#2237 - Mike Benz

Summary

The Joe Rogan Experience - Episode #2237: Mike Benz

Release Date: December 3, 2024

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Introduction

In episode #2237 of The Joe Rogan Experience, host Joe Rogan engages in a profound and unsettling discussion with Michael Shellenberger and Kurt Schlichter. The conversation delves deep into the intricate web of internet censorship, exploring its historical roots, current implementations, and the geopolitical strategies intertwined with it. The episode provides listeners with a comprehensive understanding of how government entities, private sectors, and non-governmental organizations collaborate to shape and control information flow in the digital age.

Guests' Background

• Michael Shellenberger: An influential author and environmental policy expert known for his critical views on prevailing environmental and political narratives.

• Kurt Schlichter: A seasoned commentator with a background in corporate law and experience working within the Trump White House. Schlichter has extensively researched internet censorship and its evolution over the past decade.

Main Discussion Points

1. The Genesis of Internet Censorship Efforts (00:16 – 03:53)

Kurt Schlichter outlines the origins of modern internet censorship, tracing it back to efforts initiated in 2014 amidst geopolitical upheavals in Ukraine. He explains that the U.S. government, leveraging organizations like the CIA and State Department, began promoting free speech as a tool of soft power across the globe. This initiative marked a significant pivot from direct military interventions to influencing narratives and information dissemination online.

"The promotion of free speech is sort of the flip side of promotion of free speech... when the Internet was privatized, it was initially a military project."
— Kurt Schlichter [02:08]

2. The Gerasimov Doctrine and Hybrid Warfare (04:08 – 07:25)

The conversation shifts to the Gerasimov Doctrine, named after Russian General Valery Gerasimov, which emphasizes the importance of controlling information and media narratives as a form of warfare. Schlichter discusses how this doctrine influenced NATO's strategies, leading to the formal incorporation of hybrid warfare tactics that extend beyond traditional military engagements to include information control.

"They took a quote from him saying, the new nature of war is no longer about military to military conflict."
— Kurt Schlichter [06:13]

3. Evolution of Censorship Infrastructure Post-2016 (07:25 – 16:30)

Following the 2016 U.S. elections, the censorship machinery intensified its efforts. The rise of populist leaders like Donald Trump prompted a shift in focus from combating foreign threats to addressing domestic populism. Schlichter details how entities like the Disinformation Governance Board were established to oversee and regulate online narratives, effectively blurring the lines between protecting democracy and suppressing dissenting voices.

"What they did is they argued that democracy has to be defended from demagoguery. Democracy needs guardrails."
— Michael Shellenberger [28:13]

4. Role of NGOs and the National Endowment for Democracy (16:30 – 30:52)

The discussion highlights the pivotal role of NGOs, particularly the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), in advancing censorship agendas. Schlichter explains how NED functions as a façade for CIA-backed operations, funding media institutions and activist groups to influence and control public discourse in various countries.

"The National Endowment for Democracy was created so that the CIA could effectively subsidize the groups without having CIA fingerprints on it."
— Michael Shellenberger [40:08]

5. Censorship in Action: COVID-19 and Election Interference (30:52 – 75:12)

Shellenberger and Schlichter provide concrete examples of censorship mechanisms in action. They discuss projects like Wisedex and Mitre Squint, which utilize AI and machine learning to identify and suppress "misinformation" across social media platforms. The COVID-19 pandemic served as a testing ground for these technologies, enabling authorities to control narratives around vaccine efficacy and pandemic origins.

"Mitre Squint for COVID 19 provides a fast, reliable way to report and counter Covid misinformation."
— Mitre Squint Promo [76:44]

Additionally, the conversation touches upon election interference strategies employed to marginalize populist candidates, ensuring that certain narratives dominate the political landscape.

"They argued that we need something to stop them from being able to combat our media influence."
— Michael Shellenberger [05:04]

6. Institutional Entrenchment and Resistance (75:12 – 99:08)

The guests discuss the challenges faced in dismantling or reforming the entrenched censorship infrastructure. They emphasize that the intertwining of governmental bodies with private sectors and NGOs has made these systems resilient and resistant to change. The acquisition of platforms like X (formerly Twitter) by figures like Elon Musk represents a critical juncture, offering a potential alternative to the prevailing censorship paradigms.

"This has not yet reached full maturity where we are at complete 1984 on all of this, but it is no longer in its infant stage."
— Kurt Schlichter [58:54]

7. Geopolitical Implications and Future Outlook (99:08 – 137:50)

The latter part of the episode explores the broader geopolitical implications of internet censorship. Schlichter and Shellenberger theorize that controlling information is essential for maintaining global hegemony, particularly in energy-rich regions like Eurasia. They argue that censorship acts as a weapon in economic and political battles, influencing elections and public opinion to safeguard national and corporate interests.

"We are an international empire because of the banana wars in the 1800s that gave the US vassalage control over much of South America."
— Michael Shellenberger [132:18]

Key Quotes

• Kurt Schlichter [02:08]:
  "It started in 2014 with the Ukraine fiasco... promoting free speech around the world."

• Michael Shellenberger [28:13]:
  "Democracy needs guardrails. We need bumper cars on democracy."

• Kurt Schlichter [40:08]:
  "The NED was created so that the CIA could effectively subsidize the groups without having CIA fingerprints on it."

• Mitre Squint Promo [76:44]:
  "Mitre Squint for COVID 19 provides a fast, reliable way to report and counter Covid misinformation."

• Kurt Schlichter [58:54]:
  "This has not yet reached full maturity where we are at complete 1984 on all of this, but it is no longer in its infant stage."

• Michael Shellenberger [132:18]:
  "We are an international empire because of the banana wars in the 1800s that gave the US vassalage control over much of South America."

Conclusions

Episode #2237 of The Joe Rogan Experience serves as a wake-up call regarding the pervasive and often covert operations aimed at controlling information flow on the internet. Through insightful analysis and compelling evidence, Shellenberger and Schlichter reveal how deeply ingrained censorship mechanisms are within governmental and corporate structures. The discussion underscores the urgent need for transparency, accountability, and public awareness to counterbalance these forces and preserve the integrity of free speech and democratic institutions.

Listeners are left contemplating the delicate balance between preventing harmful misinformation and safeguarding individual freedoms, recognizing that the tools designed to protect democracy can, paradoxically, become instruments of its suppression.

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Note: This summary is based on the provided transcript and aims to encapsulate the essence of the podcast episode, highlighting key themes and statements made by the participants.

Transcript

[Joe Rogan]

Joe Rogan podcast.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Kurt Schlichter]

Nice to meet you, Joe.

[Joe Rogan]

I wish you didn't have to exist. You're one of those guys that when you talk like God, I wish what he's saying isn't true, but I know it is. But I'm happy you do. I don't remember where I first saw you speak, but, I mean, right away I was thinking, okay, this makes a lot of sense when you're explaining, like, the Ministry of Truth or whatever it is. Is that what it's called, Ministry of Truth? Well, they tried to do that for a while. That was, I think. So just as a background, please tell people what you do and what positions you held.

[Kurt Schlichter]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Kurt Schlichter]

It started in 2014 with the Ukraine fiasco, the coup and then the counter coup. The coup was great for Internet free speech. You really do need to start the story of Internet censorship with the story of Internet freedom. Because promotion of censorship is sort of the flip side of promotion of free speech. And we've had this free speech government diplomatic role for 80 years now. When World War II ended, we embarked. We had the International Rules Based Order that was created in 1948. We had the UN, we had NATO, we had the IMF, the World Bank. We had this big global system. Now there was a prohibition in 1948 under the UN Declaration of Human Rights that you can't acquire territory by military force anymore. And have it be respected by international law. So everything had to move to soft power influence. And so the US government took a very active role beginning in 1948 to promote free speech around the world. And this was done through all these initially CIA proprietaries like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, and then the whole Wisner's Wurlitzer, State Department, CIA apparatus, all the early partnerships with the media and the war machine around. Propaganda for World War II continued through the Cold War. And then that hit the gas with promotion of free speech on the Internet. When the Internet was privatized, it was initially a military project. So it was a government operation from jump street. And then in 1991, the World Wide Web came out, civilian use. And right away, the State Department, the military, our intelligence sphere, was promoting free.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Speech so that we could have basically government pressure on foreign countries to open.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Up their Internet to allow basically groups that the US Government was supporting to be able to combat state control over media in those other countries.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So we already had this sort of.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Deep interplay between government, tech companies, universities, NGOs that dates back 80 years. You look at the evolution of NGOs like Freedom House or the Atlanta Council or Wilson center in promoting these free speech. But what happened was, is in 2014, we had had about 25 years of successful free speech diplomacy. And then there was a. You know, we tried to overthrow the government of Ukraine. We successfully did. And I'm not even arguing whether that's a good or a bad thing, but the fact is the US did effectively January 6th, the Yanukovych government out of power in 2014. I mean, we literally had our Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, handing out cookies and water bottles to violent street protesters as they surrounded the parliament building and ran the democratically elected government out of office.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But then what happened is the eastern.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Side of the state completely broke away. So we don't respect this new US installed government. Crimea voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation, and that kicked off that sort of set in motion the events that would end the concept of free speech. Diplomacy is like a US government unfettered. Good.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Because what they argued is we pumped.

[Kurt Schlichter]

$5 billion worth of US government money into media institutions in Ukraine. That's the figure that's cited by Victoria Nuland In December 2013, right before the coup, $5 billion setting up Independent Media companies, basically sponsoring Mockingbird style, our media assets in the region. And they still didn't penetrate Eastern Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine was primarily Ethnic Russian didn't penetrate Crimea. So they said, we need something to stop them from being able to combat our media influence. And they initially called this the Gerasimov Doctrine, named after Valery Gerasimov, who was this Russian general. They took a quote from him saying, the new nature of war is no longer about military to military conflict.

[Michael Shellenberger]

All we need to do is take.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Over the media in these NATO countries, and that's primarily social media. Get one of our pawns elected as.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The president, and that president will control the military. So it's much cheaper and more efficient.

[Kurt Schlichter]

To win a military war by simply winning civilian elections.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So that was called the Gerasimov Doctrine.

[Kurt Schlichter]

That's what set up the early censorship infrastructure in 2014. Three years later, the guy who coined that, Mark Galeotti, would write a sort.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Of mea culpa saying, oops, I'm sorry.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Gerasimov was actually citing what the US does, but by that point, they'd already renamed it hybrid Warfare. NATO formally declared its tanks to tweets doctrine, saying that the new role of NATO is no longer just about tanks, it's about controlling tweets. And then Brexit happened in June 2016. In July 2016, the very next month in Warsaw, NATO added hybrid warfare to its formal charter, basically authorizing the military, the diplomatic sphere, and the intelligence world to take control over social media. And then five months later, Trump won the election, being called the Russian Asset. So all that infrastructure was redirected home to the U.S. jesus.

[Joe Rogan]

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[Michael Shellenberger]

It was.

[Joe Rogan]

It was. It seemed like the censorship machine was winning up until around the time that Elon purchased X. That seems to me to be our fork in the road. That's the alternative timeline. You know, Mark Andreessen talked about that yesterday, that we've had a couple of alternative timelines where things have shifted. I think that was one of the big ones.

[Michael Shellenberger]

That's exactly it.

[Kurt Schlichter]

I mean, he's sort of the timeline where we miss the bullet is where there's a deus ex maskina. You know, it's sort of like a deus ex machina where it's this random plot thing that happens. Someone descends onto the stage and solves all the plots, loopholes, and magically saves the plucky heroes that were otherwise in danger.

[Michael Shellenberger]

There were events in the run up. Well, it all sort of happened simultaneously.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Really, because the month that Elon announced his acquisition was the same month that the Disinformation Governance Board was announced at dhs, which was the first thing that really roused Republicans and frankly, anyone with institutional power in D.C. to finally stare into the sun and recognize or at least begin to glimpse the size of what they were up against. The Disinformation Governance Board set off a flurry of congressional activity from Chuck Grassley and other luminaries in Congress. There were a lot of whistleblower documents came out, and for years, the entire Republican Party and most of the Democrat Party had denied the existence of government censorship. And frankly, the Mystery of Truth was not the Disinformation Governance Board.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The Mystery of Truth had already existed.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Three years earlier at dhs. They just called it a name that masked what it did. It was called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is a name that puts you half to sleep by the time you're finished saying it.

[Joe Rogan]

Ministry of Truth scared the shit out of people just because of the Orwellian context of the term. You know, it just seemed like, what are you? What?

[Michael Shellenberger]

Well, the funny thing is, they were right.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The Disinformation Governance Board was not the Ministry of Truth. It was a dull, boring, mundane, bureaucratic.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Layer to manage the Ministry of Truth that was already created three years earlier.

[Kurt Schlichter]

But the fact is, nobody called them out on it because of the thick language of censor speak.

[Michael Shellenberger]

That hides this.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Whole thing from general public awareness.

[Michael Shellenberger]

I Mean, in my own path, I've.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Tried to self reflect about how I ended up here spending my life on this. And I used to think it was primarily about chess and my early encounters with AI and then seeing the censorship AI that really sparked my pursuit into this. But the more I've thought about it.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The more it's based. I think it's just kind of coming.

[Kurt Schlichter]

From a corporate law background where your job is to plant dirty tricks in the fine print of 150 page legal documents and to catch dirty tricks in that linguistic framing that's done by opposing lawyers. And that's really how they pulled this off. Nobody thought in 2019 that the cybersecurity agency in DHS would be the Ministry of Truth. They didn't appreciate the layers of censor speak that were constructed on top of that to say that, well, DHS governs.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Critical infrastructure and elections are critical infrastructure. Public health is critical infrastructure, Misinformation online is a cyber component. So it's a cyber attack on critical infrastructure. And so normally policymakers or people in the public think, oh, cybersecurity, that's hacking, that's phishing, that's for CIA, NSA people.

[Kurt Schlichter]

To stop Russians from hacking us.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And they think critical infrastructure, they think.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Things like dams or subsea cables or low earth satellites.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They don't think it means you sitting.

[Kurt Schlichter]

On the toilet at 9:30pm on a Thursday saying, I don't know that I.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Love mail in ballots.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And then suddenly you're being flagged by DHS as a cyber threat for attacking the US critical infrastructure of confidence in our elections.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But that's how they scaled these definitions.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Into this giant mission creep. And now it's metastasized into the entire U.S. federal government. The Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, DHS, FBI, DOJ, HHS. And the task in front of this administration is just unbelievably enormous. In deconstructing that, is it possible they're going to run into a lot of headwinds? Because once this power was discovered and funded to the tune of billions as.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It has been, we have this foreign.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Policy establishment that manages the American empire that saw Internet censorship as kind of an El Dorado key to permanently winning the soft power influence game around the world. And what I mean by that is.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Okay, so you know how in a.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Lot of people talk about the early CIA activity in the media with things like Operation Mockingbird and whatnot, and the ability to sort of propagandize things in the media?

[Michael Shellenberger]

Well, you never had this capacity in.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The 1950s, while that was going on, if you and I were at dinner, Thanksgiving or something, and there's 12 people at the table and I start talking to you about, I don't know, the COVID vaccines may have adverse side effects.

[Michael Shellenberger]

There was never an ability to simply reach under the table as an intelligence.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Agency, or as the Department of Homeland Security, or as the Pentagon or the State Department. Just turn off the volume when we talk to each other, peer to peer.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But since the lion's share of all.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Communication is digital, especially the politically impactful.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Ones, that capacity now allows our blob, our foreign policy establishment, to effectively control.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Every election, or at least tilt every.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Election around the world. And they've sprawled this into 140 countries. And Trump is going to run into every single regional desk at the State.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Department, every single equity at the Pentagon, arguing that if you do not allow us to continue this censorship work, it will undermine national security because it will allow Russian favored narratives to win the day in the Ivory coast, in Chad, in Niger and Brazil and Venezuela and.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Central and Eastern Europe.

[Kurt Schlichter]

You're going to have the State Department argue that if we don't have this counter misinformation capacity, then extremists will win.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Elections around the world, or populists will win the election around the world.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And that will undermine the power of our democratic institutions, essentially our programming, our.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Assets in the region, and they've built this enormous capacity. We use it because it works, because it wins. And the fact is, Trump probably only won this election because for the same reason he probably only won the 2016.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Election, which was, in both cases, there.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Was largely a free Internet. It was when Trump got censored into.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Oblivion in 2020 by the US government under his nose, working with webs of outside NGOs and Pentagon front groups to mass censor virtually every narrative that he was putting out that he lost. So it does work to win elections.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And every. There's a regional desk at the State Department covering every country on Earth. Victoria Nuland at a desk that covered about 20 countries. So every country, the State Department is.

[Kurt Schlichter]

A preferred winner of that election.

[Michael Shellenberger]

We work with all political parties, and that's a hugely powerful tool to lose. It's just twisted and evil, and it needs to. And we need to win. I don't want to say fair fights, but dipping into this sort of dark.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Sorcery power has, not only does it crush the First Amendment entirely, but the diplomatic blowback, it's just absolutely normal and enormous. I can go through examples of that. If you're interested?

[Joe Rogan]

Sure.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Well, so we have this thing called.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The Global Engagement center at the State Department. It was set up initially to fight ISIS, because in 2014, 2015, when the Obama administration was trying to put military boots on the ground in Syria, there was this sort of giant threat that was publicly talked about all over about ISIS recruiting on Facebook and Twitter, homegrown ISIS threats. For example, the Garland, Texas fiasco where there was a shooting by ISIS terrorist. And the web of online intrigues around that. Three years later, it would come out that he had been effectively groomed by the FBI. The FBI had paid someone over $100,000 to become his best friend and text him to tear up Texas before that. But never mind, the horse was out of the barn.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So this idea that ISIS was recruiting.

[Kurt Schlichter]

On Facebook and Twitter gave a license to the State Department to create this thing called the Global Engagement center, which was really the first official censorship capacity in the US Government. It predated the DHS stuff that would come along in the Trump era.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And this gave the State Department the.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Direct back channel, the direct coordinating capacity with all the social media companies to tell them about isis. ISIS accounts, ISIS narratives that were trending.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The Pentagon poured hundreds of millions of.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Dollars into developing a technique called natural language processing, which is a way to use AI to scan the entire Internet for keywords.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And you would have these academic researchers.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Effectively constructing code books of language. What do ISIS advocates or supporters talk like? What words do they use?

[Michael Shellenberger]

What prefixes and suffixes? This whole lexicon is then conjoined with the ingested sum of all of their.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Tweets and transcribed YouTube videos and Facebook posts.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And then suddenly the State Department is a real time heat map of everyone who is likely to be or hits.

[Kurt Schlichter]

A certain confidence level being suspected to support ISIS.

[Michael Shellenberger]

That was 2014-2016, set up by this.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Guy, Rick Stengel, who described himself as Obama's propagandist in chief. He's now on the advisory board of NewsGuard, one of the largest censorship mercenary firms in the world.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But he described himself as a free speech maximalist because before he started this.

[Kurt Schlichter]

He was the undersecretary of State for Public diplomacy. He started this censorship center. He was the former managing editor of Time magazine. And so he's talked about how he used to be a free speech maximalist back when he was in the media, and media companies benefited from that. But when Trump won the election in 2016, he became convinced that actually the First Amendment was a mistake. He actually openly advocated in the Washington Post in an op Ed, that we effectively end the first Amendment, that we copycat Europe's laws.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And then he wrote a whole book on it.

[Kurt Schlichter]

This is the guy who started effectively the country's first censorship center.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But then they did a really cute trick. They went from counterterrorism to counter populism. Now we've always had this ability since.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The 1940s to interfere in the domestic affairs of foreign governments or foreign countries, to topple communist countries. This was the whole cold, cold war counter communism work of the CIA and the State Department. But that was primarily targeting left wing communists or left wing socialists or left wing populist run countries.

[Michael Shellenberger]

When Trump won the election in 2016, this is one of the reasons I.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Think Republicans were so slow to move on all this.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They had never experienced the brunt of.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The intelligence state against the mainline GOP or at least the in power Trump faction of the GOP in the way that Democrats did in the 1960s and 70s when the CIA was actively interfering in Democrat party politics to try to tilt them away from the anti Vietnam movement and more into the sort of limousine liberal, international interventionalist, neoliberal camp.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And so in 2016, the global engagement center pivoted from being counterterrorism to counter populism, arguing that right wing populist governments, it wasn't just right wing, they were.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Also against left wing populists. But they simply never rose to power in the way that Trump did in the U.S. bolsonaro did in Brazil, Matteo Salvini did in Italy, Marine Le Pen almost did in France. Nigel Farage was on his way to in the UK and the Brexit referendum, the AfD party in Germany, the Vox.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Party in Spain in 2016, they were afraid that social media rising, all these right wing populist parties to power, would effectively collapse the entire rules based international order. Unless there was international censorship.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Because Brexit would give rise to Frexit if Marine Le Pen won and she.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Was massively overpowered on social media versus Macron.

[Kurt Schlichter]

If as I mentioned Italy, there was.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Going to be not just Brexit, there was going to be Frexit Spegs it italics it Grexit, Grexit. So the entire EU would come undone, which would mean all of NATO would come undone, which would mean there's no.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Enforcement arm for the IMF or the World bank or international creditors, which would.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Mean it would be like the ending scene of Fight Club where the credit.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Card company buildings all collapse just because.

[Michael Shellenberger]

You'Re allowed to shitpost on the Internet. And they talked about that quite openly.

[Kurt Schlichter]

In 2017, as they were creating this whole censorship infrastructure.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yeah, it was the final straw because.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The 2014 Crimea situation is.

[Michael Shellenberger]

I mean, the Pentagon was actively working.

[Kurt Schlichter]

With and funding these censorship operations through the entirety of Central and Eastern Europe starting in 2014. And then Brexit was a major event in that. Basically it was said to come to Western Europe at that point.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But when Trump won, that was, I guess, both the final straw and then.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The massive anvil that collapsed any residual resistance that existed within the national security state that we didn't need to do this.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And Russiagate really was the useful tool.

[Kurt Schlichter]

To drive that all through.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The fact that Trump came into office.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Under the barrel of a gun of a special prosecutor, openly alleging that he may be a Russian asset, effectively a Manchurian candidate of Russia, who only rose to power because of social media operations.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Being run by Russia, allowed that national.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Security predicate to carry forward this infrastructure.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And be massively funded by the Pentagon.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The State Department, the ic, the NGO.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Sphere, in order to set this infrastructure. But then in July 2019, Russiagate died on the vine immediately, as soon as.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Bob Mueller completely goofed his three hour testimony and a lot of people were.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Thinking before he took the stand that Trump was going to be in jail as a Russian asset because it was kept under such close hold for two and a half years. What was Bob Mueller doing? There's the SNL sort of fanfare around that. But then when it was revealed he had nothing, There was a moment in.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Time between July 2019 and September 2019.

[Michael Shellenberger]

When all of this could have been.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Shut down and we could have just called all that censorship work counterintelligence, a national security state thing.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But they did something really, really nasty.

[Kurt Schlichter]

At that point, which we now live in, the permanent aftermath of, which is.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They switched from a sort of counterintelligence.

[Kurt Schlichter]

National security threat from Russian interference predicate.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Which is useful because that gives you.

[Kurt Schlichter]

A blank check to use the Pentagon and the State Department, the ic, on.

[Michael Shellenberger]

This to a.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Domestic democracy predicate. Now, this is really, really nasty because it basically transitions censorship from being a.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Strictly military thing that we're doing to stop Russia to being a total permeating.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Apparatus over all civilian domestic affairs, regardless of whether there's a foreign threat.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And when that was allowed to go.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Unchallenged for effectively three years, up until Elon announced the acquisition of X. And that same month, the Disinformation Governance Board spilled over. And then Republicans won the house in November 2022, which then allowed congressional hearings on all this and the elevation of.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The Twitter files and the public awareness from that. But for three. You had this handoff from Russiagate. I call this the foreign to domestic switcheroo.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And if you're interested, Jamie, if you look up, not asking to, but if you're curious, I have a whole supercut.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Of what these people were saying from.

[Kurt Schlichter]

2016 to 2018 while the Russiagate investigation was going on to 2019, 2020, after Russiagate.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They do this foreign to domestic switcheroo.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Those are the key terms, if you're. Yeah, let's see if you're interested in that.

[Joe Rogan]

There's a compilation.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yeah, I did a compilation of all these DHS officials, State Department officials, Pentagon officials, completely changing their justification for why.

[Kurt Schlichter]

We need Internet censorship before Russiagate and after Russiagate.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And they switched from saying Russian disinformation is the threat. So that's why the Pentagon's involved. That's why the state and CIA and FBI is involved. Just saying. Well, actually, domestic disinformation is a threat to democracy. So regardless of whether it's the Russians or not, we need to censor Americans to preserve democracy. And this happened in tandem with.

[Joe Rogan]

What examples were they using to justify this?

[Michael Shellenberger]

Well, they pulled off a cute trick where they doctrinally redefined democracy to mean.

[Kurt Schlichter]

A consensus of institutions rather than individuals.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They had. When Trump won in 2016 and Brexit passed in 2016, they took this anti authoritarian toolkit which has for 80 years.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Been the CIA's predicate for overthrowing governments.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Really, since the 1910s, when Woodrow Wilson.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Announced that America's role is to make.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The world safe for democracy, we've long had a habit of intervening in foreign countries in order to liberate people from authoritarian control and bring them the gift of democracy. And that has always meant primarily that the government would represent the mass of individuals in the form of voting. When Trump won in 2016, at the same time that all these right wing populist parties who were just like Trump.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Also won between 2016 and 2018, primarily.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Using free speech on social media and their popularity there, they argued that right wing populism was the same authoritarian threat that left wing socialism, left wing communism was. And so they Said, well, populism is the people's ground up revolt against institutions, against government, science, media, against the NGOs, the experts, the academics. So what they did is they argued that democracy has to be defended from demagoguery. Democracy needs guardrails. We need bumper cars on democracy that.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Go beyond what people vote for, because.

[Michael Shellenberger]

People voted for Hitler, people voted for Trump. And they were doing this at US government conferences, by the way, in 2017.

[Kurt Schlichter]

I can show you some funny ones if you're interested.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But they were arguing that we need these institutional guardrails against people voting for the wrong person. And those institutional guardrails are so called democratic institutions, which is another cute rhetorical trick because that's the CIA, State Department watchword for asset. When usaid, for example, goes in and.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Funds university centers, media outlets.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Parliamentarian groups, activist groups, legal scholars, you name it, in a region, they are building up their assets to exert soft power influence.

[Kurt Schlichter]

On that society, on that government, in.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Order to influence the passage of laws.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The, you know, the span of operations that they're doing that touch the US.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Embassy in the region. And so what they argued is actually democracy is not about the will of individuals, it's about the consensus of institutions. So if there's institutional consensus building between the military, the diplomatic sphere, the intelligence community, the NGOs, the media outlets, the universities, that's really democracy. Those are the institutional guardrails, the people who know best. That's a difficult process, by the way. That's a process that takes months, years. That's why there are these major consensus building institutions like the Atlanta Council and the Council on Foreign Relations and Wilson center and the Carnegie Endowment. We have a whole suite of consensus building institutions to bring together the banks, the corporations, the government officials, the outside interests. So they all get on the same page about a certain policy or initiative or regional drive or industrial change. If at the end of that process, a bunch of people vote for a politician because he does funny TikTok videos or he's got a popular dance and throws a monkey wrench in those years of consensus building that they began to view as an attack on democracy. And so they said democracy is really about institutions. And you can actually look up, for example, Reid Hoffman in 2019. They were doing all of these conferences where they said elections are a threat to democracy. Elections, corrupt democracy, because we can't think of democracy as elections anymore. For example, Ukraine has banned elections. We don't. We still call, we still say we are providing $300 billion of military support to promote democracy in Ukraine, even though they don't have elections? Well, it's because of the. It's controlled by US institutions. You can look up something called the.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Red lines memo, by the way, on my account, if you're curious.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Michael Shellenberger]

Well, they've indefinitely canceled elections.

[Kurt Schlichter]

So he is.

[Joe Rogan]

Because of the war.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Because of the war is their argument.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Now.

[Kurt Schlichter]

We had elections during the civil war here in the US this is.

[Michael Shellenberger]

This.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Is not uncommon for countries to be.

[Michael Shellenberger]

At war and still have elections. The issue is Zelensky is unpopular and not winning in those election polls. And we no longer define democracy as being about elections because elections allow populists to circumvent the consensus of institutions. And if you want to see a great example of this, you can look.

[Kurt Schlichter]

At something called the Redlines memo, which is, I think I have it near the top of my ex account. Or you can look for just the phrase red lines memo.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And you will see Zelensky's first month in office he was given a threat.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Letter, effectively by the US State Department.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Where they had something like 70 US funded NGOs who wrote a letter to Zelensky telling him, ordering him not to cross the below listed red lines or else there will be political instability in your country. Now, political instability in the country caused by the US State Department is the reason Zelensky ultimately became president. The 2014 coup in Ukraine was US and UK orchestrated political instability to have a January 6th style mob destabilize the government and literally run it out of the country. And they gave him red lines on every single aspect of what he could do as president.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Security red lines, cultural red lines, energy policy.

[Joe Rogan]

What were these red lines like? Cultural red lines.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So for example, that he could not allow the use of Russian language to.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Be aired on any of the major Ukrainian media channels.

[Michael Shellenberger]

This was part of a drive by the US State Department in tandem with.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The censorship work that started at that.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Same time in order to prevent the sort of affinity, the sort of Russian affinity network that happens because of Russian propaganda spreading from Russian language news sources and to try to pry the country off of these Russian ethnicities faction and have essentially the Ukrainian dialogue.

[Joe Rogan]

This is in response for what happened in Crimea.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yes, yes, and Crimea and the Donbass, the whole eastern side breakaway. But this is effectively the long arm.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Of Langley, the long arm of the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

State Department and CIA telling Ukrainians that they can't, what kind of language they can use in their own country. Ukraine was effectively forced to transfer over its education ministry to an EU commissioning body so that, you know, Russian adjacent mythologies couldn't be taught in the country. They were told what industries they needed to privatize and to block any attempt to maintain sovereign control of those energy assets. This is ultimately what gave rise to.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The Burisma scandal, by the way, and the Hunter Biden State Department affairs that ran through all of that, which is a whole other fascinating topic, I should add. But the fact is.

[Joe Rogan]

Get back to that.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yeah, but this is every aspect of Ukrainian society effectively top down, controlled by democratic institutions funded by the US government. When it's stock standard, that the only reason we do that, he pays the piper, calls the tune. They're being funded to exert this soft power issue, this soft power force on the Ukrainian government. And Zelensky knows that force because the only reason he occupies the power that he does is because that force ushered him in through the sequence of events from Yatsenyuk in 2014 up to him. The issue is those are the institutions. By the way, that whole thing was run through something called the Ukraine Crisis Media center, which is effectively a suite of media institutions in the area that are CIA conduits, like the Kiev Independent, which is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. The National Endowment for Democracy is one of the most pernicious forces in the.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Entirety of the censorship industry.

[Michael Shellenberger]

You were talking with Mark and dreeson.

[Kurt Schlichter]

About NGOs and their role in Internet censorship, and he was, I think, fleshing out sort of the concept of a gongo, a government organized non governmental organization.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And so the National Endowment for Democracy is sort of posited as an ngo, but it's got a very curious history.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Again, this is what sponsors so much of Ukrainian media.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The National Endowment for Democracy was created.

[Kurt Schlichter]

In 1983 because of a dilemma that the new Ronald Reagan administration faced.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The CIA at that point in the.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Early 80s, its name was dirt.

[Michael Shellenberger]

There were the massive scandals in the.

[Kurt Schlichter]

1960S to the 1970s, everything from Operation.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Mockingbird to MK Ultra to Operation Chaos to effectively bribing student groups on college campuses. All sorts of the heart attack gun being held up in a public hearing at the church Committee in 1975 about ways the CIA was assassinating world leaders.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Assassinating journalists and political figures using methods that included a gun that would make it look like they organically died of a heart attack. All of these things gave rise to.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Jimmy Carter being elected in 1976. He was not expected to win in 76.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But he won on the back of Democrat mass outrage over the malfeasance of the national security state, the CIA. And so the following year, Carter does.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Something called the Halloween massacre.

[Michael Shellenberger]

He fires 30% of the CIA's operations.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Division in a single night.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And then he totally cripples the CIA's budget. Reagan gets to power after the Iran.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Hostage situation, wants the CIA's powers back.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But the Democrats were still hugely hostile to it.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The public still had not fully forgiven the CIA.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So they came up with a cute trick. And you can actually look at a September 1991 David Ignatius article called Spy Less Coups. This is in the Washington Post.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The article begins with a.

[Michael Shellenberger]

By saying that we don't even really need to have. We don't really even need to nominate.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Robert Gates, the Senate, the new CIA director for.

[Michael Shellenberger]

You know, we don't even need to do a Senate confirmation hearing for a.

[Kurt Schlichter]

CIA director anymore because the CIA is.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Effectively made obsolete by its new tactic.

[Kurt Schlichter]

That we use through NGOs spearheaded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And you'll find in that article a.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Quote by the National Endowment for Democracy's founder.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Carl Gershman, where he explicitly says that it would be a terrible thing.

[Kurt Schlichter]

For groups supported by the US government.

[Michael Shellenberger]

To be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We did that in the 1960s, and it worked out terribly for us when.

[Kurt Schlichter]

It turned out they were backed by the CIA.

[Michael Shellenberger]

That's why the National Endowment for Democracy was created, so that the CIA could effectively subsidize the groups without having CIA fingerprints on it. If you look at its legislative history, passed effectively a bill through Congress that Ronald Reagan approved. The origins of it come from the CIA director, William Casey in 1983, working directly with the US Attorney General, as well as an entire USAID blueprint.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The previous year.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The CIA requested this to be set up. It's funded entirely by the US Government. It's officially accountable to the House Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So it's funded by the government. It's literally accountable to a US Congressional committee. It was. The CIA director birthed it. The founder acknowledged that they were created to do what the CIA wants to do, but gets in trouble for doing. And we call this an ngo?

[Kurt Schlichter]

I don't think so.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And so the issue is the national noun for democracy and the entire intelligence community was they were the ones who led this conversion from counter communism to counter populism. They're the ones who, when Trump rose to power and when Brexit and the whole NATO EU country Domino started electing right wing populists who were hostile to the foreign policy establishment's consensus. And a lot of this has to do with energy, geopolitics and military interventionism.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And we can get to those if you want to go there.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But the NED has its octopus arms.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Around the entirety of the censorship industry.

[Michael Shellenberger]

If you want to see something really, really crazy, there's a video that we can watch. It's a two minute video from one of ned's global censorship programs where they explicitly work with foreign governments to get foreign governments to pass censorship laws to attack US companies. So this is the US government funding a CIA cutout to back channel with regulators and influencers and foreign countries to get those foreign countries to crush US national champions in the tech space. This is the exact opposite of what the State Department was set up in 1789 to do.

[Joe Rogan]

Where is this video? How can we see it?

[Michael Shellenberger]

If you. If you.

[Kurt Schlichter]

If you There you go.

[D]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa.

[Kurt Schlichter]

They're in 140 countries. It's entirely funded by the US government. I can break this down in detail.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So this CEPS program is basically in.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Large part the reason that the Brazil censorship state was erected.

[Michael Shellenberger]

This came a little bit later in.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The game, but it's a spawn out of this NED censorship network.

[Michael Shellenberger]

This explicitly created by the CIA director, self confessed, effectively CIA cutout. What CEPS does is they manage an umbrella portfolio of all of the censorship.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Institutions that they've capacity built in a region.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Capacity building is a, is a phrase in statecraft that effectively means building up an asset so that it has the.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Capability to be instrumentalized by the U.S. state Department.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So for example, whenever we're trying to.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Do something in a foreign country, the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

First thing we do is we look.

[Kurt Schlichter]

At the state of the chessboard.

[Michael Shellenberger]

What assets are on our side there, what political groups, what demographic groups, what.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Religious groups, what political parties, what universities.

[Michael Shellenberger]

What media institutions, what capacities do they currently have, what capacities do they need but don't have? And that is where the flood of State Department and USAID and NED funding comes in to capacity build them so.

[Kurt Schlichter]

That they can be instruments of US statecraft.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Now it doesn't mean they always use those capacities. Sometimes we create those capacities even if we don't intend to use them right.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Away, just in case we might need them later. And I can. That's a whole other fascinating field. But.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So what CEPS does is it's a joint program by the U.S. state Department.

[Kurt Schlichter]

USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy Now.

[Michael Shellenberger]

USAID is a very notorious, it's sort.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Of a switch player. There's no aid in usaid. By the way, your brain is being tricked when you see the phrase USAID. It's not an aid organization.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The aid in USAID stands for agent, U.S. agency for International Development. It is developing internationally around the world all of the institutions that the State Department needs to use. So when they are capacity building activist groups in a foreign country, that's because the State Department wants those activists there. Now USAID, for the first time in.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Its history, it was created in the early 1960s by JFK, 1961.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It was created because you had all of this intelligence statecraft and military support and logistical aid that was tripping over itself. Basically the military would be funding, you.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Know, would be running aid to certain.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Groups in the region. The State Department would be running aid to certain groups in the region, the intelligence community. And there was no way, there was no sort of central coordinator of those of those capacity building operations. USAID, by the way, is a $50 billion budget. The entirety of the intelligence community is only 72 billion. So it has more than the CIA and more than the State Department.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And aid is basically, USAID is effectively a switch player to assist the Pentagon on the national security front, to assist the State Department on the national interest.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Front, or to assist the intelligence community on a sort of clandestine operations front. So you can look up funny moments, by the way, in USAID being a CIA front.

[Michael Shellenberger]

If, for example, you want to pull.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Up the Wikipedia of Zunzanillo when USAID created basically a CIA Twitter in Cuba to try to convince the people of.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Basically to try to get a free speech Internet, a free speech Twitter knockoff.

[Kurt Schlichter]

In Cuba at a time when Twitter in 2014 was restricted and USAID laundered.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Money that was earmarked for Pakistan in order to create a identical version of Twitter, but just for Cuba and to recruit them, using messaging that at first involved music, sports and hurricane updates. And then in their own documents, once they had accumulated about 100,000 users, they would start to feed them in the algorithm messaging to make them want to overthrow their government and form smart mobs to bring a Cuban spring to Cuba in the same way that the CIA, the State Department and USAID pulled off the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, 2012. By the way, I'm not even opining.

[Kurt Schlichter]

On whether this is good or bad.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But you can't bring that home and.

[Kurt Schlichter]

You can't target US companies like they've done here.

[Michael Shellenberger]

USAID provides most of the money. The State Department provides the policy vision for the CEPS censorship program, and NED does the technical implementation work. Now, you saw in that video, there.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Were two organizations that were listed.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It didn't say they were the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute.

[Kurt Schlichter]

IRI and ndi.

[Michael Shellenberger]

These are the two political branches of.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The national down for Democracy.

[Michael Shellenberger]

When this CIA cutout was set up.

[Kurt Schlichter]

In 1983, they set up their four core fours.

[Michael Shellenberger]

One of them, the first two are the political cores, the IRI, the Republican.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The GOP wing of the CIA, effectively the NDI, the Democrat Party wing of the CIA.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And then two others, one called the center for International Private Enterprise, which is the Chamber of Commerce, is basically the CIA liaising with multinational companies with our.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Big US national champions.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And then the fourth one is called the Solidarity center, which is the CIA's.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Work with unions, which has been a part and parcel of our CIA work since the 1940s.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But these two political branches of the National Endowment for Democracy are designed to basically gel both sides of the political.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Aisle to make sure they have support for CIA activity in a region.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And so this, for example, there was a split on Russia between the GOP.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And the DNC up until Ukraine in 2014. You may recall in 2012, there was that debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama over Russia policy where Mitt Romney was flanking Obama from his sort of hawkish Russia. Right?

[Michael Shellenberger]

He was saying, Obama, you're soft on Russia.

[Kurt Schlichter]

You're letting Vladimir Putin get everything he.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Wants in Eastern Europe. And Obama's response was the 1980s called.

[Kurt Schlichter]

They Want their foreign policy back.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Because at the time, it was primarily the GOP economic stakeholders whose energy investments.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Were being sabotaged by Russian activity in Georgia and Azerbaijan.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It hadn't yet hit the NDI network, the DNC side of the economics, until Ukraine in 2014. That was when there became a bipartisan consensus on the need to effectively go to war and launch this big energy.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Sanctions operation against Russia.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And so there's that. So that's who's running that CEPS program. It's both sides of the political aisle, but both of them hate Trump. Both of them hate populists, whether it's the US with Trump, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and again, the whole suite of EU countries that we just talked about. And they descended on Brazil just two weeks after Bolsonaro was elected in 2018, the Atlanta Council and Ned held all these meetings about how Bolsonaro only won.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Because of basically social media, social media and end to end encrypted chats like WhatsApp and Telegram, and that we need to basically stop Bolsonaro's presidency in its.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Tracks and stop him from getting reelected by creating a censorship infrastructure in Brazil that is powerful and institutionally as wide.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And deep as our other diplomatic work.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So ndi, which I should note, Hunter.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Biden was on the chairman's advisory board of ndi, the DNC CIA wing. So if anyone is a little curious.

[Michael Shellenberger]

As to why the CIA intervened on.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The Justice Department investigation, folks, remember the IRS wanted to question Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's lawyer, who paid his taxes for five years. And then the CIA intervened and told.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Them, do not look into who is funding Hunter Biden. I find it curious that the CIA's DNC branch, Hunter Biden, was on the chairman's advisory board. But so NDI sets up this sprawl.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Of coalitions called D4D, Design for Democracy.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And Design for Democracy, in tandem with this CEPS program, goes on to work with the Censorship Court de Morias, the.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Censorship Voldemort on their TSE court, basically the election management and censorship body of their Supreme Court. This is the guy who has gone to war with Elon Musk.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They help that censorship court set up a disinformation task force and their own institutional assets get put on the advisory committee of the Brazilian Censorship Court to direct the censorship policies of that of the same institution that banned X from Brazil, that seized starlink's assets. They worked with the universities, fgv, DAP and other very significant Brazilian universities. They set up disinformation centers in there and got academic thought leadership published in Brazil about the need to pass anti misinformation laws. Their own NDI fellows and operatives were publicly testifying to the Brazilian Parliament on the need to pass these laws. They were publicly speaking to the prosecutors association groups in Brazil telling them they need to prosecute misinformation on this. They were funding millions of dollars to Brazilian media institutions to promote Internet censorship and to promote the banning effectively of any pro Bolsonaro content on social media or on end to end encrypted chats. The USAID then kicked in millions of dollars of funding to internews, which is another US government funded media projection arm to promote media literacy programs, information integrity.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Programs, countering MIS and disinformation programs in Brazil.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So at every level, Brazilian media companies.

[Kurt Schlichter]

They partnered with Globo, for example, the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Largest media outlet in Brazil. The media institutions, the universities and thought leaders, the politicians, the judges, it was full spectrum. It was the same thing that we do when we try to regime change a country. By the way, this is in USAID's charter. This is one of the reasons they're able to get away with this. In USAID's charter it allows US aid to capacity build assets to do so called judiciary reform, which means influencing the laws and the structure of the judges and to be able to have our foreign aid money get laws passed or get structural changes made to the made to the court system there. And this is what seps did, this State Department, CIA front censorship organization, they, they developed a strategy they called EMBs, election management bodies which is basically focusing in on the court system of different countries that are in charge with adjudicating elections in order to get them to grow a censorship capacity to censor the ability for people to question their elections. And they had all these stakeholder meetings. Some of them are really funny, some of them, they said, well some of our EMB partners didn't want to actually didn't think they could pull this off. They couldn't convince the other political stakeholders in their country to grow the censorship capacity and they advised them about how they could cleverly use rhetoric to disguise the programs. Don't call it a counter disinformation program if you think that will ruffle too many feathers. Instead, simply call it strategic communications. Listen, every government agency has some sort of public affairs branch, some sort of communications capacity. Simply say that this is for monitoring and engaging in strategic communications and then you can mass flag the accounts of the U.S. state Department's political opponents. They want to stop from winning the election.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Kurt Schlichter]

Lockstep because we waited too long.

[Michael Shellenberger]

We waited too long and now look, it's, it's not full blown.

[Kurt Schlichter]

This has not yet reached full maturity where we are at complete 1984 on all of this, but it is no longer in its infant stage.

[Michael Shellenberger]

There was if, if Elon had, if Congress was aware of that CISA, that cybersecurity branch at DHS was the real Ministry of Truth in 2019 instead of in 2022. If people were aware of the State Department's Global engagement Center and USAIDS, democracy, human rights and governance, and all this in 2018, 2019 when it was really getting its feet down. It may have been easy to have.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Been pulled out at the roots then.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Because they were skittish at the time.

[Kurt Schlichter]

About going through with this. At first.

[Michael Shellenberger]

You heard in that video that we.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Just watched a reference to this phrase called whole of society. This is another funny, funny video. If you want to just pull up though, if you're interested, Jamie, and if you think, Joe, this is appropriate, I could have made this a six hour supercut.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But if you just, I made a.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Two hour super cute of.

[Michael Shellenberger]

If you just look up whole of.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Society supercut on my, on my X account, you'll see this.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And this phrase is their get out.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Of jail free card.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So when these CIA cutouts and State.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Department emissaries and you know, the whole.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Apparatus of the Blob had this apparition.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Moment in 2016 where the rules based international order would collapse and we have.

[Michael Shellenberger]

To stop populism, we have to stop Trump from, you know, ending RC's Eurasia foreign policy. When that happened, they had a lot of Self reflection where they said china doesn't have this problem, Russia doesn't have this problem. Authoritarian countries don't have to deal with.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The threat of insurgent populist groups radically.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Altering that country's foreign policy, that country's national security state. But they do it all top down. And our entire diplomatic apparatus is arrayed as a sort of dichotomy between democracy and autocracy because that's what lets us go and take over or overthrow or regime change. Foreign countries is they're autocracies and we're bringing democracy to them. So we can't be seen to look like the autocracies we're trying to overthrow. We want the. We want the autocratic outcome with a. But we don't. We can't be seen to use the autocratic process. So they came up with a really cute trick to prevent the top down perception. And they called this the whole of.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Society counter misinformation framework. The Whole of Society counter Misinformation Alliance.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And the reason I thought it'd be.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Funny to just play this clip before.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Delving into it a little bit more is because it actually starts with a clip from cisa, the cybersecurity turned cyber censorship DHS internal meeting where the CISA censorship official leading the meeting apologizes for using the phrase whole of society. Because by that point everyone is so sick of hearing it. It's like a mantra, like an incantation.

[Kurt Schlichter]

That has to be recited almost like a religious ritual.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Because this is how you get this government, private sector, civil society, media alliance. This thing was completely orchestrated top down to avoid the appearance of top down. In 2017, they borrowed this concept from their military counterinsurgency work and they simply grafted it onto censorship.

[Kurt Schlichter]

But I don't know.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Do you want to just like watch this?

[Kurt Schlichter]

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

[Michael Shellenberger]

If you just look for the phrase.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Whole of society at Mike Bencyber.

[Joe Rogan]

I did.

[Michael Shellenberger]

You could also.

[Kurt Schlichter]

I found a lot of issues talking about it.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Well, if you go to in my.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Highlights tab and scroll down, I think you'll see it there. It's supercut. I use the phrase supercut if that's helpful to highlight it.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But whole society is this concept that the government will fund allies to astroturf. The appearance of a spontaneous democratic surround sound around the need to do the censorship work. So the. So there are four quadrants in their whole society framework. Government meaning all the different government. They have a whole of government side.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Of that, which is everything from the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

State Department, the DHS HHS for Covid censorship work. You know, FBI, doj, National Science foundation, all that. The private sector are the private sector companies, the social media tech platforms where the censorship actually takes place. The civil society quadrant means university censorship centers.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Disinformation studies is what they call it. Misnomer of the century.

[Michael Shellenberger]

There's now about 100 U.S. universities.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Every major U.S. university has a censorship center.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It'll be called disinformation studies.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Sometimes it'll be tucked under their sociology department or their communications, even their applied.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Physics when they do AI censorship. So you have the universe in the civil society layer. You have the universities, the NGOs, the activist groups, the independent nonprofit foundations. And then the fourth quadrant is media, which is the government working with media.

[Kurt Schlichter]

To promote censorship of U.S. citizens.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And so by effectively wielding all these assets so that there's government funding and government coordination. But technically most of the pressure being put on the tech companies is coming from.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Yeah, here you go. You can watch just like a funny super cut. We don't need to watch the whole thing, but you'll get the picture very quickly. And we hear this term all the time. A problem like disinformation, fighting disinformation really requires a whole society response. And I know whole society is a little bit cliche and a term that.

[Joe Rogan]

Gets thrown around a lot.

[D]

Addressing disinformation requires a whole of society approach.

[E]

Disinformation is not going to be fixed.

[Michael Shellenberger]

By governments acting alone. I think we've seen that a whole of society effort is really key to the solution. There are some countries, more so in.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Europe or up in other parts of.

[Michael Shellenberger]

North America that are more progressive in recognizing that this is a whole society challenge, whole of society approach. What would be your wish list if.

[Kurt Schlichter]

You could implement anything or to be able to trust when somebody tells them it's fake. Is there anything that governments can do on that front?

[Michael Shellenberger]

Absolutely. This is a whole of society problem. So there's things that governments can do. Individual, national governments and multilateral institutions. Disinformation challenges democracy require that we work together as a community to share our experiences and to hold governments, social media platforms and political leaders accountable for making sure that people are empowered with information that is real and accurate. Democracy depends on a healthy information space that can only be achieved through a whole of society effort. Countering disinformation. We often talk about a whole of society response. Of course we need disinformation. A whole of society approach. I want to get into the quote, whole of society response, that whole of society network response, private sector, public Sector civil society means that we're circulating. And that to me is the whole of society approach.

[D]

I think the solution has to be.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Whole of society, which is the word.

[D]

That we throw around a lot, especially in venues like these.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Right. We need cooperation from the tech platforms.

[D]

Good faith cooperation and inform enforcement of terms of service.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But we also need people in the.

[D]

Government who are willing to say, yes, this is a problem and it's not just about foreign actors.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Okay, so a few things on that. If you remember the CEPS video, the CIA Front Ned program to get censorship.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Laws in 140 countries.

[Michael Shellenberger]

If you remember there was one of those nine things they read off is that the US government needs to capacity build these counter misinformation institutions in civil society because the government has the money and the resources, but not the credibility. Civil society organizations, the universities, the NGOs, they've got the credibility, but not the money. So that's part of what they're saying here with the role of this civil society is they can't be. The government can't be seen as telling everyone to do all of this censorship because that's authoritarian. That would look not credible. That would look authoritarian for the government to do. So we've got the muscle and the money, but not the credibility. Our cutout organizations have the credibility, but not the money and the muscle. So we're going to give them the money and the muscle. And so I can show you, if you want to see what this looks like in action, I can show you some great videos that sort of show this. So if you just look up wisedex, it's in my highlights. It's also if you just do ikebencyber, wisedexpo show you a couple of things.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Of how this works.

[Michael Shellenberger]

When Jamie's able to pull that up.

[Kurt Schlichter]

You'Re saying wise dex.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Wise dex. W I S E D E X And so Trump did something really ambitious.

[Kurt Schlichter]

When he was president at the National Science Foundation.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The National Science foundation is the main.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Funder of higher education in the United states. It's a $10 billion pool of money that goes to fund university centers.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And it is sort of the civilian arm of darpa. It's technically a sort of civilian foundation for science. But if you look at its history, it basically has a. It's when military technology becomes dual use.

[Kurt Schlichter]

For commercial and civilian purposes.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So for example, the Internet itself started off as darpa in the 60s. Then it was transferred to the National.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Science foundation for civilian effectively management.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Then it made its way to the World Wide Web. That's why the National Science foundation has.

[Kurt Schlichter]

A 15% quota on national security related projects.

[Michael Shellenberger]

All the technical implementers of the censorship programs at the National Science foundation come from darpa, including this that I'm going to show here. Trump created this thing in his first term at the National Science foundation called.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The Convergence Accelerator Program.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And the idea was is that we were going to converge scientists from different fields to solve these home run swing.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Challenges like cold fusion and all the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Quantum mechanics challenges that required physicists to talk to data scientists and network modelers and bringing them all together so that they could all converge on a common problem. So he set up about five of these tracks. In 2019, Biden gets into office. His first year in office, his National Science foundation creates a new track. It's called Track F. And the whole thing is for countering misinformation to converge scientists on developing censorship technology to censor the Internet at scale. So they have spent tens of millions of dollars. This one that we're about to watch was eligible for $5.7 million from the National Science Foundation. It received $750,000 from the National Science foundation to create this. This is the promo video that they put up on YouTube in connection with their grant. So I'll just let it play and.

[F]

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

[Joe Rogan]

So, so COVID 19 was essentially like a proof of concept of all this, right? Like this is a. This is something they could utilize and see how everything works. Because you have this sort of consensus among most people because of the media narrative that this is dangerous, we're all going to die. The thing that's fucking us up is these people who are vaccine deniers and these people who are believing things that are ridiculous, like natural immunity. And so you have like a public support of this thing to go full scale where they can try it out with COVID 19, where there was no real specific narratives that we thought of wholly as problematic as a society before COVID 19, COVID 19 became one that at least a large swath of society believed. The narrative that's being given to you by corporate news and this was the thing that they could combat on social media and have support for this type of censorship.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They had already begun doing it for.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Hate speech before COVID 19.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It didn't hit the scale though. But they were already using hate speech.

[Kurt Schlichter]

As a proxy for populism, both in the US and across NATO. And they were conflating everything with hate speech. Basically, if you opposed open borders in the US or in Italy or in Germany or in the uk.

[Michael Shellenberger]

In fact, that's why the US Justice Department funded Hate Lab.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Want to see another crazy video from all this? I'm not saying we have to pull it up. This was not.

[Joe Rogan]

Let's pull it up.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Fuck it. Yep, look up the Hate Lab, their video on their AI Scan and ban dashboard.

[Joe Rogan]

For a group, all of this is just a large scale implementation of censorship. Just using all these different things to get people accustomed to it and to try to start using this full scale.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yes. Actually, before we go to the Hate Lab, I do want to dwell on this Covid thing for a second because that's exactly right on what we just watched with wisedex. Just coming back to this whole society concept. So this is the National Science Foundation. The administrators for this are both DARPA guys. It is funding the University of Michigan to create an AI censorship claims database so that the censorship policies that the Biden Administration strong armed onto these social.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Media companies, as we know from Mark Zuckerberg and others, to adopt in the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

First place, so that there's no escape. Every claim that a COVID vaccine skeptic says will be mapped out in a sort of lexicon code book of terms and claims that will then be automatically flagged. And the National Science foundation does not want to be seen as having the government tell the private sector companies to do it. So it is capacity building a civil society nonprofit, a University of Michigan disinformation lab, to create this AI censorship technology to then sell to the social media platforms to make sure there's no escape in terms of the ability to criticize government policy on Covid without getting censored. But just to drive home that point on Covid censorship, this is something that I think is really terrifying that people.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Should be aware of.

[Michael Shellenberger]

There's a company called Graphica which figures.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Very heavily in all of the censorship industry.

[Michael Shellenberger]

If you pull up Graphica's April 2020 report on Covid and Covid conspiracy theories, it's also on my timeline, if you look up the word Graphica, it's G.

[Kurt Schlichter]

R A P H I K A.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Graphica is a longtime military contractor that did social media monitoring, surveillance and analytics.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Work for the US military and intelligence in order to see what narratives, opposition, you know, various political movements or insurgent groups are saying on social media.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They were formally a part of the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative. The Minerva Initiative is the psychological Operations.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Research center of the Pentagon.

[Michael Shellenberger]

When the Pentagon is trying to do information shaping operations and they solicit propositions and ideas and thought leadership from outside organizations to help the military achieve psychological.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Operations outcomes that are favorable to the intended military policy.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So Grafica has gotten over $7 million in Pentagon grants. It was formerly a part of the Pentagon's Psychological Operations Research center. And Grafica was one of the very first entities to begin the censorship around.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The world of COVID 19.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Given the strange unresolved role of the Pentagon in potentially giving rise to COVID 19 or the strangeness of the DARPA.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Grants around there and the military networks.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Around the biosecurity state, Grafica began their work before COVID 19 even got its name. They started in their own source documents.

[Kurt Schlichter]

They say they started December 16th. The pneumonia like symptoms did not begin were December 12th, 2019. So just four days after.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Now they've said later that actually we started in January 2020, but we backdated our data, our AI, you know, ingestion of all the tweets and Facebook posts in January 2020. So even if you accept that that is still just one month after Covid broke out. And if you pull this, if you pull up their April 2020 report, you will see that they've, they've literally scanned. Yeah, this is the one and I have a highlighted version of it by.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The way.

[Michael Shellenberger]

On my X account as well. So if you scroll up, if you start on page one, I'll sort of walk you through this. So again, this is a Pentagon funded psychological operations research arm of the Pentagon. And you'll see it's called the COVID 19 infodemic. So they published this in April 2020.

[Kurt Schlichter]

After Covid got its name, but they.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Started this before it did. And if you scroll down to I think page five here, you'll see so this is by the way an AI generated network map of all people expressing skepticism about the origins of COVID and different conspiracy theories. So if you scroll down to page five, it says a key analytical habits of these maps. Okay so you'll see that they so similarly large mega clusters of US right wing accounts. We're diminishing the mainstreaming of the coronavirus conversation. If you scroll down to the next one, you see they've dedicated coronavirus disinformation map seeded on disinformation specific hashtags reels that conservative groups had a larger total presence of COVID heterodox opinions. This is right at the outbreak. One month into it, a Pentagon funded Psyops firm is doing political mapping. Not in the US in the uk in Italy. So they found that disproportionately. It's conservatives who need to be censored more. If you just scroll down through this, I'll show you some highlights.

[Joe Rogan]

What was this in regard. This was disinformation in regard to the origin at this point?

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yes. And you can run a control F.

[Joe Rogan]

Which is wild that they were already countering when the origin was not really disclosed yet. And you're still being debated.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Right. And you'll see they even so again, this is the Pentagon creating network maps. We're paying for this effectively to protect the political the online reputation of Bill Gates and George Soros. You'll see they have a whole section on if you just run a control F for Gates or Soros, you'll see this as well. But you'll see that they map these different conspiracy. How much would Bill Gates or George Soros need to pay a cloak and dagger public relations shop to scour the entire Internet and create targetable, censorable demographic communities that Social media should censor in order to protect their reputation. This is us paying the Pentagon to pay a PsyOps firm to protect the reputation of Bill Gates and George Soros from conspiracy theories online. And they did the same thing with COVID origins. They did the same thing with vaccines. The same group, Graphica was a part of something called the Virality Project, which mapped out 66 different claims of if you questioned COVID vaccine efficacy, if you question masks and their efficacy, if you question policies around lockdowns. All of that was systematically mapped. All four of the entities involved in.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The Virality Project, by the way, were.

[Michael Shellenberger]

US government funded in terms of at the organizational level.

[Kurt Schlichter]

University of Stanford and the University of Washington, who were two of those four.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Received a joint $3 million grant from the National Science foundation, which again is.

[Kurt Schlichter]

This basically civilian side of DARPA.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Grafica has received 7 million in Pentagon funds. And then the nastiest one of them all is this group, the Atlantic Council, which gets annual funding, over a million dollars a year from the Pentagon, over a million dollars a year from the State Department.

[Kurt Schlichter]

It also gets annual funding from the CIA cutout.

[Michael Shellenberger]

National Endowment for Democracy gets annual funding from usaid. Basically every web of US cloak and dagger intelligence and diplomatic funding funds the Atlantic Council. Every year the Atlantic Council has seven.

[Kurt Schlichter]

CIA directors on its board of directors.

[Michael Shellenberger]

A lot of people don't know seven former number one heads of the CIA are still alive, let alone all locally clustered on the exact organization which is the premier heavyweight in Internet censorship around the world. And the Atlantic Council. And I can show you some wild.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Clips of that, by the way, including.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Them training journalists on what to censor.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, I need to see that.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Yeah.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Okay, so if you pull up, you can find this Also if you look for on Rumble NATO training journalists, you'll see that.

[Joe Rogan]

Is rumble the only place you can put that up right now?

[Michael Shellenberger]

No, I have it on my ex account. I actually have a 45 minute video. I have a 45 minute video that.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Goes through it and all the supporting receipts. That's got I think almost 3 million views right now.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But there's a two minute, there's like a two to four minute video. If you look at Atlantic Council censorship journalists or the videos and I can tell you the source video, it's called I call bullshit. This was in June 2019, right on the heels of the Bob Mueller investigation. The Atlantic Council again with seven CIA directors on its board and annual funding.

[Kurt Schlichter]

From the State Department.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Pentagon does this 360 meeting where they bring in journalists and fact Checkers from all over the world to come to this. I mean, it looks like something straight.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Out of Dr. Strangelove.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And Jamie, let me know if you.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Have trouble pulling it up, because I can send me down. Too many. Adding what you added pulled up what you were talking about on other podcasts. That's not what I'm looking for. So I have to.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It's definitely. I think it's definitely searchable, easily on.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Rob Blackshit wanted to load this up, but.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And I can. I can tell you the exact. If you just. Look, it's called. I call bullshit is what it was.

[Kurt Schlichter]

By Ben Nimmo, the Atlanta Council. I'll just show you what I'm seeing because every time I type in what you're saying, it just brings up, you talk.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Okay. Okay. How about Atlantic Council? Atlantic Council? Journalists.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Or training? Yeah, journalists. Oh, yeah, yeah, I think you need.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yeah.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Still probably gonna bring up what.

[G]

You talked about on other ones, though.

[Kurt Schlichter]

There you go.

[Michael Shellenberger]

That. That's the top one. Okay, so. So here you go.

[Joe Rogan]

Censorship training session.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yes. So can I tell you a little backstory on this?

[Joe Rogan]

Real Trump tweets, Brexit slogans. Yeah, give me some Brexit slogans.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Okay, all right, so if you pause. Wait, if you pause right there on.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The, on the thumbnail. If you just see it real quick.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Okay, so I found this video in 2019. You know, my, like my whole life has been 24.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Seven, morning, noon, night, tracking, watching.

[Michael Shellenberger]

I know these people closer than my.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Own friends and family.

[Michael Shellenberger]

This is, you know, I found this video, I think at around the five.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Or six hour mark of a day. Two of.

[Michael Shellenberger]

I found this, I think at five or six hour mark of a nine.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Hour video in June 2019.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Where this is basically the month before the Bob Mueller investigation. And they wanted to pre censor and throttle Trump's ability to be able to fight off charges that he was a Russian asset. Because at the time, the Pentagon and the intelligence community want him out. If you remember, the Ukraine impeachment in 2019 came from Sia Morella. The CIA agent came from the Vindman brothers, who were the military. Basically. Trump had a big beef with the.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Existing brass at the Pentagon and the intelligence community over Russia policy, over Eurasia policy, which is a whole thing that we can maybe talk about if you're interested.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The Atlanta Council was one of the very, very, very first movers in the censorship industry space. I mentioned how this really started in 2014 with 25 years of free speech diplomacy.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Sort of ended with the 2014 Ukraine fiasco.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Because of this Gerasimov Doctrine hybrid warfare thing. And I mentioned that that's when NATO began setting down infrastructure just to censor the Internet.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And that's what snowballed into what we now have.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And so the Atlantic Council effectively bills itself as NATO's think tank. That's what it's known as in Washington.

[Kurt Schlichter]

There's places like the Council on Foreign.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Relations are sort of more known for chamber of commerce and big business sort of working on government policy. The Atlantic Council is one of these. That's for NATO, and it's basically NATO's clandestine civilian sort of civil military arm. When there's a NATO military agenda that needs massaging at the political level, they need laws passed, they need sanctions put in place, they need capacity building on the civilian side to help a military thing. That's what the Atlanta Council primarily does. And I'm not even opining on whether much of what they do. I'm not even saying good or bad organization, but they set up something called the Digital Forensics Research Lab right at, you know, basically right on the heels of the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, counter coup. And it was one of the earliest NATO, US military liaised Internet censorship shops that targeted populist governments. Trump, the whole uk, Italy, Germany, Spain network that I talked about. Bolsonaro right out the gate. And so this video was again right before russiagate ended. And they thought they could put Trump in prison with this. And this was a training session that they did for journalists and fact checkers in June 2019. You'll see this session is an interactive session. It's called I Call Bullshit. By the way, Ben Nimmo, he's at the Atlantic Council on this one. But he goes on shortly after this to be effectively the technical lead for Grafica. The same Pentagon, by the way, he had started his career in the NATO press shop, basically doing media work for NATO. Then he goes over and again, we fund all of this, but let's just watch and we'll show you this.

[E]

Who works in this space will, I think, acknowledge that in any information operation, it's not just lies. You take a grain of truth and they will build a pearl of disinformation around it. When we're in this space, there isn't a simple binary true or false. There are all kinds of shades of meaning in between. Now, there are various different ways of modeling how you can identify the ways in which people are trying to twist the story.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Wait for it.

[E]

This gets good because it's short and because, frankly, I developed it, is the four Ds. Dismiss, distort, distract and dismay. These are the four responses that we see time and again.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Not false. None of these are false. How can we get censored?

[G]

Anyway, all of you should have some of these cards on the table. If you don't look on another table and steal one that's not being used, because these are going to help get our attention. We are going to go through a set of slides showing quotes from different organizations and individuals who are using certain rhetorical devices to make their argument. And so if you go through all of them, at least one of these four will apply again. Dismiss, distort, distract, dismay. Everyone, say it with me. Dismiss, distort, distract, dismay.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Excellent.

[G]

You're welcome to scream. I call bullshit too, if you're comfortable, but it's not.

[Kurt Schlichter]

It's all funded by US taxpayers.

[G]

With that, let's.

[Joe Rogan]

Witch hunt.

[Michael Shellenberger]

How can you censor the sitting president arguing that what he said is disinformation? How can you tell the tech platforms that that tweet is disinformation?

[G]

Thank you.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Get creative. Obviously, it can be any number of the Ds. You can say it's distorting what they're saying or distracting them from whatever the issue is saying. The issue isn't real. They're just after. To me, because as they're witches and.

[Kurt Schlichter]

It'S evil, I'm the injured party here.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So it could be a whole lot of them. Trump's got a nice range when it comes to disinformation.

[G]

Does anyone have a number one pick that they would like to mention related to this one? They said dismiss. Dismissed.

[E]

Other voices.

[G]

How many of you think. Dismissed. Raise your card, please. I think we're onto something here.

[E]

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

[G]

Number two.

[E]

Getting topical here.

[Michael Shellenberger]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Distort.

[E]

Any other takers? Any suggestions?

[G]

Let's ask how many of you think this one has distort involved?

[Joe Rogan]

Jesus Christ, that's a lot.

[G]

Any other.

[Joe Rogan]

They seem so happy to comply.

[G]

We've got a big hand over here.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Let's.

[G]

Oh, were you just. You just kept your hand up? Her hand goes back down. Are there any Others. Are we just going to stick with that one? Yes, ma'am. Right here. Distract. Ah, okay. So for those who couldn't hear, it's also distract because it's trying to focus attention on the NHS rather than the vote itself.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yeah. So, okay, one more example. So this, this goes on, but what you'll see is this is the exact political adversary group that the intelligence, diplomatic and military structure is trying to stop. Donald Trump, Brexit in the uk. And if you ever wondered why is it that everyone got all on board and suddenly started doing this altogether, they were literally having years of these consensus building. You want to get your career made if you're at the Poynter Institute or the International Fact Checking Union, or if you're on the disinformation beat for the Washington Post, NPR or Le Monde in France, or the Frankfurt Allgemeiner in Germany, you get your bonafides by going to these and you get effectively accredited by the Blob. And they are literally training people to find creative ways to mass flag. You can't even run a Brexit ad saying, hey, we should be spending $350 million on ourselves rather than the EU. That's disinformation, not false. They're saying it's not false. There's any number of ways that we can use to put pressure on the tech platforms to call this disinformation. You're hosting disinformation simply because it's not the agenda item that we want here. And again, the seven CIA directors currently on the board of that organization, those placards reading I call bullshit were paid for by us.

[Joe Rogan]

It's just wild to watch everybody happily comply, enthusiastically try to find ways that this makes any sense with no one having a counter narrative, no one standing up and going, wait a minute, who's to decide? What if it turns out it is and it was a witch hunt? Now, we know all that Russiagate stuff was 100% bullshit. So he was correct, right?

[Michael Shellenberger]

But remember, the Mueller disaster wouldn't happen till just the following month. So at the time they thought, great, if we can get him censored around calling this a witch hunt, then once the findings come in, he's going to be cornered. He won't even be able to defend. It'll be like an Internet gag order, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Headline readers and low information voters overwhelmingly believed it, right?

[Michael Shellenberger]

Now I should note that this is another thing Elon was a huge game changer on. A lot of these people did not begin to sort of navel gaze and self reflect on this until there was.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Political and social blowback.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The fact is there were a lot.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Of these people who in 2017, 2018, were looking around at these.

[Michael Shellenberger]

I've watched thousands of hours of these consensus building meetings. They literally, there would be some debate in 2017 about whether or not we should do this tactic or whether or not this goes too far. And I watched as these people basically let those early inhibitions go as the thing took wings and as the money poured in, because that's why I always emphasize the censorship industry. If you get rid of the money, you get rid of the glamour, you.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Get rid of the career track, you.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Get rid of the power, you get.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Rid of the networks.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And so to me, the fact is, if these people could not have their.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Careers made by doing this, they wouldn't.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Be pursuing those careers. But when Elon arrived on the scene and Congress began to take action and media began to report on it, and the Twitter files spilled open and the Murthy Missouri lawsuit, spearheaded by the Missouri and Louisiana state attorney generals, put this in the court system. And America First Legal, Stephen Miller and Gina Hamilton's group began to. I mean, it wasn't really until there started to be a whole society freedom network on the other side of this that the moral ambivalences that were expressed in the beginning began to reassert themselves. And I think there is some self reflection on that. You know, it's funny, in 2022, Harvard wrote this piece.

[Kurt Schlichter]

I covered it at my foundation.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It was called Disinformation Studies is Too Big to Fail. And they made the argument, this is.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Right before the bottom fell out on this stuff. September, October 2022 Harvard Misinformation Review. Disinformation Studies is too big to Fail.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They made the argument we've arrived. It took a while in the beginning of it. They say the catalyst for this entire field was the 2016 election. Basically, we created this entire spanning octopus.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Of censorship work because Trump won the election in 2016.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Now it's 2022. We've gone unchallenged for six years, and now if they want to get rid of us, they can't. They were making the argument that they were basically like Citibank during the 2008.

[Kurt Schlichter]

2009 financial crisis, that they were simply.

[Michael Shellenberger]

A bank that's too big to fail. Because now they are so deeply ingrained.

[Kurt Schlichter]

In the media disinformation beat.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They're so deeply ingrained in the private sector interstitials, working with all the trust and safety people at every platform, they're so deeply funded by 12 different US government departments and 50 different US government programs. There's no way to get rid of us, even if you want to. That's what they were stunting on right before Elon finished the acquisition of X and Republicans won the house in 2022. And all this went in reverse.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And now you'll see just this week in the news that there's quotes about.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Them wanting to flee the country and that the whole field is potentially in disarray if Trump does indeed go forward and defund this. Because now you're going to have 100 university centers gone.

[Kurt Schlichter]

There goes your State Department funding, there goes your NSF funding. And I have a great example of that, by the way. That's pretty eye opening on our topic of institutions. That's a quick receipt if you're interested.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Sure.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So, yeah, feel free to guide Jamie.

[Joe Rogan]

Any way you want.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Yeah.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So, Jamie, if you go to the Arizona State University Global Security Initiative, I'm.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Going to show you some of this in action, a little bit.

[Joe Rogan]

Arizona State University Global.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Very vague. I just want to go to their website. Go to.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Oh yeah, Google. Yeah, Google. Okay, Google. Arizona State University center on Narrative Disinformation and Strategic Influence.

[Joe Rogan]

Disinformation and strategic what?

[Kurt Schlichter]

Influence. Yeah, we're just. Arizona State University Center Narrative. Yes. And just go to their website.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yeah, just go to the website. If you pull it up. So this, so this is. If you click on Global Security Initiative. I'm just going to show you an example real quick. Just click on the top thing. This is Global Security Initiative. And then you will hit the back button in a second. But if you scroll down. So this is Arizona State University.

[Kurt Schlichter]

This is basically John McCain University.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Now this is significant because John McCain was the founder, the founding president.

[Joe Rogan]

Isn't it funny of the IR picture, the girl with the mask is wearing it wrong. Her nose is exposed.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Oh my gosh.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, it just kind of shows you how fucking stupid all this stuff is.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Exactly right.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, they had to have her wearing a mask still, even in 2024. You go to the website, she's wearing a mask and she's wearing it wrong. Her nose is exposed. Not only that, it's a surgical mask. It's the dumbest one, the one that provides zero, literally zero protection, especially with your nose open.

[Michael Shellenberger]

No, that's fantastic. A few things as background, Arizona State.

[Kurt Schlichter]

University, its current president, Michael Crow, is.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Now and was, since the day it.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Was born in 1999, the chairman of In Q Tel. In Q Tel is the CIA's venture capital arm.

[Michael Shellenberger]

This is literally the CIA's proprietary investments.

[Kurt Schlichter]

In early stage technology companies.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And the head of Arizona State University.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Its president is the chairman of In Q Tel and has been for 25 years.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Arizona State University has these very deep.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Partnerships with John McCain who was the senator from Arizona. John McCain who ran for president against Barack Obama in 2008, was the before.

[Michael Shellenberger]

He ran for president in 2008. For 25 years he was the founder and the president of the iri, the CIA wing of the Republican Party. Again, the IRI is the GOP side of the National Endowment for Democracy.

[Kurt Schlichter]

That's effectively self declared CIA cutout.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And in fact Arizona State University has.

[Kurt Schlichter]

A John McCain center on Disinformation that.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Works in tandem with this one. But I just wanted to show that you'll see this is technically it's Arizona State University, but you'll see that it is an intelligence program. So if you scroll up for a second, you'll see at the bottom right. This is a program at Arizona State University that is an intelligence program. Its job is to assist the intelligence community with this work. And if you scroll down and you can scroll down from here, you'll see the different branches and then click on the one narrative disinformation, strategic influence. Now this program has a $1.6 million.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Grant from the Pentagon to do censorship work.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It has $300,000 in grants from the State Department. It's got another almost $500,000 worth of.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Additional government grants from adjacent US government diplomatic, statecraft, intelligence folks.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So this is a multimillion dollar censorship center currently still up and running at Arizona State University, funded by us. Now if you click on why is disinformation dangerous? I want to show you something real quick because this language is everywhere. This is stock standard language. Why do we have this set up? Disinformation sows confusion and distrust, diminishing people's faith and confidence in the institutions that are critical to a functioning, healthy democracy, such as government, news media and science. I'm going to pause right there. The dirty tricks that this is laden with is what allows them to get away with this. So note that they are saying that they have set up this apparatus and we can get. I can show you the different projects they're involved with on the censorship side, but the issue they're saying is not that something's wrong, but that people's the simple act of diminishing public faith and confidence in the news media, government and science is an attack on democracy. This is the identical Language that dozens of university centers and both of the major censorship programs at the National Science foundation as well as at State, usaid, Pentagon, they all have this stock language now which is that the purpose of the program is to protect their assets and the and legacy news media is one of those assets. If you on social media undermine public faith in the New York Times as a credible institution, you are attacking democracy in the white blood cells of the Blob. These disinformation centers being run out of our NGOs and universities and for profit private sector censorship mercenary firms will scan and ban you off the Internet. And I can show you what some of those look like as well, these dynamic disinformation dashboards. But even if you just go to the projects page for that, I think.

[Kurt Schlichter]

If you scroll down you'll see it.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Semantic Information Defender.

[Joe Rogan]

This is right out of 1984.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yeah. So if you scroll down just the.

[Joe Rogan]

Terms Semantic Information defender.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Okay, this project, Again, this is 1.6 million just from the Pentagon alone. This project will develop a system that detects, characterize and attributes misinformation and disinformation, whether image, video, audio or text. ASU provides content and narrative analysis, text detection and characterization methods, and a large data set of known disinformation manipulated objects. So this is a database of all images, videos, audio, text that effectively the ghost of John McCain, the founder of the CIA side of the GOP after Reagan reoriented the IC around the NGO complex. And they've been caught basically conflating anything that's pro Trump with being pro Russia and going after rank and file right wing populist and conservatives, because that's who the never Trump side of the GOP, the Mitt Romney, John McCain side of the GOP is trying to take out Mitt Romney, by the way, who ran for President Obama. The the cycle after John McCain. Remember, John McCain was the founding president.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Of the IRI, the CIA wing of the GOP.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Mitt Romney is, was and still is.

[Kurt Schlichter]

A board member of the iri. I should note Marco Rubio, our incoming Secretary of State is also a board member of the iri. He is going to need to confront this in a way I hope everyone.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Is prepared for, but it's all the way down to framing techniques.

[Joe Rogan]

Could you just look at this for a second? Detecting and tracking adversarial framing. Just listen to how this is phrased. A pilot project with Lockheed Martin. So defense contractor.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Oh, we're going to go deep.

[Michael Shellenberger]

You want to see some crazy?

[Joe Rogan]

Oh yeah, let's keep going with this please go deep. But created an information operations detection technique based on the principle of adversarial framing. When parties hostile to U.S. interests Frame events in the media to justify support for future actions. That is such a weird way to phrase things because. So, okay, here we go. The research helps planners and decision makers identify trends in real time that indicate changes in the information operations strategy, potentially indicating imminent actions. A follow on project funded by the Department of Defense expands techniques developed in the pilot project to additional countries. Incorporates blog data into the framing analysis alongside known propaganda outlets.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Listen to this next one.

[Joe Rogan]

Studies the transmediation of these frames to non Russian, non propaganda services.

[Michael Shellenberger]

This is how they sources rather right. And seeks to develop the ability to automatically detect adversarial framing. This is the AI system.

[Joe Rogan]

Adversarial framing is such a strange way to put it because US interests are could be just simply narratives that turn out to not be true. So they have the ability to censor true information based on U.S. interests.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But this is how they get. You see that? Transmediation of frames to non Russian, not propaganda sources. Yeah, that's how they get to say that we are spouting Russian disinformation if we say something. But so does some random outlet they.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Don'T like in Russia.

[Michael Shellenberger]

This is how. Notice the 51 spies who lied about Hunter Biden. They will still insist, yeah, okay, the laptop's real, but it's still Russian. Because they argue that Russian propaganda outlets were amplifying it. So it's. And it's in Russia's interest to stigmatize the United States or to undermine the credibility of Joe Biden as president or to help Trump because Trump's foreign policy is helpful to them. So this is how they conflate us as US civilians with a First Amendment guarantee with the get out of Constitution free card of our counterintelligence capacities. You know, like the CIA is not allowed to operate at home.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Right.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Supposed to be a foreign facing operation, but they gave a get out of jail free card on that, which is if it's counterintelligence. If they think a US citizen is being recruited by or in a network, formal or informal, with a hostile foreign nation state intelligence services, now they get to spy on Americans. This is how the nsa, you know, reads Tucker Carlson's signal chats and whatnot. And so they launders that foreign to domestic switcheroo, which by the way, is another great, great clip.

[Kurt Schlichter]

But anyway, I was going to.

[Michael Shellenberger]

I saw your eyes go a little.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Wide with the Lockheed Martin thing.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Michael Shellenberger]

If you go to YouTube and you type in Mitre Squint. Mitre Squint Misinformation.

[Joe Rogan]

M I T E R. Yeah.

[Michael Shellenberger]

M I T R E. Mitre is.

[Kurt Schlichter]

One of the largest military contractors. They are, they're absolutely enormous. They.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They. And they're sort of like, you know, a technological version of the, of the.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Rand Corporation, if you will.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Now this. So they are funded by the US.

[Joe Rogan]

Military and fighting COVID 19 misinformation. Let's go do it. From the beginning.

[H]

As the nation continues the fight against COVID 19.

[Joe Rogan]

Wrong mask.

[H]

Wearing it wrong spread of dangerous misinformation Social media is full of conflicting, misleading and false information. The level and quality of fact checking varies from one platform to the next. That means that half truths or flat out fiction may appear as facts. People who are predisposed to believe the postings will perceive them as true. When deception and misinformation have the potential to negatively influence personal and national health outcomes, we must call it out and correct it. Mitre squint for COVID 19 provides a fast, reliable way to report and counter Covid misinformation about the disease, its treatment and vaccinations. If you're a medical or public health expert or other Squint user, you can report unTrue or inaccurate COVID 19 related postings with a single click. Whether using a desktop or mobile device, Mitre Skin collects the URL with the screenshot and the coded information for aggregation and analysis. You'll get a secure message to verify that you sent the screenshot. The verification message includes a report that you can share or send to the social media channel asking that the misinformation be removed. What happens then? Mitre Squint analyzes and identifies patterns in social media that are misleading the public. Your report enables faster takedowns and helps maintain the public's trust and confidence in the efforts to battle COVID 19. Mitre Squint for COVID 19 provides an unprecedented opportunity to report dangerous misinformation designed to create additional fear or anger in people already stressed by the pandemic. Contact us to learn more about Mitre Squint and become a participant.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Squintitre.org yeah, so Mitre is a $2.2 billion annual budget and tens of millions.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Of that come from the Pentagon.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They're a major Pentagon contractor. They did the same thing, by the way. That was the second Squint AI censorship technology they developed. Again, just like the Pentagon was paying Graphica censoring Covid origins censoring conspiracy theories. They're Paying AI censorship technology to simultaneously manage the censorship of COVID skeptic narratives. They started this actually in the drop to the 2020 election. If you look at Squint misinformation elections.

[I]

Our democracy, our elections, we must call it out.

[Michael Shellenberger]

I think that starts at the 42nd. If you go back to the beginning.

[I]

Including the viral messages spread through social media. Social media platforms are only as accurate and truthful as the people who post to them. The level and quality of fact checking varies from one platform to the next. That means that half truths or flat out fiction may appear as facts. People who are predisposed to believe the postings will perceive them as the truth. When deception and misinformation impact the infrastructure, operations and processes integral to our democracy, our elections, we must call it out and correct it. Mitre Squint provides a fast, easy and comprehensive way for election officials to combat the spread of misinformation on social media channels. When elections officials and designated Mitre Squint users see untrue or inaccurate postings about the elections process, you can report it with a single click. Whether using a desktop or mobile device, Mitre Squint collects a screenshot and the coded information for aggregation and analysis. You'll get a secure message to verify that you sent the screenshot. The verification message includes a report that you can share with election peers or send to the social media channel, asking that the misinformation be removed. What happens then? Mitre Squint analyzes and identifies patterns in social media that are misleading voters. Your report enables faster takedowns and helps restore integrity to the elections process. Mitre Squint is helping election officials like you defend the elections process from disinformation campaigns designed to undermine election legitimacy. Contact us to learn more about Mitre Squint and become a participant.

[Kurt Schlichter]

They were partnered in the whole 2020 censorship operation. There's another thing I just thought of that is just an unbelievable clip with the Atlanta Council.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The Atlantic Council was formally partnered with.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The Department of Homeland Security to censor the 2020 election to censor Trump supporters. 100% of their repeat misinformation spreaders were Trump supporters. There's unbelievable videos on all of this. Some of this has been played on the Congressional Jumbotron.

[Joe Rogan]

It was election interference.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yeah, at an unbelievable level. But they bragged afterwards.

[Kurt Schlichter]

About how this.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Thing could be scaled and how they.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Were able to get this done and.

[Michael Shellenberger]

How they could use this technique to.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Get social media companies to ban things. Well beyond basically to scale it to every other policy issue so that it's.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Not just around elections where there are.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Quote, huge regulatory stakes for the companies.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And they go over this strategy literally on a celebration video of how they pulled this off again with the Atlantic Council, Graphica, Stanford, these same institutions. In this video they go over this two part technique for how they were.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Able to do this and how they can do this in the future.

[Michael Shellenberger]

One is using their front effectively as a civil society organization, leveraging the threat of government pressure from their government partners at a top down level and leveraging the induction of crisis pr, black pr. If the companies did not do the censorship from the bottom up. So the government would threaten top down and the media would threaten bottom up.

[Joe Rogan]

What are the threats?

[Michael Shellenberger]

The threats?

[G]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

When you say the government would threaten them.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Well, so there's several. In that case in 2020, there was.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Regulatory overhang coming from Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren about breaking the big tech companies up, which they actually move forward with. Google is now under the gun of this with the U.S. justice Department.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But more significantly, it's the threats.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Probably one of the most incredible examples of this. If you want to see the receipts on it, it's wild. But I can also just tell you about it. If you look up on my profile the phrase 10 flaming examples, it'll pull.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Up the Facebook files, what Jim Jordan's.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Committee, you know, the subpoenaed version of the Twitter files, but from Facebook.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And you'll see that in early 2021.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The Biden administration was pressuring explicitly Facebook to censor Covid origins heterodox speech.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And Facebook was skittish about doing it, saying there's a highly unusual request coming.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Directly from the White House.

[Michael Shellenberger]

We don't really want to do this.

[Kurt Schlichter]

This is what Nick Clegg, the head.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Of public policy was emailing with Mark Zuckerberg about. So if you scroll over, so you see this is right, there were five claims. This is to Mark Zuckerberg from Nick Clegg. Nick Clegg was the former head of the UK Labour Party. He wrote a book called how to.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Stop Brexit after Brexit already passed. Show you how interconnected all this stuff is.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And the subject is Covid misinformation. Wuhan lab leak theory on the question of our decision to remove claims related to the origin of COVID Again, this is June 2021. There were five claims that met the standard. Basically anyone who accused Covid of potentially being man made or bioengineered or created by an individual government or country, or that it was modified through gain of function research. We reduced distribution, meaning they throttled, they algorithmically zapped out of all virality. They applied virality circuit breakers to content, making any of those five buckets of claims in February 2021. So this is right in tandem with the vaccine rollout. In response to continued public pressure, intense conversations with the new administration, we started. So they only started removing it because of, quote, tense conversations with the new administration. So if you go to the next, if you go to the next image, if you just. Yeah, oh wait, I'm sorry, go over. Yeah, bigger fish to fry. There should be a. Yeah, here we go. In June 2021, Clegg emailed others in the company that given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Biden administration, we should think creatively about how we can be responsive to the Biden administration's concerned. Then it says below, what are these bigger.

[Kurt Schlichter]

What is he talking about?

[Michael Shellenberger]

I can go over those in a second. Just one more thing on this is, you see, in April 2020, the company was seeking to work closely with the Biden administration on multiple policy fronts. So this now gets to the larger issue of the interplay between the profits of multinational corporations and the protection provided.

[Kurt Schlichter]

By the US Government when it actively advocates on their behalf.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So for example, right now, one of the major, major issues, and I'll tell you this because when I ran the cyber desk for the U.S. state Department, I got a call one day from nine Google lobbyists. These were all former lobbyists from big oil companies or from sovereign countries who had moved to Google to lobby the US State Department was the orchestra symphony conductor for all of the assets of the American empire.

[Kurt Schlichter]

These nine lobbyists told me over the course of about a 90 minute call.

[Michael Shellenberger]

That the number one threat to Google's business model, the most existential threat over.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The next five years was the EU Digital Markets act and Digital Services Act. And they laid out a variety of reasons, I won't get into too granular.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Detail, but that basically, you know, because the State Department traditionally defines US interests as being the welfare of US citizens and the aggregate welfare of US national champions, US Citizens and US corporations. This is why again, it's so insane, inflammatory and there's got to be a way, it's friggin illegal that the National Endowment for Democracy and the US State Department, USAID are currently running programs to tank US national champions like X because they're hosting, they allow the hosting of pro populist political content. Basically, the pitch is, we're a US.

[Kurt Schlichter]

National champion, we're Google.

[Michael Shellenberger]

This is another thing that the Trump.

[Kurt Schlichter]

White House was saying at the time. They were defining MAGA as Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon because their stock price being high was a big. I think Boone. I don't know what the political calculus was, but I'm trying to tell them.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Hey, they're censoring the Internet guys. And point is, so they're the G and maga and they are functionally requesting that the US State Department adjust its diplomatic posture with EU counterparts in order to have the appropriate asks and demands of the European Union that protects the profits and business divisions of Google without again getting too granular. These involve everything from data privacy rights.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Europe has something called the gdpr.

[Michael Shellenberger]

There are all sorts of fines.

[Kurt Schlichter]

It's kind of ironic how this all.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Played out when Trump won in 2016. Europe was. Many of these European governments were afraid of a Trump autocracy. And so they set about a sort of policy pivot that they called strategic digital autonomy, meaning that Europe needs to exert more sovereign autonomy over the tech space and the digital sector rather than.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Purely relying on American projection arms, our US tech giants.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And so these new EU Digital Markets Acts and Digital Services act are like.

[Kurt Schlichter]

For example, Tim Cook at Apple just.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Got hit with a $15 billion fine from this. It's the only people who can stop that, who can negotiate and who can pick winners and losers in that market are the U.S. state Department. Those are the people who negotiate. Those are the people who do the carrots and sticks. Hey, EU counterpart. Hey, counterpart in France. Hey, counterpart in eu.

[Joe Rogan]

What was the stick to Apple in relation to. What was it in response to?

[Michael Shellenberger]

I just remember the 15 billion. I forget if it was on a data. If it was on data grounds or if it was on. You can look up the. Because Tim Cook called Donald Trump on that specifically. I think this is another one of these things where Apple felt betrayed that the Biden administration didn't stick out for them as much. But just so I'm not getting the specific thing wrong, if you look up. Yeah, Here we go. $15 billion fine.

[Joe Rogan]

Additional $2 billion antitrust fine. EU has been investigating big tech firms to curb their power and ensure a level playing field. Apple recently lost a court battle, was ordered to pay 14.08 billion in back taxes to Ireland. Trump told Cook that he would not let the EU take advantage of US companies if he is elected. This government highlights this development rather highlights the ongoing regulatory challenges faced by tech giants like Apple which may impact their stock performance. Investors should monitor these regulatory developments and their potential impact on Apple's finances and financials and stock price.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Right.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And this is happening to all the tech companies. And the only reason this hasn't happened yet in the now 30 years of Internet diplomacy is because the State Department has always gone to bat for them. All sorts of carrots and sticks that.

[Kurt Schlichter]

We can threaten on that, right, the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Humanitarian aid, the security assistance.

[Joe Rogan]

So what do they want from Apple that would allow them to allow Apple to be fined that much more?

[Michael Shellenberger]

Well, the State Department in theory, could open up a diplomatic channel to the eu. The US Ambassador to the EU could march into their office, horse's head.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Out.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Of Godfather style and say, you are not going to f with Apple on this. This decision was wrongly made. If you move forward with enforcement of.

[Kurt Schlichter]

This $15 billion fine, the US government.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Will renegotiate our trade posture, our tariff posture, our humanitarian assistance, our security assistance, our role in NATO. There's any number of things that you can log roll on this. Our joint activities with you in South America, in Africa, in Central Asia. On this particular industry, it's the State Department who's got the assets of the empire to manage and to offer up to foreign countries to protect the. And frankly, oftentimes to secure those markets for those tech companies in the first place.

[Joe Rogan]

What would be the incentive to not do that.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Favors to Europe and European. I mean, you're always dipping into political.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Capital when you do that.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Whenever you are threatening something with someone you're doing business with, you are giving up a little bit of political capital in making that threat in the sense that they might, and you're sort of sanctioning yourself in a certain respect. This is what, for example, the sanctions.

[Kurt Schlichter]

On Russia that we led after 2014.

[Michael Shellenberger]

They had an agreement with Russia. They're sort of shooting themself in the leg to try to get the bear that's biting it. So you're sort of doing this with the EU. The EU is a very delicate dance with the US. It's 550 million people.

[Kurt Schlichter]

It's a giant market. It is the. There's basically three poles between China, the US and the eu. There's a ton of overlapping trade arrangements.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It's basically the economic arm of NATO. So if you were to threaten the EU too hard, so China just overtook.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The US as the EU's largest trading partner.

[Michael Shellenberger]

If we were to go to the mat for Apple, in this case on the eu, the EU may turn around and say, fine, well, if you do that, we're going to partner with Saudi.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Arabia or we're going to partner with.

[Michael Shellenberger]

China or we're going to partner. Hey, we may need to turn the natural gas imports from Russia back on. There's all sorts of. It's a constant interplay.

[Kurt Schlichter]

That's what makes that position both so.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Fascinating but also so complex is because you're having to manage all the different.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Stakeholder relations from the banks, from the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Corporations, from the political groups, from the outside ones. And Facebook, I mean it's data, it's ads. This is another thing. The media companies have been on a crusade against Facebook and Google because many of these media companies feel like their revenues are being stolen by the the ad money going to Google and Facebook. There have been laws that have been put in place in Canada and I believe Australia where they're basically trying to.

[Kurt Schlichter]

I forget if the one Canada actually.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Passed, but they're basically trying to have the media companies get a cut of the big tech profits because they are monopolists in the ad space.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Google Ads makes up a huge portion of Google's revenue. Facebook, obviously the only reason it became profitable in the first place when Facebook IPO'd. Initially there was a concern that it.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Might not even be a profitable company.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Let alone one of the top eight biggest companies in the world because they had not yet monetized those eyeballs through ads in the way that they've scaled incredibly to do.

[Michael Shellenberger]

What happens when our own US government completely betrays them and works with Europe.

[Kurt Schlichter]

To screw them unless they do censorship. If you want us an incredible receipt on this, you can look up the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

February 2021 USA disinformation primer.

[Kurt Schlichter]

You can go actually to my foundation's website, foundationforfreedomonline.com and just type in the word USAID and you'll see that disinformation primer.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Usaid in tandem with the national down.

[Kurt Schlichter]

For Democracy, that CIA cutout and in cahoots with State, who USAID serves, has.

[Michael Shellenberger]

An instruction manual for how to exert its soft power influence around the world to regulate ad networks to hurt US tech companies if they allow pro populist speech on the platforms by getting advertiser boycotts and advertiser blacklists to punch the social media companies. And so it's a plot against our own people and it's being waged as part of a political proxy war to stop populists like Trump from being able to get elected in the first place and if he gets elected to be able to throttle his administration and his allies around the world so that he.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Can'T implement his agenda.

[Joe Rogan]

Jesus. How does this not. How do you Sleep.

[Michael Shellenberger]

You know, like.

[Joe Rogan]

Knowing all this, like, what it was.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It was really, really hard the first.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Three or four years because there was.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Like, I was in this before when the whole thing was totally depressing and.

[Kurt Schlichter]

There were no wins at all. You know, I was like.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And it was. My health deteriorated.

[Kurt Schlichter]

I, you know, I didn't look good, I didn't feel good. I mean, I tell everyone, you have to go through your five stages of grief on this. You know, you're going to have your, you know, your denial and then your anger and then your, you know, your depression and then your bargaining and then your acceptance.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And you'll go through many iterations of.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Those five stages of grief.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But you get to a certain point, I think, where you accept that this is our inheritance and this is in a way, as evil as so many components of it are. The larger picture is kind of a fascinating archaeological dive into the ancient dinosaur bones of the world that we live in. The American empire would not exist without this apparatus. It took a twisted turn in 2016. But the fact is we are an international empire because of the banana wars in the 1800s that gave the US vassalage control over much of South America. We're an international empire because of the Spanish American War. 1898, we take the Philippines. We had, we had the miracle of the 20th century because this free speech diplomacy, which in large part was a State Department, CIA, cynical front, just to be able to capacity build our own assets behind the Iron Curtain that ended up giving us cheap gas and 401s and middle class lifestyles and affordable homes and pensions and all the favors that the State Department does to pry open markets is the reason that Walmart can export to the furthest reaches of the world. It's the reason that I played this really funny one a few days ago, the famous Pizza Hut ad starring Gorbachev after the, after the National Endowment for Democracy pried the Soviet Union open and it's basically saying, we have instability. These are Russians arguing with each other. We have instability at home. This is horrible. We're basically a satellite state of the United States. And then the other person at the Pizza Hut says, ah, but we have Pizza Hut and Gorbachev stars and spouses. This is a Pizza Hut advertisement.

[Joe Rogan]

And can you find that online?

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yeah, yeah, you can actually chill.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, God. They all agree on Pizza Hut. And Gorbachev hailed the Gorbachev together like.

[Kurt Schlichter]

A nice hot pizza from Pizza Hut.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So pizza.

[Joe Rogan]

That commercial. Insane. It seems like a Saturday Live sketch.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yeah. So Pizza Hut did not win the market for 200 million customers in Russia because it out competed the other pizza companies. It won because the CIA pried Russia open. I mean, you can see all the touchdown dances we did about the Boris Yeltsin puppet presidency. Boris Yeltsin was faxing the National Endowment for democracy in 1993 for permission effectively to bomb his own parliament building. There's a whole Hollywood movie called Spinning Boris which is based on the true story of how the State Department and Hollywood teamed up to prop up a ailing Boris Yeltsin. And 1996 when he was polling at 7% in the polls so that we could continue privatizing state owned Russian assets and selling them off to George Soros investment fund.

[Kurt Schlichter]

You can read Casino Moscow for more on that.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But basically I ate at Pizza Hut as a kid. At some point it becomes fascinating. At some point the tragedy shifts to a comedy. And when you start looking at the size of some of these forces, it's the most exciting time ever to be alive. It didn't look like there was any light of the tunnel when I started this in 2016. It was L after L, after L.

[Kurt Schlichter]

After L. First nobody would listen.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Then the people who listen say you're crazy. Then the people who say you're crazy say, well, you're right, but you're hopeless. Then the people who say you're hopeless say, okay, well maybe you're not hopeless, but I can't help you. And then it's just constant. And then the dam starts breaking a little bit here, a little bit there. And now this is the most exciting time ever. We have existential threats that I think may be in the end more terrifying than anything we've seen yet. But I'm just honored to be along for the ride with everybody else who's pulling the levers that they are. And if you can make it through, if you can make it through the hard times, on thinking about it, there is something beautiful. It's like getting to know. So let's just say Genghis Khan you're.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Descended from or something.

[Michael Shellenberger]

People are going to say Genghis Khan, murder, rape, whatever crimes there are. But if you're descended from that, it's still your family. And I'm not trying to smash these institutions. I'm not trying to get rid of.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The Pentagon or get rid of the CIA.

[Michael Shellenberger]

I want them to be reformed and they have to go through the gauntlet of public Sunlight. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was just named the NIH. That is one of the most inspiring stories.

[Joe Rogan]

I think that's an incredible turnaround. Yeah, tell the whole story. Because some people aren't even aware of what happened with him with the Great Barrington Declaration.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Well, he was kicked off of Twitter. He was basically a premier scientist at Stanford. He was labeled a fringe epidemiologist by Fauci and company and he was just tapped to be our new NIH director. The National Institute of Health, this is the premier medical research institution in all of medicine. And they put in one of the most critical voices of the entire Covid era to run it. I mean, it's like putting Bobby Kennedy in as the head of hhs. And to me, that's sort of what needs to happen now in the censorship space, which is that when you look back at the Church committee with the CIA, they held up that heart attack gun in public and Frank Church and James Angleton we saw. Now look, I know a lot of that was a whitewash and wonks in.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The space are probably getting triggered by me even acknowledging that that was a decent thing.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But the fact is it did have to go through a gauntlet where the way to restore faith in the institution is to make it do a naked lap, make it do its walk of shame and then it can put its clothes back on and return into the good graces. I'm not trying to take these institutions out. I'm not anti American empire. But the empire has to serve the homeland. The fact is we it does have to go through this period of penitence and I hope that the incoming administration understands the magnitude and severity of the need to do that because if they don't, they're going to be caught flat.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Footed by something very nasty, I think, coming down the pipe.

[Joe Rogan]

Have you talked to anyone there?

[Michael Shellenberger]

Not in enough detail to be able.

[Kurt Schlichter]

To feel that we are where we need to be. But maybe that will change.

[Joe Rogan]

Burisma.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Oh, it's wild.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Kurt Schlichter]

You know how I mentioned the Atlanta Council so many times in this Seven CIA directors on its board and were funding the Pentagon, State Department, CIA cutouts.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Like the nad literally sponsoring at Atlantic.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Council conferences the I call bullshit censorship training meetings.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The work partnered with DHS to censor.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Trump, partnered, you know, to censor Covid.

[Michael Shellenberger]

One week before Donald Trump was inaugurated.

[Kurt Schlichter]

In January 2017, Parisma signed a formal cooperation agreement with the Atlanta Council for.

[Michael Shellenberger]

The Atlanta Council to leverage its representation.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Effectively as NATO's brain, the think tank for NATO to kick energy deals to Burisma.

[Michael Shellenberger]

You can look this up, you can pull this on screen I'll show you.

[Kurt Schlichter]

These receipts, they're wild. If you just type in Burisma on my ex account or Burisma Atlanta Council, any of these will get you there. So there's a much larger story here that sort of gets us back to Eurasia. Just for perspective.

[Michael Shellenberger]

This issue around Russia gets to something that has been decades of tension in the making. Yeah, so this is Burisma and the Atlantic Council. This is one day, actually one day.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Before Donald Trump's inauguration, January 19, 2017.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So this group with seven CIA directors on its board and annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department, by the way, these are old numbers from 2020.

[Kurt Schlichter]

It's over a million now for all these.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But what are they doing? Signing a formal agreement with Burisma to.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Kick them deal flow.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Well, so here is where it gets to the geopolitics of the energy space.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And what a lot of this Russia stuff is about.

[Michael Shellenberger]

If you look up, for example, if you just go to Google and you type in Russia 75 trillion, you'll see what Trump got knifed for in term 1.0. And that is still the knife's edge.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Dangling over Trump term 2.0.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So if you pull up an image graph of it, it'll make it a little bit, I think more just maybe the fourth, the fifth one, if you see. Or the fourth or fifth. Fourth one or fifth. Yeah, any one of those.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Right.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So Russia has the most exploitable natural.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Resources of any country on earth. By far. By far.

[Michael Shellenberger]

I mean, it's almost double. And that was why you may have.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Heard this term from Francis Fukuyama, the end of history. In the 1990s, this was like the, the moment that America was the unipolar power.

[Michael Shellenberger]

There is this long range plan to pursue at least the political annexation of Eurasia. This goes back to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the grand chessboard. The idea that he who controls Eurasia, controls the world, because this is where two thirds of the world's resources are. There's this big stretch basically from central.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Europe all the way out into the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Far reaches of Russia where so many of these minerals and oil and gas and exploitable resources are concentrated. If you remember, Lindsey Graham finally threw.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Up the white flag about four months.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Ago when he said, listen, even if you don't care about Ukraine, they've got $12.4 trillion worth of minerals and resources, so do it for that.

[Joe Rogan]

He just said the other day, he admitted this war is about money.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It is, it is. So. But this is, this is so fascinating to Me, I almost have to take.

[Kurt Schlichter]

A self indulgent moment, if you'll allow me.

[Michael Shellenberger]

I had initially started working on this with a book in a movie that was just about the AI censorship side. It was Weapons of Mass Deletion. And it was at the time I was in 2016, early 2017, I was, I was focused on the domestic side.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Like I think everybody is when they see this.

[Michael Shellenberger]

A lot of this was woke stuff. So you see some pink haired feminist person with an outrageous Twitter account who's a trust and safety person at Twitter and you say, ah, okay, this is a culture war, right? And then as I started tracing this and just completely obsessing every day on the research side of this, you'd see these censorship planning conferences with high ranking military and intelligence officials and on the panel with them would be Eurasian focused energy investors and energy companies. And you'd say, well, what are they doing at a censorship conference? Why is Chevron here? Why is Royal Dutch Shell here? Why are representatives from NAFTA Gas at this conference about disinformation on the Internet? To me that was one of the early breakthroughs in being able to trace the larger networks and history of it was the close conjoined nature of censorship and geopolitics and in particular around the energy world. Because going back to this Milton Friedman.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Argument around free markets versus does the government secure the markets?

[Michael Shellenberger]

Milton Friedman was once sort of given a sort of Malay style list of entities to a fuera, you know, to sort of not, you know, knock out. And when it got to the Department of Energy, he said, keep that one, but fold it under the Department of Defense. Because our energy work is basically a subset of our military work. Because the military is effectively who secures.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Energy markets, the military and the State Department. The military using kinetic force or the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Threats of doing so.

[Kurt Schlichter]

The State Department on economic sanctions and economic inducements to secure the energy resources.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So this is where it gets really interesting. So we were just talking about Boris Yeltsin in the 90s. Putin rises to power in 1999. The Russian economy is totally destroyed. He is, you know, he's got but only two assets of the Russian remnant that he can leverage to try to.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Turn Russia back into a world power.

[Michael Shellenberger]

One of them is their sort of military export economy. Russia provides small arms munitions to rebel.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Groups around the world to oppose the US Pentagon, such as in Africa. There's a big battle going on right now between the US and France on the one hand, and Russia on the other hand in the Sahel. This is why a Lot of these French run governments have been toppled in the past year. Chad, Niger, Cote d'ivoire. This is one of the reasons that it's very curious that France arrested Pavel Durov, the Telegram founder, when the CIA's own media channels like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and Voice of America were effectively calling for Telegram to be reined in because it may be a Russian.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Spy in every Ukrainian's pocket. And we need to stop the ability.

[Kurt Schlichter]

For Russians to have free speech on Telegram. And you know, a lot of this is because of the.

[Michael Shellenberger]

He's arrested in France is curious because France is involved in a proxy war against Russia and that's only made possible.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Because Russia exports those arms.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Russia is also the only reason we.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Were not able to successfully topple Bashar.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Al Assad in Syria.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Folks remember the S3 hundreds, 400 anti aircraft, you know, air defense systems.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Basically if we can get rid of.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Russia's military machine, there's no, there's very, very little resistance to the Pentagon around the world from Venezuela to Africa to Central Asia to, you know, to Syria.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And Russia's other big economic export, the main one is that they have the largest energy resources in the world and exporting that can make them very healthy, very wealthy if they are able to export that freely. It's sort of a similar issue with.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Iran and Iranian sanctions.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So almost 100% of Russian gas used to be used, of European gas used to come from Russia. These pipelines had been around for many, many, many, many decades. And it was, and it was the motor engine of Russia's economy, oil and.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Gas, Rosneft and Gazprom.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And when Putin did something to reassert Russia's political influence over Central and Eastern Europe after NATO already thought these were NATO acquired territories, places like Georgia and Moldova, Ukraine, Putin began shutting off the gas in 2005, 2006 or threatening to do so to leave a sort of dark, cold winter to these European countries that were thought to be under U.S. nATO control. And these countries began to acquiesce to Russian influence on gas. And their politics started shifting to be more pro Russian. Their civil society organizations got deeper Russian penetration. Their media organizations began to spout more pro Russian affinity lines. And so our State Department of Intelligence services flew into a panic like my God, we're going to, we're going to lose the Cold War late in the game if we do not embark on a quest to destroy Russia's energy diplomacy. This is what they were calling it, energy diplomacy. Their energy soft power influence over central and eastern Europe, Germany with the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, Ukraine with the direct.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Gas pipelines that then go all the way out into Western Europe.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And we could not compete with Russia strictly because gas is a commodity. It's not like an iPhone or it's not like a phone where it comes in different flavors based on quality. It's just strictly about the price you sell it at. And the only way that you can get gas into Europe effectively, other than cheap natural gas pipelines or expensive liquefied natural gas, where you basically harvest it in the Permian Basin in Houston, you freeze it, you ship it 6,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean through the Baltic Strait, you unfreeze it, you then ship it to Ukraine. It's like orders of magnitude more expensive than the Russian alternative. So European countries wanted cheap Russian gas. The U.S. and the U.K. and NATO wanted the EU member states to sanction Russian gas, both because it would cripple Russia's economy and also so there's a national security element here. Now we get to take over Africa, now we get to take over Central Asia because there's no Russian resistance from the military because they're bankrupt. Now we can beat back Russian influence into Central and Eastern Europe because they're bankrupt. It's the same way we won the Cold War. The Soviet Union collapsed because it was bankrupt. So they embarked on a diplomatic quest to get all these countries to pass sanctions on Russia. But they couldn't do the full sanctions in 2006, so they embarked on what they called energy diversification. Then the 2014 fiasco pops off in Ukraine and this becomes existential because now half of Ukraine is effectively militarily backstopped by Russia. So they have to get Europe to.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Pass these sanctions on Russia.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But the issue is a lot of these EU member states did not want to have to buy super expensive Western lng. It would be ideal if you could simply harvest the endogenous gas supplies in Ukraine. Ukraine happens to sit on Europe's third largest unexploited natural gas resources or the shale that can be converted. And so they. So Burisma was a tool to be able to supplement the Western LNG with an endogenous an at home Ukrainian alternative gas supply so that the sanctions could go through in Europe and so that Ukraine would not be reliant on Russia to have cheap natural gas. But this required NAFTA Gas, the state owned Ukrainian gas company, which George Soros has been locked in a power struggle.

[Kurt Schlichter]

With Putin over privatization for decades.

[Michael Shellenberger]

And Burisma was the largest of the private for Profit firms that had the rights, the gas rights for exploitation of eastern Ukraine and the surrounding Crimea offshore offshore gas supplies. And so Burisma was seen as an instrument of statecraft by the US State Department to economically bankrupt Russia and to militarily shut down Russia's war machine as part of the larger play for NAFTA gas to build up Ukraine's innate gas supplies, which were underexploited in part because of a military tension over who actually controls that territory. That's why the Donbas is so important. That's why after the counter coup the US was sponsoring, this is what the military aid impeachment, the military assistance impeachment of Trump was about in 2019. We weren't at war with Russia then, right? This was 2019. This is three years before the outbreak. We were sponsoring the military reconquest of that region because that's where the energy resources are. The population's mostly in the west, the resources are mostly in the east. It's the same thing with China and Xinjiang in terms of that dichotomy. And so this is when Hunter Biden said, when he was asked what he was doing on Barisma and whether he felt shame about it, he said he was doing a patriotic duty for his country. Burisma was an instrument of statecraft for the State Department. What they were doing is they were building that up. That's why they had funding from usaid. Again, the CIA funding conduit was working the Atlantic Council with seven CIA directors on board. Hunter Biden's on the chairman's advisory board of the ndi. Hunter Biden's law firm even has this just broke four months ago, Hunter Biden's law firm actually had a. He wrote a pitch to the U.S. state Department for how Burisma could serve as basically a vassal for U.S. state Department interests in the region. You had Burisma's back channeling with, what was it, the US Ambassador in Rome on similar grounds in terms of the Italy, Greece supplies.

[Joe Rogan]

But.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But what you have here is a private sector for profit company. Many such cases, by the way, because not only was Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma as chairman's advisory board of the CIA's DNC cutout. But who else was on the board of the board of directors right next to Hunter Biden? Kofer Black. Cofer Black, who spent 30 years in the CIA, won CIA Distinguished medals awards. You can read the Daily Beast article where Kofer Black Beck is described as Mitt Romney's Sherpa to the Intelligence community to get the CIA's blessing to back him against Barack Obama. What is this CIA luminary doing on the board of Burisma? What is Hunter Biden, who the CIA personally calls the Justice Department off investigating his funding sources and is on the Chairman's advisory board of the CIA cutout? It's because, just like we have done since the 1940s, it is a private, it is a dual use entity. It's a for profit, standalone private sector firm. But it's also an instrument of statecraft because every dollar that Burisma generates is one less dollar that Gazprom generates. And so it's the best job in the world if you can get it. You get to keep all the profits and you are getting the backing of the battering ram of the Blob. And remember, we personally intervened. It was Joe Biden at the Council on Foreign Relations who bragged about forcing, using the diplomatic carrots and sticks of the US empire, that if Ukraine wanted their billion dollars in assistance they had to fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma. Nobody, nobody in our Congress, I think is prepared if, if there was a total declassification of all CIA and State Department cables and documents and meeting minutes and emails and communications for all intelligence work related to Burisma, the treasure map that would break open I think would frankly be a diplomatic scandal. Because this gets to the larger play around the IMF and its play to privatize NAFTA gas. Because there's something very nasty here which is that we have been trying to get, just like we put Russia through shock therapy when we won the Cold War. And then it was the Harvard endowment.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And the Soros crew and the U.S.

[Michael Shellenberger]

State Department who privatized trillions of dollars of state owned wealth by the Soviet Union so that it could become a capitalist society. But then the assets are held by Wall street and London. This has been the play with Ukraine. They know the potential of the entire European energy market running through Ukraine if they can just get it up and running. So this grand Ukraine energy play has been to privatize NAFTA gas, the feeder that Burisma feeds into, so that you have Western stakeholders who make the money by capturing that market. Have the Blob, the State Department, the CIA and the DoD impose enough pressure to carve Russia out of the market. Now you've got private sector stakeholders who are basically early stage equity holders in a totally protected because it's protected by the bayonet of the Pentagon, the State Department and the IC to make sure. That the profits run through there so that Russia doesn't get it. So it's a great job if you can get it. Jesus Christ.

[Joe Rogan]

And all this stuff that was on the laptop, what was the whole thing about? 10% to the big Guy and so was. What evidence is there?

[Michael Shellenberger]

Yeah, well, you know, the 10% of the big Guy. And in another text, you know, I think he had said, you know, to one of his family members that, you know, half the paycheck goes to. What you have here is almost a tale as old as time since 1948 in terms of this relationship between private sector profit and foreign policy. I mean, I call it foreign policy for personal profit, which is this idea that if you have a senior level job in blobcraft in defense diplomacy or intelligence, you don't make your money as a W2 employee of the US government. So for example, Mark Milley, the CIA director only makes about a little over $200,000 a year. I mean, more as a third year corporate associate than the Central Intelligence Agency director. You get your money from serving the stakeholders afterwards. Like Mark Milley was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What's he doing now? He's at JP Morgan doing the macroeconomic forecasting so that they basically have the insider trading vision of the guy who's tapped into everyone at the Pentagon. So they know what markets are about to open up because where the Pentagon's about to exert its influence, they know whether to invest in natural gas in companies in Germany or Ukraine because they have the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make phone calls to the people in the Pentagon about what's going to happen to that country in six months. You want to see a great example of this? Look up the Donilon brothers. Look up Tom Donilon's BlackRock Investment Institute profile. Tom Donilon is the brother of Mike Donilon. Mike Donilon is the closest advisor to Joe Biden and has been for 40 years. Mike Donilon, I think, began working with Biden in 1982. He's literally what they call the inner kitchen cabinet of the West Wing of the White House. Now that's a great job to have if you are Mike Donilon's brother, Tom Donilon, who's currently the chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute, while his brother is the closest advisor to the President of the United States. BlackRock, which has $10 trillion of assets under management and portfolio companies in every industry in every region on earth. Tom Donilon, in theory Only needs to make a phone call to his brother Mike Donilon to know exactly what to invest in because he knows what billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditure of State Department and Pentagon and intelligence work is going to do to the industries in the region. Yeah, this is basically like Pelosi tracker, but for like military intelligence. It's all legal. Tom Donilon again. What was Tom? Tom Donilon didn't start out as a banker. He was the National Security advisor in charge of military intelligence and statecraft for the US Empire. He was at the State Department, he was in ic. He was at dod. He went straight from the Blob to Blackrock's banker. Many such cases, as I mentioned Mark Milley. Another one is Jared Cohen, who was the policy planning staff whiz kid at the State Department who introduced the CIA effectively to using social media for regime change work. He was the guy who was known as Condi's party starter for how Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State could stop running regime change operations out of U.S. embassies and consulates and, and CIA station houses. They could simply use social media to organize these. That's what resulted in the Arab Spring and the Facebook and Twitter revolutions that toppled Tunisia and Egypt. Then Jared Cohen then goes on to start Google Jigsaw, which set in motion the entire world of AI censorship we now live under. He just left Google Jigsaw. What's he doing now? He's at Goldman Sachs and he's doing their geopolitical forecasting for Goldman friggin Sachs. So blob to banker pipeline every time. And this is how these people go from making two $300,000 a year to being able to live like the people who they used to have to answer to when they were in government. So they are using the assets of the American empire. They're adjusting U.S. foreign policy in a way that maximizes their own personal gain. They're not necessarily doing the calculus about, well, should we be spending all this money on your. If that's what the stakeholders want. And this is what Biden was doing and this is what the 10% of the big Guy thing comes back to. I mean, you just look at the overwhelming, just unbelievable scope of it. I mean, first of all, Joe Biden was known as Mr. Foreign Policy by the Council on Foreign Relations for 40 years. That is, he was the Blob's inside guy.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And the blob is the, the foreign.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Policy establishment which now has substantial control.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Over our domestic politics.

[Michael Shellenberger]

It's supposed to face outward Demands of the American empire. But when homeland politics interfere with the empire's plans, they sick it against us. And so for 40 years he was on the Senate Foreign relations committee. For 15 of those years he was either the chairman or the ranking member, so the top dog for oversight of the US State Department. So. So he's got these international connections people are constantly pitching him for 40 years. There's a great video, I think you can look it up. If you ever seen Joe Biden bragging about being a prostitute for the biggest donor and that when he turns 40 he was told at one meeting that for the real big money he should come back to them when he turns 40. Have you ever seen this? It's a great clip. I think if you just look up the word prostitute, Biden prostitute on my.

[Kurt Schlichter]

X account you can find this.

[Michael Shellenberger]

But basically Biden Incorporated was running a foreign policy for personal profit operation. I mean, here's a crazy example. Joe Biden, I'm sorry, Hunter Biden I believe was.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Oh yeah, this is great.

[J]

Well, I'm not sure you should assume I'm not corrupt, but I thank you for that though. The system does produce corruption and I think implicit in the system is corruption when in fact whether or not you can run for public office and it costs a great deal of money to run for the United States Senate, even for a small state like Delaware, you have to go to those people who have money and they always want something. We were told that we politicians, as the young kids say, rip off the American public. I think the American public in a way rips off we politicians by forcing us to run the way they do. To raise $300,000 is no mean feat. And unless you happen to be some sort of anomaly like myself, being a 29 year old candidate and can attract some attention beyond your own state, it's very difficult to raise that money from a large group of people. I'm a 29 year old oddball. The only reason I was able to raise the money is I was able to have a national constituency to run for office because I was 29. I'm like the token black or the token woman. I was the token young person. I went to the big guys for the money. I was ready to prostitute myself in the manner in which I talk about it. But what happened was they said, come back when you're 40, son.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And he's 80.

[Joe Rogan]

Amazing how good he talked back then.

[Kurt Schlichter]

Yeah, right.

[Michael Shellenberger]

So smooth, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Mike, you gave us a lot to think about, man. I'm gonna have to listen to this one three or four times just to try to begin to absorb it. But if it wasn't for you, we wouldn't know this. I mean, it takes someone who has done exhausting deep dives into this shit, and to be able to express it the way you do, I think is incredibly important. I think most people, including me, were not aware of the scope of it until you came out with all this.

[Michael Shellenberger]

Well, you're the man in the arena.

[Kurt Schlichter]

And, you know, been a personal inspiration for me for a long time. And what you've had to take on just to be able to do this show is something for the history books. So thanks for having me on.

[Joe Rogan]

My pleasure. Thank you.

[E]

All right, bye, everybody.