The CIA's Mass Censorship Behemoth

Hey everybody, a full episode with Mike Benz, who has recently gone super viral on the censorship industrial complex.

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Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. Mike, welcome back. Mike, that was just kind of like a sterling performance. You're kind of doing the media circuit now.

You're all over the place, and we have you for the full hour. And I think what was so powerful about this, and I'm going to ask you to do, I know what you've been doing quite a lot, which is try to retell it the best you can. What was so powerful, though, is you went through a history of how free speech and the censorship industrial complex came to be with the Internet and how the Internet and advancement of social media actually outpaced the censorship industrial complex. And that in a moment in time, the Internet was too free, was too liberated, and the bad guys had to play catch up.

And that was 2016, obviously, with the election of Donald Trump. You say it a lot better than I do. Mike Benz, congrats on the virality. Walk us through it.

Yeah. So, you know, the way that I sort of started the Tucker interview was with the story of free speech as an instrument of statecraft, because I do think it's the surprise when you see the presence of government agencies and intelligence services and the national security state and the full panoply of NGOs and state-sponsored media organs all pressing on the censorship direction. I think it's instructive to start with the history of their role in free speech on the Internet in the first place. So, you know, I can rehash that whole history, but I do think it's useful first to understand that we started this free speech industry on the Internet as a means to be able to control the American empire and manage the American empire, which I don't want to retrain everything that I said on the Tucker thing. So I think the thing that I think is most important to stress is you have the American empire as it started in 1898, right? You had the Spanish-American war. We took the Philippines. We took Cuba effectively.

We had a Monroe Doctrine from the 1823 up, you know, as soon as America essentially was founded within just a couple of decades, where we sought to essentially acquire territorial and political control over Latin America and South America. And we were a global empire, you know, an empire whose agriculture and whose oil and gas relied primarily on foreign countries. And the issue is, in the big bad mean world of geopolitics, resource nationalism is real and you need a full-throated, powerful, grass-knuckled national security state and foreign policy establishment in order to coerce other governments to giving your country what you want from their resources.

So if we have oil and gas interests or agriculture interests or supply line interests or rare earth mineral interests in another country, and that country has an opposition group rising to power that is campaigning on its own nationalism or its own socialism, that is, it's either depriving U.S. stakeholders or NATO stakeholders of those resources because they're nationalist or because they are socialist communists, they want to have their own national champions hold those interests instead of ours. We have a Department of Dirty Tricks that we roll out to deal with that government, to regime change it, to back a different group to rise to power who will do what we say, or to be able to apply different destabilization techniques in order to acquire the leverage to get what we want. And we entrusted those Department of Dirty Tricks powers to our national security state, to our Pentagon, to our CIA, to our State Department, and those agencies are all supposed to be completely foreign-facing.

They're not supposed to be able to do squat on U.S. soil or against U.S. citizens. And this was a doctrine that was all laid out in 1948 when George Kennan, the CIA's godfather, penned the inauguration of organized political warfare. You can find that in the CIA reading room or the Wilson Center or anywhere else that's hosted online. But it was a paper written right after we had rigged the Italian election in 1948, where the godfather of the CIA, just 12 days after, says, hey, we just rigged the Italian election. We were stuffing ballot boxes and we played a lot of dirty tricks. We were working with the mob. We did all this nasty stuff. But hey, we need to do this if we want to win the American century.

We need to inaugurate a policy of organized political warfare and conduct that on every plot of earth in the world or else the Bolsheviks will lose to the Bolsheviks. And so that was the argument in 1948 to establish this national security state soft power projection mechanism that would then go on to be put on steroids when the Internet was privatized. And I can keep going through this. I know I'm sort of coming at it from a slightly different angle. The part I want to isolate here and without having to make you rehash the whole thing, which is kind of like asking Jordan to rehash Game 6 because it was just such a great performance with you and Tucker. I don't want to ask you to redo that, but just talk about 2016 and how everything changed, about how when Donald Trump was elected, there was some semblance of a free and open Internet. And there was then the scrambling to institutionalize mass censorship. And then we'll go through some of the specifics.

Yeah. So, you know, I think the point that I tried to stress on the Tucker segment is that it did start a little bit before 2016 and 2016 was kind of the breaking point. You know, I mean, it really started in 2014 Crimea. It started with the 2014 Ukraine coup and the fact that we had poured five billion dollars worth of State Department, USAID and National Endowment for Democracy funding into that coup only to have the half the country fall out of our grasp when eastern Ukraine broke off and Crimea had in their own referendum a independent vote to join the Russian Federation instead of NATO. And it was that moment that the hybrid warfare doctrine was rolled out by NATO and the Pentagon, which which the doctrine of hybrid warfare is the idea that that modern warfare is no longer about tanks.

It's about tweets. And the biggest threat to to to NATO and the democratic institutions that it protects is people reading the wrong media sources, developing the wrong politics and voting NATO stakeholders out of out of out of power of their own accord. And so this was this gave rise to the so-called from tanks to tweets doctrine at NATO. And there was this then national security state focus not just on positive saturation of propaganda, which had been the way that information. Operations and in social soft power projection in the information space had been done primarily for 70, 80 years. There were incidents of the CIA, you know, asking, you know, the Washington Post to kill a story about the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Kennedy administration. Those types of censorship of stories absolutely did occur, but they were one off and they couldn't happen at scale.

You couldn't reach into the dinner table of tens of millions of homes and just turn off someone's vocal cords, which is basically the equivalent of sensitive tens of millions of tweets, YouTube videos and Facebook. That power never existed. And it began to be created after 2014, the counter coup in Ukraine because of a perception that the U.S. was losing its information advantage in Central and Eastern Europe. At the time, Germany was in the process of doubling down on its energy relations with Russia. Now, Germany is the industrial base of Europe. It's it's it's the other powerhouse, the economic powerhouse of the EU.

And we had been pursuing about 15 years of a coercive, essentially sanctions policy against EU member states who were dependent on U.S. security assistance and monetary aid. Who can you trust? Government leaders repeatedly fail us. Self-appointed experts have led us astray. Distrust and so-called authorities is spreading like a bad cold, and we can't quite shake it. But you're not as powerless as they'd like you to believe. When there's no one to depend on, it's time to rely on yourself.

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MyPatriotSupply.com. Mike, please continue. Yeah, so the thing I want to address is this 2016 censorship industry coming home to the U.S. did not just spawn out of nowhere, right? You had three years essentially between the 2014 counter-coup and the election of Donald Trump where you had the entirety of NATO, you had the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, you had the U.K. Ministry of Defense, the U.K. Foreign Office, the whole MI6 squad, Brussels, all of them beginning to invest in the architecture of internet censorship.

This is primarily done through two modalities. The first was the creation of AI censorship capacities to be able to monitor speech online in a proactive way rather than in a reactive whack-a-mole way. This is a technique called natural language processing. It uses machine learning to create these topographical maps of influence online, which started to be funded in 2014, 2015, and then would come to be used to create the system we live under currently of automated censorship.

Over 99% of all speech violations are done through this exact technique, which was created by our own military. Before 2016, the only automated censorship that was done on the internet was when AI was able to detect things like spam or child pornography. They've now developed these new complex AI training models that allow you to essentially dissect any narrative or community or political movement in that sense or scale.

That began its development in 2014. The other part was the institutional infrastructure, the connective tissue between the Pentagon, State Department, CIA faction, and the tech media platforms themselves. This was done through the creation of things like NATO Centers of Excellence. That basically extended from Germany through Ukraine and Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. When Brexit happened in June 2016, it was said to be this hybrid warfare doctrine is now affecting Western Europe.

And then five months later, when Trump won, it was the final straw. From that point forward, you had this immediately right out the gate, right in tandem with Russiagate, you had this same censorship architecture that was rolled out in Central and Eastern Europe, again, for the reasons of Russiagate related reasons. They said it was basically Russian influencing hearts and minds from Germany through Ukraine. That was the reason that NATO was beginning to lose elections and was losing control over the population in terms of who people were voting for and what their national identity was. They took that exact same predicate of Russiagate to usher this all home.

And from 2016 through 2018, actually through the summer of 2019, the initial censorship architecture in the US that was all spearheaded by Pentagon, CIA, State Department folks, as well as their organized goon squad of NGOs and university centers who were all on their payroll, did this censorship domestically through a foreign credit kit through saying, well, our national security. But it wasn't until Mueller collapsed on the stand in June 2019 and Russiagate died that they were really at this crossroads of saying, yeah, we don't have this predicate anymore to say it's all Russian bots and trolls. So, Mike, I remember during four years ago, the spring of 2020, it feels like this hasn't ended. It was like 15 days to sort of the spread, slow the spread till today.

It's just been nonstop chaos. I remember I tweeted out something that was favorable about hydroxychloroquine. And I was very popular on Twitter then. This was still like kind of when before January 6. And I'll never forget, I lost access to my Twitter account.

It was the first time that ever happened. And they said, because you're spreading disinformation when it came to public health. And what I said was not incorrect. I cited a study that hydroxychloroquine could be potentially helpful in malarial and anti, you know, as an antiviral. And Twitter came down with me and the next, you know, The New York Times came after me and wrote an article saying that I'm spreading medical disinformation.

So I want you to riff on that. But I really want you to emphasize COVID and how they used censorship as a tool to shut up different opinions when it came to medicine. Yeah, well, you were caught up in the Pentagon's crosshairs. The censorship operation of COVID started with Pentagon funded censorship gargoyles.

I'll give you the, you know, some of the craziest examples here. Without weighing too deeply into the strange administration of the whole COVID warp speed with the Pentagon and the pretty strange role of the CIA and all this, which I believe is still currently under investigation by the Jim Jordan committee. But, you know, the first pass censorship institutions who made it their mission and who received their paychecks professionally to censor anyone who talked about COVID narratives in a way that was heterodox were all Pentagon funded institutions. They were groups like Graphica. So, Graphica is a group that has gotten over seven million dollars of Pentagon grant funding, grants and contracts from the DOD. They got their start as part of what was known as what's still known as the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative, which is the psychological operations research center for the Pentagon.

When the Pentagon, when the Pentagon wants to run psyops, they turn to their their institutional sort of, you know, research folks who, you know, basically pitch and put together, you know, the social science data for doing it, doing it this way or that way. And this very group, Graphica, which came came right out of the Minerva Initiative at the Pentagon for doing psyops and had previously gotten funding for things like mapping, you know, mapping the paramilitary groups, social media activity and conflict zones that the CIA was doing. In January 2020, COVID-19 was not even called COVID-19 yet. You know, the first pneumonia-like symptoms were detected in Wuhan on December 12th.

So, this is one month later. Graphica begins a full court press in tandem with the NATO Center of Excellence, the very institution I just described that was responsible for hybrid warfare set up after the Crimea annexation in 2014 to be the internet censorship arm of NATO. So, the Pentagon's psyops cell and the NATO censorship arm came up in January 2020 within just a month after the pneumonia-like symptoms.

And before it was even called COVID-19, it was just called the coronavirus at that point. They began a systematic global mapping of every political group, every demographic in every NATO country, the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, the whole shebang. They published several dozen-page initial preliminary report and then continued to get funding from the Pentagon. They would actually come to be one of the four corners of the election integrity partnership for mail-in ballots and then one of the four corners of the virality project for formally censoring COVID dissident speech as part of this syndicate with Stanford and University of Washington and the Atlantic Council. But your talk about hydroxychloroquine was you had the long arm of the Pentagon who was responsible for that first past censorship. Well, I just want people to understand that our military then was suppressing an American citizen.

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AndrewandTodd.com. Yeah, so every single one of the major institutions that comprised the virality project were deeply involved in either the DOD or the CIA, which is one beast, right? I mean, the CIA is basically, you know, it's military intelligence apparatus, which is kind of the Department of Dirty Tricks farm of the State Department. As I described in the sort of first segment we did, you can think of the foreign policy establishment that we are up against as, you know, as essentially populist figures trying to reform corrupt institutions. You know, the thing we're up against is this three-legged stool of the foreign policy establishment, which is the State Department, the Defense Department, and the IC, the intelligence community. Those are where the Department of Dirty Tricks are located.

That is what's supposed to, the stuff we can't do to U.S. citizens, the election rigging, the media rigging, the, you know, the psyops, all of that is that it's important to think of those as one entity. You know, those jobs are interchangeable. If you work for the State Department, your next job could just as easily be at the DOD or the CIA as it could be at State. Same thing with DOD.

Next, it's completely interchangeable. So when I say CIA and DOD in this, with respect to COVID censorship, you should just be thinking of it as the same blob, that three-legged, you know, trifecta of State DOD and IC. And so all four groups that were part of the Virality Project, which were the subject of the Missouri v. Biden Supreme Court case, which oral arguments start next month, the American First legal case, you know, suing them on civil tort grounds. They were the subject of multiple congressional investigations from the Jim Jordan Committee and the Dan Bishop Committee in the House.

And they were also the major stars of the Twitter files from Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. This group called the Virality Project was comprised of four institutions, Graphica, which we just talked about, the PSYOPs arm of the Pentagon, the literal PSYOPs arm. The Atlantic Council, who we've talked about, I think, previously on several episodes of this show, the Atlantic Council had seven CIA directors on its board. A lot of people don't know that seven CIA directors are still live, let alone all concentrated on the board of a group that was the top heavyweight for censoring COVID-19. They also get annual funding every year from all four corners of the U.S. military, the Navy, the Army, the Marines, and the Air Force.

And they get funding from the annual funding from the State Department, and they get annual funding from CIA cutouts like the National Department for Democracy. So they were one of the other entities who were the four entities involved in the Virality Project. By the way, Virality Project is a play on words.

It's referring to the virality of the COVID virus and the virality of misinformation about COVID online. And they had these vast sprawling reams of essentially tens of millions of dissident posts in four different categories, including opposition to masks, mandates, reputational posts impugning Tony Fauci or Peter Dashek or other BIDs. And then they had a catchall for conspiracy theories, such as the belief that hydroxychloroquine is safe and effective. But all of these were CIA or DOD intermediated. The technical director for Stanford Internet Observatory, the third group there, was Renee DiResta, who started her career in the CIA. Her boss was Alex Deimos, who was the chief security officer at Facebook who worked directly with the Office of Director of National Intelligence, the group on top of the CIA in the intelligence community, at Facebook for censoring Russian propaganda. And his boss at Stanford was Michael McFall, the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Obama, who was kicked out of Russia for authoring full reports on how to run a successful color revolution there. And then the fourth entity, the University of Washington, with Kate Starbird, three generations of military brass. Basically, it worked with DARPA in the military for doing crisis informatics around social media's role in international crises and then gets repurposed to censor COVID-19.

So all four of the major groups responsible for censoring COVID-19 came straight out of DOD or CIA or State Department, foreign facing Department of Dirty Trick squads, all of them, every single one. It's incredible. Mike, Foundation for Freedom Online, what is your website? FoundationforFreedomOnline.com. And you can find me at Mike Ben-Cyber on X. I post everyday sort of bazooka style.

So that's that's that's the most successful way. So, Mike, I want to go through this the timeline. So in 2014, Crimea caused NATO to realize tweets, not tanks was now the power to turn world events. In 2016, we had Brexit and Trump, which led the foreign policy establishment and the domestic intel agencies to realize that nationalist and populist movements would have to be countered like they used to fight Russia and Eastern Europe. 2020, we had COVID and Trump v. Biden.

I wrote this down when I listened to your interview with Tucker. The two most censored events in history are the 2020 election and COVID. Can you elaborate? Is that correct? So the year of 2020 was the most censored year in the history of humanity.

Would you stand by that? Hands down, hands down, bar none. There's there's there's there's nothing that's that's even come close, even overseas. I mean, even China's great firewall and their and their technical censorship operations are far slower and less. They don't have the level of rapid response units and the institutional infrastructure that that was that was laid out for those two events.

I mean, it's totally sprawling. It's you know, we have 60 university centers who have gotten funding for censorship of those events. Federal government funding just by the National Science Foundation alone, not including the DOD grants, not including State Department grants, not including the FBI and Justice Department grants, which which the Biden administration has begun to do. Sixty universities here in the U.S. have professional censorship centers getting funding for those for both of those both of those events, basically election disinformation and public health misinformation.

Now, they also have expanded this into a wide range of other topics. Climate censorship, immigration censorship, abortion censorship. I mean, when when they were so successful at doing this after after COVID in the 2020 election, but before the political pushback that began in 2022, when when a whole cascade of of, you know, free speech counteroffensive began began to become effective, powered by things like Elon Musk's acquisition, the craziness of the disinformation governance board, the turning over of the House to Republicans to allow subpoena power and hearings.

The Twitter files, the the lawsuits. I mean, there was a whole cascade of things that that were that that happened later in time. Right. After, you know, between 2020 and 2022. But we and during that that halcyon period for the censorship industry to them, they thought the sky was the limit, that there were that this was now accepted by the American public.

And it was unchallengeable. In fact, the Harvard Misinformation Review even wrote a wrote a internal report for their proprietary censorship policy magazine called, you know, the Harvard Misinformation Review, saying that that the field of censorship, the disinformation studies or disinformation, misdismal information studies is what they call it, the science of censorship was now, quote, too big to fail. And it was in that sort of perception that there would never be any pushback by the American people. There would never be any pushback by Congress or by the press or by the social media platforms that they they planned to expand that infrastructure that they rolled out for the 2020 election and COVID to quote every sensitive policy issue.

That's a direct quote that I've got a dozen of these people saying on tape, almost like they're reading it from the same white paper. But the idea was is anytime there's a sensitive policy discussion, I mean, effectively that that that gets in the way of a Pentagon priority. We now have this this incredible, incredible, perfect, godlike tool when you combine the A.I. censorship capacities with a professional team to map the narratives in real time and work with the rapid response units to have the essentially CIA liaison office at Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to be to to to just put these machine readable scripts into the A.I. for what narratives to censor and what communities it will micro target and to be able to fine tune those up and down knob turns by by by having this this architecture in place. They thought that this was going to be unchallenged, inequitable to everything. And they did begin to do this in in in late 2021, early 2022.

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Promo code Charlie. Mike, has anything been done to fix or defang this centrist censorship industrial complex? And I want you to also mention the NGOs, the Aspen Institute and the outside 501 C threes that act as Janissaries for the censorship machineries and leviathans wishes. Yeah, well, I mean, so I just laid out many of the things that have already been done. I mean, you can read on my foundation's website at Foundation for Freedom Online Dotcom. We've got all the reports about how they're on their own panels. They're they have been in a sort of panic until the the ratification late last year of the EU Digital Services Act, which is the new NATO censorship law, which they see as the Hail Mary to save themselves from the the stalling of their momentum.

That's maybe a sidebar issue. You can return to we have time. But as I mentioned, you know, we should take some heed that 2023 was the first year of victory against against censorship that we ever had from the from the rise of the censorship industry from 2016 through 2022. It was one loss after another.

It looked completely unchallengeable, insurmountable, too big a goliath to take on. And then we had a serendipitous sequence of events between Elon Musk acquiring Twitter. And, you know, all it takes is one little crack in the Titanic to sink the thing. If one free platform allows free speech, then suddenly you know, the the water comes rushing into into the vessel. So yet Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and just to find a point on it, Twitter is the place for political thought leadership. And there's not even a close second in that respect, even though it has the lowest amount of monthly active users, as measured against Facebook. Instagram's got two billion. Facebook, YouTube is as far as larger by traffic.

It's the second largest most traffic website after after Google. And it is sort of a social media. But there is a huge asymmetry with respect to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube versus Twitter when it comes to political narratives and the virality of political narratives, because 99 percent of people who watch YouTube are not YouTube creators. They don't actually you can't retweet a YouTube video on platform.

You need to go to Twitter to do that. And same thing with Facebook and Instagram. These are not primarily political organs.

So Twitter is also the easiest to be able to map when it was an open when it was an open garden as opposed to a walled garden before Elon Musk changed that policy in the summer of 2023. It's much easier for the CIA funded, Pentagon funded censorship squads to be able to just get right into how a narrative was spreading and micro target who exactly to censor and how to do that in that pre-period. So you had the Elon Musk sort of victories there. You had the legal victories with two great judgments at the at the trial court, the appellate court level with the Missouri v. Biden case, which is directly suing every agency in the federal government for an injunction to prevent them from coordinating or pressuring platforms to censor. That is now before the Supreme Court riding on two major victories at the lower court level.

You have the rise of institutions like America First Legal under Stephen Miller, who have filed multiple censorship lawsuits that have that have been extremely effective at being able to get documents and discovery and be able to, you know, amplify the public understanding of the case being articulated. You have Ken Paxton, the state attorney general of Texas, now shepherding this new lawsuit against the state department. You have the revelations and constant pressure from Jay Jordan's weaponization subcommittee and don't underestimate the power of that, even though these, I mean, what we're up against is so big that you it is it is you can't think about things in terms of we're going to have this one little, you know, one one weird trick to slay the CIA and the Pentagon, which has 800 billion dollars in funding in this. That is that is that is you're living in a dream world in that case.

And you need to just I know it's painful to stare directly into the sun and see the size of the beast you're up against. But you need to in order to you need to go through your five stages of grief and get to the acceptance stage so that you can understand what victory actually looks like. Victory does not look like like, you know, stopping these people altogether.

We are way too far from that. You need to begin the process. You need momentum, the coalition building. You need resilient networks. You need funding.

You need all these. You need a public awareness. You need a whole of society freedom alliance to take on the whole of society censorship alliance.

And that did not exist before twenty twenty three. And it is beginning to end. And, you know, now the empire is striking back with this new NATO censorship law, which is existential and perhaps beyond the scope of this. But but there has been a people should appreciate that that the censorship industry is chasing right now after a string of losses they were not expecting. The I want to just touch on this briefly. You talked about mail in ballots in the Tucker interview. Did they know that they were effectively rigging the election against Trump therefore? Yeah. So they they can you can you elaborate on that?

I almost thought it would be funny to leave that as a deadpan. But yes, I mean, they literally defined on tape and my foundation has their all their confession videos clipped in a ten thousand word report we published in November twenty twenty two, where they literally at the outset defined Donald Trump himself. These are the people who have gotten millions of dollars in grant funding from the National Science Foundation for Censorship Work and who were formally deputized. They were created by the Department of Homeland Security. That is, it was they they they had a pitch meetings to to create themselves as this entity, EIB, directly with the Department of Homeland Security because of the topic we've covered, how DHS came to acquire these powers to use their proprietary domestic disinformation switchboard in order to, you know, to to achieve this mass censorship. But they defined Donald Trump himself as, quote, the death star of disinformation. This is this is they were referee. There was referee free speech about the election while defining one of the two candidates as being the exact death star that they were trying to blow up.

I mean, it's cartoonish. There's not a single person in their 120 person squad who is who is who was ideologically heterodox. It was a political hate job and they pulled it off.

So, Mike, let me let me see if we can get some forward facing thing. They're going to try the censorship campaign again in 24. How would they shut down Twitter? Elon Musk, is it possible ahead of November? Yes.

Yeah. Well, it's very nasty what they're turning to now. It's very similar as a parallel to what's happening with the Trump election or the Trump candidacy in 2024. Right now, Donald Trump is up in all seven battleground states. Polling shows he's actually winning with young people and Hispanics, which are two demos.

He's never been above the Real Clear Politics polling average ever. And it's right at that moment when in a fair fight, it would look like he would he might be victorious, where you have the escalation of things like four separate indictments breaking two and a half centuries of precedent around not indicting presidents, breaking that, you know, to charge them for 700 years of prison. And then, you know, having New York state itself extend a statute of limitations on a totally insane fake rape charge that then, you know, results in a hundred million dollars in cumulative damages.

Then you have this ruling by the state of the by a New York judge that Trump has to just, you know, dislodge 400 million dollars when even on the facts of the case, there was no one actually damaged because all loans were repaid. This escalation of the stakes beyond the traditional terms of engagement for hard-nosed politics is playing out now in the censorship industry space, in the sense that it used to be the case that you could make the argument that the straightforward path to victory was a persuasion game. And it was about getting the social media companies to stop censoring. And it was about, you know, getting governments maybe to stop putting their boot heel on the press of the private sector to coerce that censorship. That is now changing because of the nastiness of the Biden State Department.

And it's really, really nasty what's happening right now, which is there is this joint effort by the U.S. State Department, the U.K. Foreign Office, and NATO to create a legal ban on dissident speech. And this was something that began, I may have described this in the Tucker segment, but I think I went through what I call the dirty diplomats roadshow, which was this international roadshow that was done by State Department exiles of the Obama administration after they were all expecting promotions to the National Security Council when Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, won the presidency. But they were all unceremoniously fired when Donald Trump shockingly won that day. And they took their special set of skills, which is getting European regulators to pass laws in Europe. That's what their job is.

That was what my former job was, too, when I was at State. But, you know, this was the same group that that whose whose job was getting NATO member states, getting European Union states to pass sanctions on Russia. What I'm talking about here is something that I call the transatlantic flank attack.

And it is and is really the most existential threat to the Internet right now at the strategic level, which which is you had something, you know, transatlantic flank attack 1.0 is what I was describing, which is how how the censorship architecture really came back to the U.S. when we talked in the beginning about how the Pentagon and the CIA and the State Department were initially doing this in Germany, Germany and Ukraine and in the Baltics. And then it then it came to the U.K. after Brexit. Then it came to the U.S. And how that actually came to the U.S. was on the back of a series of EU regulations that were essentially coerced by and spearheaded by U.S. State Department folks who blamed the rise of alternative media for Donald Trump's election in 2016 and saw a commonality with their pro EU political class in Europe from from a comparable threat in Europe that the MAGA movement posted to U.S. You know, you had the Brexit movement in U.K., you had Marine Le Pen's movement in France. So, you know, they made the arguments about Frexit or anti NATO sentiment in France, Mateo Savini in Italy, the, you know, Grexit in Germany and Spexit in Spain and Grexit in Greece. And so all of the basically the U.S. State Department exiles who are now back in power with the Biden administration took this special set of skills around getting European regulators to pass new laws, just as they did after Crimea in 2014.

They all passed, you know, fight themselves in the legs, sanctions on themselves to cut themselves off from cheap Russian energy to sanction Russia over the Crimea annexation in 2014. They ran it back in 2017 to do the same roadshow, but instead of for sanctions, for censorship. And they went about in the U.K. and, you know, spearheaded what is now called the Online Farms Bill.

They went to Germany and they spearheaded something which was called Nets DG. And that was really what forced so much of U.S. censorship starting in late 2017 because it forced U.S. debt companies to adopt A.I. censorship as a proactive matter in order to comply with German law and effectively to comply with EU law because Germany is, you know, is the economic base of Europe and because they were forced to hire all those new content moderators anyway and to install all this technology, it wasn't a huge cost for them to then simply apply the same speech standards back here in the U.S. And at the time, there was a lot of press about, oh, the U.S. is on a collision course with Europe about the First Amendment versus these new norms and standards in Europe after the 2016 election. But, you know, the side of that the American people aren't really privy to is the role of our own U.S. state. And Europe didn't make that decision by itself. You know, there are many, many member states of the EU who occupy high positions in Parliament or the executive suite there that can't go to the bathroom in their own homes at 5 a.m. without getting approval from a State Department diplomat somewhere.

I mean, many of these countries are still basically, you know, subject to the Marshall Plan reconstruction, if you will, because they're so reliant on the U.S. for favors that they will they they're not exactly making up their own minds. And it was it was our own blob apparatus that was pressuring them to do that in 2017. And they are back at it now with a new trick called the EU Digital Services Act, which you should not think of as an EU thing.

You should think of it as a NATO thing because it is the NATO military arm which is putting its thumb on that press. And that extends the hate speech violations of of the European censorship laws into a new category called disinformation, which now does not even you know, they were mass censoring right wing populist groups because of their opposition to immigrant mass immigration in Europe. You know, after the Gaddafi assassination, there was this there was this migrant influx that created this right wing populist surge in Europe. But you could still you couldn't argue that, you know, simply supporting a political party was an act of hate speech. You had to go through proxies with this disinformation law. It is now, you know, that there are legal hate speech laws in in the EU. It sort of does make sense if you if you don't have a First Amendment and you have a legal ban on hate speech to have some compliance requirement for social media companies operate their offering there not to break the law. But that didn't extend a dis dis amount of information.

Now it does. And and the implications of that are that Twitter is now going to be forced by NATO unless they unless the State Department protects them. And this this is the killer shot because the State Department, the only way to stop that is if U.S. diplomacy puts its elbow in the mix and says, you know what, you passed this law, you're cut off from USA. Well, that's not that's not going to happen with Joe Biden.

They'd love to crush the opposite because it's the Biden administration that wanted them to do this and pressured them to do this. Mike, excellent work. Thank you so much. Check out Mike Benz on social media and support Foundation for Freedom Online. Thanks so much for listening. Everybody email us as always. Freedom at Charlie Kirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless.