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Danny Jones Podcast
#340 - Mike Benz: DARPA & USAID are Weaponizing Music to Control Human Behavior
03:13:55
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- [00:00]
Mike Benz
Foreign.
- [00:07]
Danny
Mike Benz. Thanks for coming, man. I'm. 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 big shout out to Julian Doy for hooking this up.
- [00:20]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [00:21]
Danny
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.
- [00:28]
Mike Benz
No, it's absorption. And thanks for. Thanks for having me. The music diplomacy stuff is fantastic. 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 because he's trying to sell him some like, no drip ice cream. And Trump just says music.
- [00:49]
Danny
Yeah.
- [00:50]
Mike Benz
And, you know, music really sets the vibe for the background of so much of cultural affairs, social affairs. It's what kids do to go to concerts. It's kind of the aligning magnet of so many things. And the reason that I talk about music in diplomacy and music in intelligence work and music in the military field is because it's one of these unexpected areas where the penetration is just deceptively deep. And when 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. When it's all the way down to something like music, you see these recurring patterns on how structures of influence are set up.
- [01:43]
Danny
Yeah, it's crazy because it's ubiquitous and it's everywhere. And, 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, are 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.
- [02:11]
Mike Benz
Should we go through it for folks or.
- [02:12]
Danny
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think we should. How does. What is the history of this stuff? Did it all start in Cuba or.
- [02:18]
Mike Benz
So the relationship between the State Department and CIA and the music industry? I sort of started in the 1940s with jazz diplomacy. This was this period where 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 are 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. And so this was a lot of how the J. Edgar 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 stuff on their own media channels. And 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 as essentially music diplomats to Africa and making the point to African dance diplomats and African civil society organizations that actually the west does not discriminate. The Soviets are wrong. And so you had these musical ambassador types of being flown around by on taxpayer dime. And then with classical music, around the same time, the CIA starts 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 art space, in the culture space, in the music space. Gloria Steinem was a part of that with the feminist movement. 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 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 competes on par and is better than Russian classical music. And then you had the whole rock and roll movement where you had this export essentially behind the Iron Curtain. You had this anti authoritarian challenging the government rock music space. And a lot of this stuff was sponsored by the US government sponsoring rock concerts by the Berlin Wall to try to show that we're against 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 early 2000s, the CIA, USAID, the State Department really began to turn attention to the rap and hip hop space as it achieved this kind of cultural 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 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, they'd be too scandalized to get from the CIA. Meanwhile, the 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 more targeted Afro Cuban strategy because the Afro Cuban population actually is higher, I think, than it's like the 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. And they did this demographic survey again, this is a CIA cutout doing this. And they say, okay, well, the Afro Cuban population is disproportionately unemployed, prone to using drugs, 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 San Ysidro movement, who pens this anthem about taking to the streets to rebel against the. Against the government. At the same time, USAID sets up a fake Twitter in Cuba. It's called Zunza Neo. 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. Because in 2009, 2010, this is when the Arab Spring was going on. So you had these CIA social media revolutions. And so they wanted to bring a Cuban spring there. So they have these insider documents that end up leaking a couple 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 for Cubans. So USAID got these Two unsuspecting business executives to set up this Twitter knockoff. The plan was, according to the USA documents, to get them to attract them with 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 San Ysidro movement and their anthem they penned to try to 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 War. There was the station Jam Wave. The Miami station was the largest CIA hub in the world. And because Miami was so close to giant port city and it's the Caribbean, it's Central America, you get the South America tip. So anyway, Even today in 2024, the Biden administration overthrew the government of Bangladesh. The 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 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 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. 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. 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 Poor 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 candidate who will take the place of the leadership. So having the backdrop for organizing being music everyone likes, rather than abortion, when half of the people might not have religious differences, so they might not want to organize about that. Or tax policy, when half of the people you might want to recruit are business owners or the like. Or 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. 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 noir on some of this USAID stuff because, you know, Bono's out here talking about how U.S. aid 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 auditing this. Basically, a lot of people see me as a force behind this USAID shutdown. And 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 what it's doing in terms of impacting markets, what it's doing in terms of impacting governments. So 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 light of the fact that you don't see a lot of foreign leaders complaining about USAID being shut down. Like, when Trump announced the shutdown of usaid, the president of Mexico came out and said, thank God. The president of 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 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 saw the same thing in Afghanistan, you saw the same thing in Syria. You saw the same thing. The Golden Triangle, the Golden Crescent, 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 Arsch Center. Adrian Arsch 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 it bills itself as NATO's think tank. And the benefactor for that is doing the largest performing arts center in Miami. And a lot of this is because politics is downstream of culture. And so if you can influence the culture and influence the mythology, you effectively set the bounds for what's politically possible.
- [15:25]
Danny
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- [16:55]
Mike Benz
So it's all supposed to be foreign. The justification is the legal. It's supposed to be foreign. But the issue is they get around that by the fact that these are 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, take something like the Tide center, which is this big international ngo. It's closely associated with George Soros. So a lot of Republicans and conservatives take a lot of umbrage with the Tide center because it funds the Black Lives Matter formal legal entity. They're 501c3. It gives the 501 to the Soros prosecutor managers, this group called FJP, fair and just prosecutions. So the Tide center operates domestically with these Soros prosecutors and BLM and all of these different groups, antifa 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 worth of grants just in the ones that I found on USASpending.gov and of that that I found in the past couple years. That 27 million, like 22 million were for grants to, quote, secure concrete commitments from foreign governments on civil society matters. So 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 in an in kind way when it comes to all their little housed domestic product. So with something like music, you've got this global distribution, right? So this is one of the things they did with the San Ysidro movement in Cuba is this was a local island hip hop collective. But by teaming up with USAID and teaming up with the Assistant Secretary of State for the U.S. department of State, they got distribution in America, they got distribution globally. They get all these awards at awards ceremonies. You know, I talked about this just because it's so funny, but like, even someone like Dua Lipa, I was gonna.
- [19:41]
Danny
Say that I was gonna ask you about her.
- [19:42]
Mike Benz
You know, it's so funny. Cause 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. Now the Atlanta 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, to like a, you know, a pop music princess?
- [20:19]
Danny
Victoria Nuland. Hand her the medal.
- [20:22]
Mike Benz
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 Endowment for Democracy, who is the one that I mentioned was funding the San Ysidro 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 linchpin. We fought the whole NATO did its first offensive action in its entire history. It was formed in 1949, never fired a bullet, despite being the Western world's military alliance for 46 years, until 1995 when the first bombings of 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 places that is TR that is slipping out of NATO's grasp. There are a couple countries in Europe that are providing problems for the foreign policy establishment currently. Belarus is one of them. We tried to call a revolution there in 2020. It didn't work. Moldova was giving us problems. And then this selection just happened yesterday at the time of this recording. So they appear to have solved the Moldova problem. They almost had a 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 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 no. But they can't win an election again because everyone's in jail. This is like this State Department checklist strategy because it's very expensive to run a revolution. What you want is a country that's on autopilot. You rig the election once or you overthrow the government once, and then it achieves the state of what they call stability, democratic stability, which 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 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 using her platform for this. And so, you know, but so how.
- [23:41]
Danny
Do those conversations go with Dua Lipa? Like does she, is she aware of what she's doing?
- [23:46]
Mike Benz
I don't know. I don't know about. I mean, obviously agent call her up.
- [23:49]
Danny
And be like, yo, we may have to send this tweet, they copy and paste this.
- [23:55]
Mike Benz
Or like how 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. And then I see Dua Lipa as being probably somewhere in between those. Although this is speculation, I have no idea what her conversations are with their management or what's happening at the distribution level. There's a lot of these weird relationships between creative artists, the CIA type, you know, agencies and their role in music distribution.
- [24:39]
Danny
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. But like, yeah, me too.
- [24:56]
Mike Benz
I didn't get my check this month.
- [25:00]
Danny
And like, I always wonder like, you know, how many US aides are there in other countries that are trying to fund like media in the U.S. or like, does the media, does the U.S. intelligence actually fund us? Like podcasters? You would think, like, they would 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.
- [25:25]
Mike Benz
Well, NATO, for example, I think it was published last year that they had just. They have this, what do they call it, Societal Resilience Grant Fund, where I think it was like 26 TikTokers that they pay through this 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 U.S. spends. More than 50% of NATO funding comes from the U.S. so it's those TikTok influencers are being paid by U.S. taxpayer money, but it's doing it through NATO rather than through usaid.
- [26:12]
Danny
Okay.
- [26:13]
Mike Benz
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. Bono was a guy who was teamed up with Jeff Sachs. And I'm not throwing shade at 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 State Department CIA economic carving up of Russia. This is what people call the, the economic of Russia. This was when we had 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 Russian ministers, the economic ministers and all the different oligarch government feeder heads on how to transition their economy to capitalism by taking. It was effectively almost $2 trillion worth of publicly held Soviet Union. You know, because 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 other state held industries off to Wall street and London. And who makes the money from that? You're getting 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. 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. So anyway, Bobanna links up with Jeffrey Sachs in the, in the 90s and actually a little bit before that doing this, you know, international development work. Now Bono, of course is, you know, U2, he's the front man. He's this international like sex symbol at the time and you know, giant selling out stadiums. He did this, these, you know, big kind of USAID fundraiser conference concerts, Band Aid and Live Aid to raise money for AIDS. The BBC later reported that of the $100 million raised for hunger relief in Somalia at, 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. Oh, there's a, there's hunger in a hunger problem in Somalia and Eritrea and Ethiopia. But there's also a civil war where you've got the CIA taking sides in that civil war and these groups need weapons, logistics, supplies. And so when you've got US aid vans coming in that are said to be carrying medical supplies or they're doing hunger relief and, 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 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. Then the 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, all the therapeutics and treatments for the PEPFAR program for usaid, it's Chemonics. Chemonics is the group that the head of Chemonix said he started Chemonics because he always wanted his own private CIA. And so what you see is like while Bono's doing these Kumbaya, Love the World, heal the World concerts, the money is being diverted for CIA covert action to actually kill people, not save people. And so Bono was formally knighted 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, no more, no more war. It's like this guy with, 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 word. But it's, you know, but you see this 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. Like I'll give you an example. So Bono does this AIDS fundraiser type thing or he does this raise money for Ukraine concert. You're going to 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 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. There was this big. 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 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 is trying to do through their parliament what Trump did for the January 6th folks. All the folks who were nonviolent on January 6th got a commutation of sentence and sort of pardon. And so they're trying to do that in Brazil. So what Brazil did is they organized this giant music conference against the amnesty to try to stop the Senate from passing this amnesty of folks. And then the head of the, or one of the ministers on the Supreme Court there, who's completely on the side of Lula, says, look, there are like 300,000 people who came out to this anti amnesty event. The people's will is that there's no amnesty. And it's like, okay, well you had all of the top performing 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 oh my God. But this then becomes a, you know, self fulfilling prophecy.
- [33:26]
Danny
It's like the Kamala campaign where she had the Beyonce concerts. Everyone came to see Beyonce.
- [33:34]
Mike Benz
No, it's, it's, it's that every time.
- [33:36]
Danny
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- [35:20]
Mike Benz
And you see this like the Taylor Swift thing.
- [35:23]
Danny
Yeah.
- [35:24]
Mike Benz
Do you mind if we just keep hitting this for a little bit?
- [35:26]
Danny
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm down. Yeah.
- [35:27]
Mike Benz
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 live stream 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.
- [35:48]
Danny
Content before they NATO Psychological Operations YouTube page.
- [35:51]
Mike Benz
Yes, yes, yes, yes. So. 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 the Blob overthrows the democratically elected government in Ukraine. Ukraine.
- [36:20]
Danny
Fuck the eu.
- [36:20]
Mike Benz
Fuck the eu. Right? They install Yats in Ukraine.
- [36:23]
Danny
Yeah.
- [36:24]
Mike Benz
But then they don't expect the counter coup when the entire eastern. I'm going to feel up to, actually.
- [36:28]
Danny
Yeah.
- [36:30]
Mike Benz
So they don't expect the entire eastern half of Ukraine to just completely break away. Right. Say we're not going to respect the newly installed, you know, government that no one voted for.
- [36:41]
Danny
Right.
- [36:42]
Mike Benz
And they don't expect Crimea to. 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 Gerasimov Doctrine.
- [36:53]
Danny
Gerasimov Doctrine.
- [36:55]
Mike Benz
This is, this is a hilarious story actually. So there's this NATO scholar named Mark Galeotti who in after the counter coup in Ukraine in 2014, he finds this quote from this Russian general named Valerie Gerasimov. Gerasimov wrote, 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 and especially social media now that that's emerged 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 Gerasimov 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. Now three years later, Mark Galeotti 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 Gerasimov 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 Gerasimov Doctrine. Mark Galeotti. And what he writes is I actually, silly me, Drossimov 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 point 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 Gerasimov Doctrine. And I actually was with a friend who texted Mark Galeotti about this. And so I was the first to.
- [39:16]
Danny
Write about Russia's infamous high tech military strategy. One small problem, it doesn't exist.
- [39:20]
Mike Benz
Yes, right. But this, when he wrote that, that created this industry of what NATO would later call its tanks to tweets doctrine. It's right, you know, when it went from tanks to tweets because they were like, well, the Russians see this, so this justifies us doing it. Have you ever seen that, that south park episode where they want to kill deer, but there's the state law in Colorado that the deer or the, 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 before they shoot it. So anytime, you know, in order to shoot, you know, shoot something, you have to yell, it's coming right for us 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, they had to be like, well, it's coming right for us, the rush. The Russians are doing it right. And so, so that, so at that moment when the Gerasimov 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 communications. 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 funding, and he was running on neutrality with Russia. And this is the whole Russiagate stuff kicking off.
- [41:01]
Danny
Yeah.
- [41:01]
Mike Benz
And so this YouTube page 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.
- [41:23]
Danny
Whose idea was it to put this stuff on a YouTube channel?
- [41:25]
Mike Benz
Well, this is the thing. They're competing in the marketplace of ideas, right? 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. 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 there's some level of transparency that's put forward to, you know, give this patina that this is civil society coming together. So anyway, I'm doing this lecture two years ago on the origins of the censorship industry and I'm talking about this psychological operations center out of NATO and I'm going through their YouTube channel and this is, I think like June 2019ish or something. And I'm showing the presentation. It was three people who all had these very strange links to the intelligence world presenting to a bunch of military generals. I could even pull the video if you want to see it. It's very funny. You could also. Just.
- [42:51]
Danny
How do we find it?
- [42:52]
Mike Benz
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, this created a giant firestorm.
- [43:05]
Danny
Oh, this might have been the first threat. When was this? Oh, this was recenter. More recent.
- [43:10]
Mike Benz
Well, this was. Well, this is. Scroll down, 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 a few media tub.
- [43:22]
Danny
What year. What year was it again?
- [43:24]
Mike Benz
There you go. This one, this. This 257 one.
- [43:27]
Danny
Top right.
- [43:27]
Mike Benz
Yeah, top right. Now there's a lot of curse words in this. Okay. But here you go. Yep. So. So, yeah, so this is, I believe, from 2019. So just to give a little background here 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 in question. Actually, before we watch this, if you open up a new tab and just Google the term, will a populist wave Wash Away NATO? I think it was probably like 2017. Wash Away NATO. Yeah, I think this may have. See, scroll down, scroll down or scroll up. Yeah, there you go.
- [44:17]
Danny
NATO homepage.
- [44:18]
Mike Benz
Yeah, this is on NATO's website. Okay. Wow. By Mark Galeotti. The same. The same author of the. Of the, you know, the Gerasimov 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 on 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 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. 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 and so did Sputnik. It's like, well, these are public facing, say what you want, but that's like saying the BBC had higher engagement. That's not an intelligence operation. That's organic. Like, like it or not.
- [45:36]
Danny
Right.
- [45:37]
Mike Benz
But anyway. And then the bots and troll stuff came after that. That's just hours after the CIA put that. On January 6th, DHS, our Department of Homeland Security, declared that elections are critical infrastructure. And so that federalized elections, it said. Actually, DHS doesn't just get to protect our subsea cables and our low earth satellites and our 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 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. But that. So the same day Mark Galeotti 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? Huh? 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, Frexit if Marine Le Pen wins in France, Grexit if AfD wins in Germany, Spegxit if the Vox party wins in Spain. So the EU is gonna wash away, which means there's effectively the commercial bridge to NATO is completely severed. So NATO's gonna fall apart. So there's no enforcement arm for the IMF and the World Bank. It's like the end of the world is what they're worried about. If people simply win elections organically in a fair and square Democrat fight. So this is what forces them to have the military. You know, this Gerasimov doctrine, hybrid warfare, military control over media. Right. So this is what's in the background of all this. And so in 2019, if you go back to the tab now, this, I have to warn you, has got a lot of F bombs in it. But we can find the original video for this too. But so what you're going to see here before we watch this just a little bit more 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 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 there was a huge amount of media blowback on me for posting this clip and you know, shame on me for finding what's on a friggin NATO YouTube page. But so you know, this woman here, at the time, she was at the Johns Hopkins, you know, I think it was a school of International School of Advanced International Studies, which is like this. Maybe it was like some physics. She was at Johns Hopkins doing AI social media work. But at the same time she was also at Graphica. Graphica. This is what people left out. The Wall Street Journal, everyone called me for comment about this because the Pentagon had to issue two denials of what I say here, which is hilarious. But what they leave out is she was also working for Graphica at the time. Now Graphica has gotten over $7 million in Pentagon contracts for AI social media, for AI based social media narrative monitoring. Oh my gosh. 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 Boko Haram presence on social media. To identify. What they do is they create these keyword maps of the linguistic way of talking. The slogans, 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 like this. And so this is. Wow. Wait, wait. Zoom out a little. Let's. You want to see what these guys did with, by the way.
- [50:09]
Danny
Yes.
- [50:10]
Mike Benz
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 work directly with NATO for this. They work with the NATO. StratCom, COE. Graphica did the second. Second link there. Oh, yeah, yeah, right there. Boom. Yeah, yeah. All right. Yeah. And click Download now. All right. Yeah, no, yeah, if you click Download now, it'll actually. It should just open it up. No, it wants me to register you to register now.
- [50:51]
Danny
Oh, fill out the consent form.
- [50:54]
Mike Benz
No way.
- [50:55]
Danny
Full content. Wait, wait. I access full content. No, it should download.
- [50:58]
Mike Benz
Just, just click. Just try that. Yeah, yeah. Open a new tab.
- [51:01]
Danny
Yeah, There you go.
- [51:03]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [51:05]
Danny
Oh, no way. Check your download tab.
- [51:08]
Mike Benz
This always happens every time I talk about something because I, I've covered this a couple times.
- [51:12]
Danny
They said, Mike, Ben's out of form on that website now.
- [51:15]
Mike Benz
Dude, DHS deleted a bunch of pages of this. The Arizona State University Censorship center shut down its website. The.
- [51:24]
Danny
All right, just fill it out, Steve. We'll keep riffing.
- [51:26]
Mike Benz
Okay. All right, so. But, but well, why don't, why don't we start with the Taylor thing and then, and then we'll come back to this so you can see the kind of stuff that they're involved in.
- [51:35]
Danny
Perfect.
- [51:37]
Mike Benz
So.
- [51:38]
Danny
So I just, I just registered. Now they want thank you for your submission.
- [51:44]
Mike Benz
Okay.
- [51:44]
Danny
I got it in my email.
- [51:45]
Mike Benz
Okay.
- [51:45]
Danny
Okay, cool.
- [51:46]
Mike Benz
Okay, well if you. Okay, well if you got it, let's, let's just, let's knock this out because it's a good, good background for seeing what they're going to say about Taylor Swift here.
- [51:54]
Danny
Okay.
- [51:55]
Mike Benz
Okay, perfect. Sort of see their, their way of seeing the world. But so just a little bit of background on this. So Graphica, 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. Okay, so Graphica 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 a DHS capacity to neutralize as a cyber threat. Cyber misinformation. Threat actors are a threat to elections. And so Graphica 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 dropboxes or electronic voting machines, it's because Graphica 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.
- [53:01]
Danny
Okay.
- [53:02]
Mike Benz
And so if you start at the top here, you'll see what they did. Now here's the crazy thing here, actually. If you start on page one and then I'll just guide you with control Fs on this. So, all right, so this was published in April 2020, but they started on this right away. Now understand again, Graphica either their contractor for DOD and CIA doing this first for terrorist groups, then for domestic political elections, and then then for the pandemic. According to their own website on graphica.com they said that they started ingesting data to create this report on December 16, 2019. The pneumonia like symptoms in Wuhan were first reported on December 12, 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, a DoD CIA contractor to censor opponents of the DoD and CIA, according to their own website, started this censorship project to censor the origins of teen 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 16, 2020 and we backdated the data to December 16, 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 virus.
- [54:41]
Danny
Right.
- [54:42]
Mike Benz
So within a month of the breakout you have this, you know, contractor for CIA narrative monitoring, monitoring domestic. 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. Whoa. So and this is crazy if you.
- [55:13]
Danny
See it's pro Kremlin voices, so anti CCCP activists.
- [55:17]
Mike Benz
So like run a control F for the word conservative, for example. Just control F. Okay, yeah, yeah. So, okay. And like, and you scroll up a little bit because, 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 U.S. government funds. They've gotten again at that time over $7 million in Pentagon grants for this work. And they're targeting U.S. domestic conservative groups. Grafica's decade virus disinformation map seeded on disinformation specific hashtags reveals that while conservative groups have a larger total presence than liberal groups, 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 nothing. This is about disinformation.
- [56:30]
Danny
Wow.
- [56:31]
Mike Benz
So like, 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 right wing. Right. Right dash wing. Yeah. 54 times. The French right wing. The attack, a global heat map partnered with NATO.
- [56:50]
Danny
Scroll through it, see what else you can find.
- [56:52]
Mike Benz
No, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, Just, just keep keeping the down button.
- [56:57]
Danny
US Right wing accounts, French right wing have been anti ccp. And US Right wing clusters include videos of Guo Wangui.
- [57:09]
Mike Benz
Right. It's like, but think about this.
- [57:10]
Danny
It's like Corona is a bioweapon.
- [57:12]
Mike Benz
They're calling them anti CCP groups. I mean, like, like it's not Pentagon supposed to be.
- [57:18]
Danny
Oh, and it has, it has this crazy map for every month, the heat map they use.
- [57:24]
Mike Benz
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 banning him, and then they apologized. Oh, the, the Biden administration made us censor all these videos and you know.
- [57:37]
Danny
I want to talk about that. Yeah, we'll go into that.
- [57:39]
Mike Benz
Susan Wojcicki claimed that she. They took down a million videos that were. That went against orthodoxy. A million videos on YouTube alone. This is where they sourced this stuff from. Yeah, she died. Yeah, Right. But you see this? It's. And all of these nodes are us. It's you and me, right? 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. So if you just hit enter a bunch of times and you'll see like what they do with just how deep this is. But for example, put in, put in Bill Gates, put in Gates.
- [58:21]
Danny
Because didn't Bill Gates have some crazy conference in New York, right, In November.
- [58:25]
Mike Benz
Or Bill Gates, the Gates foundation sponsored event 201.
- [58:29]
Danny
Event 201. That's what it was.
- [58:31]
Mike Benz
Event 201, which had Avril Haynes, the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who then became the Director of National Intelligence, the head of the entire ODNI throughout 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 of a bat born Corona from China coming from a wet market and then the fourth segment was how to censor the Internet to stop it. They had a tabletop simulation for how to call this questions about the origins disinformation.
- [59:07]
Danny
And this was before broke out.
- [59:09]
Mike Benz
This is October 2019. This is right beforehand. And Gates, who's invested in all these companies. 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 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.
- [59:49]
Danny
Susan Sane, man, you see 16 so fucking scary.
- [59:56]
Mike Benz
Soros. Yeah. Yep. And so 23 times mapping everyone who challenges George Soros. Now again, all this stuff. Soros is invested in all these pharma companies. By the way, the Source Management Fund is neck deep. They are asked to elbow deep in like Abbott labs, right? You AstraZeneca. They made a huge bet on AstraZeneca ahead of the, 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 U.S. government, you know, telling everyone, get every. Whatever 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&J. 23 times, you know, and, and so Soros, when you see Soros co investing in these CIA operations like he did when in the 1980s when he was partnered with USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. And they're destabilizing all these central and European governments. And then the Soros New York Management Fund, the hedge fund is betting on the 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 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, you'll always see Ned and Soros co funding things. But yeah, just so you don't have to take my word for it, type in, type in Graphica and NATO, Stratcom, CoE. In fact, you can probably go to YouTube and do this. I've seen their YouTube videos together. Okay. Like, new tab.
- [61:34]
Danny
Graphica. NATO Stratcom.
- [61:36]
Mike Benz
Yeah, NATO Stratcom. CIA.
- [61:44]
Danny
You type in CoE.
- [61:45]
Mike Benz
Try CoE after. 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, scroll. You'll see it right there. NATO StratCom. Coe is partnered with social media analysis firm Graphica 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.
- [62:06]
Danny
What is the state of this now? Is this still happening? Or is that they pulled this back or what? What's going on?
- [62:12]
Mike Benz
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 because we.
- [62:25]
Danny
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 Prize picks. You and I make decisions every day. But with prize picks 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 price picks, 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? You scroll through, you make your lineup in less than a minute, and suddenly, Sunday is twice as fun. And one of my favorite parts is if one of your guys goes down early and doesn't come back, you're not automatically sunk. They've got an injury reboot. Plus, all deposits and withdrawals are smooth. Venmo, Apple, Pay, MasterCard, whatever works for you. No waiting to play or wondering where your money went. So if you're like me and you live for those, what if I'm Right. Moments during a football game, then prize picks is the way to go. Download the app and use my code Danny to get fifty dollars in lineups after you play your first five dollar lineup. That's code D A, N, N, Y. To get fifty dollars in lineups after you play your first five dollar lineup. Prize picks. It's good to be right? So like is this.
- [63:50]
Mike Benz
We've made huge headway at the US Federal government level. So for example, Graphica was incubated in the friggin Minerva center of the Pentagon. The Psychological Operations Research center of the Pentagon. Look this. Go to my. I don't know if they still have this up on their website, but if you just like open a new tab there and like go to my X handle. Yeah, keep that one. Yeah, and just type in Graphica, 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 Minerva. M I, N, R, V A. Yeah.
- [64:36]
Danny
M I, N, R, V, A.
- [64:38]
Mike Benz
No, E. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. You're. No, with an E. Oh, with an.
- [64:42]
Danny
E. With or without Graphica.
- [64:44]
Mike Benz
Yeah, without Graphica.
- [64:45]
Danny
Okay.
- [64:46]
Mike Benz
Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, so this is. So just pull that first image. Okay, so here is, you know, the grants that Graphica 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 foundation just published a big report about. The Knight foundation has given over $107 million in disinformation grants to all these NGOs and private companies to flag disinformation. Over $100 million. We just published this report this week. Oh, wow. But the Knight foundation, they funded the Stanford Internet Observatory. They funded like they're Georgetown now. They fund all the. 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. But you'll see at the bottom left there it says Minerva Initiative. Because Graphica 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, as a Russian. But so if you, if you go to the next one, like, you'll see there's a Minerva Research initiative, 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 has had some controversy associated. If you go to the next image. But let me show you a couple other things from it actually. So if you go back to the. Just click the X button and scroll down. Yeah, scroll down. Scroll down a little bit. Scroll down a little more. Yeah. Okay, so like right here. Okay. So this is kind of stuff that Minerva initiative was funding. Okay. Because you asked what. What's the state of this? Yeah, The Minerva Initiative ceases to be. It is an ex Minerva initiative. Everyone should thank Pete Hegseth for that. This.
- [67:00]
Danny
Wow.
- [67:00]
Mike Benz
This. We've gotten so many wins at the, at the US Federal level. And among them is Graphica'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 reestablish itself as the accepted authority and create Citizen Buy in. So this is the Pentagon farming out psychology research for how to make citizens buy in to the government. 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. 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 or from long term challenges to crisis response. How these actors compete or cooperate as governors, how these connections impact actors legitimacy and authority in how civilians interact with them and attribute responsibility negatively or positively for climate management. So this is basically the Pentagon, which is effectively our Department of Energy as well. This is whenever we do Pentagon stuff, the oil and gas folks, this is.
- [68:37]
Danny
Billions of dollars going into creating the Truman show for the citizens of the.
- [68:41]
Mike Benz
Exactly what it is. This is literally the Pentagon's psychological operations center research center giving grants to Texas A and 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 and 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 and M. But what they're doing is they're creating heat maps of anyone who challenges the US government installed 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 you know, coming, coming back if you like, if you scroll down maybe just in that or in the thread there on the right, you'll see this. Minerva.defence.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 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 you understand that in the 1960s when JFK 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 big tank to tank type stuff or plane to plane type stuff. And so, you know, because we're running insurgencies to topple governments, or we're doing counterinsurgencies to stop an upstart movement from deposing one of our installed dictators like Afghanistan. And so you'll see this in our counterinsurgency guide. Legitimacy is the main objective. You know, counterinsurgency forces may achieve this objective through military or non military 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.
- [70:57]
Danny
Right.
- [70:57]
Mike Benz
The problem is when we install a puppet government and they loot everything like Yeltsin and 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 is 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? And that's like the big play. That's. And they have a whole strategy on how to do that. But Graphica plays into this through neutralizing. They call it. What is it? Shape, clear, hold, build. Transition is the five step Counterinsurgency 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 Graphica is in the first two phases of that. So you see this is the exact place, this is the, the literal center, center of Excellence that we just talked about at the time. This is in 2019. And what this woman from Graphica from the exact place partnered with the, 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 Graphica style network node maps, 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 to, 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'll. Maybe we'll just start with the punchline so it's not missed there. If you zoom into the goal example, you see that right there, top right? Yeah, top right.
- [73:08]
Danny
You punch in on that Steve, you'll.
- [73:10]
Mike Benz
See 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 hear her confirm. So the US government is funding this conference. The US government is leading. NATO is trying to get solicitations from these outside experts on how NATO can win the information war and how it 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. 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 or may accidentally share misleading. So anyway, listen to her go through, go through this.
- [74:03]
Danny
Okay, let's run it, Steve.
- [74:07]
Mike Benz
And the most was common is working with famous people or main influencers to share information a 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 Swift, who I probably rage posted about 1400 times about as a geopolitical instrument of statecraft because her goddamn IP discography was purchased by the Carlisle Group. The Carlisle Group, the private equity arm of the Iraq war with Vic Cheney on its board and, and the entire Halliburton Texas Tex. West Texas oil mafia, they were, they were the literal funders and profiteers of the entire West Texas military mafia. And, and it was jointly bought by the Carlyle Group in the Soros Group. Who's the. Who's the. Who's the. Who's the London and New York financier of west. So the military industrial complex plus its energy stakeholders who rely on the battering ram of the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA. But Taylor Swift's discography, she had to re record her own last year in order to win her right. In order to.
- [75:43]
Danny
Oh she tried to get it back right.
- [75:45]
Mike Benz
She had to re record her own songs so that ones that she had rights. George Soros and the Carlisle Group magazine's person of the year this year. And, and I think it was the Wall Street Journal that size that Taylor Swift would be Biden's quote, secret weapon to win the 2024 election. And by the way, her eras tour which is the. Has the economy of, of I think one, you know, top 20 nation states by GDP in the entire globe. Her tour, Taylor Swift is, is a cultural. There pause right there. 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.
- [76:30]
Danny
Okay.
- [76:31]
Mike Benz
And so the eu, the head of the EU came out and solicited Taylor Swift when she was like wrapping up her ERAS tour to do another leg in Europe ahead of the European election so that she could do a get out the vote drive for pro EU candidates. It's the same thing that they're doing with NATO narratives in a general sense. They're trying to rig elections. They're doing the Beyonce strategy that you outlined. But this is another one of these things and actually if you go to my page and you 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.
- [77:15]
Danny
Yeah. So she sold, she sold her IP to George Soros and the Carlisle Group and then they wouldn't. She, she tried to buy it back and they refused.
- [77:26]
Mike Benz
Well because I think it was. 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. She's. I think she sued her. Like, was it Scooter Braun?
- [77:40]
Danny
Scooter?
- [77:40]
Mike Benz
Yeah, 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. Wait, but. Oh, wait, scroll down a little bit. Scroll down. Or is that the only one? Okay, do. How about Copeland, type in C, O, P, E, L, A, N, D. So. Because 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. So here's Miles, Miles Copeland, the manager of Sting and the police producer for rem 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 REM and all these groups. His father, or I think it was his father, maybe grandfather. Miles, the original. I think he's. This is Mile, the original Miles Copeland was one of the founding members of the OSS 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. Yeah. Inside the CIA. Wow. Now, in this book, he writes that as one of the guys who operationally carried out the CIA's first election rigging event. This was the 1948. April 1948, Italy election. This is what. 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 want 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, who was our boots on the ground stuffing ballot boxes and breaking up opposition meetings. And so, you know, Copeland, 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. 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. 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 with the.
- [80:24]
Danny
Crowd waving tiny American flags.
- [80:26]
Mike Benz
So this again is like giant outdoor music concerts. Artists, you know and love. Taylor Swift, Bono, Bon Jovi. And, you know, we. We had just. We're in the middle of the war on terror, you know, 911 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 control apparatus. But you wonder, like, why is it that you've got the military all up in the Taylor Swift thing, through the Carlisle Group and the Soros Group, and through Grafika and the NATO center of Excellence. Why is it that you've got Bono doing the war profiteering for the Ukraine war, but breaking up paramilitary threats against the UK coming from the Irish? Why is it that the Pentagon is sponsoring south by Southwest? Why is it that you've got these Pentagon USAID contracts to Bangladeshi hip hop artists and Cuban rap groups and the military effectively sponsoring rock concerts at the Berlin Wall. And it's the same thing over and over again. But if you just play the clip, you'll see how it plays out. Pick up the phone thinking this is a joke. And it's the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
- [81:45]
Danny
Tori Clark, and she says, we hear.
- [81:49]
Mike Benz
That you know about our music and we think there might be a way to win hearts and minds in the Middle east. And would you help us come up with some programs that we might do and put forward that helps us, you.
- [82:01]
Danny
Know, make the Rockies not hate us?
- [82:02]
Mike Benz
You know, I said, well, sure, you know, I'm a loyal American.
- [82:07]
Danny
I'm happy to help. The plan is to find 12 girls.
- [82:11]
Mike Benz
Who will be the basis of a.
- [82:15]
Danny
Of a show featuring Arab dance and Arab music.
- [82:22]
Mike Benz
Okay. All right. Well, but it's everywhere. We do this everywhere. It's a checklist item.
- [82:27]
Danny
It's insane. Okay, that was crazy. That was a crazy deep dive into all this stuff. Fascinating shit. 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 back door way of. And I think. I don't. I think you explained that you were. You were working in, like, the cyber program of where again?
- [82:56]
Mike Benz
State Department.
- [82:57]
Danny
Of the State Department. Right. And then you said, I think you mentioned that you Got like a call or something from Facebook.
- [83:01]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [83:02]
Danny
And they were getting pressure from other countries. It was Google.
- [83:07]
Mike Benz
So.
- [83:09]
Danny
In some way, all these other countries, like in Europe and in South America, like Brazil, are censoring everything. And somehow using. We're using these other countries to pressure us to censor the same way they're doing it, Right?
- [83:26]
Mike Benz
Yeah, yeah. So our government is really. Yeah, 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 happened in Europe is you had this. This transatlantic agenda, this set of stakeholders who all profit off of what people call globalist action. For example, 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 profit from the lithium and the cobalt rather than from the fossil fuels. And if you can argue, for example, well, this will hurt our military enemies like Russia, because they are a, 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'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 what happens in the other. When Donald Trump wins the election here in the US that impacts what happens in Europe when Poland just had an election. What happens 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 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 the restrictions 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 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 political force mobilized to actually hold them accountable to the First Amendment. And as that has dropped off, 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. We've cut the National Science foundation funds for this. We've cut the DHS role in this. They are now more 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 was about this set of regulations in Europe called the EU Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act. Now, the. 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. 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 an illegal gray area where they thought they might be able to get away with it. The Atlantic Council, which is, as I mentioned, was funded not just by the Pentagon, as seven CIA directors on its board, and one of the biggest contributors is Adrian Arch, who runs all the arts and culture stuff in Miami. They wrote this memo in 2018, right before the first domestic censorship agency in the US federal government was set up. It was called CISA. It's got a really boring name, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. But all that means is elections. At the time, anything that's deemed critical infrastructure in the cyberspace is censorable by DHS's CISA unit. So as I mentioned, on January 6, 2017, they said elections are critical infrastructure. So CISA could tell. It could essentially hire this outside group to tell companies to ban anyone questioning Dominion or then later, they declared public health to be critical infrastructure. So anyone who questioned Covid, they CISA did that too. But when the Atlantic Council was first coming up with this idea for CISA's censorship operation, they published a series of memos they called Forward Defense. It's not offense, it's Forward Defense.
- [88:31]
Danny
Forward Defense and oxymoron.
- [88:35]
Mike Benz
And what they said is, 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 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 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 this is now 2018. They said, the problem is we can't censor 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 X 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. You know, the CIA can go to Le Monde in France and tell them not to publish something. They can go to the Frankfurt Alger Miner 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 yeah, but we can't do that domestically with the CIA because now technically you might be able to under some counterintelligence thing. This is how they saw it.
- [90:10]
Danny
Isn't that what the Twitter files were?
- [90:12]
Mike Benz
Yeah, okay, yeah. 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 Atlantic Council was formally partnered with DHS and it was their idea again, seven CIA directors on their board and they got three former DHS secretaries, Michael Chertoff and all these folks. They got Jett Johnson to co sign this. He was the one who signed the executive order on January 6, 2017 to set this all up. And so they said, okay, well how about the FBI? The FBI's got domestic jurisdiction and it's an intelligence agency. 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 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 law breaking 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. 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 things.
- [91:42]
Danny
Can't the CIA do it under counterintelligence?
- [91:45]
Mike Benz
Yeah, they could 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 have political blowback, they could probably argue, because you can target a US Citizen who's accused of being a Russian agent under the sea. This is how they were able to plant spies, CIA spies on Trump's campaign. It was like 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 how they always get away with it. This is how the CIA was sicced on Martin Luther King, for example. Like Martin Luther King, they said, well, his biggest financial backer is Stanley Levison. Stanley Levison is affiliated with the American Communist Party. The American Communist Party is affiliated with the Soviet Union. So the CIA can spy on Martin Luther King. Anyway, so what happened here is, I think we're sort of on the general topic of this Google 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 yes, and Dan Bishop, who was incredible from the DHS subcommittee, led all these exposures.
- [93:22]
Danny
And then didn't Jim Jordan subpoena YouTube files as well?
- [93:25]
Mike Benz
Yep, YouTube files, Facebook files, all that stuff.
- [93:28]
Danny
I never saw. I never saw much about the YouTube files.
- [93:31]
Mike Benz
They were good. I mean, it was. It was basically.
- [93:34]
Danny
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, imagine what YouTube could be. The place that was incubated by the CIA.
- [93:43]
Mike Benz
Yeah, they published like about 100 pages in it, like a summary report. But unlike the Twitter files, they didn't really give. 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. 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 congressional staffers and then the Executive Report. So they may have had restrictions on that, but they were very effective. 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 Europe, no country in Europe has a First Amendment. But the things that are illegal are like hate speech and the like. Disinformation is not a legal crime. But what the EU does is this kind of supra European body is, it says, even if it's not illegal in any country, this 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 vetted researchers to get inside access to all the internal platform data 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 law, which is in effect as we speak. 6% of global annual revenue in fines 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. 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, the performance fee kicks in. And this is 6% not of, not of profit total, like 6% of all revenue, right? Which means, you know, like a lot of companies don't even have a 6% profit margin, 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 is are the worst people on earth that you can imagine to do this.
- [97:04]
Danny
I can imagine.
- [97:05]
Mike Benz
Like, give me an example. Like, News Guard is partnered with the EU Digital Commission on this.
- [97:10]
Danny
Right. John Karaoke was showing me this stuff.
- [97:12]
Mike Benz
And who's on the board of News Guard?
- [97:14]
Danny
Oh, my God, it's diabolical.
- [97:15]
Mike Benz
Rick Stengel, the former head of the Global Engagement center, who is. We talked about was the OG US Censorship Agency. Anders Fogh 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 Gerasimov 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 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.
- [97:51]
Danny
Oh, advisors.
- [97:53]
Mike Benz
Yeah, yeah. This is. This is advising on what disinformation is.
- [97:57]
Danny
Go to the website. I'm sure it's listed on the website.
- [97:58]
Mike Benz
Yeah, well, let's. Maybe, maybe not. It definitely was. I mean, if you just go to my X account, you'll see all the screenshots. But our team. Yeah, go to our team.
- [98:15]
Danny
Editorial.
- [98:16]
Mike Benz
Go down to advisors.
- [98:17]
Danny
Keep going.
- [98:17]
Mike Benz
Unless they scrub this, which would be hilarious. Keep going.
- [98:21]
Danny
No, just keep scrolling down.
- [98:28]
Mike Benz
Business technology. That's hilarious. If they delete. They always delete stuff. If you just. If you just go to my. If you just go to my X. My X account, you'll see I. I have. I have it all archived there. I have the archive is and stuff. But if you just type in like News Guard and maybe NATO or just News Guard will get you there.
- [98:47]
Danny
Yeah.
- [98:50]
Mike Benz
Down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Okay, okay. So. So just a little bit more on this. They're partnered with Randy Weingarten's American Federation of Teachers. If you like, pop that open. Now, this is another blob entity. Randy Weingarten was on the executive board of the National Endowment 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 so it's another. Like this very teachers union partnered with the. So again, this is like their News Guard is the narrative guard. They just ban anything that's pro populist.
- [99:28]
Danny
Right.
- [99:28]
Mike Benz
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 label. So like your YouTube video will be flagged in schools so that like kids can't cite anything they learn from you. But click the X and we'll just scroll down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Okay. And you'll see there that. But yeah, right where the circle.
- [99:50]
Danny
The circle guys were.
- [99:51]
Mike Benz
That's fine. Yeah, I was just going to show like. And this is the head of News Guard doing disinformation and democracy. You'll see Renee dress, she was one of the people who was the three people presenting in that NATO Stratcom video, by the way.
- [100:04]
Danny
No way.
- [100:04]
Mike Benz
Yes, as I mentioned, this is the Stanford Internet Observatory people. But okay, so X out of that. And you'll see, by the way, you'll see the George Bush Institute is one of the co sponsors and Freedom House, which is One of the OG CIA NGOs.
- [100:17]
Danny
Four Star General.
- [100:18]
Mike Benz
Yes, yes, right, yes. So on the board of News Guard determining what disinformation is Michael Hayden. Michael Hayden, head of the CIA, Head of the nsa. Four star general. So this is, you know, Michael Beheaden I think was averaging like one or two death threats per week against Donald Trump. He was like, you know, he should hang and like, you know, he should be tried for treason. And this is who's determining, you know, what disinformation is for the eu. Go ahead, open up a new tab. For example. And that's funny. If they scrub that from the website and type in News Guard EU disinformation. They're selling compliance services for this. European Commission announces NewsGuard as new partner. Here you go. 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, Jesus, they're going to apply all these. Yeah. The World Health organization to identify COVID 19, you know, infodemics to stop the spread and also the stop of monetizing disinformation. Because News Guard works with the supply side ad exchanges to kill all the ad revenue. So anyway, so you know, News Guard, American company. Oh, here's another great thing. Type in. Go to Google and type in News Guard. My quest. Just type in my quest and then type in middleware after that. Space middleware. One word. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So what they do is they sell censorship blacklists. Okay, scroll down. Yeah, Here you go. Boom. First one. What I learned on my quest. So this is the News Guard CEO. And you'll see what it says. Can you just zoom into that? What's that subtitle say?
- [102:18]
Danny
Middleware could be the solution to our tech woes, but Congress is going to have to force the Internet companies to use it.
- [102:27]
Mike Benz
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? They came up with this concept, though. It's not. It's not censorship software that News Guard 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. You'll get a choice between six or seven different Coke and Pepsi disinformation filters that have to be forcibly applied. 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. What he's saying is, listen, the social media companies don't want to buy our coerced censorship blacklists. 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 News Guard 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. Every German 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.
- [104:43]
Danny
Yeah. How does this come back on us?
- [104:45]
Mike Benz
Because US companies get fined into oblivion. The only way to comply is by setting up this compliance node and then having that compliance node do everything the EU body says. And I played this clip a million times, but if you go to my X account and you put the word restaff in, you'll see in 2023, these exact same censorship operatives from the National Endowment for Democracy and the Atlantic Council who are in this meeting just put a hyphen in between re and staff. 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 and 20 seconds, but it'll answer your question directly about what's going on here. So speaking here is Rebecca Tremblay, who is 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 now at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which was run for seven years by Bill Burns, the CIA director. All these are funded by the US government. And then. And Katie Harbath is also in this. She's National Endowment for Democracy and Atlantic Council. So the whole thing is this CIA NGO censorship soup. 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 apologized and was getting rid of the fact checking team. He had already begun to do this. This is how I sort of advance notice about what Zuckerberg was doing because I was just following with the sensory. People were saying, they're saying there's this chain effect. We're screwed in the US here unless Europe saves us. If it weren't for Europe right now, I think that I would feel pretty defeated and despondent in this moment. It is certainly become much, much more difficult for outside researchers to do the sorts of. 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 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. If it weren't for the European Union and the Digital Services Act, I don't know that we'd have money, much hope rectifying that situation at all. But given the sort of requirements that for performing risk assessments or 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 sort of restaffing of some of these positions, increased focus again, as the DSA begins to come into force and the platforms feel the real pressure of actual enforcement action. 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.
- [108:05]
Danny
So they're like doing a test run over there to like, sort of like.
- [108:08]
Mike Benz
Carbon copy it back beyond a test run. Test run. It's in effect 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. This major EU US Trade deal has been stalled over this exact thing, really. J.D. vance and Donald Trump and the State Department, National Security Council people are apprised of this threat now and they're taking it very, very seriously.
- [108:45]
Danny
So I don't mean to cut you off, but I want to talk about, and you can finish your thought there, but I want to ask you about this thing with YouTube paying Donald Trump and this new thing that's happening with YouTube and Trump.
- [108:57]
Mike Benz
Yeah, well, they, you know, they paid him, I think, $24.5 million YouTube did for, you know, as compensation for banning him in 2021. And then they have pledged to get rid of third party fact checking and move towards an X style community notes. And they have pledged to start a pro, a pilot program to allow banned accounts who question COVID19 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 did sort of like what Zuckerberg said, but I think Zuckerberg didn't want to do it, whereas Google did it willingly, joyfully. Zuckerberg.
- [109:48]
Danny
Interesting.
- [109:49]
Mike Benz
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 his. 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. Fuck you, the advertisers.
- [110:35]
Danny
Right.
- [110:36]
Mike Benz
Whereas Zuck, I think it's, you know, Facebook is his baby. Meta is his baby. And he was. I mean, because 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 Liberals folks, who then became head of global affairs for Meta. And Zuckerberg says, do we really have to 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, so we should try to think creatively on how to be receptive to their demands. And a lot of this was they needed their help against Europe, against all these fines. Not from the Digital Services act, from something called 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. It was 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 got to 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. And presumably they didn't tell the public because that would have undermined the giving of the favor to the Biden administration.
- [112:07]
Danny
Right, 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 flack for.
- [112:15]
Mike Benz
Yeah, right now the White House was telling them to take down, you know, the. The Leo DiCaprio.
- [112:19]
Danny
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.
- [112:38]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [112:39]
Danny
At what point do they actually make this happen and, like, what happens when the next president comes along?
- [112:47]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [112:48]
Danny
So it seems like there's just this constant back and forth.
- [112:51]
Mike Benz
So the. The bigger you are, the deeper your pockets, the, you know, the more you're. You're a threat to the national sovereignty of foreign countries. 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 every agency, at the FBI, at the CIA, at the dod and at State, where I was like, when I came to State, my bureau was championing the EU Digital Markets act and Digital Services Act. That was like, they wanted this censorship capacity for Europe to stop pro Trump disinformation. But what Google called me about was about negotiating with. Because they're one of our stakeholders, they're a national champion. We have this kind of policy at State that we define the national interest as what's best for American citizens and American interests. And we define American interests 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. 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 these international laws. And so one of them at the time was the EU Digital Markets act, which is like the monopoly side. So it's a censorship side for, like, control over speech policies. That's the Digital Censorship Act. And then there's the Digital Markets act, which was basically fines on Google as Europe was pursuing what they called their Strategic Digital Digital Autonomy Initiative, which was like, it's so ironic. Like, they started this when Trump won in 2016, because 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. Like, three weeks later, all those companies were censoring Trump in cahoots with Europe, 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 the number one existential threat for Alphabet over the next five years. And meanwhile they had just banned my boss, Donald Trump. And I'm 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 a day or two before the call, they were like, yeah, so Google is on your calendar for. I'm like, like I didn't approve this. Who approved? And I think it was just kind of the Google jumps the line. It was like the unspoken, 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 like how you make your money is you help Google and Facebook and Microsoft while you're running the International Communications and Information Technology Bureau, the big tech bureau at State.
- [116:34]
Danny
Yeah.
- [116:35]
Mike Benz
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.
- [116:41]
Danny
Shown that Same thing with the pharmaceutical industry.
- [116:42]
Mike Benz
Yeah, no, it's the same thing. And so I guess, you know, they could jump the line. 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.
- [116:55]
Danny
Yeah.
- [116:55]
Mike Benz
Because they're asking for the Trump government's help while they had banned Trump from YouTube. It was completely insane. Google.com is the number one most trafficked website on planet Earth. Number two is YouTube.com and they're the same company. They already rigged Google search. They launched something called Project owl in early 2017.
- [117:19]
Danny
I had Robert Epstein on here and explained a lot of this stuff.
- [117:22]
Mike Benz
Yeah, the authoritative.
- [117:23]
Danny
Yeah.
- [117:23]
Mike Benz
News re ranking stuff. So they had already where you like.
- [117:26]
Danny
During that, during the, the, the presidential run between Hillary and Trump, you could try to Google something positive about Trump. You'd find only negative things. Try to find something negative about Hillary. You couldn't find anything.
- [117:38]
Mike Benz
Yeah. And then they formalized that with this, you know, this thing called Project Al and you can pull it up if you want in the background. But they launched this authoritative news re ranking program in 2017. In fact, one of the USAID funded. Yeah. Here you go. Wow, look at that logo. Yeah.
- [117:57]
Danny
Amazing.
- [117:58]
Mike Benz
Yeah, yeah. Watches over you. It's not Big Brother, it's Big Google Owl.
- [118:03]
Danny
That's actually pretty cool. That's a pretty cool looking owl.
- [118:05]
Mike Benz
Yeah, yeah, I love the. I love that one.
- [118:09]
Danny
The Illuminati money sign.
- [118:11]
Mike Benz
It's like subtle but.
- [118:13]
Danny
But an internal initiative to improve search quality by combating the spread of misinfo and hate speech.
- [118:20]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [118:21]
Danny
So another thing I want to ask you about after this is this hate speech thing in California.
- [118:24]
Mike Benz
Oh yeah, yeah. Well, this is the same. It's the same crew. They literally have a whole state level strategy. But actually if you go to. If you go to YouTube and you type in D4 1 word D4 disinformation. On YouTube. Yeah. On YouTube you'll find this glob sec video, global security from May 2017. And you'll watch as Michael Chertoff and the National Endowment 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 the legitimacy of NATO and the like. D4 disinformation. Type in globsec. Globsec. 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.
- [119:22]
Danny
They pulled it.
- [119:23]
Mike Benz
Oh my God. This is my favorite video in the world.
- [119:28]
Danny
How many views did it have?
- [119:29]
Mike Benz
Okay, wait, yeah, go to the globe sec YouTube video.
- [119:31]
Danny
That one channel.
- [119:34]
Mike Benz
Go to search. Type in D4. Thank God I downloaded. Yeah, 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.
- [119:46]
Danny
I got a lot of videos they have to find like that. Yeah. Including this one probably.
- [119:51]
Mike Benz
Dude, I have like multiple 5 terabyte hard drives just for this. Okay, so it's like pause here. So like what you'll see is. Okay, they're. They're doing like the intro montage. By the way, Glob Sec is funded by the State Department. Department and usaid, the host of this. They're playing a montage of like Hitler propaganda to jfk, conspiracies to the election of Donald Trump. It's like what they're about to do here. So scroll down, it says, so can democracy withstand the information revolution?
- [120:20]
Danny
Wow.
- [120:20]
Mike Benz
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 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 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. 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 U.S. state Department. Search engines and social media work with algorithms that personalize visible content, thus preventing exposure to differing views or reinforcing confirmation by. 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? 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 Atlanta 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. He was also the head of Freedom House, which was the big CIA NGO from the 1980s. Oh, and on top of that, he was also the chairman of BAE Systems, the biggest military contractor. Battelle bae.
- [122:44]
Danny
Oh, bae.
- [122:45]
Mike Benz
Yeah. They basically run the British Ministry of Defense.
- [122:47]
Danny
Right, right.
- [122:48]
Mike Benz
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 right. Basically the head of the, the brain function for the CIA's National Endowment for Democracy and who they have cornered in the room, the head of public policy. That's what content moderation is folded under for both Facebook and Google. And what you'll see in this video if you watch it is you've got the Atlanta Council director, the guy who's on the board of 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 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 and more and more. And the Google rep there says, listen, we've already started this project Al. We've done our authoritative re ranking. What more is what do you want us to do? And you'll hear them dogpile on them while they're still being monetized. You need to use Google. What about Google Ads? What about, 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 27 state attorney generals came to talk about censorship and then said, actually, we don't want to talk about censorship of 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, no, 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 censors. So I write this beautiful speech. It's like, June 2020, Trump. Now, look, Trump always does his own thing with speeches. That's the beauty of Trump. Yes, but, you know, after reading the introductions, he, like, you know, glances down because when he's seated, he has the printout rather than 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. It had Everything that was going to 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, let them try to censor me. They tried to do that before in 2016. It's not going to 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 refused to believe it. And then like the next month, Trump started getting fact checked on X or 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, 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 price is the roof. So they don't want to take it on. They didn't. The whole thing was repeal section 230. Yeah. You know, yes. Close your eyes and Babe Ruth swing. We're just going to this one tweak to some, you know, Federal Communications act regulation from the 1990s is going to 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've wised up to it and they're taking off the hydra head limb by limb right now.
- [127:06]
Danny
So the section 230 thing is interesting. It was section 230 or 40.
- [127:10]
Mike Benz
230.
- [127:11]
Danny
32, 30. So in 2020, the Democrats were threatening to pull this section 230 thing from these social media platforms. And section 230 basically is like a, a lawsuit shield for these giant companies, these social media companies that are essentially, you know, like utilities.
- [127:28]
Mike Benz
Right.
- [127:29]
Danny
So that they're not liable for someone going on the platform and posting something, right?
- [127:32]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [127:33]
Danny
And now it seems like after this Charlie Kirk assassination that the Republicans are doing this. You had, you had Lindsey Graham just say something about section 230. You had Pam Bondi, she just said something about hate speech and section 230. But she, I think she, she walked it back.
- [127:52]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [127:52]
Danny
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.
- [127:59]
Mike Benz
Yeah, yeah.
- [128:00]
Danny
Talking about threatening Section 230, talking to cash Patel need to start talking about Section 230. They're talking about you, Kash Patel. They're saying mean things about you. And 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?
- [128:18]
Mike Benz
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 independent websites before social media, this law was formed that basically allowed the modern Internet, whether it's a comment on your blog or a static web 1.0 website that somebody else writes on, what section 230 allowed you to do is it said, 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 they simply were a platform that hosted but did not exercise editorial discretion over what was published, then the idea is you could do a defamation lawsuit against that user who posts 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 legal scholarship around violations of section 230, because they were no longer acting as platforms. 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. 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 your. You're still your own publisher on our site, but there are rules to qualify for what it can be. 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, 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 it. I've always seen as 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 preempts the kind of, like, censorship decisions that the American people don't like. 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, when you have these giant mega platforms that functionally are utilities, you can't operate in the modern world. Try being a salesperson without a Facebook account, an Instagram, a YouTube, a LinkedIn, you're kicked back to the industrial age. You can't have a modern job, you can't be a mom and pop florist shop unless you can promote your business. So in terms of what the Trump administration is doing right now, there are things that have made me a little uncomfortable, that have gone up to a certain line. 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, he was threatening Section 230 enforcement, well, I mean, to me, that's.
- [132:46]
Danny
So you can find the clip of it, Steve, Lindsey Graham talking about section 230 recently.
- [132:51]
Mike Benz
So. So there's a couple 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. And there's standards. There's something called the Brandenburg standard. Brandenburg v. Ohio was a case from a couple 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, but there are lines where if you say, you know, go.
- [133:38]
Danny
Here now and go.
- [133:39]
Mike Benz
Yeah, right, exactly. If it's like, imminent, this is like, you know, fire in a movie theater type type thing. And so with the Charlie Kirk stuff, I think that you've got this really 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 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.
- [134:15]
Danny
Ten years or something.
- [134:16]
Mike Benz
Yeah, but can you imagine if we.
- [134:18]
Danny
Had social media during the 60s?
- [134:19]
Mike Benz
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. And you know, there, there is, you know, it's not. If you say, you know, assassinate Mike Benz next, you know, assassinate, you know, Danny Jones. 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? Now it's one thing to say Charlie Kirk sucked, he was a horrible person, 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 65,000 followers and has like a, you know, a history. Maybe the tweet right before that was them drawing, you know, like a, you know, bullet point, you know, laser sight on the thing. And you know, I think what's ha. 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 this is a healthcare dispute or you know, immigration dispute or a, you know, dei. This isn't, 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, 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 and Right. There were a couple other weird things that, you know, so. But I don't think in general 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 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. Her job is running the Justice Department. She doesn't have a bachelor's in disinformation studies and this sort of thing. And so I think she probably just grabbed the nearest available term for speech that we will take action against. But obviously we don't want action just on, we don't want to copy Europe style hate speech loss. 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. There is this question about whether or not the FCC applied pressure around the Jimmy Kimmel thing.
- [138:52]
Danny
Nexstar.
- [138:53]
Mike Benz
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 a merger at the end of the day, it lasted a week and even Sinclair is back on with Kimmel. So I think that every movement is prone to passions. The question is whether they become institutionalized 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.
- [139:34]
Danny
I knew him, right?
- [139:35]
Mike Benz
I knew him. He was, he reached out. I, I had less than 5,000 followers when Charlie Kirk reached out to me. I just started my X 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. Can 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, man managed to cultivate young talent everywhere. And I had no doubt he was going to be President 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, I mean, everybody, 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 Pool like canceled events and because if there's not a severe, like federal enforcement effort to neutralize that. And these groups like Antiva have gotten away with this forever. They got away with this under Trump 1. They got away with it on Inauguration Day. And you know that like the local DAs are going to let these people off. Like these Soros das, it's a factory. 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. 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, you know, people trying to, you know, vote with their dollars. But all in all, I think it was actually a very restrained response.
- [141:48]
Danny
Yeah. So what was the context of this, Steve? Is this a clip or is this. Did you find the actual clip or is this just like a summary of the context of it? This is section. So he says, taken out of the video, section two. How long is the video? Five minute, eight minutes. 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.
- [142:10]
Mike Benz
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, right, like, you know, when are we going to Alpha Centauri? Right? Like, like nothing's going to happen on section 230. This is, I exist because everyone focused on section 230. Like I was the person like in Trump one 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 trenches. 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 right now.
- [143:23]
Danny
So this law that's passed, the state legislator in California is like, it's a hate speech law for social media companies.
- [143:31]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [143:32]
Danny
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.
- [143:38]
Mike Benz
Yep. Yeah, this is, this has been a long time coming. They've been working on this strategy for a couple years now. So in fact, there's a great Norma, if you pull up, go to Norm eisen, Democracy Playbook 2025.
- [143:55]
Danny
Let's take a pause with that. I gotta take a leak real quick.
- [143:57]
Mike Benz
Yeah, we'll be right back. So, yeah, we're talking about these state laws and what's happening.
- [144:02]
Danny
Right, right.
- [144:04]
Mike Benz
So you got three levels to the sort of government architecture of the censorship industrial complex. You have the national, the US national government, our federal government, which turns every four years 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 that they promote. All three of those are angles of attack and manipulable to coerce platforms into allowing or not allowing speech. And so what we did during the period between 2020 and 2024 on the Freedom side of the free speech censorship 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. The blue states are trying to have these censorship bills. And so this is playing out right now, and there's a special focus because the Blob has lost so much of its federal government censorship powers. So what I have pulled up right Here is the 2025 Democracy Playbook by Norm Eisen. Are you familiar with Norm Eisenh? So Norm Eisen is a good name to know. He is the legal hacker, 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, administration, White House ethics czar. So every time he. 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.
- [146:40]
Danny
It's perfect.
- [146:42]
Mike Benz
You ever read the Fountainhead, the Ayn Rand book? It's a. You know, it's this character, the villain is this guy, Ellsworth Tui. 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, he's like, no, actually, if you understand these. And this is like, what ethics is like. Ethics is like the yes, no button. So if you control that, you control all the, 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. The State Department's Global Engagement Center. But he's this big transatlantic blob operative. He does all the international stuff close. Works closely with all these, like, NATO, State Department, USAID groups. And so every year for the past 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 common political opponents. And so this year, in January 2025, he put this out, the seven pillars to defend democracy in 2025, beyond. And if you go down to, like, the list of pillars, probably in the. The Thing you'll see. I can decode these. There you go. So protect elections, 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. Defend rule of law, which is just going to mean arrest everybody in the Trump administration and protect our own people from being arrested. Fight corruption just means find a predicate to arrest them. Reinforce civic and media space. This is like this translated language for meaning keep the money gun. This is a month before we announce the shutdown of usaid. And he actually says in this memo about how USAID was actually good under Trump 1 and we need to use that money gun to pay our friends 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 a usaid, you'll, you'll see this. Just type in USAID in the search. See, so it says. 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. Half of their budget came from USAID and the State Department. There's nothing more corrupt than the Corruption Reporting Project. Let me tell you this. They took US aid funds and dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani so they could be used for impeaching Trump in 2019. So we sponsored our own impeachment of our president through US aid funding. Again, the money supposed to go out to influence the world around us to make things better for Americans. And it ends up up being used to impeach our own democratically elected president. Wait, run, hit the enter or just go down 37 times. You'll see he mentions it. Okay, so let's see this. So this is on the countering disinformation 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 and you need to get your mind right. So like News Guard 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 wi fi lest 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, you know, and YouTube meta and YouTube created digital literacy programs in recent years and all this. But. But if you run a search for Brazil, you'll get to where. Why I'm bringing this up. Oh, wow. 14. Okay, again.
- [151:04]
Danny
Did you see this Wikipedia blacklist thing?
- [151:07]
Mike Benz
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's been around for a while. Yeah, well, this. But that's the media literacy strategy, right? Wait, click enter again. I'll tell you when to stop. Again, again, Again. Oh, well, you see, wait, scroll back up. You'll see he's bragging about the Digital Services act in the EU is. And these are. Look. And YouTube eliminated 17 critical policies that.
- [151:34]
Danny
Had limited the spread of misinformation.
- [151:36]
Mike Benz
Right? So that's why they want the EU and Brazil. So wait, scroll down again. Or hit the Brazil thing. I know where. This is it. One more, one more, one more, one more, one more, one more, one more, one more. Okay, wait. Okay, there, we'll 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 as 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 news guard style blacklists of the kind of media that you can use for research assignments in high school and middle school. The kind of websites you can access on the. Because all these schools are now having like school issued laptops so that you don't get distracted on your own device sort of thing. And they can put you in 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. And one of them is Wikipedia. There's something called the sift method that media literacy theorists use. It's, 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, right? So you should only sift casually through the first 10 results on google.com and whatever Wikipedia says this is like theory in media literacy is the sift method. 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 populists 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. And so they will end up, because they're against the State Department in NATO and, and USAID and this whole stakeholder blob and these big corporations, they'll end up on a media literacy blacklist and a Wikipedia blacklist. They are blacklisted on Wikipedia. But what that means is that people have to. The New York Times has to cover their own people's scandals for it to be entered into history, the historical account of something. Wikipedia does not allow primary source reporting, only secondary sources. So 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 can't tell the history of Hillary Clinton unless the New York Times has like accidentally reported something damaging to her.
- [154:38]
Danny
Right.
- [154:38]
Mike Benz
And it's the same thing now in schools.
- [154:39]
Danny
Did you see that Bill Clinton had everything about him and Epstein scrubbed? Yeah, right, Right when they started talking about the Epstein files.
- [154:45]
Mike Benz
Right. And it's like, well, who are you going to cite to cover it? It like, you know, the only people 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. Right. So. So here's what Normizen writes in the countering 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 of the federal, federal level is going to be shut down and whether progress will continue. Progress for putting guardrails around speech.
- [155:19]
Danny
Right.
- [155:19]
Mike Benz
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 to 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 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 of 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 in. And this is all like, you know, this is coming out of the Brookings Institution by Norm Isen Brookings INSTITUTION I've shown own CIA pay stubs going back to the 1970s and 80s where the CIA would send people to Brookings for their intelligence training. Brookings has its own intelligence bureau for this stuff. But the fact is this whole State Department USA CIA network just planning to move stuff to the states. It's a two part strategy, state level censorship laws and then also saying they may find partners in 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 X out of the country and has imposed these massive fines. And so I mean these are, this is literally the White House ethics are for Obama and the chief litigator during the Biden administration of all things Trump world explicitly telling the blob to move in formation 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 Graphica and they, you know, also fund all the arts and cultural centers in, in Miami. Well, their Night Institute parked out of Georgetown 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. And you'll see like who's on there. It's James Baker, if you remember this, the former, what was it? General counsel or deputy general counsel for the FBI during the Twitter files. And then he moved over to the content moderation lawyer team to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. He's still around getting paid by the Knight foundation for censorship work just like he was the same 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 supergroup, which is doling out $100 million in grants to sponsor this kind of, this kind of regulation. See that? 35, you know, they're, they're promoting 35 different bills in, in 75 state bills to all punish social media companies for allowing algorithms that have, that allow, you know, basically counter blob speech. And then we, we clipped all these videos.
- [159:02]
Danny
It's crazy because it seems like we have, we have like 30 minutes left. There's a couple things I want to cover. So I kind of want to do like some rapid fire. Not really rapid fire, but, you know, I want to cover. I want to ask a couple 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 wrapp in this fake narrative that's to protect us from each other.
- [159:26]
Mike Benz
Right.
- [159:26]
Danny
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.
- [159:32]
Mike Benz
I mean, a 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.
- [159:38]
Danny
Right.
- [159:38]
Mike Benz
Like every single one of these.
- [159:40]
Danny
Well, it was obvious when the guy, the. I forget the guy's name. And the congressman that was talking to Cash Patel, who. 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 is being scrutinized and having conspiracy theories come up about you. Right. And people talk about you.
- [160:08]
Mike Benz
Right, Right. No, and, and if there was action at the, at the Trump executive branch level against that, that I would be the first person in line to say that's wrong. And you have seen that, like Michael Shellenberger and others have also, you know, you know, published about getting close to the line a couple times on the, on the, on the Trump admin stuff.
- [160:30]
Danny
Yeah.
- [160:30]
Mike Benz
But it is, 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 what, what the Biden administration was doing is they were just creating bureaus in every. I mean the DHS had a formal office of Ms. Dis and Mal Information. They formalized it. It was called MDM in Office of Mistis 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. Right. It wasn't like. In fact, if you stay on the foundation website, if you go to foundationforfreedomonline.com and then you go to the search and you just type in 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 and go to. Scroll down. Scroll down. That whole of society how the previous admin coordinated censorship industry. So if you. And scroll down a little bit here. So what you'll see here is 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 one of these. 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. Right. And basically high integrity information gets whitelisted. You can cite on Wikipedia, low information integrity and news sources get blacklisted. It's just a censorship group. 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. Here you go. 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 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 News Guard directly partner with News Guard. Yep. So you have the CIA working formalized censorship capacity together with usaid, the Department of Defense, darpa, the National Security Council, mitre, News Guard and a bunch of their hand picked, you know, government funded university centers. 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 influence it? And if you did, that's messed up. And 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. 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 taking a fire hose to what looked like a God comp, like an insurmountable power. And 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 it remains to be seen how those will play out.
- [164:40]
Danny
What is your take on this WEF push to have this digital ID attached to Internet access?
- [164:48]
Mike Benz
Super up. I, I think it's awful. I mean this is kind of, I guess a basic take, but it's kind of the obvious one.
- [164:57]
Danny
Yeah.
- [164:59]
Mike Benz
Are you familiar with the DIA app? This is a crazy story.
- [165:02]
Danny
No, I'm not.
- [165:03]
Mike Benz
If you type in usaid D I I A so, so, so this was like, this is what we imposed on Ukraine. USAID developed. There you go.
- [165:17]
Danny
The first DIA in Washington D.C. summit.
- [165:19]
Mike Benz
Okay. So, so USAID did this digital ID program in Ukraine starting a couple 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 to, they called 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 crack. You know, because these credit card companies always, you know, like literally they just totally in bed with it.
- [165:53]
Danny
Yeah.
- [165:53]
Mike Benz
Whenever the government. Right. And of course, like 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 Delaware cracker. 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, your banking information and it'll just make it really easy and convenient for the, you know, the government to have everything in one, 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 they're using this to be able to scrub wrong thinkers in Ukraine. If you criticize the Zelenskyy government, you're black bagged, you're done. You criticize that government. What they banned like 26 different political parties. They banned elections. Zelenskyy was supposed to have 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 any political party that you know is as 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.
- [167:18]
Danny
Yes.
- [167:18]
Mike Benz
You know they, they just went, went straight to the bank accounts of people 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 News Guard. They ran this whole garm operation 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 to use it for. And I'm troubled to see this being backed by people like Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison has been like a Trump supporter. I think he's been seen as a pretty level headed ally by people in the Trump movement for like a decade now. And I see 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.
- [168:21]
Danny
Yes.
- [168:22]
Mike Benz
But there can be weird upsides in a temporary way like Elon having centralized control over X. You know, it's it all. It's always like 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. Sure. Decide you know what actually I'm going to, you know, I'm going to go against my principles and I'm going to use my, this centralized power. But at the same time that centralized control did allow them to buoy 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, 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 said for a decade now in this, that the main threat on cleaning up the censorship industrial complex has not come from Democrats pushing censorship. It's been internationalist Republicans. Because if it was as simple as Republican versus Democrat, you could eliminate this thing in one election with a majority. And what was happening from 2016 to 2020 is you had a Republican executive branch under Donald Trump. You had a Republican controlled 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. Because what you had is you had this Lindsey Graham coalition in the Republicans who were pushing the Russiagate stuff, they want to maximize 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 Democrats and international globalists, that would be something that I think could be resisted pretty easily, actually. But when I see Larry Ellison pushing it, 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.
- [171:08]
Danny
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 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 Gnome pushing this. What was it? The real ID stuff.
- [171:45]
Mike Benz
Yeah, yeah.
- [171:45]
Danny
That like, they could be pushing. They could be sort of creating this sort of like totalitarian CCP style digital ID on people.
- [171:53]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [171:53]
Danny
And the threat is terrifying sounding.
- [171:56]
Mike Benz
No, the threat, the threat is very real.
- [171:59]
Danny
I mean, a control grid, that's what, what's her name? Catherine Fitz calls it the control grid.
- [172:04]
Mike Benz
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 9 11, if you've ever seen was it a good American, the Bill Binney whistleblower.
- [172:17]
Danny
Yes.
- [172:18]
Mike Benz
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, 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.
- [172:45]
Danny
Yeah.
- [172:46]
Mike Benz
That's game over. Right. I mean there's like, you can't even mount an organizational resistance to that. Like in Ukraine, you can't vote their way out of that. Right. I mean you, you could if you disempowered this. It's like North Korea. Yeah. Or China, what they do with this. 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 a legal predicate to act on it. So at the same time this kind of digital grid is kind of an inescapable like efficiency. Like this has been a long time coming. Yeah. 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. But where I sort of am right now in terms of, I guess advocacy on directions is like, I think legal firewalls are probably better than technological firewalls. I don't think you can stop the promise of efficiency like Palantir coming in and saying, hey, give us this hundred million dollar contract and we'll take your data. At hhs, I think at a certain point our government sucks at efficiency stuff. We farm everything out to third party contractors. You know, the biggest part of a secretary's job in charge of any agency is the budget fight. You look at like, what do four star generals do, for example? They're lobbyists. They're lobbyists for Pentagon funding. It's the same thing the FDA commissioner has to do the nih, the hhs, all the way down to the Census Bureau. 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 you're also doing favors for outside folks that they might get on the board of later or they might do a favor for it's. The same thing. We were talking about the Google stuff in the, in the State Department.
- [175:05]
Danny
Right. Well, I mean like 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 30 trillion dollar black hole in the Pentagon?
- [175:18]
Mike Benz
Yeah, you know, but I, I think Elon probably, he also gets a lot.
- [175:23]
Danny
Of his money from the Pentagon. Right.
- [175:25]
Mike Benz
I know historically, like, historically there was, 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 some evidence on that because he's tried, I think, be true to the kind of libertarian principles. But definitely Tesla got a ton of subsidies, SpaceX, ton of government grants every day they launch. Arguably 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. If you type in like Elon, Bolivia lithium coup. If you type that in Google, you'll probably get a search here because you know, the Tesla battery.
- [176:20]
Danny
Elon, lithium coup.
- [176:21]
Mike Benz
Yeah, because you know, the lithium and cobalt are like, right. You know, there you go.
- [176:28]
Danny
And they 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.
- [176:48]
Mike Benz
Yeah, so like, you know, there's, that's these kind of episodes, you know, they, there's a tale of all 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, 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. He's questioned our involvement, NATO and you know, our funding of that. I do believe Doge started to look at Pentagon stuff and really ran into, ran into, you know, some headwinds there. But yeah, and I've got a lot to say on that particular thing. But, 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 in Ukraine. He's, 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. 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, it's just how I feel about it.
- [178:28]
Danny
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, Like, I've been flooded with these videos of people being arrested.
- [178:42]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [178:42]
Danny
For tweets in the uk and it's insane. That's our closest ally. And I think it was in 2023, they had 12,000 people arrested for tweets.
- [178:52]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [178:52]
Danny
And Russia was only 3,000.
- [178:53]
Mike Benz
Yep, exactly. No, it's our closest ally. Yeah. And, you know, and we funded that. I mean, you know, The. The. The U.S. 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, of. UK Hate Lab was 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.
- [179:29]
Danny
The Science of Hate.
- [179:30]
Mike Benz
Yeah. In fact, if you go to. Even if you look at YouTube on the 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.
- [179:43]
Danny
What is the zoom in on that book cover? I want to see what it says, how prejudice becomes hate and what we can do to stop.
- [179:54]
Mike Benz
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, no. In that search. Yeah, Brexit. B, R, E, X, I, T. Yeah. Okay, scroll down, scroll down. I'm looking at all the videos that mention Brexit here. Wow. And the thing. But if you scroll down. Okay. I don't 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 we go. Like the effect of Brexit on the disrupting networks of hate. And, 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?
- [181:11]
Danny
Yes.
- [181:11]
Mike Benz
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 it'll have like a identity score, like a strong language score. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like if they're N bombs that are dropped like that might, you know, bring it up to a certain threshold.
- [181:39]
Danny
Yeah.
- [181:39]
Mike Benz
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, the UK's version of the EU Digital Censorship act, compels internal data to go to outside vetted researchers. Is because they lost access to a lot of the AI tools that was used to scrape. I mentioned in 2020, they scraped 859 million tweets to build these AI censorship tools. And then 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 they are able to build these AI censorship algorithms. But that's like what's happening in the uk. It's a proxy attack on political actors who might depose the Blob's little candidate there. This Ker Starmer is a Blob creation.
- [182:54]
Danny
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.
- [183:13]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [183:13]
Danny
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 freaking 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.
- [183:29]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [183:29]
Danny
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, 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, stuck in the gig economy delivering Caesar salads with ubereats and, and they have nothing to show for what they're working for.
- [184:23]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [184:23]
Danny
And, and this, I don't know where it goes.
- [184:26]
Mike Benz
Dude, 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. And 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. You get your PhD, you know, know medieval literature specialists, you got to have a YouTube channel to promote that, a Facebook account, an Instagram account, a X account.
- [185:05]
Danny
And, 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. Yeah, 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.
- [185:31]
Mike Benz
Right. You Know, you have your license, you know, they, they pull your license for misinformation.
- [185:36]
Danny
Yeah.
- [185:37]
Mike Benz
And so I, I think that how scary that is as a, you know, this could happen to me. And what are the liabilities of. Because, 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, or 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 public vaccines or something. It's like, oh my God, I'm gonna be financially assassinated over, like, one thing. That's true. Anyway. And so that has been like, hugely motivational to me to see just like people sponging this 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 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 going to be something though, you know, and, and I do think in general, like, what.
- [186:50]
Danny
President has, has actually fulfilled everything he ran right on during his election.
- [186:55]
Mike Benz
Yeah. None. Right. And, and I do that. 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 in 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, I do think there is a kind of moment where these are, these are relatively good times in terms of like, this, the state of play for speech online. Like, whatever your opinions are like, yes.
- [187:52]
Danny
Like, I agree, I agree. But I feel, it just feels like we're in a pocket that's not gonna last long.
- [187:57]
Mike Benz
Right. Well, it's, 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, unbelievable amounts of pressure. Yeah.
- [188:13]
Danny
Elon said they're a terrorist organization. He just tweeted they're a terrorist organization.
- [188:16]
Mike Benz
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.
- [188:27]
Danny
Oh, they had TP USA listed as.
- [188:29]
Mike Benz
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 price. Stay within earshot of admin people and, you know, and the base made its voice heard. And even the ADL is like, you know, taking that off. And. And so. But that's why the thing 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 the cause, generally speaking, for freedom of speech on the Internet, has to stay together at an institutional and coalition level. 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 the coalition that has the staying power. So when I see things like Larry Ellison pushing the digital ID thing, that, to me, is a scarier threat because that is from within the coalition and very difficult to reconcile with 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 247 by. Right. You know, it's like, bruh, okay, do we get a 247 look at you in your yacht?
- [189:56]
Danny
Right? Exactly. No, dude, it's. It's. It's terrifying, man. Well, listen, Mike, we're gonna have to do another one because I feel like there's so much more we could talk about. So next time you're in Miami, maybe we'll try to make it happen. I'll link your. Your x and your YouTube. Anything else we should link below?
- [190:13]
Mike Benz
Got like an IG and a rumble.
- [190:14]
Danny
Okay, Yep, we'll get that, too. And are you cool with doing a couple of Patreon questions real quick? What time is it?
- [190:21]
Mike Benz
We got time?
- [190:21]
Danny
Yeah, we got 15 minutes for you to catch your flight. All right, that's all. Good night, folks.