Joe Rogan Experience #2237 - Mike Benz

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. NANarrator0:00

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music)

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:12

      All right, we're up. Nice to meet you, Mike.

   5. MBMike Benz0:14

      Nice to meet you, Joe.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:15

      Uh, I wish you didn't have to exist. (laughs)

   7. MBMike Benz0:19

      (sighs) Me too. (laughs)

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:19

      (laughs) You're one of those guys that when you talk, like, God, I wish what he's saying isn't true, but I know it is. Um, but I'm happy you do. Uh, I, I, I don't remember what I... where I first, uh, saw you speak, but, uh, I mean, right away, I was thinking, "Okay, this makes a lot of sense." When you were explaining, like, the Ministry of Truth or what- whatever it is. Is that what it's called, Ministry of Truth?

   9. MBMike Benz0:42

      Well, yeah, that's the name it came from.

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:43

       They tried, they tried to do that for a while. That was, uh... I think, th- so just as a background, please tell people what you do and what your... what positions you held.

   11. MBMike Benz0:55

       I do all things internet censorship. That's really my mission in life, my North Star. Uh, I started off as a corporate lawyer and then worked for the Trump White House. I was a speech writer. I sort of advised on technology issues, and then I ran the S- the Cyber Division for the State Department, basically the big tech portfolio that interfaces between sort of big government, international diplomacy issues on technology, and in the sort of private sector, US national champions in the tech space like Google and Facebook. So, I was the guy that Google lobbyists would call when they wanted favors from big government. Um, but, you know, my, my life took a huge sort of U-turn, you might say, when I... the 2016 election came around, and I became obsessed with the early development of the censorship industry, you know, this, this giant behemoth of government, private sector, civil society organizations, and media all collabing to censor the internet. And it was kind of a weird, weird path from there.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:59

       When did it all start rolling- when did the government realize that they had to get actively involved in censorship, and what steps did they initially take to get involved in this?

   13. MBMike Benz2:08

       It started in 2014 with the Ukraine fiasco.

   14. JRJoe Rogan2:14

       The coup.

   15. MBMike Benz2:14

       The coup and then the counter-coup. Uh, the coup was great for internet free speech. I mean, you really do need to start the story of internet censorship with the story of internet freedom, uh, because censorship is... promotion of censorship is sort of the flip side of promotion of free speech. And we've had this free speech government diplomatic role for 80 years now. When the- when World War II ended, we embarked the, you know, we had the international rules based order that was created in 1948. We had the UN. We had NATO. We had the IMF, the World Bank. We had this big global system now. There was a prohibition in 1948 under the UN Declaration of Human Rights that you can't acquire territory by military force anymore and have it be respected by international law, so everything had to move to soft power influence. And so the US government took a very active role beginning in 1948 to promote free speech around the world. And this was done through all these, you know, initially CIA proprietaries like Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty. And then, the whole Wisner's Wurlitzer State Department CIA apparatus, all the early partnerships with the media and the war s- the war machine around propaganda for World War II continued through the Cold War. And then that, that hit the gas with promotion of free speech on the internet when the internet was privatized. You know, it was initially a military project, so it was a government operation from, from Jump Street. And then in 1991, the World Wide Web came out, civilian use. And right away, the, the State Department, the military, our intelligence sphere was promoting free speech so that we could have a, uh, a basically government pressure on foreign countries to open up their internet to allow, uh, basically groups that the US government was supporting to be able to combat state control over media in those other countries. So, we already had this sort of deep interplay between government, tech companies, uh, universities, NGOs, that dates back 80 years if you look at the evolution of NGOs like Freedom House or the Atlantic Council or Wilson Center in promoting these, these free speech. I think so. But what happened was is in nine- in 2014, we had had about 25 years of successful free speech diplomacy, and then there was a... you know, we tried to overthrow the government of, of Ukraine. We successfully did. And I'm not even arguing whether that's a good or bad thing, but the fact is, is the US did effectively January 6th the Yanukovych government out of power in 2014. I mean, we literally had our Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, handing out cookies and water bottles to violent street protestors as they surrounded the Parliament building and ran the democratically elected government out of office. But then what happened is the eastern side of the state completely broke away, said, "We don't respect this new US installed government." Crimea voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation, and that kicked off... that, that sort of set in motion the events that would end the concept of free speech diplomacy as like a US government unfettered good. Because what they argued is we pumped $5 billion worth of US government money into media institutions in Ukraine. That's the figure that's cited by Victoria Nuland in December 2013 right before the coup. $5 billion setting up independent media companies, basically sponsoring Mockingbird style our media assets in the region. And they still didn't penetrate eastern Ukraine. The eastern Ukraine was primarily ethnic Russian, uh, didn't penetrate Crimea, so they said, "We need something to stop them from being able to combat our media influence." And they initially called this the Gerasimov Doctrine named after Valery Gerasimov, who was this Russian general.They took a quote from him saying, "The new nature of war is no longer about, uh, no longer about military-to-military conflict. All we need to do is take over the media in these NATO countries, w- and that's primarily social media, get one of our pawns elected as the president, and that president will control the military. So it's much cheaper and more efficient to win a military war by simply winning civilian elections." So that was called the Gerasimov Doctrine. That's what set up the early censorship infrastructure in 2014. Three years later, the, the guy who coined that, Mark Galeotti, would write a sort of mea culpa saying, "Oops, I'm sorry. G- Uh, Gerasimov was actually citing what the US does." But, by that point, they'd already renamed it hybrid warfare. NATO formally declared its Tanks to Tweets doctrine, saying that the new role of NATO is no longer just about tanks, it's about controlling tweets. And then Brexit happened in June 2016. In July 2016, the very next month, in Warsaw, NATO added hybrid warfare to its formal, uh, formal charter, uh, basically authorizing the military, the diplomatic sphere, and the intelligence world to, uh, take control over social media. And then five months later, Trump won the election being called the Russian asset. So all that infrastructure was redirected home to the US.

   16. JRJoe Rogan7:23

       Jesus. (exhales) Um, it was looking pretty bleak, I would say, um, in terms of the direction internet censorship was headed. It was, it was, it seemed like the censorship machine was winning up until around the time that Elon purchased X. That seems to me to be our fork in the road. That's the alternative timeline, you know, Marc Andreessen talked about that-

   17. MBMike Benz7:50

       Yeah.

   18. JRJoe Rogan7:50

       ... yesterday, that we've had a couple of alternative timelines where things have shifted. I think that was one of the big ones.

   19. MBMike Benz7:55

       That's exactly it. I mean, he's, he's sort of the, the timeline where we miss the bullet, is where there's a deus ex muskeena. You know, it's sort of like a deus ex machina where it's this random plot thing that happens, w- you know, uh, someone descends onto the stage and solves all the plot's loopholes and magically saves the, the, you know, the, the plucky heroes that were otherwise in danger. There were events in the run-up ... Well, it all sort of happened simultaneously really, because the, the month that Elon announced his acquisition was the same month that the Disinformation Governance Board was announced at DHS, which was the first thing that really roused Republicans and, frankly, anyone with institutional power in DC to finally stare into the sun and recognize or at least begin to glimpse the size of what they were up against. Uh, the Disinformation Governance Board set off a flurry of Congressional activity from Chuck Grassley and other, um, you know, luminaries in, in, in Congress. Uh, there were a lot of, uh, this whistleblower documents came out and, for years, ha- the entire Republican Party and, and most of the Democrat Party had denied the existence of government censorship. Uh, and it, frankly, the, the Ministry, the, the Ministry of Truth was not the Disinformation Governance Board. The Disinformation, Ministry of Truth had already existed three years earlier at DHS, they just made, uh, they just called it, uh, a name that masked what it did. It was called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is a name that puts you half to sleep by the time you're finished saying it.

   20. JRJoe Rogan9:37

       Ministry of Truth scared the shit out of people just because of the Orwellian context of the term.

   21. MBMike Benz9:42

       Well-

   22. JRJoe Rogan9:42

       You know, it just seemed like, what, what are you, what?

   23. MBMike Benz9:45

       Well, the funny thing is they were right. The Disinformation Governance Board was not the Ministry of Truth. It was a dull, boring, mundane, bureaucratic layer to manage the Ministry of Truth that was already created three years earlier. Uh, but the fact is nobody called them out on it because of the thick language of censor-speak that, um, that, that hides this whole thing from general public awareness. I mean, in my own path, I've, I've, I've tried to self-reflect about how I ended up here spending my life on this and I used to think it was primarily about chess and, you know, my sort of early encounters with AI and then seeing the, the censorship AI that really sparked my pursuit into this. But the more I've thought about it, th- the more it's based, I think it's just kind of coming from a corporate law background where your, your job is to plant dirty tricks in the, in the fine print of 150-page legal documents and to catch dirty tricks in that linguistic framing that's done, uh, on, by o- by opposing lawyers. And tha- that's really how they pulled this off. Nobody thought in 2019 that the Cybersecurity Agency in DHS would be the Ministry of Truth. They didn't appreciate the layers of censor-speak that were constructed on top of that to say that, "Well, DHS governs critical infrastructure and elections are critical infrastructure, public health is critical infrastructure, misinformation online is a cyber component, so it's a cyberattack on critical infrastructure." And so, normal- normally policymakers or people in the public think, "Oh, cybersecurity, that's hacking, that's phishing, you know, that's some, that's, that's for CIA, NSA people to stop Russians from hacking us." Uh, and they think critical infrastructure, they think things like dams or subsea cables or low Earth satellites. They don't, they don't think it means you sitting on the toilet at 9:30 PM on a Thursday saying, "Uh, I don't know that I love mail-in ballots." And then suddenly you're being flagged by DHS as a cyber threat actor for attacking the US critical infrastructure of confidence in our elections. But that's how they scaled these definitions into this giant mission creep and now it's metastasized into the entire US federal government, the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, DHS, FBI, DOJ, HHS. And the task in front of this administration is just unbelievably enormous in deconstructing that.

   24. JRJoe Rogan12:16

       Is it possible?

   25. MBMike Benz12:18

       ... they're gonna run into a lot of headwinds because once this power was discovered and funded to the tune of billions, as it has been, we, we have this foreign policy establishment that manages the American empire, that saw internet censorship as, kind of, an El Dorado key to permanently winning the soft power influence game around, around the world. And what I mean by that is, okay, so you know how in a lot of people talk about the early CIA activity in the media with things like Operation Mockingbird and, and whatnot, and the ability to sort of propagandize things in the media? Well, you never had this capacity in the 1950s while that was going on. If, if you and I were at dinner, Thanksgiving or something, and there's t- twelve people at the table and I start talking to you about, I don't know, C- the COVID vaccines may have adverse side effects, there is never an ability to simply reach under the table as an intelligence agency or as the Department of Homeland Security or as the Pentagon or the State Department and just turn off the volume when we talk to each other peer-to-peer. But since the lion's share of all communication is digital, especially the politically impactful ones, that capacity now allows our blob, our foreign policy establishment, to effectively control every election, or at least tilt every election around the world. And they've sprawled this into 140 countries and the, and Trump is going to run into every single regional desk at the State Department, every single equity at the Pentagon arguing that, "If you don't, do not allow us to continue this censorship work, it will undermine national security because it will allow Russian, uh, favored narratives to win the day in the Ivory Coast, in Chad, in Niger, in, and, uh, and Brazil, in Venezuela, and Central and Eastern Europe." Uh, you're going to have the State Department argue that if we don't have this counter-misinformation capacity, then, uh, extremists will win elections around the world or populists will win the election around the world and that will undermine the power of our democratic institutions, essentially our programming, our assets in the region. And they've built this enormous capacity. It's, it... We use it 'cause it works, because it wins, a- and the fact is, is Trump probably only won this election because, for the same reason he probably only won the 2016

2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Sure. …

   1. MBMike Benz15:00

      election, which was, in both cases, there was largely a free internet. It was when Trump got censored into oblivion in 2020 by the US government under his nose, working with webs of, of outside NGOs and Pentagon front groups to mass censor, virtually every narrative that he was, that he was, uh, putting out, that, that he lost. So it does work to, to win elections and every... There's a regional desk at the State Department covering every country on Earth. Victoria Nuland, you know, had a desk that covered about 20 countries. So every country, the State Department is the preferred winner of that election. We work with all political parties. And that's a, that's a hugely powerful tool to lose. It's just twisted and, and evil and it needs to, and we, we need to win... I don't want to say fair fights, but dipping into this sort of dark sorcery power has s- not only does it crush the First Amendment entirely, but the diplomatic blowback is just absolutely normal and, uh, enormous. I can go through examples of that if you're interested.

   2. NANarrator16:05

      Sure.

   3. MBMike Benz16:06

      Well, so we have this thing called the Global Engagement Center at the State Department. It was set up initially to fight ISIS, uh, because in 2014, 2015 when the Obama administration was trying to put military boots on the ground in Syria, there was this sort of giant threat that was publicly a- you know, talked about all over about ISIS recruiting on Facebook and Twitter, homegrown ISIS threats, for example, the Garland, Texas, uh, fiasco where there was a shooting by a ISIS terrorist and the web of online intrigues around that. Three years later, it would come out that he had been effectively groomed by the FBI, that the FBI had paid someone over $100,000 to become his best friend and text him to tear up Texas before that, but never mind. The, the horse was out of the barn. S- uh, this, so this idea that, that ISIS was recruiting on Facebook and Twitter gave a l- gave a license to the State Department to create this thing called the Global Engagement Center which was really the first official censorship capacity in the US government. It predated the DHS stuff that would come along in the Trump, in the Trump era. And this gave the State Department the direct back channel, the direct coordinating capacity with all of the social media companies to tell them about ISIS, ISIS accounts, ISIS narratives that were trending. The Pentagon poured hundreds of millions of dollars into d- into developing a technique called natural language processing which is a way to use AI to scan the entire internet for keywords and you would have these academic researcher- researchers effectively constructing code books of language. What do ISIS, uh, advocates or supporters talk like? W- what words do they use? What prefixes and suffixes? This, this whole lexicon is then conjoined with the ingested sum of all of their tweets and transcribed YouTube videos and Facebook posts, and then suddenly the State Department has a real-time heat map of everyone who is likely to be or hits a certain confidence level of being suspected to support ISIS. That was 2014 to 2016, set up by this guy Rick Stengel who described him- himself as Obama's propagandist in chief. Uh, he's now on the advisory board of NewsGuard, one of the largest, uh, censorship mercenary firms in, in the-... in the world. Uh, but he described himself as a free speech maximalist because before he started this, he was the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy when he started this, this censorship center. He was the former managing editor of Time Magazine. And so, he, he's talked about how he used to be a free speech maximalist back when he was in the media, and media companies benefited from that. But when Trump won the election in 2016, he became convinced that actually, the First Amendment was a mistake. He actually openly advocated in The Washington Post, in an op-ed, that we effectively end the First Amendment, that we copycat Europe's laws.

   4. JRJoe Rogan19:08

      (exhales)

   5. MBMike Benz19:09

      And then he wrote a whole book on it. Uh, this is the guy who started, effectively, the country's first censorship center. Uh, but then they did a really cute trick. They went from counter-terrorism to counter-populism. Now we- we've always had this ability, since the 1940s, to interfere in the domestic affairs of foreign governments or foreign countries, uh, to topple Communist countries. This was the whole cold, Cold War, counter-Communism work of the CIA and the State Department. But that was primarily targeting left-wing, left-wing Communists, or left-wing Socialists, or left-wing Populist run countries. When Trump won the election in 2016, this was, this is one of the reasons I think Republicans were so slow to move on all this. They never experienced the brunt of the intelligence state against the mainline GOP, or at least the in power Trump faction of the GOP, in the way that Democrats did in the 1960s and '70s when the CIA was actively interfering in Democrat Party politics to try to tilt them away from the anti-Vietnam movement and more into the sort of limousine liberal international, um, interventionist neo-liberal camp. And so, in 2016, the Global Engagement Center pivoted from being counter-terrorism to counter-populism, arguing that, that right-winged populist governments ... It wasn't just right wing. They were also against left-winged populists, but they simply never rose to power in the way that Trump did in the US, Bolsonaro did in Brazil, Matteo Salvini did in Italy, Marine Le Pen almost did in France, um, Nigel Farage was on his way to in the UK in the, the Brexit referendum, the AFD party in Germany, the VOX party in Spain. In 2016, they were afraid that social media rising all these pop- right wing populist parties to power, would effectively collapse the entire rules-based international order, unless there was international censorship. Because Brexit would give rise to Frexit if Marine Le Pen won and she was massively overpowered on social media, versus Macron. If, you know, as I mentioned, Italy, Germ- there was, there was going to be not just Brexit, there was going to be Frexit, Spegxit, Italexit, Grexit, Gorexit. So the entire EU would come undone, which would mean all of NATO would come undone, which would mean there's no enforcement arm for the IMF or the World Bank or international creditors, which would mean it would be like the ending scene of Fight Club where the credit card company buildings all collapse just because you're allowed to shit post on the internet. And they talked about that quite openly in 2017 i- in, as they were creating this whole censorship infrastructure.

   6. JRJoe Rogan21:53

      So the 2016 elections was, that was a counterpoint, that was like a turning point. That was a, a moment where they realized like, "This is actually dangerous." Like, allowing people to freely communicate online and say whatever they want completely undermines the propaganda that they have been distributing, completely undermines their ability to control who's the president, what policies get pursued, things along those lines.

   7. MBMike Benz22:23

      Yeah. It was, it was the final straw because, you know, the 2014 Crimea situation is, is ... I mean, the Pentagon was actively working with and funding these censorship operations through the entirety of Central and Eastern Europe starting in 2014. And then Brexit was a, was a major event in, in that basically it was said to come to Western Europe at that point. But when it ... When Trump won, that was, I guess, both the final straw and then the massive anvil that, that collapsed any residual resistance that existed within the national security state that we didn't need to do this. And, and Russiagate really was the, the useful tool to drive that all through. The fact that Trump came into office, uh, under the barrel of a gun of a special prosecutor openly alleging that he may be a Russian asset, ef- effectively a Manchurian candidate, uh, of, of Russia who only rose to power because of social media operations being run by Russia, allowed that national security predicate to, to carry forward this infrastructure and be massively funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, the IC, the NGO sphere, in order to set up this infrastructure. But then (laughs) in July 2019, Russiagate died on the vine immediately, as soon as Bob Mueller completely goofed his three-hour testimony and ... A lot of people were thinking before he took the stand that Trump was going to be in jail as a Russian asset because it was kept under such close hold for two and a half years-

   8. JRJoe Rogan24:02

      Right.

   9. MBMike Benz24:02

      ... what was Bob Mueller doing?

   10. JRJoe Rogan24:04

       Right.

   11. MBMike Benz24:04

       You know, there was the SNL sort of fanfare around that. Uh, but then when it was revealed he had nothing, there was, there was a moment in time between July 2019 and September 2019 when all of this could have been shut down and we could have just called all that censorship work counterintelligence. You know, a national security state thing. But they did something really, really nasty at, at that point which we now live in the permanent aftermath of, which is they switched from a sort of counterintelligence national security threat from Russian interference predicate, which is useful because that gives you a blank check to use the Pentagon and the State Department and the IC on this, to a-... domestic des- uh, domestic democracy predicate. Now, this is really, really nasty 'cause it basically transitions censorship from being a strictly military thing that we're doing to stop Russia to being a total permeating apparatus over all civilian domestic affairs regardless of whether there's a foreign threat. And when that was allowed to go unchallenged for effectively three years, up until Elon announced the acquisition of X, in that same month the Disinformation Governance Board spilled over and then Republicans won the House in November 2022, which then allowed Congressional hearings on all of this, and the elevation of the Twitter files, and the public awareness from that. But for three years, you had this handoff from Russiagate f- I call this the foreign to domestic switcheroo, and i- if you're interested, you know, uh, Jamie, if you look up, uh, not, not asking you to, but if you're curious, I, I have a whole super cut of what these people were saying from 2016 to 2018 while the Russiagate investigation was going on to 2019, 2020 after, after Russiagate, they do this foreign to domestic switcheroo. Those are the key terms if you're-

   12. NANarrator26:01

       Yeah, let's see it.

   13. MBMike Benz26:01

       ... if you're interested in that.

   14. NANarrator26:01

       It- there's a compilation video?

   15. MBMike Benz26:02

       Yeah, I did a compilation of all these DHS officials, State Department officials, Pentagon officials completely changing their justification for why we need internet censorship before Russiagate and after Russiagate. And they switched from saying, "Russian disinformation's the threat, so that's why the Pentagon's involved, that's why the State and CIA and FBI's involved," to saying, "Well, actually domestic disinformation is a threat to democracy. So regardless of whether it's the Russians or not, we need to censor Americans to preserve democracy." And this happened in tandem with the-

   16. NANarrator26:36

       What, what examples were they using to justify this?

   17. MBMike Benz26:39

       Well, they, they pulled off a cute trick where they doctrinally redefined democracy to mean a consensus of institutions rather than individuals. They had, when Trump won in 2016 and Brexit passed in 2016, they, they took this anti-authoritarian toolkit, which is, which has for 80 years been the CIA's predicate for overthrowing governments, and really since the 1910s when Woodrow Wilson announced that America's role is to make the world safe for democracy, we've long had a habit of intervening in foreign countries in order to liberate people from authoritarian control and bring them the gift of democracy, and that has always meant in, primarily, that the government would represent the, the mass of institutional, uh, uh, the mass of individuals in the form of voting. When Trump won in 2016, at the same time that all these right-wing populist parties who were just like Trump also won between 2016 and 2018, uh, primarily using s- free speech on social media and their popularity there, they argued that right-wing populism was the same authoritarian threat that left-wing socialism, left-wing communism was. And so they said, "Well, populism is the people's ground-up revolt against institutions, uh, against, against, uh, government, science, media, uh, against the NGOs, the experts, the academics." So what they did is they argued that democracy has to be defended from demagog- demagoguery. Democracy k- needs guardrails, we need bumper cars on democracy that go beyond what people vote for because people voted for Hitler, people voted for Trump, and they were doing this at US government conferences, by the way, in 2017. I can show you some funny ones if you're interested. But they, they were arguing that we need these institutional guardrails against people voting for the wrong person, and those institutional guardrails are so-called democratic institutions, which is another cute rhetorical trick because that's the CIA-State Department watchword for asset. When we, when, when USAID, for example, goes in and funds university centers, media outlets, um, (laughs) parliamentarian groups, activist groups, uh, s- uh, legal scholars, you name it, in a region, they are, they are building up their assets to exert soft power influence on that society, on that government, in order to influence the passage of laws, the, you know, the, the span of operations that they're doing that, that touch the US Embassy in the region. And so what they argued is actually democracy is not about the will of individuals, it's about the consensus of institutions. So if, if there's institutional c- uh, consensus building between the military, the diplomatic sphere, the intelligence community, the NGOs, the, the media outlets, the universities, that's really democracy. Those are the institutional guardrails, the people who know best. That's a difficult process, by the way. That's a process that takes months, years.

3. 30:00 – 45:00

   (laughs) …

   1. MBMike Benz30:00

      That's why there are these c- major consensus-building institutions like the Atlantic Council, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and Wilson Center, and the Carnegie Endowment. We have a whole suite of consensus-building institutions to bring together the banks, the corporations, the, the, the government officials, the outside interests, so they all get on the same page about a certain policy, or initiative, or, or regional drive, or i- industrial change. If at the end of that process a bunch of people vote for a p- uh, a politician because he does funny TikTok videos or he's got a popular dance and throws a monkey wrench in the, that years of, those years of consensus-building, that they began to view as a, as an attack on democracy. And so they said democracy is really about institutions, and you can actually look up, for example, Reid, Reid Hoffman w-Um, in 2019, they were doing all of these conferences, th- where they said elections, uh, are, are a threat to democracy, elections corrupt democracy-

   2. JRJoe Rogan31:01

      (laughs)

   3. MBMike Benz31:01

      ... because we can't think of democracy as elections anymore. For example, Ukraine has banned elections. We don't... we still ca- we still say we are providing $300 billion of military to support, to promote democracy in Ukraine even though they don't have elections. Well, it's because of the ins- it's controlled by US institutions. You can look up something called the Red Lines Memo, uh, by the way, on my X account if you're curious. Jamie should have-

   4. JRJoe Rogan31:24

      So when you say that Ukraine no longer has democracy, ess- essentially what happened is Zelensky was supposed to leave office and he did not. Is that what happened?

   5. MBMike Benz31:33

      Well, they've, they've indefinitely canceled elections. So he is, uh-

   6. JRJoe Rogan31:37

      Because of the war.

   7. MBMike Benz31:38

      Because of the war, is their argument. Now, we had elections during the, during the Civil War here in the US. This is, uh, y- this is not uncommon for countries to be at war and still have elections. The issue is, is Zelensky is unpopular and not winning in those election polls. And we no longer define democracy as being about elections, because elections allow populists to circumvent the consensus of institutions. And if you wanna see a great example of this, you can look at the, something called the Red Lines Mem- Red Lines Memo, which is, which is... uh, I think I have it near the top of my X account, or you can look for just the phrase Red Lines Memo, and you will see Zelensky's first month in office, he was given a threat letter, effectively, by the US State Department, where they had s- they had something like 70 US-funded NGOs who wrote a, a r- a letter to Zelensky s- uh, in telling him, ordering him not to cross the f- the below listed red lines or else there will be political instability in your country. Now, political instability in the country caused by the US State Department is the reason Zelensky ultimately became president. The 2014 coup in Ukraine was US and UK-orchestrated political instability to have a January 6th-style mob destabilize the government and literally run it out of the country. And they gave him red lines on every single aspect of what he could do as president, security red lines, uh, cultural red lines, energy policy red lines.

   8. JRJoe Rogan33:11

      What, what were these red lines, like cultural red lines?

   9. MBMike Benz33:13

      So, so for example, uh, that he could not allow the use of Russian language to be aired on any of the major Ukrainian, uh, m- media channels. This was, this was part of a drive by the US State Department in tandem with the censorship work that, that started at that same time, uh, in order to prevent the sort of affinity, th- the sort of Russian affinity network that happens because of Russian propaganda spreading from Russian language news sources, and to try to pry the country off of the s- Russian ethnic faction and, and have essentially the, the Ukrainian dialect

   10. NANarrator33:50

       This is in response for what happened in Crimea?

   11. MBMike Benz33:53

       Yes, yes, in Crimea and, and the Donbas, the whole, uh, eastern, eastern side breakaway. But this is effectively the long arm of, of Langley, the, the long arm of, of the State Department and CIA, telling Ukrainians that they can't... wha- what kinda language they can use in their own country. Ukraine was effectively forced to transfer over its, you know, its, its education ministry to an EU commissioning body so that, uh, you know, Russian-adjacent mythologies couldn't be taught in the country. They were, they were told what, you know, what industries they needed to privatize and to block any attempt, uh, to, you know, to maintain sovereign control of, of those, uh, energy assets. This is ultimately what gave, gave rise to the Burisma scandal, by the way, and the Hunter Biden State Department affairs that, that ran through all of that, um, which is, which is a whole other fascinating topic, I should add. But the fact is-

   12. JRJoe Rogan34:48

       I'd love to get back to that.

   13. MBMike Benz34:49

       Yeah. (laughs)

   14. JRJoe Rogan34:49

       Yeah.

   15. MBMike Benz34:50

       But, but this is, this is... every aspect of Ukrainian society effectively top-down controlled by democratic institutions funded by the US government when it's stock standard that the only reason we do that... you know, he who calls the piper... who, who pays the piper calls the tune. They're being funded to exert this soft power issue, every s- this, this soft power force on the Ukrainian government, and Zelensky knows that force because the only reason he occupies the power that he does is because that force ushered him in through this sequence of events from Yatsenyuk, uh, in 2014, uh, thr- through up to him. And so the issue is, is those are the institutions. It... by the way, that whole thing was run through something called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, uh, which, which is effectively a, a, a, a suite of media institutions in the area that are, that are CIA conduits, like the, the Kiev Independent, which is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. The National Endowment for Democracy is one of the most pernicious forces in the entirety of the censorship industry. And it... you know, you were talking with Marc Andreessen about NGOs and their role in internet censorship, and, you know, he was, I think, fleshing out sort of the concept of a GONGO, a government organized non-governmental organization. And so the National Endowment for Democracy is sort of posited as, as an NGO, but it's got a very curious history. Again, this is what sponsors so much of Ukrainian media. Th- the National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 be- because of a dilemma that the new Ronald Reagan administration faced. The CIA at that point in the early '80s, its name was DIRT. Uh, there were the massive scandals in the 1960s to the 1970s, everything from Operation Mockingbird, to MKUltra, to Operation Chaos, to effectively bribing student groups on college campuses, all sorts of thi- the, the heart attack gun being held up in a public hearing at the, at the Church Committee in 1975 about s- uh, ways the CIA was assassinating world leaders and, and, uh, and-... assassinating journalists and political figures, using methods that included (laughs) , you know, a, a gun that would make it look like they organically died of a heart attack. All of these things gave rise to, to, to Jimmy Carter being elected in 1976. He was not expected to win in '76, but he won on the back of Democrat mass outrage over the malfeasance of the national security state, the CIA. And so, the following year, Carter does something called the Halloween Massacre. He fi- he fires 30% of the CIA's operations division in a single night, and then he totally cripples the CIA's budget. Reagan gets to power after the Iran hostage situation, wants the CIA's powers back, but the Democrats were still hugely hostile to it. The public still had not fully forgiven the CIA. And so they came up with a cute trick, and you can actually look at a September 1991 David Ignatius article called Spyless Coups. This is in The Washington Post. The c- the article begins with a, uh, (laughs) by saying that we don't even really need to have, we don't really need to n- even need to nominate, uh, Robert Gates, the, the, uh, the, the Senate... The, the new CIA director, uh, for, you know... We don't even need to do a Senate confirmation hearing for a CIA director anymore because the CIA is effectively made obsolete by its, by its new tactic that we use through NGOs spearheaded by the National Endowment for Democracy. And you'll find in that article, uh, you know, a, a quote by the National Endowment for Democracy's founder, uh, w- uh, who (laughs) ... Carl Gershman, where, where he explicitly says that it would be a terrible thing for groups supported by the, by the US government to be seen as p- as subsidized by the CIA. We did that in the 1960s and it worked out terribly for us when it turned out they were backed by the CIA. That's why the National Endowment for Democracy was created so that we could (laughs) do... We c- the CIA could effectively subsidize the, uh, the groups without having CIA fingerprints on it. It, it, you know, if you look at its legislative history, w- it was, y- passed, ef- effectively a bill through Congress that, that Ronald Reagan approved. The origins of it come from the CIA director, William Casey, in 1983, working directly with the US Attorney General, uh, as well as an entire US aid, uh, blueprint th- the previous year, t- for the, for this... The CIA requested this to be set up. It's funded entirely by the US government. It's officially accountable to the House Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Foreign, uh, Foreign Relations Committee. So it's funded by the government. It's, it's literally accountable to congression- to, to a US Congressional committee. It was this, the CIA director birthed it, the founder acknowledged that they were created to do what the CIA wants to do but gets in trouble for doing, and we call this an NGO? I don't think so. And so, th- the issue is, is the National Endowment for Democracy and the en- the entire intelligence community was... They were the ones who led this conversion from counter communism to counter populism. They're the ones who when Trump won, rose to power, and when Brexit and the whole, you know, NATO-EU country domino started electing right-wing populists who were hostile to the foreign policy establishment's consensus, and a lot of this has to do with energy, geopolitics, and military interventionism, and we can get to those if you're, if you're... If you wanna go there. Um, but the, the NED is... Has its octopus arms around the entirety of the censorship industry. They, uh, i- if you wanna see something really, really crazy, you know, there's a, there's a video that we can watch. It's a two-minute video from one of NED's, uh, global censorship programs where they explicitly work with foreign governments to get foreign governments to pass censorship laws to attack US companies. So this is the US government funding a CIA cutout to back channel with regulators and influencers in foreign countries to get those foreign countries to crush US national champions in the tech space. This is the exact opposite of what the State Department was set up in 1789 to do.

   16. NANarrator41:35

       Where is this video? How can we see it?

   17. MBMike Benz41:36

       Uh, if you, if you, if you... Here you go. I'll explain it right now.

   18. NANarrator41:39

       You got it, Jame? Put it up?

   19. Disinformation has invaded online conversations on social media platforms, posing challenges to healthy information environments and threats to democracy. It bolsters authoritarians, weakens democratic voices and participation, exploits and exacerbates existing social cleavages, and silences opposition. Countering disinformation and promoting information integrity are necessary priorities for ensuring democracy can thrive. The CEPPS Countering Disinformation Guide is a resource including nine thematic sections and a comprehensive database of interventions highlighting various approaches for advancing information integrity and strengthening societal resilience to disinformation and other harmful online campaigns. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems, International Republican Institute, and National Democratic Institute developed this guide with support from USAID through the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening. Here are nine key takeaways from the guide. Addressing disinformation requires a whole-of-society approach. We need to create a sense of urgency to drive collective action for addressing disinformation. Institutions and platforms have the resources to address disinformation, but lack credibility, whereas civil society has the credibility but is chronically under-resourced.Countering disinformation requires a mixed methods approach, including fact-checking, monitoring, and other interventions. Focusing on major events like election outcomes alone will not achieve a healthy information environment. Developing norms and standards, legal and regulatory frameworks, and better social media content moderation is necessary for a healthy information ecosystem. It is important to establish frameworks to discourage political parties from engaging in disinformation. Not sure where to start? Click here to explore the interventions, database of organizations, projects, and donors working to counter disinformation around the world.

   20. Whoa.

   21. MBMike Benz43:57

       They're in 140 countries. It's entirely funded by the US government. It's r- it's, uh, I can, I can break this down in detail. So, so this CEPPS program is basically, in large part, the reason that the Brazil censorship state was, was erected. I mean, this came a little bit later in the game, but it's, it's a spawn out of this NED censorship network. This explicitly created by the CIA director, self-confessed, effectively, CIA cutout. What, what, what CEPPS does is they manage an u- an umbrella portfolio of all of the censorship institutions that they've capacity built in a region. So, c- capacity building, is a, is a, is a phrase in state craft that effectively means building up an asset so that it has the capability to, to be instrumentalized by the US State Department. So, for example, whenever we're trying to do something in a foreign country, the first thing we do is we look at the state of the chess board.

4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Phew. …

   1. MBMike Benz45:00

      What assets are on our side there? What political groups? What demographic groups? What religious groups? What, what political parties? What universities? Or what, what media institutions? What capacities do they currently have? What capacities do they need but don't have? And that is where the flood of State Department and USAID and NED funding comes in to capacity build them so that they can be instruments of US state craft. Now, it doesn't mean they always use those capacities. Sometimes we create those capacities, even if we don't intend to use them right away, just in case we might need them later, and I can ... that's a whole other fascinating field. But, but, so what, what CEPPS does is it's a joint program by the US State Department, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Now, now USAID is, uh, you know, a, a very noto- it's, it's sort of a switch player. There's no aid in, in USAID, by the way. That's ... Your brain is being tricked when you see the phrase USAID. It's not an aid organization. The aid in USAID stands for Agent- US Agency for International Development. It is developing internationally around the world all of the institutions that the State Department needs to use. So, when they are capacity building activist groups in a foreign country, that's because the State Department wants those activists there. Now, USAID, for the first time in its history, it was created in ye- the early 1960s by JFK, 1961. It was, it was created because you had all of this intelligence, state craft, and military support and logistical aid that was tripping over i- itself, basically. The military would be funding, uh, you know, would be running aid to certain groups in the region. The State Department would be running aid to certain groups in the region. The intelligence community would ... And there was no way, there was no sort of central coordinator of those, of those capacity building operations. So USAID, by the way, is a 50 billion dollar budget. The entirety of the intelligence community is only 72 billion.

   2. NANarrator47:08

      Phew.

   3. MBMike Benz47:08

      So, it is, is more than the CIA and more than the State Department.

   4. NANarrator47:11

      Wow.

   5. MBMike Benz47:12

      And aid is basically a S- USAID is effectively a switch player to, to assist the Pentagon with, with, eh, on the national security front, to assist the State Department on the national interest front, or to assist the intelligence community on a, on a sort of clandestine operations front. So, you can look up funny moments, by the way, in, in USAID being a CIA front if you, if, for example, you wanna pull up the Wikipedia of ZunZuneo when USAID, uh, cre- uh, created a, basically a CIA Twitter in Cuba to try to, um, to try to convince the people of, of ... Basically to try to f- get a free speech internet, a free speech Twitter knockoff in Cuba at a time when Tw- Twitter in 2014 was, was restricted. Uh, and USAID laundered money that was earmarked f- for Pakistan in order to create a identical version of Twitter, but just for Cuba, and to, uh, recruit them using messaging, eh, that at, at first involved music, sports, and hurricane updates. And then in their own documents, once they had accumulated about 100,000 users, they would start to feed them in the algorithm messaging to make them want to overthrow their government and form smart mobs to, to bring a Cuban spring to Cuba in the same way that the CIA, the State Department, and USAID pulled off the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, 2012. By the way, I'm not even opining on whether this is good or bad, but you can't bring that home, and you can't target US companies like, like they've done, like they've done here. Um, but so, so USAID provides most of the money. The State Department provides the policy vision for this CEPPS censorship program, and NED does the technical implementation work. Now, you saw in that video there were two organizations that were, that were listed. It didn't say e- They were the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, IRI and NDI. These are the two political branches of the National Endowment for Democracy. When this CIA cutout was set up in 1983, they set up f- their, their four core fours.... one of them to- th- the first two are the political cores, the IRI, the Republican, the GOP wing of the CIA, effectively, the NDI, the Democrat Party wing of the CIA, and then t- and then two others, one called the Center for International Private Enterprise, which is s- which is the Chamber of Commerce, is basically the CIA liasing with multinational companies, with our big US national champions, and then the, the fourth one is called the Solidarity Center, which is the CIA's work with unions, which is, which has been a part and parcel of our CIA work since the 1940s. And so you have... But these two political branches of the, of the National Endowment for Democracy are designed to basically gel to, m- uh, both sides of the political aisle to make sure they have support for CIA activity in a region. And so this, for example, there was a split on Russia between the GOP and, and the, the DNC up until Ukraine in 2014. You may recall in 2012, there was that debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama over Russia policy, where Mitt Romney was flanking Obama from his sort of hawkish Russia right. He was saying, "Obama, you're s- you know, you're soft on Russia. You're letting Vladimir Putin, you know, get everything he wants in, in Eastern Europe." And Obama's response was, "The 1980s called. They want their foreign policy back." Because at the time, it was primarily the GOP economic stakeholders whose energy investments were being sabotaged by Russian activity in Georgia, in Azerbaijan. It hadn't yet hit the NDI network, the CI- the, the DNC side of the economics until Ukraine in 2014. That was when there became a bipartisan consensus on the need to effectively go to war and launch this big energy sanctions operation against Russia. And so there's that... So that's who's running that CEPPS program. It's- it's both sides of the political aisle, but both of them hate Trump, both of them hate populists, whether it's the US in- with Trump, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and again, the whole suite of EU countries that we just talked about, and they descended on Brazil just two weeks after Bolsonaro was elected in 2018. The Atlantic Council and, and NED held all these meetings about how Bolsonaro only won because of basically social media, social media and end-to-end encrypted chats like WhatsApp and Telegram. And that we need to s- basically stop Bolsonaro's presidency in its tracks and stop him from getting reelected by creating a censorship infrastructure in Brazil that is powerful and, and institutionally as wide and deep as o- our other diplomatic work. So NDI, which I should note, Hunter Biden was on the Chairman's Advisory Board of NDI, the DNC CIA wing. So if, if anyone is a little curious as to why the CIA intervened on the Justice Department investigation, folks remember the IRS wanted to question Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's lawyer, who paid his taxes for five years, and then the, the CIA intervened and told them, "Do not," (laughs) you know, "Do not look into who is funding Hunter Biden." I find it curious that the CIA's DNC branch, uh, Hunter Biden was on the Chairman's Advisory Board. But so NDI sets up this, this sprawl of coalitions called D4D, Design for Democracy. And Design for Democracy, in tandem with this CEPPS program, goes on to work with the, the Censorship Court, de, de Moraes, the, the censorship Voldemort on their, uh, their TSE court. The, it's the basically the election management and, and censorship body of their Supreme Court. This is the, the guy who has gone to war with Elon Musk. They help that, that Censorship Court st- set up a disinformation task force and their own institutional assets get put on the advisory committee of the, of the Brazilian Censorship Court to direct the censorship policies of that, of the same, the same institution that banned X from Brazil, that seized Starlink's assets. They worked with the universities, FGV DAP and, and other very significant y- uh, Brazilian universities. They set up disinformation centers in there and got academic thought leadership published in Brazil about the need to pass mis- anti-misinformation laws. Their own NDI, uh, y- uh, fellows and, and operatives were publicly testifying to the Brazilian parliament on the need to pass these laws. They were publicly speaking to the prosecutors, uh, association groups in Brazil telling them they need to prosecute misinformation on this. They were funding millions of dollars to Brazilian media institutions to promote internet censorship and, and to pro- and to promote the banning effectively of any pro-Bolsonaro content on social media or on end-to-end encrypted chats. The USAID then, uh, kicked in millions of dollars of funding to Internews, which is another US government funded media projection arm to promote media literacy programs, information integrity programs, countering mis- and disinformation programs in Brazil. So at every level, Brazilian media companies, they partner with Globo, for example, the largest, uh, the, the largest m- media outlet in Brazil. The, the media institutions, the universities and thought leaders, the politicians, the judges. It was full spectrum. It was the same thing that, that we do when we try to regime change a country. By the way, this is in USAID's charter. This is one of the reasons they're able to get away with this. In USAID's charter, it allows USAID to capacity build assets to do so-called judiciary reform, which means influencing the laws and the structure of the judges and, uh, to, to be able to-... have our foreign aid money, get laws passed, or get, uh, structural changes made to the, uh, made to the court system there, and this is what SEPs did. This State Department, (smacks lips) C- CIA-front censorship organization, they, they developed a strategy they called EMBs, ele- election management bodies, which was basically focusing in on the court system of different countries, e- that are, that are in charge with adjudicating elections, in order to get them to grow a censorship capacity to censor the ability for people to question their elections. S- and, and they've, they had all these stakeholder meetings. Some of them are really funny. Some of them, they said, uh, "Well some of our EMB partners didn't want to actually, uh, didn't think they, they could pull this off." They couldn't convince the other political stakeholders in their country to grow this censorship capacity, and they advised them about how they could cleverly use rhetoric to disguise the programs. "Don't call it a counter-disinformation program if you think that'll ruffle too many feathers. Instead, simply call it strategic communications, and, 'cause ev- listen, every p- every government agency has some sort of public affairs branch, some sort of communications, uh, capacity. Simply say that this is for monitoring and engaging in strategic communications, and then you can mass flag the accounts of the US State Department's political opponents they wanna stop from winning the election."

   6. NANarrator57:08

      Jesus. (sighs) This is why, you know, when you're saying it's gonna be insanely difficult and Trump's gonna face so many headwinds trying to unravel all this stuff, like, it's, the, there's so many organizations, and there's so many people involved, and there's so many countries that are in lockstep.

   7. MBMike Benz57:27

      'Cause we waited too long. We waited too long, and now, look, it's, it's not full-blown. Um, this has not yet reached full maturity, where, where we are at complete 1984 on, on all of this, but it is no longer in its infant stage. There was, if, if Elon had acq- if, if Congress was aware of that s- that CISA, that cybersecurity branch at DHS was the real Ministry of Truth in 2019 instead of in 2022, um, if people were aware of the State Department's Global Engagement Center and USAID's democracy, human rights, and governance, and the, all, all of this, you know, um, in 2018, 2019, when it was really getting its, its feet down, it may have been easy to have been pulled out at the roots then, because they were skittish at the time about going through with this at first. You heard in that, in that video that we just watched a reference to this phrase called whole of society.

   8. NANarrator58:28

      Yeah.

   9. MBMike Benz58:29

      This is another funny, you know, funny video. If you, if you wanna just pull up the- if, if you're interested, Jamie, and if you think, Joe, this is appropriate, uh, I, I could have made this a six-hour supercut, but if you just, I put, I made a two-hour supercut of, of, if you just look up whole of society supercut on my, on my X account, you'll, you'll see this, um, and this phrase is their get out of jail free card. So when these CIA cutouts and State Department emissaries and, and, uh, you know, the whole apparatus of the blob had this apparition moment in 2016 where the rules-based international order would collapse, and we have to stop populism, we have to stop Trump from, you know, e- ending our seas Eurasia foreign policy, when, when that, when that happened, they had a lot of self-reflection where they said, "China doesn't have this problem. Russia doesn't have this problem." Authoritarian countries don't have to deal with the threat of s- insurgent populist groups o- you know, radically altering that country's foreign policy, that country's national security state, but they do it all top-down. And we have, our entire diplomatic apparatus is arrayed as a sort of dichotomy between democracy and autocracy, because that's what lets us go over, go and take over, or overthrow, or regime change foreign countries is, they're autocracies and we're bringing democracy to them, so we can't be seen to look like the autocracies we're

5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Sure, yeah. …

   1. MBMike Benz1:00:00

      trying to overthrow. We want the, we want the autocratic (laughs) outcome with a, uh, but we don't, we can't be seen to use the autocratic process. So they came up with a really cute trick to prevent the top-down perception, and they called this the whole of society counter-misinformation framework, the whole of society counter-misinformation alliance. And the reason I thought it would be funny to just play this clip before delving into it a little bit more is because it actually starts, uh, with a clip from CISA, the cybersecurity-turned-cyber sis- uh, censorship DHS, uh, uh, internal meeting where the guy, (laughs) where the CISA, uh, censorship official leading, leading the meeting apologizes for using the phrase whole of society, because by, by that point everyone is so sick of hearing it, uh, it's like a mantra, like an incantation that they, that they're, th- that has to be recited almost like a religious ritual, because this is how you get this government-private sector, civil society-media alliance. This thing was completely orchestrated top-down to avoid the appearance of top-down in 2017. They borrowed this concept from their military counter-insurgency work and they simply grafted it onto censorship, but I don't know, do, do you wanna just-

   2. NANarrator1:01:18

      Sure, yeah.

   3. MBMike Benz1:01:18

      ... like watch this and, and-

   4. NANarrator1:01:19

      Well, I haven't found it yet. I'm sorry.

   5. MBMike Benz1:01:20

      If you, if you just look for the phrase whole of society-

   6. NANarrator1:01:23

      I did.

   7. MBMike Benz1:01:23

      ... @mikebenciber.

   8. NANarrator1:01:24

      I did. Yeah.

   9. MBMike Benz1:01:25

      It ch- it ch- oka- uh, you could also-

   10. NANarrator1:01:27

       I found a lot of it's you talking about it, but not-

   11. MBMike Benz1:01:28

       Well, well if you go to, in my highlights tab and, and scroll down, I think you'll, you'll see it there. It's, uh, it's a supercut. (smacks lips) I use the phrase supercut, if that's helpful to, to highlight it. But whole of society is this concept that the government will fund...... allies to AstroTurf the appearance of a spontaneous, uh, democratic, um, surround sound around the need to do the censorship work. So, the- so, there are four quadrants in their whole-society framework. Government meaning, all the different government, they, they have a whole of government side of that, which is everything from the State Department, the DHS, HHS for COVID censorship work, um, you know, FBI, DOJ, National Science Foundation, all that. The private sector are the private sector companies, the social media tech platforms where the censorship actually takes place. The ci- civil society quadrant means university censorship centers count- disinformation studies is what they call it, misnomer of the century. But, uh, but, so they've, there's now about 100 US universities, every major US university has a censorship center. Whe- it's, it'll be called disinformation studies, sometimes it'll be tucked under their sociology department or their communications, even through applied physics when they do, uh, AI censorship. So, you have the univ- and the civil society layer, you have the universities, the NGOs, the activist groups, the, uh, the, you know, independent nonprofit foundations. And then the fourth quadrant is media, which is the government working with media to promote censorship of US citizens. And so by, by ass- effectively wielding all these assets, so that there's government funding and government coordination, but technically, most of the pressure being put on the tech companies is coming from-

   12. NANarrator1:03:22

       This?

   13. MBMike Benz1:03:22

       Yeah, here you go.

   14. NANarrator1:03:23

       Okay.

   15. MBMike Benz1:03:23

       You can just watch, just, it's like a funny super cut. We don't need to watch the whole thing, but you'll get the picture very quickly.

   16. NANarrator1:03:30

       Um, an- and we hear this term all the time, uh, a problem like disinformation, fighting disinformation really requires a, a whole-of-society response. And I know whole of society is a little bit cliche, and, and a term that gets thrown around a lot.

   17. Addressing disinformation requires a whole-of-society approach.

   18. Disinformation is not going to be fixed, uh, by governments acting alone. Uh, I think, uh, we've seen that a whole-of-society effort, um, is really key to the solution. There are some countries more, so in Europe or, or up in, in, in, in other parts of North America, that are more progressive in recognizing that this is a whole-of-society challenge. Whole-of-society approach of what would be your wish list if you, if you could, if you could implement anything? (laughs) Or to be able to trust when somebody tells them it's fake. Is there anything that governments can do on that front? Absolutely. This is a whole-of-society problem. So, there's things that governments can do, um, you know, individual, national governments and, and multilateral institutions. Disinformation challenges-

   19. MBMike Benz1:04:34

       Sense.

   20. NANarrator1:04:35

       ... democracy require that we work together as a community to share our experiences and to hold governments, social media platforms, and political leaders accountable for making sure that people are empowered with information that is real and accurate. Democracy depends on a healthy information space that can only be achieved through a whole-of-society effort. Countering disinformation, we often talk about a whole-of-society response, uh, th- of course, we need the- Disinformation, a whole-of-society approach. I wanna get into the "whole-of-society" response, the whole-of-society networked response, private sector, public sector, civil society. Memes that were circulating, and that to me is the whole-of-society approach. Um, I think the solution has to be whole of society, which is the word that we throw around a lot, especially in venues like these, right? We need cooperation from the tech platforms, good faith, cooperation and enforcement of ter- terms of service. But we also need people in the government who are willing to say, "Yes, this is a problem. And it's not just about foreign actor."

   21. MBMike Benz1:05:38

       Okay, so-

   22. NANarrator1:05:39

       (sighs)

   23. MBMike Benz1:05:39

       ... so a few things on that. If you remember the SEPs video, the, the CIA front NED program to get censorship laws on 140 countries. If you remember, there was this, one of those nine things they read off is that the US government needs to capacity build these counter-misinformation institutions in civil society, because the government has the money and the resources, but not the credibility. Civil society organizations, the universities, the NGOs, they've got the credibility, but not the money. So, (laughs) that, that, that's part of what they're saying here with the, the role of this civil society is they can't be s- the government can't be seen as telling everyone to do all of this censorship, because that's authoritarian. That would look not credible, that would look authoritarian for the government to do. So, we've got the muscle and the money, but not the credibility. Our cutout organizations have the credibility, but not the money and the muscle. So, we're gonna give them the money and the muscle. And so I can, and I can show you, if you wanna see what this looks like in action, I can show you some, some great videos that-

   24. NANarrator1:06:43

       Okay.

   25. MBMike Benz1:06:44

       ... sort of sh- show this. Um, so, uh, if you, if you just look up WiseDex, it's in my highlights, um, it's also, if you just do @mikebenciber WiseDex, I'm gonna show you a, a couple of, of, of things of how this, um, how this works. So if, if, when, when Jamie's able to pull that up, uh, so-

   26. NANarrator1:07:01

       What is, you're saying WiseDex?

   27. MBMike Benz1:07:02

       WiseDex, W-I-S-E-D-E-X.

   28. NANarrator1:07:06

       Dex.

   29. MBMike Benz1:07:06

       Mm-hmm. And so Trump did something really ambitious when he, when he was president at the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation is, uh, is the main funder of higher education in the United States. It's a $10 billion pool of money that goes to fund university centers. And it is sort of the civilian arm of DARPA. Uh, it's technically, you know, uh, a sort of civilian, uh, you know, foundation for science. But if you look at its history, it basically has a, uh, i- i- it's, it's, it's when military technology becomes dual use for commercial and civilian purposes. So, for example, the internet itself started off as DARPA in the '60s-... then it was transferred to the National Science Foundation for civilian, uh, uh, effectively management. That meant it made its way to the World Wide Web. That's why the National Science Foundation has a, like a 15% quota on national security-related projects. And that's, and all the technical implementers of the censorship programs at the National Science Foundation come fr- (laughs) come from DARPA, including this that, that I'm- Jesus Christ. ... going to show here. But, but so, Trump created this thing in, um, what, uh, in his first term at the National Science Foundation called the Convergence Accelerator Program. And the idea was, is that we were going to converge scientists from different fields to solve these home run swing challenges like, you know, cold fusion and, um, and, you know, all the, you know, quantum mechanics challenges that required physicists to talk to data scientists and network modelers and bringing them all together so that it, they all can converge on a common, common problem. So, he set up about five of these tracks, uh, in like 2019. Biden gets into office. His first year in office, his National Science Foundation creates a new track. It's called Track F. And the whole thing is, is, (laughs) it's for, it's, is for, for countering misinformation, to converge scientists on developing censorship technology to censor the internet at scale. So, so they have spent tens of millions of dollars. This, this, this one that we're about to watch, uh, was eligible for $5.7 million from the National Science Foundation. It received $750,000 from the National Science Foundation to create this. This is the promo video that they put up on YouTube in connection with their, with their grant. So n- and, so I'll just let it play and then I'll...

   30. NANarrator1:09:39

       Posts that go viral on social media can reach millions of people. Unfortunately, some posts are misleading. Social media platforms have policies about harmful misinformation. For example, Twitter has a policy against posts that say authorized COVID vaccines will make you sick. When something is mildly harmful, platforms attach warnings, like this one that points readers to better information. Really bad things, they remove. But before they can enforce, platforms have to identify the bad stuff, and they miss some of it. Actually, they miss a lot, especially when the posts aren't in English. To understand why, let's consider how platforms usually identify bad posts. There are too many posts for a platform to review everything. So first, a platform flags a small fraction for review. Next, human reviewers act as judges, determining which flagged posts violate policy guidelines. If the policies are too abstract, both steps, flagging and judging, can be difficult. WiseText helps by translating abstract policy guidelines into specific claims that are more actionable. For example, the misleading claim that the COVID-19 vaccine suppresses a person's immune response. Each claim includes keywords associated with the claim in multiple languages. For example, a Twitter search for negative efficacy yields tweets that promote the misleading claim. A search on eficacia negativa yields Spanish tweets promoting that same claim. The trust and safety team at a platform can use those keywords to automatically flag matching posts for human review. WiseText harnesses the wisdom of crowds, as well as AI techniques, to select keywords for each claim and provide other information in the claim profile. For human reviewers, a WiseText browser plugin identifies misinformation claims that might match the post. The reviewer then decides which matches are correct, a much easier task than deciding if posts violate abstract policies. Reviewer efficiency...
6. 1:15:00 – 1:30:00

   What was this in…

   1. MBMike Benz1:15:00

      sell to the social media platforms to make sure there's no es- escape to, for, in terms of being, the ability to criticize government policy on COVID without getting censored. But just to drive home that point on, on COVID censorship, this is something that I think is, is really terrifying that the people should, should be aware of. There's, there's a company called Graphika, which, which figures very heavily in all of the censorship industry. Uh, if you, if you pull up Graphika's April 2020 report on, uh, on, on COVID and COVID conspiracy theories, it's also on my timeline if you look up the, the word Graphika, it's G-R-A-P-H-I-K-A. Graphika is a, is a, is a longtime military contractor that did social media monitoring surveillance and analytics work for the US military and intelligence in order to see what narratives opposition, you know, uh, various political movements or insurgent groups are saying on social media. They were formally a part of the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative. The Minerva Initiative is the psychological operations research center of the Pentagon. When the Pentagon is trying to do information shaping operations and they solicit propositions and ideas and thought leadership from outside organizations to help the military chief psychological operations outcomes that are favorable, uh, to the intended military policy. So, Graphika has gotten over $7 million in Pentagon grants. It was formally a part of the Pentagon's Psychological Operations Research Center, and Graphika was one of the very first entities to begin, uh, this, this censorship around the world of COVID-19. Ex- given the strange unresolved role of the Pentagon in potentially giving rise to COVID-19, or the, the, you know, the strangeness of the DARPA grants, uh, around there and the military networks around the bio-security state, Graphika began their work in, bef- before COVID-19 even got its name. They started, in their own source documents, they say they started December 16th. Uh, the, the, the pneumonia-like symptoms did not begin un- to, were, were December 12th, 2019, so just four days after. Now, they've said later that, "Actually, we started in January 2020, but we backdated our data, our AI, you know, ingestion of all the tweets and Facebook posts in January 2020." So, even if you accept that, that is still just one month after COVID broke out. And if you pull this, if you pull up their, their April 2020 report, you will see that they've, they've literally scanned... Yeah, this is the one. And, and I ha- I have a highlighted version of it, by the way, on my, um, uh, on, on my X account as well if, if, if... But, but, so if you, if you, if you scroll up, so, so if you, let's just, if you start on page one, I'll sort of walk you through this. So again, this is a Pentagon-funded psychological operations research arm of the Pentagon, and you'll see like the, you know, it's called the COVID-19 infodemic, um, uh, 'cause they published this in April 2020 after COVID got its name, but they started this before it did. And if, if you scroll, if you scroll down to I think page five here, you'll see, you'll see. So, this is, by the way, uh, uh, an AI-generated network map of all people expressing, uh, skepticism about the origins of COVID and different, different conspiracy theories. So, if you scroll down to page five, it says, "A key analytical h- of these maps." Okay. So, you'll see that they, uh, so similarly large mega clusters of US right-wing accounts were diminishing the, the mainstreaming of the coronavirus conversation. If you scroll down to the next one, you'll see they've, "Dedicated coronavirus mis- disinformation map seeded on disinformation-specific hashtags reveals that conservative groups have a larger total presence of COVID heterodox opinions." This is right at the outbreak, one month i- you know, into it, a Pentagon-funded psyops firm, uh, is, is doing political mapping, not in the US, in the UK, in, in Italy. Uh, so the, so they found that disproportionately, it's, it's conservatives who need to be censored more. If you just scroll down through this, I'll show you some highlights. Um-

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:19:22

      What was this in regard-

   3. MBMike Benz1:19:23

      So-

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:19:23

      This was d- disinformation in regard to the origin at this point?

   5. MBMike Benz1:19:27

      Yes, yes. Uh, and you can run a Control+F.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:19:28

      Which is wild that they were already countering when the origin was not really disclosed yet.

   7. MBMike Benz1:19:34

      Exactly. And you'll s-

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:19:34

      It was still being debated.

   9. MBMike Benz1:19:35

      Right. And you'll see, they even... So again, this is the Pentagon creating network maps. We are paying for this, effectively, to protect the politic- the online reputation of Bill Gates and George Soros. You'll see they have a whole section on c- if you just run a, a Control+F for Gates or Soros, you'll see this as well. But you, you'll see that...... they map these different conspiracy the- how much would Bill Gates or George Soros need to pay a cloak and dagger public relation shop to scour the entire internet and create targetable, censorable demographic communities that social media should censor in order to protect their reputation? This is us paying the Pentagon to pay a psyops firm to protect the reputation of Bill Gates and George Soros from conspiracy theories online. And they did the same thing-

   10. NANarrator1:20:28

       Wow.

   11. MBMike Benz1:20:28

       ... with COVID origins. They did the same thing with, with vaccines. The same group, Graphika, was a part of something called the Virality Project, which, you know, had, which mapped out 66 different claims of if you questioned COVID vaccine efficacy, if you co- questioned masks and their efficacy, if you, if you questioned policies around, around lockdowns. All of that was systematically mapped. All four of the entities involved in the Virality Project, by the way, were US government funded, uh, in terms of at the, at the organizational level. University in S- of Stanford and the University of Washington, who are two of those four, received a joint $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, which again, is this basically, uh, civilian side of DARPA. The, you know, Graphika has received $7 million in Pentagon funds, and then the, you know, the nastiest one of them all is this group, the, the Atlantic Council, which has, uh, which gets annual funding over, over a million dollars a year from the Pentagon, over a million dollars a year from the State Department. It also gets annual funding from the CIA cutout, National Endowment for Democracy. It gets annual funding from USAID, basically every web of US cloak and dagger intelligence and, and diplomatic funding, funds the Atlantic Council every year. The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its, on its board of directors. A lot of people don't know seven former number one heads of the CIA are still alive, let alone all locally clustered on the exact organization which is the premier heavyweight in internet censorship around the world. And s- the Atlantic Council... And I can show you some wild clips of that, by the way, including them training journalists on what to censor, uh, and it-

   12. NANarrator1:22:07

       Oh, I need to see that.

   13. MBMike Benz1:22:08

       Yeah. Okay. So if you pull up, um, if... You can find this also if you look for, on Rumble, NATO training journalists. Uh, you'll, you'll see that, uh-

   14. NANarrator1:22:19

       Is Rumble the only, uh, place you can put that up right now?

   15. MBMike Benz1:22:21

       Uh, no, I ha- I have it on my X account. I actually have a 45-minute video-

   16. NANarrator1:22:25

       X and Rumble.

   17. MBMike Benz1:22:25

       I have a 45-minute video that goes through it and all the supporting receipts that's got, I think, almost three million views right now. But there's a two-minute, there's like a two to four-minute video. If you look at Atlantic Council, uh, censorship journalists or... The video's k- And I can tell you the, the Source video is called, I Call Bullshit. This was in, this was in Ju- uh, June 2019, right on the heels of the Bob Mueller investigation. The Atlantic Council, again, with seven CIA directors on its board and annual funding from the State Department and Pentagon, does this, uh, this 360 meeting where they bring in journalists and fact checkers from all over the world to come to this... (laughs) You know, I m- I mean, it looks like something straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Uh, and Jamie, let me know if you have, you have trouble pulling it up because I can, um-

   18. NANarrator1:23:11

       (clears throat) You're sending me down too many little... Adding what you added-

   19. MBMike Benz1:23:14

       (laughs)

   20. NANarrator1:23:14

       ... pulled up what you were talking about on other podcasts, that's not what I'm looking for, so I have to-

   21. MBMike Benz1:23:17

       It's definitely... Uh, it, I think it's definitely searchable easily on, on Rumble. I actually wanted to load this up, but, um, it, the... And I can, (laughs) I can tell you the exact, uh... If you just look, it's called, I Call Bullshit, is what it was, by, uh, uh, Ben Nimmo, the Atlantic Council.

   22. NANarrator1:23:32

       Here, I'll just show you what I'm seeing because every time-

   23. MBMike Benz1:23:34

       Sure.

   24. NANarrator1:23:34

       ... I type in what you're saying, it just brings up, you talk about this stuff-

   25. MBMike Benz1:23:36

       Oh, okay. Uh, okay, how about, how about, how about-

   26. NANarrator1:23:38

       ... from other podcasts.

   27. MBMike Benz1:23:38

       ... Atlantic Council. Atlantic Council journalists. Or training, yeah, or journ- journalists. Oh, journ-

   28. NANarrator1:23:49

       Training two?

   29. MBMike Benz1:23:50

       Yeah. Oh.

   30. NANarrator1:23:51

       I know it's gonna... Oh, sh-
7. 1:30:00 – 1:31:00

   Does anyone have a…

   1. NANarrator1:30:00

      isn't real, they're just after me because as their witch isn't into e- evil, I'm the injured party here. So it could be a whole lot of, lot of them. Trump's got a nice range when it comes to disinformation.

   2. Does anyone have a number one pick that they would like to mention related to this one? This, they said dismiss, so-

   3. Yes, dismiss. Yeah.

   4. Wait. Dismiss?

   5. Dismiss.

   6. How many voices, how many of you think dismissed? Raise your card please. I think we're onto something here. Yeah. Yeah.

   7. Absolutely. So you're right that, that underneath that attempt there are, y- you know, he's twisting the story. He's, he, he's accusing somebody else of the same thing, right? But the main thing is what's, what, what he's saying is like, don't listen to them because it's a witch hunt. So that was our first one.

   8. All right. Number two.

   9. Getting topical here.

   10. MBMike Benz1:30:51

       Pro-Brexit.

   11. NANarrator1:30:51

       Put your cards up when you have an idea.

   12. MBMike Benz1:30:53

       This is a Brexit ad saying we should be spending their money on our own national health system instead of funding the EU.

Episode duration: 2:43:51