire, uh, West Texas military mafia. And it was jointly bought by the Carlyle Group and the Soros Group, who's the London and New York financier class of West Texas.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  So the fucking military industrial complex, plus its energy stakeholders who rely on the battering ram of the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, bought Taylor Swift's discography. She had to re-record her own shit last year in order to win her right, in order to have a parallel tracks to win back her own rights. She had to re-record her own songs. And of course, she was wheeling out for Biden in 2020. Because George Soros and the Carlyle Group bought it. She won Time Magazine's Person of the Year this year. And I think it was the Wall Street Journal that hypothesized that Taylor Swift would be Biden's, quote, "secret weapon to win the 2024 election." And by the way, her era's tour, which is, uh, has the economy of, uh, of, I think, one

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  of, you know, top 20 nation states by GDP in the entire globe, her tour. Taylor Swift is a cultural battering ram. Pause right there, pause right there. So, so if you, the, so what happened here is, again, understand NATO and the EU are like the same, just the commercial arm and the military arm are the same thing. And so the EU, the head of the EU, uh, came out and solicited Taylor Swift, uh, when she was like wrapping up her era's tour to do another leg in Europe ahead of the European election so that she could do a get out of the vote drive for pro-EU candidates. It's the same thing that they're doing with, you know, NATO narratives in a general sense. They're trying to rig elections.

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  They're doing the Beyonce strategy that you outlined. So, but, you know, this is another one of these things. And actually, if you go to my page and you type in, um, uh, type in Rumsfeld, if you go to my X account, I'll just show you another example of this. Just since we're hitting on the the military and the music.

• 1:18:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55Danny Jones?

  So she sold, she sold her IP to George Soros and the Carlyle Group.

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:00Danny Jones?

  And then they wouldn't, she, she tried to buy it back and they refused.

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  Well, cause I think it was, I, I don't know that, I mean, there's a whole operation around her. I don't know that she necessarily wanted to do it, or if it was done through her man. She's, I think she sued her, like, was it Scooter Braun?

• 1:19:16Danny Jones?

  Scooter, yeah.

• 1:19:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, she like sued, like, I think she said she didn't really consent, or like she was misled about the thing. And she has got some lawsuit against all of them. I don't know what the status of it is.

• 1:19:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  Wait, but, oh wait, scroll down a little bit.

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  Uh, scroll downs, or, is that the only one? Uh, okay, do, how about Copeland? Type in C O P E L A N D. So, cause we're getting to this like, well, how does this music get distributed and things like this? Okay, so take like, so, all right, before we play this, I'm just gonna read this. So here's Miles, Miles Copeland, the manager of Sting and the Police, producer for R E M, Dead Kennedys and more, talking about how the Pentagon recruited him to swing hearts and minds in the Middle East. Now, a little bit, now, now, Miles Copeland, before he was the manager of Sting and the Police and producer for R E M and all these groups, um, his, was it father?

• 1:20:15Speaker 03

  Or I think it was his father, maybe grandfather. Um, Miles, the original, I think he's, this is Miles, the original Miles Copeland was one of the founding members of the O S S and was part of the original group that did the CIA's first covert action in Italy in 1948. He wrote a book, if you open up a new tab and you type in Miles Copeland cloak and dagger.

• 1:20:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, inside the CIA.

• 1:20:44Danny Jones?

  Okay, wow.

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  Now, in this book, he writes that we, that this, you know, as one of the guys who operationally carried out the CIA's first election rigging event, this was the 1948, April 1948 Italy election.

• 1:20:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  This is what, uh, this is what effectively convinced the State Department to give the CIA its plausible deniability cloak because of how effective this operation was and they wanted to scale it around the world. And he writes in here that if we, the CIA had not interfered in that election, the pro-US candidate would have lost 60 to 40, and we couldn't have done it without the help of the Italian mafia.

• 1:21:19Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  Who was our boots on the ground stuffing ballot boxes and breaking up opposition meetings and so, you know, so, you know, Copeland, uh, I forget if it's the son or the grandson, but, you know, becomes this big music producer and then we'll, we'll play, you know, we'll just like play this 50 seconds, I think.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  So I get a call from Donald Rumsfeld, my secretary comes up to me and says, Miles, it's Donald Rumsfeld on the phone. I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  Pause, pause right there, pause right there, let's read this. Okay, Copeland was brought to the Pentagon three times to advise the Bush administration on propaganda plans in the Middle East, including the notion of filming a Bon Jovi concert in Damascus, in Syria.

• 1:22:00Danny Jones?

  With the crowd waving tiny American flags.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  So this again is like giant outdoor music concerts, artists you know and love, Taylor Swift, Bono, Bon Jovi. And, yeah, we, we had just, we're in the middle of the war on terror, you know, 9/11 is like just happened. And so the Pentagon is working directly with the music industry in order to have this propaganda shape the hearts and minds, to shape the elections, to install the, the control apparatus. But you wonder like, why is it that you've got the military all up in the Taylor Swift thing through the Carlyle Group and the Soros Group and through Grafica and the NATO Center of Excellence? You know, why is it that you've got Bono doing the war profiteering, you know, for,

• 1:22:43Speaker 03

  uh, for the Ukraine war and, but breaking up, you know, uh, paramilitary threats against the, the UK from, coming from the, you know, the Irish? Why is it that the, the Pentagon is sponsoring South by Southwest? Why is it that you've got these Pentagon USAID contracts to, to, you know, Bangladeshi hip-hop artists and, you know, Cuban rap groups and...

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  You know, the military effectively sponsoring rock concerts at the Berlin Wall. And it's, it's the same thing over and over again. But if you just play the clip, like you'll see how it plays out.

• 1:23:16Speaker 03

  Pick up the phone, you know, thinking this is a joke. And it's the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Tori Clark. And she says, uh, we hear that you know about our music and we think there might be a way to win hearts and minds in Middle East.

• 1:23:30Speaker 06

  And would you help us come up with some programs that we might do and put forward that helps us, you know, make the Iraqis not hate us. I said, well, sure, you know, I'm a loyal American. I'm happy to help. The plan is to find 12 girls who will be the basis of a, of a show featuring Arab dance and Arab music.

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  Okay. All right. We'll pause there. But it's everywhere. We do this everywhere. It's a checklist item. It's insane.

• 1:24:06Danny Jones?

  Um, okay. That was crazy. That was a crazy deep dive into all this stuff. Fascinating shit. Um, but I want to transition a little bit. One of the things that I really want to try to understand better is this whole sort of backdoor way of, and I think, I don't, uh, I think you explained that you were, you were working in like the cyber program of where again?

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  State Department.

• 1:24:33Danny Jones?

  Of the State Department, right? And then you said, I think you mentioned that you got like a call or something from Facebook.

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:38Danny Jones?

  And they were getting pressure from other countries. It was Google.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:43Danny Jones?

  So

• 1:24:46Danny Jones?

  in some way, all these other countries, like in Europe and in South America, like Brazil, are censoring everything and somehow using, we're, we're using these other countries to pressure us to censor the same way they're doing it, right?

• 1:25:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So our government is really

• 1:25:07Danny Jones?

  I gotta get rid of these things.

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Our, our government is really unique in that we have a first amendment, which is a, you know, this, this very ironclad protection against government's ability to compel the censorship of speech. There's no other country on planet earth that has that protection. So what, what happened in Europe is you had this transatlantic.

• 1:25:33Speaker 03

  Agenda, the set of stakeholders who all profit off of, you know, what people call like globalist action. Like, for example, if there's going to be a transition in the energy market, there are all these stakeholders who are going to profit from that transition. They're going to, you know, profit from the lithium and the cobalt rather than from the fossil fuels. And, and if you can argue, for example, well, you know, this will hurt our military enemies, like Russia, because they are, as John McCain said, a gas station with a military. When we transition the global market away from gas and we do these mandates away from gas, then, you know, we, we're knocking out two birds with one stone. But that requires this kind of global collective action. And also, what happens in one of these countries impacts

• 1:26:17Speaker 03

  what happens in the other. When Donald Trump wins the election here in the US, that impacts what happens in Europe. When the, the Pol- Poland just had an election. What happens in, in Poland's election will determine whether or not the US war policy in Ukraine is as effective. Because Poland is the big vector for the liquefied natural gas that the US is shipping from Houston to use Ukraine's gas architecture by cutting out Russia. If Poland decides actually we want neutrality with Russia, and they don't want to allow, you know, all these gas transits, or they don't get enough of a cut, then that would be a big problem. So, so this is a big transatlantic community, if you will, big transatlantic blob. And with, with the restrictions

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  in the First Amendment, this capacity to censor the internet is limited with what can be done out of the US federal government. They got away with it for a time, essentially from like 2017 to 2024, mostly because people didn't know what they were doing. They had not been exposed, they had not been sued. There was not really, you know, political force mobilized to actually hold them accountable to the First Amendment. And as that has dropped off, you know, we've cut the USAID funds, we've cut the State Department funds for this, we've cut the Pentagon programs doing this, most of them. You know, we've cut the National Science Foundation funds for this, we've cut the DHS rule on this. Like, they are now more

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  and more reliant on foreign censorship laws that force US social media companies to censor in order to keep their markets or suffer giant fines. So like, for example, The Google call that I got in 2020. Right. Was about this set of regulations in Europe called the EU Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act. Okay. Now, the Digital Services Act is the Digital Censorship Act. That's like if you're providing digital services like social media platforms, you need to be answerable to our disinformation code of practice. You need to work with the EU Digital Commission to censor any narratives that the EU calls disinformation.

• 1:28:28Speaker 03

  Now, this was championed by the US State Department as a way to get around the First Amendment. When they first started setting up the censorship architecture, they were very careful to try to structure it in a way that was in a legal gray area, where they thought they might be able to get away with it. The Atlantic Council, which is, as I mentioned, you know, was funded not just by the Pentagon, has seven CIA directors on its board and one of the biggest contributors is Adrian Arsh, who, you know, runs all the arts and culture stuff in Miami. They, they wrote this memo in 2018, right before the, the, the first domestic censorship agency in the, in the US federal government was set up.

• 1:29:13Speaker 03

  It was called CISA. The, it's got a really boring name, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Yeah, but well, all that means is elections at the time, anything that's deemed critical infrastructure. Right. In the cyberspace is censorable by DHS's CISA unit. Right. So as I mentioned, on January 6th, 2017, they, they said elections are critical infrastructure. So CISA could tell, you know, it, it's could essentially hire this outside group to tell companies to, you know, ban anyone questioning Dominion, or then later they declared public health to be critical infrastructure. So anyone who censored, anyone who questioned COVID, uh, you know, they, CISA did that too.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  But when the Atlantic Council was first coming up with this idea for CISA's censorship operation, they published this series of memos they called Forward Defense. It's not offense, it's forward defense.

• 1:30:07Danny Jones?

  Forward defense.

• 1:30:09Speaker 03

  And.

• 1:30:09Danny Jones?

  It's oxymoron.

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. And what they said is, um, well, the only capacity we have that currently does internet censorship is the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which was set up in 2014 to censor ISIS propaganda. So that the State Department could tell YouTube and Twitter and Facebook to take down these ISIS accounts. And they kind of got away with it because it was foreign facing. It wasn't US citizens, so they didn't really have first amendment protection. And it was terrorism and.

• 1:30:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:30:40Speaker 03

  Look at what just happened in Garland, Texas. Look what happened to the Ariana Grande concert. Like, we don't ISIS terrorism is bad and they're recruiting people on Facebook and Twitter. And so they, they got away with that at that time. But then in 2016, when Trump won, the Global Engagement Center shifted to Russian propaganda and Russian disinformation. And then they just called Trump supporters Russians. They said, so, so this is now 2018. They said, the problem is, is we can't censor, you know, US citizens out of the State Department. They said, well, okay, they literally have a memo on this. I think I posted the screenshots on my ex account, but I don't mean to put Steve through all the, the muscle here. They said, well, you know, what we could do is, you know, this is really an intelligence operation.

• 1:31:23Speaker 03

  You know, the CIA can go to Le Monde in France and tell them not to publish something. They can go to the Frankfurt Algarve minor in Germany and tell them not to publish something. So they could go to the social media companies and tell them, you know, not to send, tell them not to publish something. They said, but hi, yeah, but we can't do that domestically with the CIA.

• 1:31:42Speaker 03

  Cause now technically you might be able to, under some counterintelligence thing. This is how they saw.

• 1:31:47Danny Jones?

  Isn't that what the Twitter files were?

• 1:31:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:49Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:31:49Speaker 03

  And who got busted in the Twitter files doing, calling, doing this, it was the Atlanta Council itself, which had this whole unit called the DFR lab that was flagging tens of thousands of posts. The Atlanta Council was formerly partnered with DHS and it was their idea. You know, again, seven CIA directors on their board and they got three former DHS secretaries, Michael Chertoff and, you know, all these, all these folks. They got Jet Johnson to co-sign this. He was the one who signed the, you know, executive order on January 6th, 2017 to set this all up. And so they said, okay, well, how about the FBI? The FBI has got domestic jurisdiction and it's an intelligence agency.

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• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  They said, oh, the problem with that is the FBI has a legal requirement as the investigative arm of the Justice Department to have a predicate of lawbreaking. And it's not illegal to support Donald Trump or to, you know, later question COVID-19. So what's the only other domestic intelligence equity you have? You have 17 intelligence agencies, only two of them are domestic: FBI, DHS. They said DHS is not beholden to the Justice Department. It can be standalone. They don't need a lawbreaking predicate to do this. So they essentially, out of DHS, created this combination of the CIA's powers abroad with the FBI's jurisdiction at home.

• 1:34:04Speaker 03

  They actually bragged about this on tape at October 2021 Disinformation Conference at CISA. They bragged about how they pulled off this structure of this kind of domestic CIA fusing these, you know, fusing these things.

• 1:34:16Danny Jones?

  Can't the CIA do it under counterintelligence?

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, they could. If it had a foreign, if it had a foreign nexus, in theory, they could say, this is sort of like, if it was just Russiagate stuff, it would be unseemly. It would, it would, it would have political blowback. They could probably argue, because, you know, you can target a US citizen who's accused of being a Russian agent under the CIA. And this is how they were able to plant, you know, spies, CIA spies on Trump's campaign. It was like they, you know, they said, well, there's a suspected... Russian connection and so we can spy on our own citizens to stop spies from foreign countries. That's like how they always get away with it.

• 1:34:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:34:58Speaker 03

  Um, this is how the CIA was sicked on Martin Luther King, for example.

• 1:35:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:35:01Speaker 03

  You know, like Martin Luther King, they said, well, his biggest financial backer is Stanley Levinson. Stanley Levinson is affiliated with the American Communist Party. The American Communist Party is affiliated with Russia, with the Soviet Union. So the CIA can spy on Martin Luther King. Anyway, so, uh, so what, what happened here is think like we're sort of on the general topic of like this, this Google.

• 1:35:22Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:35:22Speaker 03

  Call and what was happening in Europe. So, so they were aware at the time, the thin ice they were skating on. I don't think they expected to get away with it for as long as they did. And then, once they, once they won the 2020 election, for about a year and a half, they went completely gangbusters on this. Until Elon purchased X, Twitter files, Republicans won the House and then Jim Jordan led this big, Jim Jordan and.

• 1:35:50Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:35:51Speaker 03

  And, uh, Dan Bishop, who was incredible from the DHS Subcommittee, led all these exposures and then.

• 1:35:57Danny Jones?

  Didn't Jim Jordan subpoena YouTube files as well?

• 1:35:59Speaker 03

  Yep, YouTube files, Facebook files, all that stuff.

• 1:36:02Danny Jones?

  I never saw, I never saw much about the YouTube files.

• 1:36:05Speaker 03

  They were good. I mean, it was, it was basically.

• 1:36:08Danny Jones?

  Well, I imagine if the Twitter files are what they are, if we saw that they were having weekly meetings with the moderators in the FBI and the CIA. I imagine what YouTube could be, the place that was incubated by the CIA.

• 1:36:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, they published like about a hundred pages in it, like a summary report. But unlike the Twitter files, they didn't really give.

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  It was, a lot of it was more executive summaries than actually being able to see the cold, hard screenshots. You know, hundreds of them at a time.

• 1:36:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  So I think the rollout could have been a lot, but I don't know what kind of restrictions they're under when you subpoena that stuff to not make all of it publicly available. Like it may be only reviewable by, you know, congressional staffers and then the executive report. So they may have had restrictions on it, but they were very effective. But, so what the State Department and the blob was lining up in the background of all of this, was having other countries regulatory bodies be able to do what the First Amendment would not let them do here. And the main weapon in that was the EU Digital Censorship Act. I'm not going to dignify it with the Digital Services Act because it's just a censorship act. What that does. Is because you know, Europe, no, no country in Europe has a first amendment.

• 1:37:19Speaker 03

  But the things that are illegal are like hate speech and you know, and the like. There's no, it's not like disinformation is not a legal crime. But what, what the EU does is this kind of supra European body is it says, even if it's not illegal in any country. This, you know, kind of insular EU governing body will be able to decide what disinformation is. And it will be able to tell the platforms that either you have to throttle that content or suppress it algorithmically. And also allow all of our, you know, vetted researchers to get inside access to all the internal platform data.

• 1:38:01Speaker 03

  So we can create these topographical network maps of disinformation spreaders. Or else you will suffer billions of dollars in fines. The penalty for non-compliance is 6% of global annual revenue. Under this, under this law, which is in effect as we speak. 6% of global annual revenue.

• 1:38:20Danny Jones?

  And fines?

• 1:38:21Speaker 03

  In fines for non-compliance with the Digital Censorship Act. Now, that means all of the revenue that like YouTube gets in India, in New Zealand, in Madagascar, in the United States, in Brazil, has to be turned over to the European Union. If they don't comply with the censorship order, 6% of global revenue. You know, a lot of companies, most Fortune 500 companies operate at like a, you know, what is the typical private equity fund? Milestone is like 8%, right? That's like a good return on investment where you know, you're, the performance fee kicks in. And this is six, not of, not of profit.

• 1:39:05Danny Jones?

  Total.

• 1:39:06Speaker 03

  Like 6% of all revenue.

• 1:39:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:39:08Speaker 03

  Which means, you know, like a lot of companies don't even have a 6% profit margin.

• 1:39:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:39:15Speaker 03

  Let alone, you know, so. The alternative is you you lose the EU market. And how can you be a global social media platform without access to the 550 million people in Europe? So they're completely under the gun of this. And this is now all of the people who do who determine what disinformation you know is are the worst people on earth that you can imagine to do this.

• 1:39:38Danny Jones?

  I can imagine.

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  Like I'll give you an example, like and like like NewsGuard is partnered with the EU Commission on this.

• 1:39:44Danny Jones?

  Right. John Kerryaki was showing me this stuff.

• 1:39:47Speaker 03

  And who's on the board of NewsGuard?

• 1:39:48Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God, it's diabolical.

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  Rick Stengel, the former head of the Global Engagement Center, who was we talked about, was the OG US censorship agency. Anders Fog Rasmussen, the former head of NATO. He was the guy who was the head of NATO from 2009 to 2014. 2014 is right when the Drosimov Doctrine kicks off. He's the guy who sets up effectively the NATO STRATCOM COE. And then now he's the guy on the board, you know, that's of the company that's directly partnered with the EU Digital Commission to determine what disinformation is. You can just look this up. Look up. Yeah. Well, go to the Board of Advisors. Oh, advisors? Yeah. Yeah, this is this is advising on what disinformation is.

• 1:40:31Danny Jones?

  Scroll their website. I'm sure it's listed on the website.

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, let's.

• 1:40:35Danny Jones?

  Maybe. Maybe not.

• 1:40:38Speaker 03

  Definitely was. I mean, if you just go to my ex account, you'll see all the screenshots. But.

• 1:40:42Danny Jones?

  Our team.

• 1:40:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, go to our team.

• 1:40:49Danny Jones?

  Editorial.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  Go down to advisors.

• 1:40:51Danny Jones?

  Keep going.

• 1:40:52Speaker 03

  Unless they scrub this, which would be hilarious.

• 1:40:53Danny Jones?

  Keep going. No, just keep scrolling down.

• 1:41:02Danny Jones?

  Business. Technology. Oh.

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  That's hilarious if they delete. They always delete something I were talking. If you just if you just go to my if you just go to my ex, my ex account, you'll see I have I have it all archived there. I have the archive dot IS and all that stuff. But if you just type in like NewsGuard and maybe NATO or just NewsGuard will get you there.

• 1:41:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:24Speaker 03

  Down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Okay, uh, okay, so just a little bit more on this. They're partnered with Randy Weingarten's American Federation Teachers. If you like, pop that open. Now, this is another blob entity. Randy Weingarten was on the Executive Board of the National Network for Democracy. Is the head of the, you know, the 1.7 million teachers' union. Randy Weingarten, who had the Ukraine emoji in her X account and, and, uh, so it's another like, this very teachers' union partnered with the, so again, this is like their, NewsGuard is the narrative guard. They just ban anything that's pro-populist.

• 1:42:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:42:02Speaker 03

  And if you scroll over, like, you'll see, yeah, just like hit a couple of these. You'll see, this is, you know, a traffic like news nutrition labels. Like, your YouTube video will be flagged in schools so that, like, kids can't cite anything they learned from you. But click the X and we'll just scroll down.

• 1:42:18Speaker 03

  Down, down, down, down, down, down. Uh, okay, and you'll see there that, but, uh,

• 1:42:22Danny Jones?

  Go up.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, yeah.

• 1:42:24Danny Jones?

  Right, where the circle, the circle guys were?

• 1:42:25Speaker 03

  That's fine, that's fine. Well, yeah, I was just gonna show, like, and this is the head of NewsGuard.

• 1:42:29Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:42:29Speaker 03

  Doing disinformation in democracy. You'll see Renee Dresch, she was one of the people who was the three people presenting in that NATO STRACOM video, by the way.

• 1:42:38Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  Yes, as I mentioned, uh, yes, the Stanford Internet Observatory people. Um, but, okay, so X out of that. And you'll see, by the way, you'll see the George Bush Institute is, is one of the co-sponsors and Freedom House, which is one of the OG CIA NGOs.

• 1:42:51Danny Jones?

  Four-star general.

• 1:42:52Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, right, yeah, so, so, on the board of NewsGuard, determining what disinformation is.

• 1:42:57Danny Jones?

  Michael Hayden.

• 1:42:58Speaker 03

  Michael Hayden, head of the CIA.

• 1:42:59Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 1:43:00Speaker 03

  Head of the NSA, four-star general. So, this is, you know, Michael B. Hayden, I think, was averaging like, one or two death threats per week against Donald Trump. He was like, you know, he should hang and, and like, you know, he should be tried for treason and this is, who's determining, you know, what disinformation is to the EU. Go ahead, open up a new tab, tab, for example, and, um, that's funny if they scrub that from the website, and type in "NewsGuard EU Disinformation."

• 1:43:30Speaker 03

  They're selling compliance services for this. Yeah, the European Commission announces NewsGuard as new, as new partner. Here you go.

• 1:43:41Speaker 03

  The code of practice on disinformation. And if you scroll down, you'll see they talk about they're going to help us censor climate narratives and they're going to censor like, you know, they're going to apply all these, yeah, the World Health Organization to identify COVID-19, you know, infodemics.

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  To stop the spread and also the stop of monetizing disinformation because NewsGuard works with the ad, the supply side ad exchanges to kill all the, the ad revenue. So anyway, so, you know, NewsGuard, American company, oh, here's another great thing. Type in, go to Google and type in NewsGuard.

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  My Quest. Just type in My Quest. And then type in middleware after that. Space middleware, one word, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:36Speaker 03

  So what they do is they sell censorship blacklist. Okay, scroll down, yeah, here you go, boom, first one. What I learned on My Quest. So this is the NewsGuard CEO. And you'll see what it says. Can you just zoom into that, what's that subtitle say?

• 1:44:52Danny Jones?

  middleware could be the solution to our tech woes, but Congress is going to have to force the internet companies to use it.

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  Okay, so middleware was this branding term they came up with. They came up with this out of the Stanford Internet Observatory. In fact, I think he even references this. This is this Francis Fukuyama, like CIA, State Department node. They had all these, these like prep conferences for how we can install censorship out of the government. How can we, how can we bill it in a way that's politically palatable? So they came up with this concept, oh, it's not, it's not censorship software that NewsGuard sells, it's middleware that's simply a filter in between the platform and the user. And we can create, instead of having forced government censorship, we can bill it as a competitive middleware industry where like six or seven different disinformation companies will, it won't be like a monopoly on speech.

• 1:45:46Speaker 03

  You'll get a choice between six or seven different Coke and Pepsi disinformation filters that have to be forcibly applied. So, so, you know, but again, what he's saying there, if you just again scroll up or scroll down, but just to come back to, so you can see those words on your screen, you can really take that in.

• 1:46:03Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:46:03Speaker 03

  What he's saying is, listen, the social media companies don't want to buy our coerced censorship blacklist.

• 1:46:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:46:13Speaker 03

  So Congress is going to have to force them to buy it from us. But we have a First Amendment and that shit is incredibly politically unpopular. So if the US government can't force it, Hillary Clinton's little friends in Europe will, Tony Blinken's little friends in Europe will, George Bush's little friends in Europe will. And that is what they've done. They've gotten Europe to use NewsGuard by force, under penalty of the code of, the mandatory code of practice on disinformation. And the only way to stop this is through the Donald Trump State Department and Donald Trump White House threatening to punch them back 100 times harder. Every French wine company, Macron is all over this.

• 1:46:58Speaker 03

  Every German, you know, pharmaceutical company and manufacturing company. We need to have a retaliatory regulatory structure in place. We need to have tariff threats through the roof. We need to threaten to leave NATO or to slash NATO funding because if this thing is enforced, that's the end of free speech in America. They won't have a choice.

• 1:47:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah, how does this come back on us?

• 1:47:19Speaker 03

  Because US companies get fined into oblivion.

• 1:47:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  The only way to comply is by setting up this compliance node and then having that compliance node do everything the EU body says.

• 1:47:31Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  And, and, you know, I played this clip a million times, but if you go to my ex account and you play, you put the word restaff in, you'll see in 2023, these exact same censorship operatives from the National Down for Democracy and the Atlantic Council, who are in this meeting, just put a hyphen in between re and staff.

• 1:47:51Speaker 03

  And I'm sorry that I played this clip like everywhere I go now, but it's so important. It's about, it's about a minute, a minute and 20 seconds, but it'll answer your question directly about what's going on here. So, speaking here is Rebecca Tremblay, who was the head of tech toxic conversations in Twitter 1.0, and she's flanked by Dean Jackson from the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA cut out, and that now at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which was run for seven, seven years by Bill Burns, the CIA director. All these are funded by the US government, and then Katie Harbath is also in this. She's a National Endowment for Democracy and Atlantic Council. So the whole thing is this CIA NGO censorship soup.

• 1:48:34Speaker 03

  And you'll see this is in December 2023, after Elon had already completed the acquisition of X, and Mark Zuckerberg in the background, this is before he told Jim Jordan that he was, you know, that he apologized and was getting rid of the fact checking team. He'd already begun to do this. This is how I had sort of advanced notice about what Zuckerberg was doing, because I was just following with the censorship people who were saying, they're saying there's this chain effect, we're screwed in the US here unless Europe saves us.

• 1:49:04Speaker 06

  If it weren't for Europe right now, I think that I would feel pretty defeated and despondent in this moment. It has certainly become much, much more difficult for outside researchers to do the sorts of, right, of the options that you list, Samir, to actually engage directly with people at the platforms, because there are simply fewer of them, right? We spent literally years building up relationships with good folks at all of these platforms who are trying to do the right thing, and for the most part, they're gone, right? It's really, really difficult to know who to reach out to, who to work with.

• 1:49:43Speaker 06

  If it weren't for the European Union and the Digital Services Act, I don't know that we'd have much hope of rectifying that situation at all. But given the sort of requirements that for performing risk assessments, for sharing more transparent information with the public, and crucially for sharing data with researchers, I do think that we still have some... Options for leverage to continue the work that we've been doing. And hopefully, ultimately, that leads to a sort of restaffing of some of these positions. Increased focus again, um, as the DSA begins to come into force. And the platforms feel the real pressure of actual enforcement action.

• 1:50:27Speaker 03

  These are American professional censors think going to Europe to get their censorship jobs back in the United States. And that's what we're up against right now. And thank God.

• 1:50:39Danny Jones?

  So they're like doing a test run over there to like, sort of like carbon copy.

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  It's beyond a test run. It's, it's in effect. They're, they're skittish about enforcement, I think, because they're afraid of Trump's blowback, but they're already imposing these compliance costs on the tech companies. They've had to set up these compliance units, all the tech companies. But we're well beyond a test run, but thank God that the Trump administration has stalled trade talks. The, this major EU-US trade deal has been stalled over this exact thing.

• 1:51:09Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:51:10Speaker 03

  JD Vance and Donald Trump and the State Department, National Security Council people are apprised of this threat now and, um, they're taking it very, very seriously.

• 1:51:19Danny Jones?

  So I don't mean to cut you off, but, um, I want to talk about, and you can finish your thought there. Um, but I wanted to ask you about this thing with YouTube paying Donald Trump and this new thing that's happening with YouTube and, and Trump.

• 1:51:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, they, you know, they paid him, I think, $24.5 million, YouTube did, uh, for, you know, his compensation for banning him in 2021. Uh, and then they have pledged to get rid of third-party fact-checking and move towards an X-style community notes.

• 1:51:49Speaker 03

  And they have pledged to start a pro, a pilot program to allow banned accounts who questioned COVID-19 or the 2020 election to come back on the platform. That is not up yet, but they've said they're going to be starting it soon. And they have blamed the Biden administration for the censorship actions. They said, they really, they told us to do it and we shouldn't have complied. They, it's sort of like what Zuckerberg said. But I think Zuckerberg didn't want to do it, whereas Google did it willingly, joyfully.

• 1:52:22Speaker 03

  Zuckerberg.

• 1:52:22Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:52:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Zuckerberg in 2019 was giving speeches about how he thought censorship had gone too far. And then he got hit with a $60 billion market cap devastation from the advertiser boycotts under the change the terms campaign against Facebook. And then they caved. Zuckerberg cares more about is, I think Zuckerberg and Elon actually have very, very, very similar values. The difference is Elon has a spine and Elon is willing to, you know, when the advertiser boycott hit X, Elon went on, what was it like Aaron Sorkin and said, and he was asked, what will you do if it bankrupts X? And Elon said, the world will watch, you know? Right.

• 1:53:08Speaker 03

  Fuck you, the advertisers. Right. Whereas Zuck, I think it's, you know, Facebook is his baby, Meta is his baby. And he was, I mean, cause you see the emails, it was in the Facebook files that Jim Jordan showed, where Zuckerberg is being told by, I think it was Nick Clegg, who is the UK Labour Party guy, UK, you know, liberals, folks who then became head of global affairs for Meta. And Zuckerberg says, you know, do we really have to, you know, get rid of this COVID misinformation stuff that the White House flagged? And Nick Clegg says, yeah, we have to, because we have bigger fish to fry with the Biden administration.

• 1:53:51Speaker 03

  So we should try to think creatively on how to be receptive to their demands. Yeah. And a lot of this was they needed their help against Europe, against all these fines, not from the Digital Services Act, from like the Digital Markets Act, mostly. And so Zuckerberg responds to that email and says, can we at least tell the public the Biden administration made us do it? And then the email trail runs dry, but I have to imagine a phone, this is in 2021. Right. Like mid 2021. So Zuckerberg didn't want to do it in the first place. When they, you know, when he was told essentially by his business team, listen, we gotta play ball because we need the government's help. He says, well, can we at least tell the public like this is why we're doing it?

• 1:54:35Speaker 03

  And presumably they didn't tell the public because that would have undermined the giving of the favor to the Biden administration.

• 1:54:41Danny Jones?

  Right. And then there was that thing that he talks about that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio, like pointing at the TV or something like that that he got a little flack for.

• 1:54:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Now, the White House was telling them to take down, you know, the Leo DiCaprio.

• 1:54:53Danny Jones?

  So Trump has how many more days left in office? And YouTube is, I mean, we're almost a year into his, his last term, I guess. And YouTube is saying they're going to start moving in this direction and start leveling out the playing field.

• 1:55:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:13Danny Jones?

  At what point do they actually make this happen? And like, what happens when the next president comes along?

• 1:55:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:22Danny Jones?

  So it seems like there's just this constant back and forth.

• 1:55:25Speaker 03

  So the

• 1:55:28Speaker 03

  the bigger you are, the deeper your pockets, you know, the more you're a threat to the, to the national sovereignty of foreign countries. Like, Google was under this pressure in 2020. Again, a lot of this is like, the Trump administration was completely in term one betraying him at, at every agency, at the FBI, at the CIA, at the DOD. And at State where I was, like, when I came to State, the, my bureau was championing the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. We, that was like, they wanted this censorship capacity for Europe to stop, you know, pro-Trump disinformation.

• 1:56:07Speaker 03

  But what, what Google called me about was about negotiating with, you know, because they're one of our stakeholders, they're a national champion. We have this kind of like policy at State that we define the national interest as like, what's best for American citizens and American interests. And we define American interest as like, part of that is our national champions, our big multinational companies who operate internationally. So like, if it's good for ExxonMobil, it's good for the United States.

• 1:56:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:56:34Speaker 03

  If it's good for Microsoft, it's good for the United States. If it's good for Google, it's good for the United States. And so I was the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau and my job was like interfacing with our national champions to get their feedback about our negotiating posture with, you know, these international laws.

• 1:56:51Speaker 03

  And so one of them at the time was the EU Digital Markets Act, which is like the monopoly side. So it's the censorship side for like control over speech policies. That's the Digital Censorship Act. And then there's the Digital Markets Act, which was, you know, basically fines on Google. As Europe was pursuing what they called their strategic digital autonomy initiative, which was like, it's so ironic. Like they started this when Trump won in 2016 because they, you know, they, Europe was saying, Trump is going to wield the social media companies as a geopolitical weapon against Europe, and we need to have digital autonomy, you know. Like three weeks later, you know, the, all those companies were censoring Trump in cahoots with Europe.

• 1:57:35Speaker 03

  Uh, but it was still used as a crowbar to make sure that those companies would censor what Europe was doing. And so Google wanted the State Department's help to strike a negotiating posture with Europe that would protect Google's profits to the maximum degree. And they identified the EU Digital Markets Act to me as quote, the, the number one existential threat for Alphabet over the next five years.

• 1:58:02Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:58:03Speaker 03

  And, you know, meanwhile, like they had just banned my boss, Donald Trump, and I'm like sitting on this phone. They've got nine Google lobbyists. And these are all like, I looked up all their LinkedIn histories, you know, before the call. It was weird how they even got on my calendar in the first place because it's like, it's like a process to speak to the Deputy Assistant Secretary. And it's normally like a multi-week process to get on the calendar. And like my secretary just told me like, uh, like a day or two before the call, they were like, yeah, uh, so, uh, Google is on your calendar for, I'm like, I didn't approve this. Who, who approved? And I, and I, I think it was just kind of the-

• 1:58:42Danny Jones?

  Google jumps the line.

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  It was like the unspoken, the, the guy in the job before me, you know, got this like, what I'm told is like a kind of fat salary as a Google lobbyist, like right after doing my job. Like that's, that's like how you make your money is you, you help Google and Facebook and Microsoft while you're running the International Communications and Information Technology Bureau, the, the big tech bureau at state. And then you go and work for them as a lobbyist because you've, they'll pay you a lot of money because you've already been good to them and shown that you're-

• 1:59:15Danny Jones?

  Same thing with the pharmaceutical industry.

• 1:59:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, it's, it's the same thing. And so I guess, you know, they could jump the line. And at the time I thought, well, you know what? Actually, I'm kind of glad you did because I'm, I'm, I'm awfully curious about what you have to say about this.

• 1:59:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  Because, you know, they're asking for the Trump government's help while they had banned Trump from YouTube. It was completely insane. YouTube, Google.com is the number one most trafficked website on planet earth.

• 1:59:43Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:59:43Speaker 03

  Number two is YouTube.com. And they're the same company. They are already rigged Google search. They, they launched something called Project Owl in early 2017.

• 1:59:53Danny Jones?

  I had Robert Epstein on here and explained a lot of this.

• 1:59:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, the authoritative news re-ranking stuff. So they'd already.

• 2:00:00Danny Jones?

  Where you like during that, during the, um, the, uh, the presidential run between Hillary and Trump. You could try to Google something positive about Trump, you would find only negative things. Try to find something negative about Hillary. You couldn't find anything.

• 2:00:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then they formalized that with this, um, you know, this thing called Project Owl, and you can pull it up if you want. Um, in the background, but they, they launched this authoritative news re-ranking program in 2017. In fact, one of the USAID funded, yeah, here you go.

• 2:00:30Danny Jones?

  Wow. Look at that logo. Amazing.

• 2:00:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Watches over you. It's not big brother. It's big Google owl.

• 2:00:37Danny Jones?

  That's actually pretty cool. That's a pretty cool looking owl.

• 2:00:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I love the, uh, I love that one.

• 2:00:43Danny Jones?

  The Illuminati money sign.

• 2:00:45Speaker 03

  I was like, subtle, but, but.

• 2:00:48Danny Jones?

  An internal initiative to improve search quality by combating the spread of misinformation and hate speech.

• 2:00:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:55Danny Jones?

  So another thing I want to ask you about after this is this hate speech thing in California.

• 2:00:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, this is the same. It's the same crew. They literally have a whole state level strategy. Uh, but it, it actually, if you go to, if you go to YouTube and you type in D4, one word, D4 disinformation.

• 2:01:12Danny Jones?

  On YouTube?

• 2:01:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, on YouTube. You'll find this GlobSec video, Global Security, um, from May 27. And you'll, you'll watch as Michael Chertoff and the National Down for Democracy corner, the head of content moderation for Central and Eastern Europe for Google in a room in 2017 and tell them that they need to do more to censor populist voices because they are undermining, you know, the legitimacy of NATO and like D4 disinformation.

• 2:01:42Danny Jones?

  D4?

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  Type in Globsec.

• 2:01:44Danny Jones?

  Globsec?

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, one word. G L O B S E C. Please tell me they didn't pull this down. Yeah. Oh, scroll down. Oh my god.

• 2:01:56Danny Jones?

  They pulled it.

• 2:01:58Speaker 03

  Oh my god, this is my favorite video in the world.

• 2:02:02Danny Jones?

  How many views did it have?

• 2:02:03Speaker 03

  Okay, wait, yeah, go to the Globsec YouTube video.

• 2:02:06Danny Jones?

  That one? Channel?

• 2:02:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, go to search. Type in D4. Thank god I downloaded it. Yeah, you're there. Okay, there you go, there you go. I wonder why it's not in search. Okay, so right there. Yeah, when I first found this video, it had like six.

• 2:02:20Danny Jones?

  I've got a lot of videos that I have to find like that. Including this one, probably.

• 2:02:25Speaker 03

  I have like multiple 5 terabyte hard drives just for this. Okay, so it's like, pause here. It's like, what you'll see is, okay, they're doing like, the info montage. By the way, Globsec is funded by the State Department and USAID for most of this. They're playing a montage of like, you know, Hitler propaganda to JFK conspiracies to the election of Donald Trump. That's like what they're about to do here, you know, it's like. But, so scroll down. It says, so can democracy withstand the information revolution? So, so.

• 2:02:54Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:02:54Speaker 03

  And Globsec, by the way, is one of the credentialed implementers of the EU Digital Censorship Act. So funded by USAID to administer Europe's censorship law. It's like, like, think about it. We're, our tax dollars are paying for the implementation of a foreign government censorship law to censor our voices. And this is the group doing it. So click, click the more button. Let me just read you the description of this video. "Social media are transforming the world in a much faster way than anyone could have predicted. Traditional media are being challenged by the plurality of internet news sources and social networks.

• 2:03:35Speaker 03

  More internet users are relying on the abundance of unfiltered alternative media that often spread fake news or propaganda." Yeah, of course, they don't spread propaganda at USAID and the US State Department. Search engines and social media work with algorithms that personalize visible content, thus preventing exposure to differing views or reinforcing confirmation. Research shows that populist, right-wing groups excel in abusing these algorithms that amplify their propaganda and spread it like a virus across the internet. Populist, right-wing groups. What can be done to protect internet users from fake news, lies, and propaganda? How can this be done without introducing censorship?

• 2:04:19Speaker 03

  You'll see how quick they gave up on that. What is the role of IT companies in this matter? To what extent does social media bear responsibility for us losing the 2016 election and the Brexit referendum? And what's happening in France with Marine Le Pen? And Italy with the Five Star Movement? And Spain with the Vox Party? And Germany with the AfD Party? How can we fight these extremist groups, the right-wing populist groups, in the internet battlefield and environment they have so successfully mastered? And who's, you know, here? Michael Chertoff, the head of DHS and the mastermind behind the DHS CISA operation. It was his idea out of the Atlantic Council. And in fact, Michael Chertoff became the head of the Disinformation Governance Board at DHS when Nina Jankovic had to step down. Fun fact.

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  Oh, he was also the, he was also the head of Freedom House, which is the big CIA NGO, you know, from the 1980s. Oh, and on top of that, he was also the chairman of BAE Systems, the biggest military contractor in the United Kingdom. BAE? BAE, yeah. They basically run the British Ministry of Defense. Right, right, right. And who else? Christopher Walker, who's the head of analysis. This is the research and it's like the CIA. Ned has the two tracks, you know, the analyst division and the operations division. And Ned is the same way. They've got, you know, their covert operations division and then they've got their, you know, intelligence analysis and, you know, brain function. He's the, basically the head of the brain function for the CIA's National Now for Democracy. And who they have cornered in the room?

• 2:05:48Speaker 03

  The head of public policy, that's what content moderation is folded under, for both Facebook and Google.

• 2:05:56Speaker 03

  So, and, and what you'll see like in this video, if you watch it, is you've got the Atlanta Council Director, you know, the, the guy who's on the, the board of the, you know, the CIA's think tank and NATO's think tank, and the guy who's the head of the brain for the CIA's most prolific, uh, you know, cutout, telling Google and Facebook in early 2017, "You have to stop any ability to amplify right-wing populist groups in the US and Europe. You need to do more, more, more." And the Google rep there says, "Listen, we've already started this project, Al. We've done our authoritative re-ranking. What more do you want us to do?" And you'll hear them dogpile on them, "Well, they're still being

• 2:06:41Speaker 03

  monetized. You need to use Google. What about Google Ads? What about, uh, you know, the amplification funnel that's happening at the YouTube level?" So this was happening under Trump, one. This was not just the Biden administration. But Trump didn't know it, and they didn't want to believe it. I was the Chicken Little dude in the White House in 2020. I wrote the speech for Trump in 2020 about censorship in June, when, uh, 27 state attorney generals came to talk about censorship and then said, "Actually, we don't want to talk about censorship at these remarks because, because we have a 50-state consensus with the Democrats on taking on Google and Facebook, and if we make it about censorship, we'll lose the Democrats." And we said, "No, we're, no,

• 2:07:26Speaker 03

  this is about censorship. We're talking about censorship." They said, "Well, can we frame it as consumer abuse?" It's like, "No, we have to talk about censorship." So I write this beautiful speech. It's like June 2020. Trump, now, look, Trump always does his own thing with speeches. There's, that's the beauty of Trump. Yes. Um, but, you know, after reading the introductions, he like, you know, glances down, because when he's seated, he has the printout rather than the teleprompter. And he sees that it's about, and this is like my Mona Lisa. I was like, "We're gonna, we're gonna red pill the entire world about everything." And all the statistics, and all the networks, and all the names, and had everything that was gonna be done. And he like, he's like glancing down, he looks up and he goes, you know, everyone talks about censorship like it's a big deal. Let them try, let them try to do, uh, let them

• 2:08:11Speaker 03

  try to censor me. They tried to do that before in 2016. It's not gonna work. And I'm like, sitting here, like whatever hairs I have remaining at the time, I'm just like tearing out. I'm like, oh my God. Even when it's right in front of them, they refuse to believe it. And then like the next month, Trump started getting fact checked on X, right?

• 2:08:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:31Speaker 03

  On Twitter, you know, and suddenly it was like censorship is real. But meanwhile, at the time, millions of his own supporters had been either deplatformed, you know, shadow banned, ghost banned, recommendation banned, demonetized. But, you know, at the time, Trump, we in the middle of the pandemic, Trump was running on all time stock market highs. They were calling MAGA, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon, because the stock prices, so they didn't want to take it on. They didn't, the whole thing was repeal section 230.

• 2:09:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:03Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:09:03Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:09:04Speaker 03

  Close your eyes and Babe Ruth swing. We're just gonna, this one, this one tweak to some, you know, uh, Federal Communications Act regulation from the 1990s is gonna save us. And it's like, they did not want to do trench warfare. They didn't want to do it with the State Department, with the Pentagon, with the National Science Foundation, with DHS, with the FBI, with the NGOs, with the tech companies themselves. And so the censorship apparatus ran on autopilot. And thank God, they're, they're, they've wised up to it and they're, they're taking off the Hydra head limb by limb right now.

• 2:09:39Danny Jones?

  So, the section 230 thing is interesting. It was a section 230 or 40?

• 2:09:44Speaker 03

  230.

• 2:09:45Danny Jones?

  230. So in 2020, um, the Democrats were threatening to pull this section 230 thing from these, uh, social media platforms. And section 230 basically is like a, a, a lawsuit shield.

• 2:09:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:57Danny Jones?

  For these giant companies, these social media companies that are essentially, you know, like utilities.

• 2:10:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:10:03Danny Jones?

  So that they're not liable for someone going on their platform and posting something, right? And now it seems like after this Charlie Kirk assassination that the Republicans are doing this. You had, um, you had, um, Lindsey Graham just say something about section 230. You had, um, Pam Bondi, she just said something about hate speech and, and section 230, but she, I think she, she, she walked it back.

• 2:10:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:26Danny Jones?

  And just the other day, and I was watching this Tucker Carlson monologue that he did the other day where he was showing basically all these Democrats in Congress.

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:34Danny Jones?

  Talking about threatening section 230, talking to Cash Patel, need to start talking about section 230. They're talking about you, Cash Patel. They're saying mean things about you. And, um, what is, what is going on with that? And can you explain to people, can you give them like a better context of like this whole section 230 thing? And using that as like the stick against these social media companies?

• 2:10:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it boils down to this platform publisher distinction. So the idea is when the internet came online in the 1990s and you started to have, you know, independent websites. This is before social media, this law was formed that basically allowed the modern internet.

• 2:11:11Speaker 03

  Whether it's a comment on your blog or a static web 1.0, you know, website that somebody else like, you know, writes on.

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  What section 230 of the, you know, allowed you, you to do is it said, if you are, um, if you are a platform, rather than a publisher with editorial control, if you're a neutral platform and you do not exercise editorial discretion over what content is hosted, then you have a liability from lawsuits, like defamation lawsuits. Like if the New York Times writes something about you, they, New York Times is a publisher. You can sue the New York Times for defamation. If Twitter in its kind of classical state. If a user, if they simply were a platform that hosted,

• 2:12:04Speaker 03

  but did not exercise editorial discretion over what was published, then the idea is you could do a defamation lawsuit against that user who posted on that platform, but you could not sue the platform itself because it had a liability shield from Section 230. And so when all the social media companies in 2017, 2018 started exercising editorial discretion over what could be published on their platforms through their terms of service policies, it naturally created this wave of pressure and, you know, legal scholarship around violations of Section 230 because they were no longer acting as platforms.

• 2:12:48Speaker 03

  They were clearly acting as a publisher by deciding what kind of content could or couldn't be published there. And then, you know, there's, there's sort of a counter argument where it's saying, well, we're not deciding individually what's published, we're setting general terms of service policies. And then, you know, so it's not like we published, you're, you're still your own publisher on our site, but there are rules to qualify for what it can be to, so that like fight has played out. And if you just get rid of the Section 230 entirely, all you're going to be left with is, you know, YouTube and Facebook, because nobody else can,

• 2:13:30Speaker 03

  like Gab, for example, or like BitChute, or Odyssey, or like smaller platforms will not be able to comply, you know, they'll be bankrupted very quickly. And, you know, so the, the question, I've always seen this, this kind of Chinese finger trap. It's like you put your fingers into the Section 230 and you can never get it out because it's, it's just really, really hard to find the exact constellation of puzzle pieces that protects the ability to have a tech market online, but then also preamps the kind of like censorship decisions that the American people don't like.

• 2:14:14Speaker 03

  But then you also do want to be able to have platforms have discretion over what kind of content they host, like that. The issue is, is when you have these giant.

• 2:14:27Speaker 03

  Mega platforms that functionally are utilities, you can't operate in the modern world. Try being a salesperson without a Facebook account, an Instagram,

• 2:14:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:14:34Speaker 03

  A YouTube, a LinkedIn, like you, you're kicked back to the industrial age.

• 2:14:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:39Speaker 03

  Like you can't have a modern job. You can't, you can't be a mom and pop florist shop unless you can promote your business.

• 2:14:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:14:48Speaker 03

  So, um, so, you know, in terms of what the Trump administration is doing right now, there's, there are things that have made me a little uncomfortable that have gone up to a certain line.

• 2:15:05Speaker 03

  There's an open question about, like, so I don't know that, like, Lindsey Graham, actually, I'm not familiar with what he specifically said that you mentioned, but if you're saying he was threatening Section 230 enforcement. Well, I mean, to me, that's.

• 2:15:20Danny Jones?

  So you can find the clip of it, Steve. Lindsey Graham talking about Section 230 recently.

• 2:15:26Speaker 03

  So, so there's a couple of things here. One is, you know, incitement to, these protections are mostly, in my view, around political speech. Like, the First Amendment is a protection of speech, but there are, you know, you don't have protection to incite violence, for example.

• 2:15:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:15:46Speaker 03

  You know, and there's standards, there's something called the Brandenburg standard. Brandenburg v. Ohio was a case from a couple of decades ago that established, like, where the line is about incitement. You know, there has to be like an imminent threat to bodily harm, like it, you can't be like some, it's First Amendment protected speech to, you know, say, I think someone should die, or, you know, um, but there are lines where if you say, you know.

• 2:16:12Danny Jones?

  Go here now and do this.

• 2:16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, exactly. If it's like imminent, this is like, you know, fire in a movie theater type, type thing. And so, you know, with the Charlie Kirk stuff, I think that you've got, you've got this really.

• 2:16:28Speaker 03

  Kind of dangerous moment where you had what I think is the most high profile assassination in modern history and done in a way that was way more vivid than any assassination. I think in in world history. I mean, we don't know what JFK looked like when it took years for the Zapruder film to come out. Even that was fuzzy and great. Yeah.

• 2:16:51Danny Jones?

  But can you imagine if we had social media during the sixties?

• 2:16:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, but with Charlie, you saw right away. I mean, you saw the life leave his body. You saw the the close up shots are absolutely gory and gruesome and it was done in broad daylight at an open college event.

• 2:17:08Speaker 03

  And, you know, there, there is, it's, you know, it's not, if you say, you know, assassinate Mike Benz next, you know, assassinate, you know, Danny Jones, there's,

• 2:17:25Speaker 03

  there is a kind of, well, this is not really like political speech. This is, you know, incitement to violence. And the question is, is it actually incitement?

• 2:17:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:17:37Speaker 03

  You know, now, it's one thing to say, you know, Charlie Kirk sucked. He was a, he was a horrible person. He's a, you know, you know, or even to say something like, it's a good thing he died or that. So that's uncouth. It's completely distasteful. I completely disagree with it. That would be like a political commentary on an event. You have seen a lot of language that is really dark in that gray zone. Like when you see someone say, Matt Walsh next, and then you see that that person is, you know, got like a

• 2:18:18Speaker 03

  65,000 followers and has like a, you know, a history, maybe the tweet right before that was them drawing, you know, like a, a, you know, bullet point, you know, laser sight on on the thing. And, you know, I think what's hap- I'm, I'm not as worried about for the free speech environment about some of the things that are happening with this Charlie Kirk thing, because this is not like.

• 2:18:42Speaker 03

  This is a healthcare dispute, or, you know, immigration dispute, or a, you know, DEI. This is like, you have to, I mean, you look at what happened with this, this ICE shooting. Like, the week after Charlie Kirk, right? This guy goes in and engraves bullets that say anti ICE, and goes and shoots up this ICE facility, and evidently kills, like, migrants detained there. But, you know, he had, you know, engravings, just like the Charlie Kirk shooter. Right. And there were a couple other weird things that, you know, so, but I don't think in general

• 2:19:22Speaker 03

  that the conservative base has, you know, wants to replicate what Democrats and the kind of never-Trump Republicans did in the 2020 era. You know, there isn't, the only thing that I've seen that comes close to that line, so far, because if Lindsey Graham says that, I don't, I mean, there were so many times that that was said by Republicans during Russiagate. You had the, you had the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee, you know, threatening Section 230 against that. This is one of the reasons that it went this far with censorship, because the Democrats were calling for censorship. But the Republicans, who were in control of Congress at the time, were all, like, these neocon

• 2:20:06Speaker 03

  Republican types, who were all part of this, like, Russiagate blob, and they wanted a crackdown on Russian disinformation, too. And they were threatening Section 230 alongside Donald Trump. But, you know, I think when Pam Bondi made that statement about hate speech, she quickly ran into the ire of the base over that, and she issued, I think, what was intended to be a clarification, where she said, "Oh, I meant hate speech that crosses the line into incitement to violence." And so, I think that was, that was an attempt to say, like, because a lot of these people, their regular jobs, they're not fluid with the language and the distinctions. You know, her job is running the Justice Department. She, you know, doesn't have, like,

• 2:20:51Speaker 03

  a bachelor's in disinformation studies and this sort of thing. And so, I think she probably just grabbed the nearest available term for, you know, "speech that we will take action against." But obviously, we don't want action just on, we want to copy Europe-style hate speech laws. But obviously, if you... Have incitement to violence, you don't need hate speech first. But so I think that she did try to correct that to make it synchronized with free speech principles. You know, there is this question about whether or not the FCC applied pressure around the Jimmy Kimmel thing.

• 2:21:26Danny Jones?

  Nextar.

• 2:21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I don't actually know what the underlying facts on the ground were about what the FCC actually did in that case. I know there were allegations that there was pressure to potentially hold up like a merger. You know, at the end of the day, it lasted a week and even Sinclair is, you know, is back on with with Kimmel. So I I think that every movement is prone to passions. The question is, is whether they become institutionalized, you know, in the heat of something like, you know, your top leader, Charlie Kirk. It's the biggest boots on the ground operation in the entire GOP.

• 2:22:08Danny Jones?

  And you knew him, right?

• 2:22:09Speaker 03

  I knew him. He was he reached out. I I I had less than 5,000 followers when Charlie Kirk reached out to me. I just started my ex account in December 2022. I started like December 9th. In like two or three weeks, he reached out to me and was like, hey, I like what you're doing. This is really interesting. Could you come on my show and tell my audience? This is before Fox and, you know, mainstream media and Tucker and Rogan, all this like he he really early on, I mean, and he managed to cultivate young talent everywhere. And I had no doubt he was going to be President of the United States one day. If he was 35, I could see him as J D Vance's VP in 2028. But you know, when you see that, there's going to be passions, especially when

• 2:22:55Speaker 03

  I mean, everybody.

• 2:22:58Speaker 03

  Everybody who does public speaking had to completely reevaluate their entire security situation in light of that. You know, I got a million phone calls about that. I know that people like Tim Poole, like canceled events and because if there's not a severe that like federal enforcement effort to neutralize that.

• 2:23:21Speaker 03

  And these like groups like Antifa have gotten away with this forever. They got away with this under Trump I. They got away with it on inauguration day. And you know that like the local DAs are gonna let these people off. Like this, these Soros DAs, it's a, it's a factory. They, they get the legal bills paid for by the National Lawyers Guild. The Soros prosecutors let them off. And so, it's like, half the country becomes a no-go zone.

• 2:23:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:23:44Speaker 03

  And, so, you know, so I think in that moment, there was a kind of passionate search for, we don't want copycat killers. We don't want people who are going to get the glory of killing, you know, the next, you know, big conservative voice. But I think that where we've settled, you know, within, within two weeks' time, is, you don't really see like calls for censorship. What you see is, people voting with their feet. You see people, you know, canceling subscriptions to things. And you see, um, you know, people trying to, you know, vote with their dollars. But, all in all, I think it was actually a very restrained response.

• 2:24:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So, what was the context of this, Steve? Is this a clip, or is this, uh, did you find the actual clip, or is this just like a summary of the context of it?

• 2:24:30Speaker 03

  This is, uh...

• 2:24:31Danny Jones?

  Section, so he says-

• 2:24:33Speaker 03

  This is taken out of the video.

• 2:24:34Danny Jones?

  Section two, how long is the video?

• 2:24:36Speaker 03

  Uh, five minutes, eight minutes.

• 2:24:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So he says, "Section 230 needs to be repealed." He said, "If you're mad at social media companies that radicalize our nation, you should be mad."

• 2:24:44Speaker 03

  Well, so, I mean, again, just, my thoughts on this is like, this is saying, you know, we, the Alpha Centauri should have a green energy program. It's like, okay, like, you know, when are we going to Alpha Centauri?

• 2:25:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:25:00Speaker 03

  Like, like, no, nothing's going to happen on Section 230. It's, this, I exist because everyone focused on Section 230. Like, I was the person, like, in Trump I-

• 2:25:15Speaker 03

  Telling everybody, stop tweeting repeal section 230. It is the ultimate Chinese finger trap. It's a dead end. It's not going anywhere. You just don't want to have to stare into the sun and confront the enormity of what you're up against. You need the trench warfare against the government agencies, the NGOs, the for-profit censorship mercenary firms, the rapid response units, the international side of this with the foreign governments, the tech companies themselves, like they, they wanted an easy way out. And so they kept striking out on a home run swing. And so when I see this, this is like, all bark, no bite, and not a very loud bark at that.

• 2:25:54Danny Jones?

  Right. Now, um, so this law that's passed the state legislator in California is like, uh, it's a hate speech law for social media companies. And I think Gavin Newsom has like another week or so to sign it and then it would go into law, go into effect in 2027.

• 2:26:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, this is a, this has been a long time coming. They've been working on this strategy for a couple of years now. Um, so in fact, there's a great norm. If you pull up, uh, go to norm Eisen Democracy Playbook 2025.

• 2:26:30Danny Jones?

  Let's get a pause there. I gotta take a leak real quick. We'll be right back.

• 2:26:33Speaker 03

  So yeah, we're talking about these state laws and what's happening.

• 2:26:36Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:26:37Speaker 03

  So you got three levels to the, the sort of government architecture of the censorship industrial complex. You have the, the national, the US national government, our federal government, which, you know, turns every four years on, on elections. Then you've got the substructure of that in the states. You've got every state level government. And then you've got international governments. So you've got the state, federal and international side of this. And all three of those are in flux in terms of the state of freedom versus censorship and the policies

• 2:27:17Speaker 03

  that they promote. All three of those are angles of attack, surf, you know, and manipulable to coerce platforms into allowing or not allowing speech.

• 2:27:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:27:29Speaker 03

  And so what, what we did during the period between 2020 and 2024, on the freedom side of the, you know, free speech censorship.

• 2:27:41Speaker 03

  You know, kind of, you know, spectrum is we had states like Florida and Texas do these kind of digital Bill of Rights type bills in order to try to enforce more freedom than what the tech platforms were trying to do with with the censorship. And so this this goes both ways where you have, you know, the red states were trying to have these freedom bills and the blue states were trying to have these censorship bills. And so this is playing out right now. And there's there's a special focus because the the blob has lost so much of its federal government censorship powers. So what I have pulled up right here

• 2:28:25Speaker 03

  is the 2025 Democracy Playbook by Norm Eisen. Are you familiar with Norm Eisen? So Norm Eisen is a good name to know. He is the legal Norman? Yeah, Normie. Normie. So Norm Eisen is the guy who is behind he's the lawyer who's behind the Trump indictments, the Trump impeachments. I think he drafted 10 articles of impeachment for Donald Trump before he was even inaugurated in 2017. He was the former US ambassador to the Czech Republic under the Biden administration. He was also the Biden administration White House Ethics Czar. So every time Tom Brand?

• 2:29:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. They put the worst people. It's like Tony Fauci's, you know, wife was the NIH Ethics Czar, you know, during during. It's like he that It's perfect. So you ever read The Fountainhead, the Ayn Rand book? No. You know, it's a this is character, the villain is this guy Ellsworth Toohey. And you know, he like wants to take over the world effectively in his own little Machiavellian way. And he he's, I think he's like a religion, he majors in like religion in college and he brags everyone told him not to do it because it's a path that goes nowhere. And yeah, or he's like, no, actually, if you understand these, this is like what ethics

• 2:29:48Speaker 03

  is like ethics is like the yes, no button. So if you control that, you control the Yes. You know, all this. But so so Norm Eisen is this, he coordinates all the law affairs, like all the all the lawsuits against Trump, like all the lawsuits against him trying to like shut down USAID or the State Department's Global Engagement Center. But he's this big transatlantic blob operative. He does all the international stuff. Works closely with all these NATO, State Department, USAID groups. And so every year for the past like seven years, he's put out this democracy playbook, which is like the bat signal to the blob about what they all need to do to stop their their common political opponents.

• 2:30:32Speaker 03

  And so this year in January 2025, he put this out, the seven pillars to defend democracy in 2025. And if you if you go down to like the list of pillars probably in the thing, you'll see like, I can decode these. There you go. So protect elections, you know, which is going to mean like you need to let dead people stay on the rolls. You need to make sure that there's no need for a signature for mail in ballots. You know, defend rule of law, which is just going to mean arrest everybody in the Trump administration and protect our own people from being arrested. You know, fight corruption just means, you know, find a predicate to arrest them. Right. Reinforce civic and media space. This is like this

• 2:31:16Speaker 03

  translated language for meaning. Keep the money gun is before this is a month before we announced the shutdown of USAID. And he actually says in this memo about how USAID was was actually good under Trump won. Of course. And, you know, we need to use that money gun to, you know, pay our our friends in in the university centers and the NGOs and in the media. But pillar six says counter disinformation. We need to need to. So actually, if you run a search for USAID, you'll you'll see this. Just type in USAID in the search.

• 2:31:51Speaker 03

  See, so this is in under reinforced civic and media spaces. So this should include supporting investigative investigative consortiums such as the Corruption Reporting Project. Now, the Corruption Reporting Project, they hate me. They half of their budget came from USAID and the State Department. Oh, there's there's nothing more corrupt than the Corruption Reporting Project. Let me tell you this. They they took USAID funds and dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani so they could be used for the for impeaching Trump in 2019. So like we sponsored our own, you know, impeachment of our president through USAID funding. Again, the money supposed to go out to influence the world around us to make things better for Americans and it ends up being used to impeach our own Democrat, the elected president.

• 2:32:35Speaker 03

  Um, wait, run, hit the enter or just go down 37 times you'll see he mentions it. Okay, so let's see this. Um, so this is on the counter information.

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• 2:33:43Speaker 03

  Says at the user level, social media companies should prioritize digital media literacy. That means media literacy means if you read the wrong media sources, you are media illiterate. Right. Media your mind right. So like NewsGuard bills itself as a media literacy company now. And, you know, getting schools to not allow your YouTube videos to be played for students on public wifi. Less they become media illiterate because they're reading the wrong sources. But so like one of the things that Norm Eisen says is a good thing is that Meta partnered with USAID in 2023 to promote initiative of 200 university students in Indonesia promoting media literacy. And all and YouTube, Meta and YouTube created digital literacy programs in recent years and all this.

• 2:34:26Speaker 03

  But, but if you run a search for Brazil, you'll get to where, why I'm bringing this up.

• 2:34:35Speaker 03

  Oh wow, fourteen, okay, again.

• 2:34:36Danny Jones?

  Did you see this Wikipedia blacklist thing?

• 2:34:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's been around for a while, yeah. Well, this, but that's the media literacy strategy.

• 2:34:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:34:44Speaker 03

  Wait, click enter again, I'll tell you when to stop, again.

• 2:34:50Speaker 03

  Again.

• 2:34:52Speaker 03

  Again, oh, well, you see, well, wait, scroll, scroll back up. You'll see he's bragging about the Digital Services Act in the EU. Is, and, yeah, and these are, he's, and, look, and YouTube eliminated.

• 2:35:04Danny Jones?

  Seventeen critical policies that had limited the spread of misinformation.

• 2:35:08Speaker 03

  Right, so that's why they want the EU and Brazil, so wait, scroll down again, or hit, hit the Brazil thing. I'm, I know, I know where this is, isn't it? One more, one more, one more, one more, one more, one more, one more, one more. Okay, wait, uh, okay, there, well, stop, yeah, stop right there. Okay, so, on the Wikipedia thing, by the way, this is the media literacy strategy, like. So, they're doing these media literacy laws in. In California has mandatory media literacy K through 12, New York now has mandatory, Illinois has mandatory, all these blue states and they're creeping into the purple and red ones. And this is like, required, NewsGuard-style blacklist of the kind of media that you can use for research assignments in high school and middle school.

• 2:35:52Speaker 03

  The kind of websites you can access on the, cause, you know, all these schools are now having like, school-issued laptops.

• 2:36:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:36:00Speaker 03

  So that you don't get distracted on your, you know, your own device sort of thing, and they can put you in a little fishbowl of the kind of information you can see and not see. And so these media literacy programs say, well, these websites, these blacklisted websites are, you know, will make you media illiterate, so you can only stay within the confines of these websites.

• 2:36:21Speaker 03

  And one of them is Wikipedia, there's something called the SIF method that media literacy theorists use, it's, uh, it's this, it's basically the opposite of critical thinking. It's like, don't do your own research, because that leads you down a rabbit hole and turns you into a right-wing populist.

• 2:36:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:36:37Speaker 03

  So you should only sift casually through the first 10 results on google.com and whatever Wikipedia says. This is like theory i- in media literacy is the sift method. And but effectively, what this means is because these black, any, anyone from one side of the aisle, or anyone who's from one ideological side of thinking, because there are left wing populist accounts that get censored on this. It's like, are you anti NATO? Are you like the gray zone, for example, is like a left wing populist site. Like they're not Republican by any stretch. They don't, you know, like Trump or whatever, but they, they have that kind of like old school Bernie thing where he wanted to take away war funding to pay for free medical care and free housing and free education.

• 2:37:20Speaker 03

  And so they will end up because they're against the State Department and NATO and USAID and this whole stakeholder blob and these big corporations, they'll end up on a, you know, media literacy blacklist and a Wikipedia blacklist. They are blacklisted on Wikipedia. But what that means is that like people have to, like, the New York Times has to cover their own people's scandals for it to be entered into history. Like the historical account of something like Wikipedia does not allow primary source reporting.

• 2:37:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:37:48Speaker 03

  Only secondary sources. So like unless the New York Times covers one of their own people's scandals, it's inadmissible in history. Like the blacklist is like Fox News, Breitbart, Zero Hedge, great, like, you like can't tell the history of Hillary Clinton unless the New York Times has like accidentally reported something damaging to her.

• 2:38:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:38:10Speaker 03

  And it's the same thing now in schools.

• 2:38:11Danny Jones?

  Did you see that Bill Clinton had everything about him and Epstein scrubbed?

• 2:38:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 2:38:15Danny Jones?

  Right when they started talking about the Epstein files?

• 2:38:16Speaker 03

  Right. And it's like, well, who, who are you going to cite to cover it? Like, you know, the only people who will, who will cover that are people who don't like Bill Clinton. And so the only people who are, you know, whitelisted are the ones who do.

• 2:38:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:38:28Speaker 03

  So, so here's what Norm Eisen writes in the counter and disinformation section. Although there's been some action on the federal level to place guardrails around new media, it is uncertain how next steps will evolve. This is in January 2025 before Trump took office. So they're afraid that the whole censorship industrial complex at the federal level is going to be shut down and whether progress will continue, progress for putting guardrails around speech.

• 2:38:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:38:51Speaker 03

  Federal action may be uncertain, but pro democracy proponents at the state level. should consider wielding their considerable regulatory power to minimize the destabilizing effects of new media. So he's saying, listen, this is in January 2025. Shit, Trump's about take office. We're probably not gonna be able to do the USA shit anymore. Probably not gonna be able to do the sister shit at DHS anymore. Probably not gonna be able to do the FBI flagging posts anymore. Probably not gonna be able to have the Pentagon Minerva Initiative shit flagging stuff anymore. Probably not gonna be able to have the State Department Global Engagement Center. We need to move our strategy to the state level. And this is what you see in California. This is what you see in Michigan. This is what you see in New York. There are 35 states that they have all these different things percolating

• 2:39:35Speaker 03

  in. And this is all like, you know, this is coming out of the Brookings Institution by Norm Eisen. Brookings Institution, I've shown CIA pay stubs going back to the 1970s and 80s where the CIA would send people to Brookings for their, you know, intelligence training. Right. Brookings has its own, you know, intelligence, you know, bureau for this stuff. But the fact is, is this whole State Department, USA, CIA network just playing to move stuff to the states. And so you see, it's a two-part strategy. State-level censorship laws, and then also saying they may find partners and allied regulators such as the EU and Brazil. The EU, as we talked about with the EU Digital Censorship Act, and Brazil, which kicked

• 2:40:19Speaker 03

  X out of the country and has imposed these massive fines. And so, I mean, these are, this is literally the White House ethics czar for Obama and the chief litigator during the Biden administration of all things Trump world explicitly telling the blob to move information to do state-level censorship laws and to partner with the EU for censorship. And in the next, the next tab that I had pulled up, this is a report from my foundation, FFO. We just published this this week. Credit to our managing director, Alan Bakari, for this. This is the, remember, we talked about the Knight Foundation? How the Knight Foundation sponsored Grafica? And they, you know, also fund all the arts and cultural centers in

• 2:41:01Speaker 03

  Miami. Well, their Knight Institute parked out of Georgetown is, has this new counter disinfo hub that is pushing all these state regulation of social media laws. And if you scroll down through it, you'll see like some of the receipts. Like $107 million that they've spent on doing disinformation work, funding the NGOs, funding the censorship university centers, you know, through all this. And if you just run like a, you'll see like who's on it's James Baker. If you remember this, the, the, the former, what was it? General Counsel or Deputy General Counsel for the, for the FBI during

• 2:41:42Speaker 03

  the Twitter files. And then he moved over to the, you know, the content moderation lawyer team to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. This is, he's, he's still around getting paid by the Knight Foundation for censorship work, just like he was paid for censor in the, the night, in the Twitter files. But if you, if you just control F for the word state, you'll see that this Knight Foundation super group, which is doling out $100 million in grants to sponsor this kind of, this kind of regulation. See that 35, the, you know, they're, they're promoting 35 different bills in, in 75 state bills to all punished social media companies

• 2:42:26Speaker 03

  for allowing algorithms that have, that allow, you know, basically counter blob speech. And then we, we clipped all these videos.

• 2:42:34Danny Jones?

  It's crazy because it seems like we have, we have like 30 minutes left. There's a couple of things I want to cover. So I kind of want to do like some rapid fire, not, not really rapid fire, but you know, I want to cover, I want to ask a couple of things before we wrap up. First of all, it seems like in general, there's like this whole censorship thing is just to protect the people in power. It doesn't seem, it's like it's wrapped, it's gift wrapped in this fake narrative that's to protect us from each other. Right. But it's really only to protect the people in power so they can continue to pillage and plunder the world without us knowing it and keep us fighting.

• 2:43:03Speaker 03

  I mean, the way it's even sicker than that. It's not even to protect the people in power. It's to protect the sponsors of the people in power.

• 2:43:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:43:10Speaker 03

  Like every single one of these.

• 2:43:12Danny Jones?

  Well, it was obvious when the guy, the, I forget the guy's name and the congressman that was talking to Cash Patel. And he said to him, when he was talking about 230, he said, they're talking about your personal life, Cash Patel. Like that, that's, you're saying the quiet part out loud. You're trying to tell this guy that he needs to worry about it because, I mean, that's the whole point. That, that comes with the territory of being a public figure.

• 2:43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:36Danny Jones?

  Is being scrutinized and having conspiracy theories come up about you.

• 2:43:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:43:39Danny Jones?

  And people talk about you.

• 2:43:40Speaker 03

  Right, right. No, and, and if there was action at the, at the Trump executive branch level against that, I would be the first person in line to say that's wrong. And then you have seen that, like Michael Schellenberger and others have also, you know, um, you know, published about getting close to the line a couple of times on the, on the, on the Trump admin stuff.

• 2:44:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:02Speaker 03

  Um, but it is, uh, you know, that worries me too, when I see that. But I also think you have this kind of passion flare up. And it's a different thing from creating a, you know, I mean, what, what the Biden administration was doing is they were just creating bureaus in every, I mean, DHS had a formal Office of Misdis and Malinformation. They formalized it. It was called MDM. An Office of Misdis and Malinformation. They formalized it. They institutionalized it. This was not like a random person's, you know, remark, it wasn't like a Pam Bondi offhand remark.

• 2:44:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:44:42Speaker 03

  It wasn't like, uh, in fact, if, if you stay on the foundation website, if you go to foundation for freedom online.com, and then you go to the search and you just type in, uh, White House. I'll show you how formalized this was. Yeah, right there. Yeah. Just go to the main page. Yep. Then hit the search button. Just type in White House.

• 2:45:09Speaker 03

  Uh, and go to, scroll down, scroll down. Uh, that was the whole of society, how the previous admin coordinated censorship industry. So if you, and scroll down a little bit here. So, so what you'll see here is,

• 2:45:25Speaker 03

  The White House formally created a 26 government agency, interagency working group on information integrity on social media. Information integrity is like media literacy. It's, it's one of these, you know, when the word disinformation starts getting scandalized. Information integrity means all of the world can be segregated into two groups. High integrity information and low integrity information. It's binary. Right. And basically, high integrity information gets whitelisted. You can cite on Wikipedia. Low information integrity news sources get blacklisted. It's that, it's just a censorship. Yes. And this, and if you scroll down, and this is to coordinate the whole society. So scroll down to this, like, to the first image, I think. Yeah, here you go.

• 2:46:08Speaker 03

  So here's a list of all of the interagency working group members. 26 different government agencies. And you'll see, this is everything from the CIA to, to the Department of State, to Gender Policy Council, I didn't even know we had one of those. The National Security Council, USAID, and then you'll see also in nonprofits, corporations, and individuals, you'll see NewsGuard, directly partnered with NewsGuard. Yep. So you have the CIA, working in a formalized censorship capacity, together with USAID, the Department of Defense, DARPA, the National Security Council, MITRE, NewsGuard, and a bunch of their handpicked, you know, government-funded university centers.

• 2:46:52Speaker 03

  And like, they could formalize and scale and have this kind of speed, scale, and comprehensive speech control capacity, which to me, like, you're gonna have people make errant remarks in this because they don't like the speech. Yes. And so, there's going to be a kind of passionate pain aversion that politicians are going to use where they say, "Well, you can't say that about me." Well, it's, okay, well, have you put forward a bill about it? You know, did you use state coercion to, to influence it? And if you, if you did, that's messed up. And it, when it becomes systemic, then it should be actionable. Lawsuits should be filed, you know, in the same way that they were filed against the Biden administration.

• 2:47:35Speaker 03

  What I've seen so far, though, has been a couple of passionate, periodic flare-ups, but generally speaking, a pretty principled approach, combined with, you know, taking a fire hose to what was, what looked like

• 2:47:53Speaker 03

  You know, a god comp like a

• 2:47:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:54Speaker 03

  Un insurmountable

• 2:47:58Speaker 03

  power and it's it's at the federal level, we've been dismembering it limb by limb. But like I said, you have these two threats from the international side and at the state level. And those it remains to be seen how those will play out.

• 2:48:11Danny Jones?

  What is your take on this? Uh, WEF push to have this digital ID attached to internet access?

• 2:48:20Speaker 03

  Super fucked up. I I think it's awful.

• 2:48:26Speaker 03

  I mean, this is kind of a, I guess, a basic take, but it's kind of the obvious one.

• 2:48:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:31Speaker 03

  Are you familiar with the DIA app? This is a crazy story.

• 2:48:34Danny Jones?

  No, I'm not.

• 2:48:35Speaker 03

  If you type in USAID, D I I A.

• 2:48:39Danny Jones?

  So.

• 2:48:41Speaker 03

  So, so this was like, um, this is what we imposed on Ukraine. Um, USAID developed. There you go.

• 2:48:48Danny Jones?

  The first DIA in Washington DC summit.

• 2:48:51Speaker 03

  Okay, so, so USAID. Did this digital ID. Program in Ukraine.

• 2:49:00Speaker 03

  Starting a couple of years ago, they rolled it out in like four. Countries, it was like the experimental guinea pigs where they did this, they did this like they tie your digital identity. So they call it a state and a smartphone and it was developed by. USAID in combination with, I think it was like American Express or something like the correct, you know, because these credit card companies always. You know, like literally they're they're just totally in bed with it.

• 2:49:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:25Speaker 03

  Whenever the government.

• 2:49:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:49:26Speaker 03

  And of course, like.

• 2:49:27Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:49:28Speaker 03

  Who who gave Joe Biden start to his career was the credit card companies and when he was in Delaware. Before he, you know, that was like his original sponsors for his senate run where the.

• 2:49:37Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:49:37Speaker 03

  Delaware credit card companies. Yeah, yeah. But. But, you know, this is basically a tool. That, you know, they say it's a state and a smartphone and it's your digital ID and it's going to synchronize your health information, your voter information and your social media information and your banking information. And it'll just make it really easy and convenient for the, you know, the government to have everything in one place because it's an inefficient government which has strained economic resources. So in Ukraine, in the middle of a war. And so what they're doing is like they're using this to be able to scrub wrong thinkers. Like in Ukraine, if you criticize the Zelensky government, you're blackbagged. You're done. Like you criticize that government, what they banned,

• 2:50:19Speaker 03

  like 26 different political parties, they banned elections. That, you know, Zelensky was supposed to have, you know, he was five year terms elected in May or April 2019. Coming up on a year and a half and he's, you know, they banned elections and they banned a political party that, you know, has approached popularity. And now they can just immediately see and have total control. It's like what they did in the Canadian truckers envoy thing.

• 2:50:49Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:50:50Speaker 03

  You know, they, they just went straight to the bank accounts of people.

• 2:50:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:50:53Speaker 03

  You can do that with, I mean, the World Economic Forum is pushing that. What was their word of the year in 2021? Disinformation, misinformation. And the World Economic Forum is partnered with NewsGuard. You know, they, they ran this whole Garm operation to, to get rid of $2.6 billion in programmatic ad spend on populist and alternative websites. So you know exactly what they're going to use it for. And I'm troubled to see this being backed by people like Larry Ellison. Like Larry Ellison has been like a Trump supporter. I think he's been seen as like a pretty level-headed ally by people in the Trump movement for like a decade now.

• 2:51:34Speaker 03

  And I, I see, you know, what's him pushing this through the Tony Blair Institute and Tony Blair is like, not like, none of these people, you know, you could, there are always risks with centralized control.

• 2:51:53Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:51:54Speaker 03

  But there can be weird upsides in a temporary way, like Elon having centralized control over X. You know, it's, it's always like.

• 2:52:07Speaker 03

  Now, I love Elon. I think he's a great man of history, and I think he saved human civilization. I can see how people could be concerned about a dark Elon era if he were to, you know, take an ayahuasca trip and decide, you know what, actually, I'm going to, you know, I'm gonna go against my principles, and I'm gonna use my, this centralized power to... But at the same time, that centralized control did allow them to buoy... If, if this stuff was decentralized like Meta was, Meta was being run at the decentralized layers. Like Zuckerberg was getting run over by his lieutenants about the content moderation stuff. And also, so like, not everybody wanted to go down with the ship, you know, and, and,

• 2:52:51Speaker 03

  but with, with this, you know, digital ID thing, that is the scary part of it to me, is it would be one thing if it was the World Economic Forum, and you could be like, listen, this is why I've, I've said for a, you know, a decade now in this, that like, the main threat on cleaning up the censorship industrial complex has not come from like, Democrats pushing censorship. It's been internationalist Republicans, because if it was as simple as Republican versus Democrat, you could eliminate this thing with a major, with, in one election with a majority. And like, what was happening from 2016 to 2020 is, you had a Republican executive branch under Donald Trump, you had a Republican-controlled

• 2:53:34Speaker 03

  House of Representatives from 2016, 2018, you had a Republican-controlled Senate, and you had a Republican majority on the Supreme Court. And yet, the entire censorship industrial complex was birthed in that period. And you had, because what you had is you had this Lindsey Graham, you know, coalition in the Republicans, who were pushing the Russiagate stuff, they wanted maximum pressure on, they didn't like Trump's foreign policy, and Trump required them to fend off Mueller at the FBI, to fend off an impeachment vote, to get a budget passed, and so they could threaten to defect to the Democrats and get a majority over populist Republicans. And so, I think there's something similar here, where it's like, if the digital ID push was just being pushed by, you know, Democrats and, and like,

• 2:54:19Speaker 03

  international globalists, that would be something that I think could be resisted

• 2:54:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:26Speaker 03

  pretty easily, actually. But when I see Larry Ellison pushing it... That's, that's a danger Will Robinson thing because he's got clout and credibility as an ally and I don't know Trump's tolerance for taking on allies at that level.

• 2:54:40Danny Jones?

  Right. And there's a lot of people that have expressed concern as well with Elon's Doge thing with, and you know, this is all conjecture, obviously, but there's people who have speculated that Elon going into and doing the Doge thing with the IRS, the HHS, um, and all these organizations that if he could be going in there and sucking out all the user data simultaneously being partnered with Palantir AI and then Kristi Noem pushing this, um, what was it? The Real ID stuff?

• 2:55:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:55:17Danny Jones?

  That like they could be pushing, they could be sort of creating this sort of like totalitarian CCP style, uh, digital ID on people.

• 2:55:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55:25Danny Jones?

  And, um,

• 2:55:27Speaker 03

  The threat is real.

• 2:55:27Danny Jones?

  Terrifying sounding.

• 2:55:28Speaker 03

  No, the threat, the threat is very real. I mean,

• 2:55:31Danny Jones?

  A control grid. That's what, uh, what's her name? Catherine Fitz calls it the control grid.

• 2:55:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's hard to distinguish that from everything we said we hated about, you know, General Michael V. Hayden's, you know, the nine 11.

• 2:55:45Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:55:46Speaker 03

  If you've ever seen, was it A Good American, the Bill Binney whistleblower?

• 2:55:49Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:55:49Speaker 03

  Thing where, you know, he's going through this, you know, the prism, like every, all the, all, all the stuff that, you know, James Clapper lied about and said that they didn't collect all this, uh, you know, incidental bulk collection. It's like every phone call you've made, your entire digital footprint. And when you tie that to, if, if Republicans set that up in the United States and you tie that with like Democrat, like misinformation on social media.

• 2:56:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:18Speaker 03

  That's game over, right? I mean, there's like, you can't even mount an organizational resistance to that. Like in Ukraine, they, they can't vote their way out of that.

• 2:56:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:56:27Speaker 03

  I mean, you, you could, if you disempowered this, it's like North Korea, you know, you, or China, what, you know, what they do with this. Like you can't have a democracy when the incumbent government can effectively neutralize any political opposition because they can micro-target things at that level and have like a legal predicate to act on it. So, you know, at the same time, this kind of like digital grid. Is kind of an inescapable. Like efficiency, like this has been a long time coming.

• 2:57:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:05Speaker 03

  You know, we, I remember the digital ID stuff a decade ago as like, you know, an imminent threat. And I think we have gotten closer to it.

• 2:57:17Speaker 03

  But where I sort of am right now in terms of, I guess, advocacy on directions is like, legal firewalls are probably better than technological firewalls. Like, I don't think you can stop the, the promise of efficiency, like Palantir coming in and saying, hey, give us this hundred million dollar contract and we'll take your, you know, uh, data at HHS. Like, I think, I think, like, at a certain point, like, our government sucks at efficiency stuff. We farm everything out to third-party contractors. You know, it's, it's a, the, the biggest part of a secretary's job in charge of any agency is the budget fight.

• 2:58:02Speaker 03

  Like you, you look at like, what do four-star generals do, for example, like they, they just, they're lobbyists, they're lobbyists for Pentagon funding. This, it's the same thing the FDA commissioners has to do, the NIH, the HHS, the, you know, all the way down to the Census Bureau, they all, and so any money they can save by, you know, some contract that allows other parts of the agency to get more money. Like, there's going to be a temptation to do that, especially when it's also doing favors for outside folks that they might get on the board of later. They might do a favor for, it's the same thing we're talking about with the Google stuff and the, and the State Department.

• 2:58:37Danny Jones?

  Right. Well, I mean, Eli, with Doge too, like people will criticize him saying like, well, Elon, you're going to go after all these little agencies for, you know, cutting, you know, waste, fraud and abuse, but what about the thirty trillion dollar black hole in the Pentagon?

• 2:58:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:58:50Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 2:58:51Speaker 03

  But I, I think Elon probably.

• 2:58:54Danny Jones?

  He also gets a lot of his money from the Pentagon, right?

• 2:58:57Speaker 03

  I know historically, like historically, there was, um, you know, SpaceX, obviously, I think, I think Elon tried to kind of repay back a lot of the subsidies that his earlier companies got. I know there was, I've seen.

• 2:59:14Speaker 03

  Some evidence on that, you know, because he's tried to, I think, be true to the kind of libertarian, you know, um, principles, but definitely like Tesla got a ton of subsidies. SpaceX, you know, ton of subsidies, government grants.

• 2:59:28Danny Jones?

  Every day they launch.

• 2:59:30Speaker 03

  Arguably, you know, US foreign policy on Bolivia was a kind of Tesla play. I think this is like 2019. You can look this up. I think Elon even had a funny tweet at the time. Uh, if you type in like Elon Bolivia lithium coup. Just if you type that in Google, you'll probably get a search here. Cause you know, the Tesla batteries.

• 2:59:51Danny Jones?

  Elon lithium coup.

• 2:59:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cause you know, the lithium and cobalt are like.

• 2:59:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:59:57Speaker 03

  You know, there you go. And yeah.

• 3:00:00Danny Jones?

  In a now deleted July 2020 tweet, Elon Musk responded to an accusation about US involvement in Bolivia's 2019 coup by stating, we will coup whoever we want. Deal with it. The exchange centered on an idea that the coup was motivated by access to Bolivia's lithium reserves, a key component to, for his company Tesla Batteries. Wow.

• 3:00:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like, you know, there's.

• 3:00:22Danny Jones?

  That's fucking insane.

• 3:00:24Speaker 03

  You know, they.

• 3:00:28Speaker 03

  There's a tale as old as time. I mean, this goes back to, you know, the banana republics and United Fruit working with the War Department and all that stuff. Like, you know, that, that is, that is kind of an inescapable part of, you know, um, you know, the nexus between that. But I think to Elon's credit. I don't think that he's doing that with modern day foreign policy. Like if you like Elon has come out pretty strongly on the side of peace, for example, in like the, you know, the Ukraine. Uh, he's questioned our involvement in NATO and, you know, our funding of that. I do believe Doge started to look at Pentagon stuff and.

• 3:01:06Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 3:01:07Speaker 03

  Ran into, ran into, you know, some headwinds there. This is. But yeah, uh, you know, I've got a lot to say on that particular thing, but.

• 3:01:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:19Speaker 03

  But, you know, I mean, if Elon was just in it for himself, I don't think he'd make an enemy of those things. Like, I mean, he was given Starlink for free, uh, in Ukraine. He's.

• 3:01:31Speaker 03

  You know, his own, you know, there's a lot of money to be made in Eurasia if it's under, you know, American military occupation rather than under, you know, Russian.

• 3:01:43Speaker 03

  And so I think he's, you know, he's gotten a kind of godlike power, but he's, I would argue, used it responsibly and in a pretty restrained way all in all. That's just how I feel about it.

• 3:02:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. And then like, you know, another thing when it comes to like the speech laws in the, like in Europe, especially in like the UK, I've been, I've been flooded with these videos of people being arrested for tweets in the UK. And it's insane. It's our closest ally. And I think it was in 2023, they had 12,000 people arrested for tweets.

• 3:02:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:02:24Danny Jones?

  And Russia was only 3,000.

• 3:02:25Speaker 03

  Yep, exactly. No, it's

• 3:02:27Danny Jones?

  Our closest ally.

• 3:02:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, you know, and we funded that. I mean, you know, the, the, the US Justice Department funded Hate Lab, which is the AI political radar system that the UK Metropolitan Police use in London to arrest people off of. You can look up Hate Lab and, you know, UK Hate Lab is funded by the Justice Department to go after Brexit supporters. They argued that hate speech comes disproportionately from Brexit people. And so, so we funded their little

• 3:03:01Danny Jones?

  The science of hate.

• 3:03:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. In fact, if you go to, even if you look at YouTube on Hate Lab, you can see what this, what these videos look like. It's, it's every identity. It's like a hate speech on gender grounds, hate speech on religious grounds, hate speech on ethnic grounds.

• 3:03:15Danny Jones?

  What is the, zoom in on that book cover? I want to see what it says.

• 3:03:22Danny Jones?

  How prejudice becomes hate and what we can do to stop it.

• 3:03:25Speaker 03

  To do with that though. I mean, like, this is, this is their cover, but it's just going after like pro Brexit, pro reform party. Like go to YouTube and type in like Hate Lab. I actually featured them in my, I did a 2018 documentary. This is seven years ago now. Type in, type in Brexit in search. No, no, in that search. Yeah.

• 3:03:43Danny Jones?

  Brexit.

• 3:03:45Speaker 03

  B R E X I T.

• 3:03:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, scroll down, scroll down. I'm looking at all the videos that mentioned Brexit here.

• 3:03:54Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 3:03:55Speaker 03

  And the thing, but scroll down.

• 3:04:00Speaker 03

  Okay, I don't.

• 3:04:02Danny Jones?

  No, you didn't.

• 3:04:02Speaker 03

  It might not be on YouTube. I forget where I pulled the video from, but basically, even if you just go back to their website, you'll see, you'll see like what I'm, what I'm getting at here. Like what they do is they do real time heat maps of like every tweet in the UK. And they run it through these machine learning trained filters. You know, they have all the keywords associated with like the Brexit movement. Oh, here you go. Like, you know, the effect of Brexit on the disrupting networks of hate and, you know, all this stuff. And what they do is so every tweet gets like a confidence score for whether, whether it's hate speech, right?

• 3:04:42Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 3:04:43Speaker 03

  So like you could plug in like Shakespeare's To Be or Not To Be. And, and, and it will give you like, you know, a hate speech toxicity score of like 0.07. And then you could plug in like a Biggie Smalls rap song. And it'll give you like a higher than that because they'll have like a identity score, like a strong language score, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like if there are N bombs that are dropped, like that might, you know, bring it up to a certain threshold.

• 3:05:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:11Speaker 03

  And if it crosses like a certain, like an 85% confidence interval, it goes straight to the UK Metropolitan Police and they get like a real time readout of every tweet, every Facebook post. At least this was the way it worked until 2022. I don't know if the rate limiting, this is one of the reasons that the UK Online Safety Act, they're the UK's version of the EU Digital Censorship Act, compels like internal data to go to outside vetted researchers. It's because like they lost access to the, a lot of the AI tools that was used to scrape. And I mentioned like in 2020, they scraped 859 million tweets to build these AI censorship tools.

• 3:05:53Speaker 03

  And then like Elon imposed this big fee to access that API. It's like a million dollars or something. And so you have all these little labs doing the censorship work. And now it's being imposed by law that you they are able to build these AI censorship algorithms. But you know, that's, that's like what's happening in the UK. It's a proxy attack on political actors who might depose the blobs little candidate there. This Kair Starmer is a blob creation.

• 3:06:26Danny Jones?

  It's insane, man. And it's, it's like, you know, so much of it. The crazy thing is that it's like with the access to information on the internet. All of this stuff is, it's so visible to everyone, all the stuff that's going on. And it's being talked about more than ever now.

• 3:06:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:06:45Danny Jones?

  And it's like, if you want to find this information, you can find it, right? You can go to Mike Benz's Twitter page and fucking find all of this corruption that's going on. And I feel like more and more people, at least young people are like waking up to this stuff now more than ever.

• 3:07:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:07:01Danny Jones?

  And they're getting fed up with it. And it feels like it's, to me, there's just a vibe to me, especially like with everything that just happened with the Epstein files, the, the Iran thing, the Charlie Kirk assassination. Right now, I have like, the vibe is not good. It feels almost like COVID vibes right now. Like, like we've reached this weird fever pitch where everyone is kind of like aware of nothing's adding up, the government's lying to us. And people are fed up. They can't afford a house, they can't afford a one, one, a one bedroom, one bath house for $5 million at an 8% interest rate. They're, you know.

• 3:07:47Danny Jones?

  Stuck in the gig economy, delivering Caesar salads with Uber Eats and, and they have nothing to show for what they're working for.

• 3:07:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:07:55Danny Jones?

  And, um, I don't know where it goes, dude.

• 3:07:58Speaker 03

  Think about this, like what YouTuber overtook astronaut is like, you know, the thing most middle schoolers say they want to do, you know, when they grow up.

• 3:08:07Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 3:08:08Speaker 03

  When you look at, for example, like these censorship policies, I mean, imagine being like a 18 year old kid and not being able to have a social media account for the rest of your life. You know, you gotta spend the next 80 years banned from YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, like, you know, you can't have a career to even start a career.

• 3:08:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:08:27Speaker 03

  You're a PhD, you know, medieval literature specialist. You gotta have a YouTube channel to promote that, a Facebook account, an Instagram account, a X account and.

• 3:08:37Danny Jones?

  And there's more and more people that are going through like the full college gamut, getting their PhDs. And I, I mean, I've noticed it that are just going straight to YouTube.

• 3:08:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:08:47Danny Jones?

  They're like, I'm not gonna like play the game being a researcher as a career. I'm just gonna go display all the knowledge that I've learned, debate people, learn new things and like spread information online. And if you, if you're a doctor and you go against the government narrative, now you're kaput.

• 3:09:03Speaker 03

  Right, you don't even have your license. You know, they, they pull your license for misinformation.

• 3:09:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:08Speaker 03

  And, uh, so I, I think that how scary that is as a, you know, this could happen to me and what are the liabilities of, cause like the social media thing is a way out of the gig economy. You have a lot of people who are like driving Ubers during the day and are working like a service job, but like their side hustle is they're like trying to build up a social media channel so that they can support themselves and ultimately do that professionally. And like you see, one of your friends gets banned for life because they said something about climate change or, or public vaccines or something. It's like, oh my God, I'm gonna be financially assassinated over like one thing that's true anyway.

• 3:09:49Speaker 03

  And, and so that has been like hugely motivational to me to see just like people.

• 3:09:57Speaker 03

  Sponging the stuff up and making their voices heard. I think there's enough of a coalition here in the United States, finally, that it is robust, even though there are these threats. And, you know, I agree with you on the Epstein stuff and, you know, like the Iran thing and things like that. Like, there are, there's always gonna be something, though, you know? And I do think in general-

• 3:10:22Danny Jones?

  Like, what president has actually fulfilled everything he ran-

• 3:10:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:10:26Danny Jones?

  On during his election.

• 3:10:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:10:27Danny Jones?

  None.

• 3:10:28Speaker 03

  Right. And, and I do-

• 3:10:29Danny Jones?

  I get that.

• 3:10:30Speaker 03

  Like, there is a level of perspective, like, you know, you've got, like, accounts that were banned for five years, and now they're back on X, and they're bigger than ever, and they've got monetization abilities, and, like, the, and the only thing, now, look, understandably, when something's a pain point, like, you do get, you know, the complaining to celebrating ratio is always going to be high, because you're always focused on, like, what the current problem is and what the next barrier is. But I do think there is a kind of moment

• 3:11:09Speaker 03

  where these are, these are relatively good times in terms of, like, the state of play for speech online. Like, whatever your opinions are, like-

• 3:11:23Danny Jones?

  Yes. I agree. I agree. But I feel, it just feels like we're in a pocket that's not gonna last long.

• 3:11:29Speaker 03

  Right. Well, it's a fragile thing, and that means that the consensus, the institution, the coalition has to stay together to keep fighting for it. And like, you have a lot of these, like, the ADL was a huge censorship organization, like-

• 3:11:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:11:43Speaker 03

  Unbelievable amounts of pressure.

• 3:11:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah, Elon, so they're a terrorist organization. He just tweeted they're a terrorist organization.

• 3:11:48Speaker 03

  Where's the lie? I mean, but they just took down their heat map of Charlie Kirk, you know, putting TPUSA on their hate group thing. They just scrubbed this, I think-

• 3:11:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, they had TPUSA listed as a hate group.

• 3:12:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, TPUSA is a hate group type thing, you know? And, and they did that because of the pressure, you know, because of, you know, Elon and the, and I think, you know, them wanting to probably stay within earshot of admin people and, you know, and-

• 3:12:17Speaker 03

  The base made its voice heard and even the ADL is like, you know, taking that off. And so, but that's why the thing I'm more, I'm most concerned about right now are like the coalition dynamics. It was a scary moment to me when Elon and Trump had that big fight because you know, the cause generally speaking for freedom of speech on the internet has to stay together at an institutional and coalition level. That's, that is, there's no law you can pass that can't be repealed. There's no regulatory structure you can set up right now that can't be dismantled and replaced. It's, it's the coalition that has the staying power. So when I see things like Larry Ellison pushing the digital ID

• 3:13:01Speaker 03

  thing, that to me is a scarier threat because that is, that is from within the coalition and very difficult to reconcile with, you know, because he came out and said, well, this is a, you know, a good thing because people will be on their best behavior when they're surveyed 24/7 by.

• 3:13:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:13:23Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, brah, okay, did we get a 24/7 look at you in your yacht?

• 3:13:28Danny Jones?

  Right, exactly. No, dude, it's, it's, it's fucking terrifying, man. Well, listen, Mike, we're gonna have to do another one because I feel like there's so much more shit we could talk about. So, um, next time you're in Miami, well, maybe we'll try to make it happen. Um, I'll link your X and your YouTube. Anything else we should link below?

• 3:13:45Speaker 03

  Kind of like an IG and a rumble.

• 3:13:46Danny Jones?

  Okay, yep, we'll get that too. And, uh, are you cool with doing a couple Patreon questions real quick? What time is it? We got time? Yeah, we got 15 minutes before you get to catch your flight. All right, that's all. Good night, folks.

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