Mike Benz - Trump’s War On Censorship Revealed: Hit Plan To End Big Tech Control & Restore Free Speech For All

Full transcript: Mike Benz on London Real

3:41 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mike Benz, the technology lawyer, free speech advocate, and author. You are the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, the free speech watchdog dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open internet. You previously spent time as a speechwriter and technology advisor in the first Trump administration before moving on to the state department. You have been pivotal in exposing the censorship industrial complex and what you refer to as the Blob, a deep state web of government-led agencies that are routinely manipulating media organizations, NGOs, and even universities. You have said the Blob has consistently influenced the course of events in foreign countries while domestically censoring freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas online. You believe that now President Trump must choose his staff wisely or risk sabotage attempts from within his own administration while the GOP must not squander this extraordinary mandate to make positive long-term changes.

4:57 Mike, welcome back to London Real. That was amazing. I think our work is done here. I think we’ve covered it. Yes, thanks. It’s great to be back.

5:08 Mike, great to have you here. Last time I saw you, I think was in Myrtle Beach when our film was premiering and it was great to have you out there. Look, I just want to get your take on the events, maybe the two weeks leading up to the election, how you were feeling. I think we were all pretty tense. The day itself, obviously the win and how you’ve been feeling since, can you walk me through that kind of, probably maybe the most emotional period of your life? I don’t know. What was it like for you?

5:38 That’s absolutely right. I mean, it was a total roller coaster. Everyone saw the numbers. Everyone saw Trump was up big, but there was a big open question about whether or not, and I think this was not alone to America. I think many people and all around the world were wondering, are they going to let Trump win? And I think the size of the victory, I do really believe that it was in the end too big to rig. We are still seeing, there are still votes being counted in Pennsylvania and in California, and there’s now rumblings that they have clawed back the popular vote victory.

6:12 This is one of these dynamics here in the US, which is that we have this electoral college system, which reflects the various states sort of aggregate input. It’s sort of rounded to give smaller states a larger say so that they don’t get isolated by these big sort of dense metropolitan areas. And one of the arguments that was made in 2020 by high level officials from the blob was that even if Trump were to win the election on election day, if he were to lose the popular vote, that they could organize street riots and protests and do a sort of color revolution style pro-democracy shutdown of the country, shut down the highways, block the federal buildings, invade the police precincts all in the name of mostly peaceful protests because the people’s will is not being represented by the popular vote.

7:05 That was planned to be sort of carried out in tandem with a legal attack on the electoral college system itself. We saw an attempt to sort of gerrymander that in 2024 in the weeks leading up to the election, there was a flurry of New York Times, Washington Post articles, even the Dean of Berkeley Law School came out and said that the Constitution is a threat to democracy, that it needs to be thrown in a paper shredder or some sort of incinerator because this electoral college allows Trump to win and Trump is a threat to democracy. But then, lo and behold, on election day, Trump not only wins a 300-point electoral college blowout, he also wins the popular vote by 5 million votes. So what are the protester signs going to say?

8:01 It’s, you know, I think that right now they are regrouping, but I think that the avenue to block Trump from inauguration that I was concerned about has been mostly alleviated by just the sheer too big to win, too big to rig size of the win. Yeah, I spoke to Jim Rickards about some of the games they could play in early January, labeling him as the insurrectionist and potentially, you know, not making valid some of these electoral votes and obviously the pushback. And then there is some action going on in Pennsylvania right now. I know they’re still contesting, I think, a Senate seat and they’re talking about how to qualify certain mail-in votes and whether they’re disqualified if they’re not dated.

8:42 And it still seems like some fun and games are going on out there. Is that something we should still be concerned about? Well, you still have to be concerned about it because it still influences what ends up happening in the House and the Senate. The fact is, is their fallback plan shy of something tragic happening to the President is to effectively neuter his administration through having a inside resistance through the Senate, through the House, through the courts and through outside media and civil society pressure. And the more that our Congress is stacked in favor of President Trump, the harder it’s going to be to block the Trump agenda.

9:21 And so they’re fighting for every House seat. They’re fighting for every Senate seat. And that’s how you’re seeing this drag on for so long. As you mentioned, in Bucks County, they’ve self-declared that they’re counting illegal votes. It’s just unbelievable. But the fact is, is because of the size of the blowout, they really, they’re desperate to pad as much of their own cronies in there as possible by hook or by crook.

9:47 You know, it’s interesting, like a week before the election, I was talking to people and, you know, we had a lot of people on the show. I had Rudy Giuliani here in the studio about a month before. And he was the first guy that had ever gone into detail with me about the interference. And I was like, wow, I’ve never actually heard this talked about because it’s been kept out of mainstream for so long. But here’s a guy who is, you know, a really good attorney, you know, was the attorney general in New York who was giving me the details. And I thought, wow, this is fascinating. And then with everything that was going on with Elon and this government efficiency department and what Vivek was talking about, I was reminded of what you were talking about in the blob. And I just thought, you know what, a trillion or two trillion dollars worth of military industrial or worth of government jobs and bureaucracy doesn’t go quietly into the night.

10:38 And so whether you’re a conspiracy theorist or not, you know, you’ve got an inertia that doesn’t want to move. And so if you’ve got someone coming in that’s going to try to move that thing, it’s going to resist and it’s going to find some way whether, and you don’t even have to be a conspiracy theorist, it just doesn’t want to go away. And so I thought to myself, there’s no way they can allow this man in to do these things without a massive amount of pushback. And I’m just curious what you think about that.

11:08 I guess we’re seeing it starting to happen now, but this thing isn’t going to want to go away just from pure entropy itself. And so how do you see that pushback coming? We now see that Vivek and Elon are going hard on this department of government efficiency. The rhetoric from Vivek has been crazy as in, you know, we’re going in to slash and burn. And that’s the only way to get rid of this thing. What do you expect the pushback to be?

11:36 Well, you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist. You can simply read the New York Times and be a true believer in the trust and integrity of the mainstream media, because the New York Times published last week that there were emergency meetings at the Pentagon about how to Trump proof the agency against the commander in chief. So we know that these conversations are happening. In fact, there’s a sort of somewhat notorious famous tweet going around right now. Someone found the actual procurements at the Pentagon. They ordered an industrial shredder the day of the election, which is big enough to basically mash up servers. I mean, you have a $35 trillion black hole in the Pentagon budget. That’s larger than the annual GDP of the entire country, just the size of the accounting black hole in the Pentagon’s budget. So, yeah, there’s a lot to be cleaned up. But I think what you’re going to see from their side, in addition to attempts to use law fair, I think you’re going to see state prosecutors play a highly active role in this administration trying to use state level prosecutions where there’s no ability to have federal pardons or federal immunity on various things. I think you’re going to see attempts to bribe and poach and extort members of the Trump administration to pivot them closer to the blob. You’re seeing this today. Today, Matt Gaetz, the Justice Department selection nominee from the Trump administration, there was an anonymous hack of his electronics that were then given

13:13 To the New York Times. And they’re trying to snowball this into some sort of sex trafficking ethics probe. But, you know, there’s only two ways to be a hacker in this country. You work for the CIA, the NSA or the FBI, or you’re a felon. That’s the only two ways that you can be a hacker in this country. And the fact is, is someone just today hacked Gaetz’s personal electronics and then gave it to the New York Times, who’s publishing its contents.

13:48 You are going to see that in an attempt to shut up, to silence, to threaten either directly or through back channel conversations that you don’t want to go there. You have a beautiful thing going, simply go along to get along, obstruct from the inside. You’re going to see this at the DOJ level. You’re going to see this at the State Department level. You’re going to see this at the DOD level, USAID, the whole shebang, DHS, FBI. Now, Trump has done, I think, a remarkable job so far in terms of his cabinet pick selections in order to try to put people in who are tough enough and loyal enough to resist the extortion and blackmail attempts.

14:29 I do not think Matt Gaetz is going to be deterred by this. I think it is only going to make him angry. But there are others I’m not so sure about. The fact is, is everyone on the MAGA Trump side was pulling for Rick Scott to be the Senate Majority Leader, but in a sort of midnight emergency meeting pulled off by Senate Republicans, they put John Thune in as the Senate Majority Leader. Well, the Senate Majority Leader has an unbelievable amount of power over the Senate.

15:02 He’s the person who gets to determine all of the committee assignments, which is how you get power in the Senate. So everyone is going to need to suck up in some sense to John Thune if they want a healthy Senate career on the Republican side. John Thune is a guy who has made his career with faithful fidelity to the blob. It’s also the Senate who determines impeachments, who has the power of the filibuster in order to stall things. And that impeachment is not just of the president. They’re already their rumblings that this Senate Majority, a pretty wide Republican majority currently, may not approve the president’s own cabinet picks, including Matt Gaetz.

15:50 I think it was just published that there were nine Republican members of the Senate that are considering not appointing several Trump nominees, such as Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz. And all nine of those voted to appoint the Democrat Merrick Garland, who was the single most corrupt attorney general in the history of the United States. Bar none, nobody else even comes close. The damage done to the credibility of the American justice system. We violated a 250 year pact around not prosecuting your political opponents. And they did it over total BS and everyone knew it. They even worked at the state level. They sent the Justice Department sent their number three directly to the demotion to the New York district attorney’s office, just to be able to mine parasite the prosecutors at the state level, to coordinate at the federal level. This is the sort of thing we put sanctions on foreign countries for doing. And we made it the the home court philosophy of this Justice Department. And it was totally greenlit by the Senate. There was no impeachment of Merrick Garland. He shouldn’t have been approved on day one. Anyone who knows his track record would have seen the parable of the frog and the snake, as Trump once told it. But the fact is, is they may not allow the appointment of pro-Trump candidates within the cabinet, and then they may impeach them any step of the way. So there’s going to be this very close collaboration between the blob side of the Republican party

17:31 Here in the US and the out of power Democrat party. And that coalition may indeed prove stronger than the MAGA coalition. So the battle is won, but the war has just begun. And people need to really understand that because it sounds like there’s a lot of euphoria out there. Everyone thinks, oh, the next four years, we’re going to have everything that we desired and wanted.

17:50 But that’s by no means what’s going to happen. You’re going to have to fight for every single inch of this. The analogy that I give is we just won that the title contender fight. So you should pop champagne. You should have a good time. Have a night out. Celebrate. You earned it. But it’s not the title fight. Now you’ve qualified to fight for the title. Now you’ve qualified to actually have the change and the legacy and the glory that comes from actually having that kind of real world impact. So I think there is a necessary celebration.

18:27 The fact is, we did stave off what may have been the darkest chapter in American history after the chapter we’re now emerging from. Another four years of this may have permanently stained not just the reputation, but the standing of the United States all over the world. It could have tanked our economy. It could have permanently changed the fabric of this country in terms of our trust in institutions, in terms of the functionality of our institutions.

18:53 The fact is, is almost every major agency in the federal government broke down. We lost ground internationally. We lost ground economically. Half of our country has had no trust in our election systems, in our justice department. It has become a badge of honor for half of the United States to be a felon, to be a criminal, to be indicted by this justice department or by some Soros prosecutor in some jurisdiction somewhere. Because if you’re not being hunted by these totally corrupt justice officials, are you really threatening to make change in the world?

19:32 And so that’s how bad things have gotten. They tried this whole line, you’re voting for a convicted felon. And I think half of this country, more than half of this country said, yeah, because that’s how you really know that you’re on the side of good, that you’re on the side of light. It’s the same argument you guys told us about Nelson Mandela and how many other freedom fighters that were prosecuted by corrupt justice departments to take them out of politics. Well, everything you’ve taught us since childhood about what it means to truly stand for something. Martin Luther King was prosecuted.

20:09 Gandhi was prosecuted. Mandela was prosecuted. Okay. Well, you just did that to Trump. Yeah, I was in California, Mike, in August, speaking to a couple of family members. And they were parroting back to me front page of the New York Times. And I was just shocked, because I think usually I’m in circles hanging out with people like you and Rudy. And I had Navarro on and all these people that literally have taken massive hits for standing up for what they believe in. We’ve taken ours. And thanks to you, I know where those came from.

20:41 I used to think it was YouTube persecuting me. And now I realize it was much higher up the food chain. And it was shocking to me to hear these people parrot back these things. He’s a rapist. He’s a this is that. And funny enough, yesterday, I thought about Mandela and I I did at the time I didn’t, but I would have been like, Oh, yeah, man. So Mandela spent 27 years in a prison, you know, it was he guilty of those crimes? And of course, most people would say, well, of course not. You know, he was obviously persecuted because of this and that. And yet, because censorship works, because the media gets inside people’s heads, it’s a very effective tool. And it caused most of the U.S. to think this was a 50-50 race when it never was.

21:22 When you look about that, that amount of misinformation that we got from the polls and the media coming up right to the end, what are your comments on that? I mean, do you look at people and say you clearly can’t trust these sources because they couldn’t even tell you within, you know, an error, a margin of error who the president could have been? Or what do you say to people based on what the election results were? Well, the fact is, the betting markets were crystal clear from moment one, and those tend to be a far more honest indicator of sentiment in terms of how institutional money is moving, in terms of how highly informed or high net worth individuals are putting their money.

22:01 You know, it’s almost like a Pelosi tracker or a Soros investment portfolio type thing. I think that there’s no skin in the game for the independent pollsters. You know, they’re hired mercenaries. Half of them are affiliated with the campaign when they put it out. And so the fact that there was Poly Market and Kalshi and these other very vigorous, you know, betting markets, you know, ironically, just last week, the Justice Department raided the home of the Poly Market CEO, you know, seizing the electronics, seizing the phone, the home computer. When Poly Market was such a big signal for Trump, you know, it’s like there’s no end to the vindictiveness of the Merrick Garland torture campaign. And I just have to add this one thing as another reason why even though we have not won the war, that we should still celebrate the battle is because, Brian, imagine right now if Merrick Garland was going to be running the US Justice Department for the next four years and Donald Trump facing 91 felony indictments had to spend the rest of his life in Rikers prison, rotting away with the whole world watching the one of the most popular presidents in US history die in a prison cell over what people can’t even remember half of the charges. I mean, do you even remember what he was indicted for in New York? Does anyone? Do you think if you were to ask right now what he would be sitting in a Rikers prison cell rotting away as the rest of world politics

23:44 Plays out, as the Ukraine war plays out, as the Middle East. And meanwhile, the 45th president of the United States is in solitary confinement and nobody can even remember the crime. That’s what we very narrowly avoided in this country. So it’s not just the opportunity to make change and to alter the course of US history for the good. It’s the fact that our country was very, very close to death.

24:14 Yeah, I felt that. I mean, I’ve never been so anxious. I’ve never been so emotionally invested. And I just could not imagine a future Mike where the status quo remained. I just couldn’t.

24:26 And it was and I thought about it even from Trump’s perspective. And, you know, this is a guy who had no choice but to win, although he wasn’t playing it like that. But I agree, like he would have been and so many other people would have been in prison for the rest of their lives. And I still had to pinch myself that it actually happened because it felt too good to be true. It felt like one of those movies where the good guys win in the end and you’re like, wow, does this actually going to happen? And it’s a great thing. And I’m glad we celebrated it.

24:56 I felt really good for many days and that doesn’t happen very often. But now I see the pushback and I see the articles on the front page of the New York Times, Tulsi Gabbard, a favorite Russian asset. I was like, come on. I can’t believe they’re playing this again. Obviously Gates and the headlines and it’s just back to the same old games that still 40, 50 percent of the American public doesn’t know the game. And so I can see now the pushback and now I can see what you said. It’s still the title fight is happening.

25:30 What can people do out there if they want to be aware of this and how can they keep pushing this narrative forward? Obviously they voted, but is the best way to stay informed to push these narratives on social, to call and write their congressmen and senators and hold these Republican members accountable? Because just because they’re Republican doesn’t mean they’re on team Trump. Just because Trump helped them get elected doesn’t mean they’re on team Trump anymore, does it?

25:58 The best thing you can do is get a premium account subscription on X. The fact is, is, you know, it’s something like $8 a month. You’re supporting a good cause, which is the most robust political thought leadership network ever created. And it’s run by, you know, a guy who frankly put the whole country on his back, Elon Musk, not just with the financial support to the campaign, not just with freeing X from, again, the clutches of just of near total free speech death in this country, but also what hit the ground running. This is someone who spent weeks in the trench warfare in Pennsylvania, you know, who put every fiber of his being, who risked everything, who stood up to the advertisers in a way that Mark Zuckerberg, who I think actually does share very similar ideological and philosophical strains with Elon in terms of a kind of soft libertarian philosophy about the role of government in private markets. We know that Mark Zuckerberg felt incredibly pressured and coerced by the Biden administration, but did not have the chutzpah to be able to publicly challenge him for years. That is the Biden Harris, to challenge the Biden Harris White House, a guy who had talked about how censorship was bad in 2019. And then he got hit with an ad boycott that cost him 60 billion in market cap. And then he folded like a lawn chair. And when that happened to Elon, he said, I mean, I vividly remember that interview that he did the same

27:37 One where he gave the double barrel middle fingers to the advertisers saying, G F Y. He was asked, what will you do if X goes bankrupt? What will you do if the advertisers, your approach to the advertisers saying G F Y to them? What if that ends up killing X? What if that bankrupts your company? And his response to that was not, well, you know, then we’ll crawl back.

28:01 We’ll negotiate. It was the world will watch. I mean, he literally put himself up on the cross that way. And the fact is, is it’s not for lack of threats to his to his personhood. You’ve had 11 different government agencies under the Biden administration go after him personally, go after every portfolio company. You had the justice department, you had the FTC, you had the FCC, you had the SEC, every, every death by a thousand paper cuts they could do to Elon. They tried. And if Kamala had won that election, do you think Merrick Garland, who was comfortable putting Trump in prison for the rest of his life would have any qualms about running that same operation against Elon Musk? There’s no shame. There’s no shame to these people. It’s raw political power calculus, and they would have had the ability to get away with it. And who on the world stage would have stopped them? Care Starmer’s government in UK, it would have been the front page of Fleet Street that this is, you know, in furtherance of democracy that they’ve taken down probably the biggest guardian for free speech in the history of mankind at this point, Elon Musk. So, you know, the fact is, is this was a team effort.

29:17 The fact is, is there was a in institutional last minute to the rescue that came in support of, of making our country great again. It was Elon Musk. It was Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos, who at the last minute sent a very, very powerful signal to all the other media owners that, you know what, we’re actually going to renegotiate our posture about being totally supplicant to the blob. Actually, I, I seem to remember we call ourselves independent media. Maybe we shouldn’t issue an endorsement this year. You, you had the support from Bill Ackman on the activist investor side. You had the support of David Sachs and some and Chamath from the, from the Silicon Valley side. You have a new web of institutional hubs at the educational level here in the U S through Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott and what they’re doing in Florida and Texas. You had the ability for citizen journalism to flourish again, which again, I say, if there’s one thing that you, you know, can do, you become a journalist.

30:20 You own a newspaper company effectively. The moment you have a subscription account on X and you have the full panoply of features there, you are doing, it is not a, you know, tax deductible, you know, charity donation, but you are helping a good cause by capitalizing the motor engine of free speech in the world today. And you yourself become a journalist every time you hit the retweet button. Yeah. Well said here, here on that. Yeah.

30:54 Elon was absolutely pivotal. The fact that he just camped out in Pennsylvania and, you know, ran his own version of optimization. He did an incredible job and really probably guaranteed those results there. What do you make of what him and Vivek are going to do with the department of government efficiency? Like I said earlier, it sounds like they’re intending to go in there and slash and burn, which I think is the greatest strategy ever. I’m just curious.

31:21 What do you think they’re going to do and what do you think they should do? Well, I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t have any inside knowledge on this. I’ve not spoken with anyone affiliated with that about it. So I’m, I’m sort of on the outside with everyone else, just sort of speculating and hoping and dreaming and, and thinking about what they’re going to run into and what, what they should do. But, but the way it appears to be structured is as a kind of advisory council that is able to provide a sort of independent audit for what the office of management and budget can, can take out. The fact is, is there is a constant turf war within the US federal government between all the different agencies. Everyone’s competing for the same 3 trillion odd, you know, dollars in the, in the federal budget every year.

32:12 You have the Pentagon and DHS and FBI and DOJ and USAID and HHS and veteran affairs and everyone’s fighting for their slice of the pie. No one wants their side of it cut. None of the administrators of the programs want to, you know, they almost represent their contractors and their budget in the same way that a congressman represents the constituents, the constituents in his or her district in the sense that the more you do for those stakeholders, the more you do, for example, at the US Pentagon for Raytheon and Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the more likely you are like Nikki Haley to end up with a cushy board seat on that company after your tenure is done.

32:58 And that same phenomenon is true as we talked about last time with that relationship between the inside of the blob with the government agencies and the outside of the blob with the banks and the multinational corporations. And so no one is going to want their little slice of the pie cut. It is going to take a heavy hand. It is going to take an intractable, immovable force to hold the line against that pushback. I can think of no man on earth who has proven more capable of holding the line in the face of pushback than Elon Musk.

33:30 So the fact that he is sort of atop the food chain of of Doge and assisted by Vivek, who is quite frankly a brilliant man who has succeeded, I think, in everything he has set his mind to thus far in life but has not been tested at the government level. There has always, I think, been an open question, which is that Vivek is so talented and has been so successful in all of his other ventures and so eloquent in his sort of rhetorical diplomacy. The one open question is what happens when pressure is applied to him? Will he make good on the promises that he has spoken about or will he fold under pressure? Because as Mike Tyson famously said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face and you never really know someone until they have gotten back up off of the ground. And so this, I think, is a really excellent testing point for Vivek in terms of his political future, in terms of how well he executes this Doge janitorial cleanup job of all of the waste, fraud, and abuse happening within the US federal government. Mike, let me ask you a question. And if you can answer this completely objectively as if you’re not Mike Benz, what would be the best use of Mike Benz for the next four years in order to make America great again? Period. Whether that’s in the administration, that’s in the Doge, whether that’s as an advisor to any of these people or appointees, if you really just take a step back and thought, okay, what would be the best use of this man’s

35:12 Talents and his knowledge and everything he knows about all these different departments, what do you think it would be? Well, I think I’m fundamentally an independent voice. And I know I’m a political appointee of the first Trump administration. I’m obviously an open supporter of Donald Trump in terms of many aspects of his agenda. But I have a North Star, I have a mission in life, which is free speech on the internet, the thing that I came of age with, the thing that is near and dear to my heart at a personal level, and that I believe is a universal principle, is the greatest gift ever given to mankind, the ability to connect to every other heartbeat on earth, and, and communicate in a totally unfiltered, uncensored way, I think it is the beating heart of everything I was ever told as a kid represented democracy and represented human freedom and dignity. And so that is my North Star. And I see the Trump administration as a capable instrument of helping that mission be accomplished. And whether that’s on the inside, or whether that’s on the outside, I don’t know. I believe that what I’ve done as an independent voice over the past, frankly, eight years, but in particular the past two, in being able to be a public champion of these issues is, is a tremendously powerful post to be able to scream this from the mountaintops in a way that allows me to be independent. There, there is a high likelihood that there will be friction between the best way that I see

36:49 For the, the incoming government to handle various things around, around internet governance issues and what folks at the cabinet level want or desire. I can already see friction around the secretary of state level course of action that, that, that we may encounter. I can see that potentially on the department of defense side, on the foreign aid side, at the DHS side. And so, you know, there, there is, there is something to being an outside independent voice that I think may allow me to more honestly provide criticism and feedback. There is also the ability to publish journalism, to be able to speak freely to the, to other voices in the media in a way that does not, you know, tie a government administration to my every, my every word.

37:46 At the same time, I, I obviously have an interest in, in helping, you know, at the government level, every way that I, that I can. So I remain open to the possibility later in time to be able to, you know, have those discussions. But, you know, I’m not, not currently in those discussions and we’ll, we’ll see what the future holds. But, you know, my, my North star is something, I think bigger than government and, but government is, is one, one set in that whole of society effort that needs to, needs to be conducted to win the internet back.

38:23 Yeah, look, free speech online is something obviously very near and dear to our heart. You are our film, our movie premiere. And we’ve been really the victims of that for the past four years with Google and Alphabet and YouTube kind of dialing up their prosecution and persecution of us. Our channel was completely de-platformed, I think about 13 months ago now. And it’s really hindered us getting our message out. It’s hindered our business. It’s really sucked to be quite frankly. And I always tell people censorship works. It works because a lot of people meet me in the streets and ask me if I’m still doing London Real. And I laugh out loud sometimes.

39:02 I’m like, I’m doing it more now than I ever was. I’m broadcasting even more, but they don’t see it because it’s being, it’s being kept from them. I had Rudy Giuliani in the studio a month ago. And at the end of the episode, I said, Rudy, if Trump wins and asks you to come in, will you prosecute the people at Google and Alphabet? Will you put them in jail for violating our rights? And will you get my channel back? And he said, yes, I will Brian.

39:33 And you know, maybe it was a bit of a naive question and maybe it was a bit of a simple request and maybe a selfish request. But I’m also curious if you think something like that actually could happen, Mike, or is that is that a very difficult thing to happen? You know, about a week ago, a video circulated that Trump made, I think two years ago, and it has him with American flags behind him. And there’s a six minute clip of him talking about really going after these social media platforms that have held back the truth and violated our human rights. It turns out it was from a couple of years ago, but it was a beautiful video that made me think, wow, is he really going to go in here and clean up what’s, what’s going on out there and really put people in jail for violating the law.

40:22 Do you think that will happen, Mike? Do you think that could happen? I’m sure it’s not that simple, but how do you think that could play out? Well, I think prosecution at the private sector level is unlikely. And, and in my view, a kind of dangerous precedent, I’m more concerned at the government level in terms of the infractions against our first amendment, in terms of just the sheer malevolence of how the the laundering was structured. I mean, the fact is, is we have money laundering laws around, around illicit efforts to conceal an illicit source of funds. And that is exactly how they’ve structured the censorship industry, to accomplish the censorship by laundering it through private sector, civil society, media groups and whatnot, in knowing full well that they could not have the government in the US do that directly. And so I think that going after that level is is far more appropriate than going after it at the private sector level.

41:26 I mean, especially with all the confessions that we’ve had through the Twitter files, through the Facebook files, through the YouTube files, through the Amazon files, about the sheer extent of the coercion on the tech platform. So though, frankly, you didn’t even need those, because if you were paying attention in 2017, you would have seen it all in black and white at these government meetings, these US taxpayer funded meetings, where you had effectively henchmen from the central intelligence agency in the Department of Homeland Security, colluding about how to permanently change the economics of the news industry in order to make sure that platforms like yours, Brian’s, are not allowed to generate a profit and that you can kill alternative news by killing the advertising revenue by killing the ability of platforms to host them. And frankly, that threat is not going away anytime soon.

42:20 I fully expect the greatest threat to free speech over the next four years to be shadow diplomacy between the out of power Democrat Party in the US and not the whole party, but those associated with the blob. And same on the Republican side, in order to back channel and build robust networks with the UK, with Brazil, with Australia, with Central and Eastern Europe, with parts of Central Asia, in order to effectively encircle US platforms by making it the global environment for information distribution completely inhospitable to allowing Americans to even talk to Americans. This is what the EU Digital Services Act threatens, a 6% global revenue fine for X for allowing information to spread on X that is designated disinformation effectively by NATO. You saw a copycat law, which is being voted on this week in Australia, which is a 5% global revenue fine on X if they allow misinformation as designated by their E-Safety Commissioner, who, oh, by the way, was openly bragging about how she was recruited to join the CIA right out of college, and whose model legislation was written by First Draft, who’s the technical implementer of the State Department’s most significant censorship program.

43:50 So this all started with the international roadshow that out-of-power diplomats did through back channels around the world when Trump won the first time. This is not the first time Trump won a social media election. That was 2016. And the first thing the out-of-power Hillary Clinton State Department and John Kerry State Department did, they didn’t ride off into the sunset and decide to just chill out on a Martha’s Vineyard beach for the next four years. They ran back their international roadshow, these dirty diplomats, and they used the same back channel connections they had to impose sanctions on Crimea, to impose censorship laws on Europe.

44:34 And it was those European censorship laws which coerced the censorship policies in the US, like NetsDG in Germany in 2017, which is the product of effectively a State Department pressure valve on our European partners, effectively required the implementation of AI censorship superweapons, the weapons of mass deletion that we talked about last time. That was the only safe harbor for avoiding $54 million fines for each incidence of hate speech left up on the platform. So guess what? Americans now had every word they said on the internet. Everything you say on YouTube gets run into back-end speech-to-text transliteration.

45:17 So everything you say, everything you write, every Facebook post, every tweet, every everything gets run through these AI censorship weapons because of shadow diplomacy done out of a rogue out-of-power blob which used its assets in power, in foreign governments, to effectively commit treason against the United States and our Constitution. That is a sort of thing that I would hope our Justice Department under Matt Gaetz will be closely monitoring because everything they accused Trump 1.0 around Russiagate of doing, this cabal is going to be doing on steroids around the world in order to try to enter power again by crushing the ability of Americans to talk to Americans and to free people around the world to speak to each other if it goes against their agenda.

46:10 Let’s talk about Gaetz and Justice. Let’s say that he gets through the committee, although I think Trump is rumored to have said it’s 50-50, but he doesn’t mind that. Let’s say he gets through and can pursue his agenda and Trump’s agenda. What should he do? What do you think he can do?

46:28 What would be the right message to send for him to do over the next two years? It’s a great question. I don’t know, I think Gaetz has excellent discernment and judgment. I think that just this morning Trump announced, I think on Fox News, that he’s not trying to pursue retribution, that he is not out to get even for all of the incredible harm that was done to him. I think at the same time, if there’s no pursuit of accountability for what is bar none, the most corrupt period in United States history, then it allows our history books to legitimize precedents that are simply totally inconsistent with our Constitution, with our moral fabric. I do think that there are several high-level individuals who need to be interrogated and looked at by this Justice Department. I think part of that involves the head of the previous Justice Department himself, Merrick Garland. The fact is, is Merrick Garland sent Steve Bannon to prison for defying a congressional subpoena. The week that Merrick Garland sent Steve Bannon to prison for defying a congressional subpoena, Merrick Garland defied a congressional subpoena. If folks remember the Biden-Herr tapes, Congress, the House Judiciary Committee, which has formal oversight and accountability of the Justice Department, made a formal subpoena demand for Merrick Garland to turn over the audio tapes of the President of the United States with the, effectively the special prosecutor probe, and Merrick Garland refused the same thing that

48:18 He had called a federal crime and sent an innocent man to prison for four months for doing. The head of the Justice Department said, it’s not a crime when I do it. Rule of law, rule of law is all he was saying until the moment the same question came to him. And then he said, I am above the law. And when he was referred to for prosecution by the House Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said, we’re not going to prosecute our boss. So you had the effectively self-admitted criminal running the Justice Department, and then you had the criminal underlings refusing to prosecute their boss. That to me is completely untenable. It is, it is completely routine. You can simply take the precedent that the head of the Justice Department laid down himself and accountability at the highest level means that the message is sent, the rule of law is observed, and you don’t need to embark on some retribution campaign because everyone knows that this precedent has been observed, and you don’t do this again.

49:36 I think you can make the same argument about Tony Fauci, and I think you can make the same argument about several other individuals, but I leave that to the independent determination of Matt Gaetz and the Justice Department. But I think that there is a need for accountability, not revenge, not retribution, but there will be many more Justice Departments to come. And if folks feel like they can get away with this, and there will never be accountability because the other side simply does not exercise the powers that it has around accountability, they will hit Trump, they’ll hit J.D. Vance with 300 felony counts. They’ll have him run up a billion dollars in legal fees because nothing happened last time when Lady Justice took off her blindfold and decided to just use the sword instead of the scales. So I do believe there has to be accountability, but I think it has to be narrow, it has to be targeted, and it has to be focused on the worst of the worst rogue actors inside the blob.

50:53 Yeah, I agree. It has to be done. You can’t just pretend like it didn’t happen. It has to be investigated and something has to be done. What do you make about some of these other appointees, Bobby and Health, Hegseth for defense, Tulsi for intelligence? Do you think they’ll get approved?

51:12 And what do you think they’re going to be able to do? And what do you think that maybe they should do?

52:06 I don’t know, there’s a lot of options. There’s a lot of levers that can be pulled. Some of this is sort of far above my head, I think, in terms of the Trump inner circle and their conversations with donors on the one hand and with Congress on the other hand. An executive branch needs the support of a coalition within Congress, and Congress is far less MAGA on the Republican side than Trump’s base of voters. In particular, our Senate Majority Leader now, John Thune, as we covered. So I don’t know how much of the ongoing conversations are related to the John Thune element at the Senate level.

52:57 And I always say, and Trump is not immune to this maxim, but you don’t really vote for a president. You vote for the people the president owes favors to. And this is simply true of all U.S. politics. It’s been true in some sense since George Washington. This is the nature

53:19 Of leadership and campaigns in our electoral system. And so I don’t know what kind of favors Trump owes. I don’t know how hard he will fight, how much political capital he will apply, what kind of leverage he will dip into in order to get some of those candidates sort of shoved in, how much he will fight for to a somewhat reasonable degree and then settle for someone else. All this is, you know, I think the fog of war on that is quite thick. I think that he is going to sincerely try. I just don’t know what tricks they’re going to pull in terms of holding up the nominations. Again, the fact that you have up to nine senators who may form a block with Democrats to block some of these.

54:10 Well, that’s far more than the, I think it’s a 53, 47 block right now on the Republican side. Even with half of those nine, you can block a nominee. I know that there’s talk about using recess appointments to try to end run that process. I think that there’s going to be, you know, a number of legal obstructions that are going to be attempted to be thrown up to block that path. But, you know, one of my open concerns remains what happens at the Secretary of State level. You mentioned Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz.

54:47 We don’t know yet what’s going to happen at the FBI level. That’s going to be extremely telling. You know, people are talking about Cash Patel on the one hand, which would be, you know, an unbelievable cleanup job at the FBI. Cash Patel has said publicly that his desire is to turn the J Edgar Hoover building, the FBI headquarters, just two blocks from the Capitol building into, to shut it down and turn it into a deep state museum. So you can imagine if he’s made the head of the FBI, the shock wave and signal that will send to all of Washington and all to the, you know, cloak and dagger black ops arm of the blob. But that remains undecided. I think that’s going to be very telling because the other name that’s been floated has been Mike Rogers. Mike Rogers, who effectively cosigned every element of Russiagate against the Trump administration. Mike Rogers, who’s the, you know, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee overseeing the CIA. Mike Rogers, who is a part of the International Republican Institute, which is the major CIA cutout on the Republican side. He’s been a part of the beacon project, which is the major CIA internet censorship operation, which has done unbelievably dastardly things to censor the internet, not just in the US, but to lobby for global censorship laws around the world, including in the EU, including in Brazil. It’s so if Mike Rogers made the head of the FBI, I think that will tell us

56:21 Something about the relative power of donors and Congress vis-a-vis Trump. But then the Marco Rubio, Secretary of State question is a big open question to me. I’m open to Rubio proving himself and doing a great job there. I do have a lot of open questions, though, about just how in sync his foreign policy is with Trump foreign policy. And his commitment to a free and open internet is with the vision articulated by Donald Trump. That’s a whole separate question, which I, I’m not predicting it will be a major issue, but I have very serious concerns that it could be and it could throw a monkey wrench in this whole thing and allow that shadow diplomacy to be carried out in quite a malevolent way. And so the call is, is that Trump is putting loyalists in and disruptors versus his previous administration where he was coming to Washington unprepared, surprised he won and he trusted a lot of people and he hired a lot of insiders and he had to fire a lot of them and then still struggled, you know, still had a successful administration. Is that the way you’re seeing this? Is it that simple or is there a little bit more of a nuance going on here? And is it really candidate by candidate? Like you said, Rubio, maybe less so of that loyalist disruptor and a little bit more of that Washington person.

57:53 But is that what Trump is doing? He’s also moving fast. And is that another signal to Washington about what’s coming? I’m just curious what you see in some of these picks overall. I think it’s, it’s the latter of what you said. I think it’s case by case. I mean, obviously there’ve been a string of people that I think it’s fair to describe as loyalists between Bobby Kennedy and Matt Gaetz and Pete Hagseth and, and, and Tulsi. Although we have not seen, you know, what Tulsi will do with power. The fact is, is, you know, Jeff Sessions also was seen as a loyalist and then as soon as the heat was applied around Russiagate, he recused himself, basically allowed, you know, allowed the, basically gave a Justice Department green light to what would become the single biggest attack dog of the blob that obstructed, frankly, all of Trump 1.0 up until year four. I mean, it wasn’t until July 2019 that Russiagate collapsed. And that was only because after two and a half years of investigations, hundreds of, hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees racked up by, by, by all Trump insiders and the White House, I think that there were probably several foreign policy decisions that were only made by the Trump, you know, inner hive mind as an accommodation to the pressure generated by Russiagate. I think everyone saw Jeff Sessions as a, as a loyalist moment one. And by the way, I’m not making an opinion on Jeff Sessions. He, he seems to me like a, like a fine, a fine guy.

59:30 I don’t know him personally, but the fact is, is I think there was at least the perception that he, he was simply untested, even though he seemed like a loyalist at the time, once handed power, that was not how power was wielded. I think there’s an open question around many of the folks here. It’s, it’s a different thing when you’re on the outside spectating the game than when you’re in the fight, taking the hits. And every single one of these cabinet members are going to be taken hits. They’re going to be taking hits from strange South Paul angles they’ve never seen before. And you can’t train for, they’re going to be taken at the legal level. They’re going to be taken at the media level.

1:00:11 They are going to be surrounded by careers inside the agencies who are going to be poking them with, with pointy spears, you know, every little thing they do is going to be tightly monitored. Every secretary in every one of these offices is going to be looking for whether or not they put the thing in the burn box if it was classified or, you know, if, you know, any number of ethics probes and, uh, yeah, I mean, there’s so many tripwires it’s, um, you don’t, you don’t really know it until you’re in it. And so there is that, but again, you know, when, when Trump went on Joe Rogan, I think he, the secretary position he talked about most vividly was the secretary of state position. How many people were lobbying him to be secretary of state?

1:00:58 How significant that post was in terms of projecting American power abroad. Well, one of these things is not like the other. Marco Rubio is no Trump loyalist. Marco Rubio was working six months ago with the Hillary Clinton network to Trump proof the incoming administration. And now he’s been handed the keys to the kingdom for all of us foreign policy. And frankly, half of us domestic policy in terms of the nastiness of the state department to boomerang back on Americans, the work that it funds of foreign NGOs. So, um, I don’t know what the political calculus there was. Again, I’m, I’m not trying to jinx it. I’m, I want to give secretary Rubio the chance to prove that he is really going to fight for a free speech agenda. But Marco Rubio, just five months ago, won the annual award from the IRI, the international Republican Institute, the CIA wing of the GOP, which is one of the most pernicious actors in the entire censorship industry. Again, that same organization, which lobbied the EU for the digital services act and which lobbied Brazil, its, its internal parliament, its prosecutors and its censorship court, the TSE, in order to round up and arrest the, the Trump of the tropics, Bolsonaro, as well as millions of his supporters. And they’re giving Marco Rubio the man of the year award just five months ago. So, you know, probably the most significant post in the administration is someone who’s going to have to either leave a knife in the back of the donors and stakeholders

1:02:42 Who have made his entire political career, or the knife is going to go in the back of the incoming administration when they’re not looking. So, Rubio is between a blob and a hard place. I think it was yesterday we saw President Biden approve the use of these long range missiles US made for Ukraine to use on Russian targets. And then of course they’ve used them today. Putin’s come out with, with the announcement that I heard was scheduled saying that now they’ve lowered the threshold of when they might use, you know, nuclear arms.

1:03:19 I’m about to say, why are they doing this? But then I know I’m talking to Mike Benz. And so, is this just more of that mob blob pushback? Is this more of that shadow war that’s starting right now to just work for the next four years to push back against what Trump is trying to achieve?

1:04:26 It’s hard to say. I think I won’t really have a hardened answer on this until I see how some of the future moves play out, because you may expect me to sort of say, you know, this is all sort of, you know, nefarious blob ops, because it certainly does look like that from a distance. But there have been some strange recent things that lead me admittedly to total utter uncommitted speculation. I mean, the fact is, is Donald Trump was just meeting with Joe Biden at the White House last week. So a week before this decision gets made, there was a personal meeting between Trump and Biden. Frankly, they looked to Trump’s credit, given that Biden hit him with 91 felony charges and was basically the most cruel and sadistic abuser of power in American history to Donald Trump. They did seem quite chummy. I think Biden felt so betrayed by Kamala Harris, you know, the famous incident of Biden asking a union worker for his Trump hat, putting it on, having that big grin. You know, I’ve said this all week, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen Joe Biden smile as widely as he did as in his concession speech when Trump won the election.

1:05:47 I’ve never seen Joe Biden so happy for such an extended period as when he was delivering his defeat speech about about Trump winning. And so then Biden and Trump are in the White House together, they’re smiling for the cameras, they’re walking around the garden. And I’ve not seen Trump on True Social, unless I missed it, come out and disavow Biden’s articulated authorization of long, long range missiles. Trump is not the kind of guy who’s shy about pointing out foreign policy blunders of the Biden-Harris cinematic universe. So I think I have a weird, uncommitted, utter speculation, don’t know if it’s true, don’t know if it isn’t true.

1:06:37 But the thing that the U.S. needs in its negotiations with Russia is leverage, because Russia is winning this war. They’re winning it militarily. They’re winning it diplomatically. They’re even winning it economically. Russia has retaken the U.S.

1:06:54 As the largest gas exporter into Europe because they are essentially laundering it through other sources that basically buy directly. They evade U.S. sanctions and then they effectively retail it into Europe from there. And they’ve also now, they’re constructing the power of Siberia pipeline to reroute the gas from Europe to China, which is another punch in the face to the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Great. You just gave discount gas to China. And although there’s an open question about whether there are those in the U.S. power structure who may have their own back channel conversations with Chinese partners around that. But the fact is, is we have not crushed Russia’s economy. It’s as strong as ever. We have lost ground in the Donbass. They have consolidated Crimea. There is no way at this point if you were to simply enter state negotiations with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to simply reset the world to the pre-2014 coup period where Ukraine was on track to be a NATO satellite state and where the territory of Ukraine was completely intact. I don’t think Russia is giving up the extremely resource rich areas of the Donbass that it is conquered militarily. I don’t think they’re giving back Crimea. I don’t think they’re going to give that back to Ukraine. The only way to be able to get on the path to doing so, I think in the eyes of the blob and potentially in the eyes of Donald Trump, is with a credible threat of escalation and fomenting at home in

1:08:42 Russia, a kind of Vietnam faction where Russians are coming home in body bags and people are seeing their own kin being affected by the war. It is no longer a war in Ukraine. It’s a war in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I think that there is some potential in the Trump world sort of view that it’s actually quite useful to have this authorization because the credible threat of using it may allow a sort of detente on terms more favorable than the US than before they were willing to play chicken that way. I think what it will come down to over the next two months is what exactly the US does with this authorization. If they limit it to targeted strikes on Russian military facilities inside of Moscow, on Russian weapons depots, on munitions facilities, and they do not inflict so much damage at the civilian level in Russia that Russia can effectively save face at the negotiating table without it causing a 9-11 for them where they now have to double down. There’s a way in which I could see this being a kind of 4D chess thing that Trump now has an offer to the Russian Ministry of Affairs saying, we will rescind this authorization that this madman Joe Biden did. I mean, this was the way Trump talked about John Bolton. He said, you know, effectively he hated his guts. He was going to cause World War VI if we let him in for another two months, but he was useful in negotiations because he was so crazy. It allowed us to carve out an aggressive negotiating posture in order to take

1:10:29 Two steps forward, one step back, and still achieve a one-step victory. So I don’t know. This could go either way. Mike, what’s CensorSpeak? I think it’s a term that you’ve coined. What does that mean? CensorSpeak is the dense lexicon of diction and camouflage words that’s carved out by government-funded US and UK academics in order to create an internal language for carrying out censorship work while convincing the world they’re simply countering misinformation, countering disinformation, pursuing media literacy, building digital resilience, improving information integrity. I mean, if you go back and you look at how Marxism developed at the sort of philosophical and ideological and cultural level, it really started with a thick jargon of academies. It started in places like Columbia and Berkeley and in these sort of elite academic institutions who behind the scenes were building a sort of Jenga Tower of abstractions for why this is actually a good idea. And that sort of Jenga Tower of abstractions requires you to have sort of hardened concepts, jargon terms, that build on top of each other so that you can get a truly crazy, dangerous idea approved and filtered out into the application funnel because no one really knows what they’re saying. Everyone’s sort of, you’re taking a word like democratic institution. That’s like a big phrase in CensorSpeak. And you think, you see the phrase democratic institution and you think, okay, well, democracies have these

1:12:22 Institutions. And yeah, maybe they do put guard rails that protect the democratic process. And so you say, well, we need to defend democratic institutions against threats to the information integrity space. And you say, information integrity. I like information.

1:12:40 I like integrity. I like institutions. It’s almost like a hypnosis, like a pacing and leading. They get you to say yes, yes, yes to things that you don’t know what you’re signing up for. And so then lo and behold, the Defense Department, the National Science Foundation, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI are all defining democratic institutions as the media. And so suddenly you’ve signed up for saying, if you undermine public faith and confidence in the New York Times, you are now on a hit list of the US Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security and FBI and US State Department. You are attacking democracy itself. And so the blobs, long armed jurisdiction, democracy promotion programs can censor you because you’ve contradicted the New York Times. So you, so censor speak is basically a language of lies. It’s a serpent tongue that allows them to get political buy-in for political black ops. A great example of this, if I can just drive the point home, is the Disinformation Governance Board that was set up in 2022.

1:13:59 At the helm of it was Nina Jankiewicz, who had come from this NATO censorship blob arm as an advisor to Zelensky in Ukraine, and as apparently a UK Intercluster Cell member of the Integrity Initiative, one of the first British intelligence censorship operations that started in 2015 until it was busted in 2018 for what it was. She’s now a registered UK foreign agent here in the US. She has a formal FAR registration for her work on information resilience with the UK NGO. Resilience is another one of these censor speak words. It means psychological resilience against anti-blob beliefs. But they called that the Disinformation Governance Board. And that was one of the first moments of institutional pushback in the Republican Congress against internet censorship. Everyone called it the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Truth, because they, for a moment, actually gave an Orwellian name to their Orwellian operations. Well, unfortunately, it was not the Ministry of Truth. They were sort of correct in their sort of faint, ineffective self-defense case when they said it was not the Ministry of Truth. We’re not setting up a Ministry of Truth, and technically, they were right. It was just a dull, boring bureaucratic management layer of the Ministry of Truth they had set up three years earlier, which they had given a censor speak, you know, lie word name. They called it the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure

1:15:32 Security Agency. We’ve given it this boring name that puts you half to sleep before you’re three letters into the acronym because we care so much about security. It’s in our name twice. And then they said, actually, tweets on the internet are a threat to cybersecurity. So they became a cybersecurity agency within 12 months of their birth. And it became so sprawling and so aggressive and had so many touch points between the intelligence community, the media, the fact checkers, the universities, the for-profit censorship mercenary firms, that they needed a dull, boring bureaucratic management layer to manage all the censorship operations that the censor speak coded CISA agency was doing. But if they had called CISA, the Disinformation Governance Board in 2019, it would have never gotten out the gates. But the fact is, it was able to censor the 2020 election and totally decimate the ability for any Trump ally to articulate a pro-Trump talking point on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, Discord, Reddit, you name it, because it was protected by censor speak. And part of my job is to effectively take a sledgehammer to that little piggy bank of lies so that people can see what’s really inside it.

1:16:52 Yeah, I’m so glad you’re articulating that. And yeah, Mike, I mean, you really are unique in your intellectual property and everything that you can communicate to the world. And it’s such such an important part of the narrative. And yeah, just want to take the time out to say thank you. And thanks for continuing going ahead with these tireless efforts and going on all these great platforms like Tucker and Patrick McDavid and just continuing.

1:17:17 And London Real. Yeah, and London Real as well. And drive this message home because it’s so important. And it’s so important that the public is understanding this. I feel like they are slowly grasping this and slowly starting to question where they get their information from.

1:17:33 A couple more things I wanted to ask you about. One is crypto. You know, Trump really went big into crypto. I think it got him a lot of votes. We also know there was quite a lot of money spent in the stand for crypto lobbying campaign that probably was pretty effective. Meanwhile, you know, Kamala didn’t give it any lip service and obviously had an administration with Warren and Gensler that were very against it. I’m curious what you see there. I think you’ve talked in the past what what’s a little more interesting to me, which is the stablecoins and the relationship between the State Department and Circle, which is very interesting, besides something like Bitcoin, which is obviously very decentralized.

1:18:13 I’m curious what you think about the whole thing. Obviously, Trump’s going in. It looks like we’ll get a new SEC chairman. He seems very pro crypto. He’s doing crypto projects.

1:18:22 How do you see that also affecting freedom and freedom of speech online? Well, I have a somewhat complicated relationship with the crypto space. And, you know, when I was asked to speak at the Bitcoin 2024 conference this year in Nashville, Tennessee, I asked the organizers, I said, are you sure you want me to speak about Bitcoin? Because you’ve seen what I’ve said about it, right? Because I’ve done a whole series of videos and I’ve been talking about this for many years. And, you know, look, my opinion on this is still in flux. I’m not hard committed to what my intuition and research has sort of led me to believe so far, but I can’t hide it. It is how I feel, which is that, you know, I think when they asked me to speak at Bitcoin 2024, I just published a video called, I think it was called Crypto is a Scam, but it’s a scam backed by the US government agency, by the US government and the blob. And so it’s a great bet. You know, it’s a great bet. Even, you know, it’s just because there’s a scam at the heart of it doesn’t mean it’s not a good investment.

1:19:48 And I can sort of flesh out, I’m being a little bit glib when I say that. And so again, I may not be saying what you or your audience want to hear on some of these things, but I just have to be true to who I am and what I believe about some of the things in this space. And, you know, the fact is, is there is a really interesting role that is being made for the stablecoins in the face of threats to the US dollar. In particular, Tether and Circle and the incredible liquidity that is given by the stablecoins to the whole of the crypto market. I was very, very, very gung ho about Bitcoin from 2014 to 2018. I had a lot of unanswered questions about Tether and the Tether origin story and the strange sequence of events that appeared to rescue Bitcoin after the Mount Gox disaster when you had this strange alliance around Bitfinex and Tether and this magical influx of liquidity into the market, which sent in which effectively rescued Bitcoin because at the time after Mount Gox, there was no perceived exchange security. The price completely tanked. The demand was drying up and then suddenly billions of dollars flowed into it, effectively emanating from Tether that sent this market signal that this is going to rebound.

1:21:30 I think that added to user confidence, that added on the developer side and the miner side to the fact that you shouldn’t just shut down and move into something else. Tether is the world’s third largest crypto right now after only Bitcoin and Ethereum. Tether is not supposed to be a crypto. It is supposed to be this dollar for dollar match because they’re supposed to have a dollar in a vault somewhere that is supposed to represent an actual dollar that they have. If Tether doesn’t have every dollar that they put in circulation, they are effectively an offshore better reserve printing money. For example, I take my Bitcoin and I buy Tether with it so that I’ve got dollars. I don’t need to take it off platform. I don’t need to incur the transaction fees.

1:22:33 If I’m a heavy volume trader, Tether is very useful. I can keep everything on the exchange that way. Well, if I take my Bitcoin and I buy a million dollars worth of Tether with it, and then I take that Tether and I exchange it into fiat. If I had a million dollars worth of Bitcoin, I buy a million dollars worth of Tether with it, I exchange it into Tether, and then I exchange that Tether for US dollars through the exchange. I now have a million dollars.

1:23:03 What happens if Tether doesn’t have the money? Tether has just printed a million dollars. The fact is, Tether and Circle are both taking almost 100% of the proceeds and putting it directly into US treasuries. This is one of the reasons why just the day after Saudi Arabia announced earlier this year that they are considering moving off the petrodollar in 2027, then they’ll still have the dollar as part of the oil exchanges, but it’ll be a basket of currencies, including the renminbi, and it will just be one of several dozen currencies.

1:23:53 The day after that, Paul Ryan, who is one of the Blob’s favorite GOP representatives, the former Speaker of the House, who effectively knifed Trump in the back during Trump term 1.0 when he was the House Speaker from 2016 to 2018, he wrote a full-page Wall Street Journal spread the day after the petrodollar threat came in, saying that the US has to offset that by doubling down on stablecoins. Tether, Circle, the new the new suite, and the fact is stablecoins now represent, I think, one of the top 10 or top 12 forces now insulating the US dollar. That is, all the treasuries that are being bought up by these crypto stablecoins, which there’s an open question as to whether or not that’s just an unaccountable private offshore Federal Reserve printing money to buy dollars at the same time that Saudi Arabia may be moving off the petrodollar. China has done this massive divestment. China has been propping up the US dollar for a very long time. I think they offloaded $50 billion worth of treasuries in the past several quarters alone. Now you have this budding crypto space. I predicted this price rise if Trump were to win. Bitcoin is going to be an incredible investment because they’re going to want to protect the US dollar, but it’s a very different argument than the argument that Bitcoin maximalists were making in 2016 that Bitcoin is an instrument in order to take on the banking sector or in order to have an alternative to the US dollar. It’s actually

1:25:46 Sort of the opposite. You mentioned Circle. Circle now has a close formal relationship with the US State Department and with the US government because Circle has proven very effective for the central intelligence agency to evade the state controlled banking system in Venezuela. They can now airdrop effectively money to dissidents in foreign countries that the CIA wants to overthrow because the CIA has a big problem with the banking industry when the state controls the bank because every dollar that they give to a dissident has to go through the Venezuelan banking system or the Iranian banking system or the Russian banking system.

1:26:29 And if they can’t set up a local bank like Castle Bank and Trust or Nugenhand or the traditional ones, then the dollars are going to be monitored by the state. Well, how do you evade that? Crypto is the magic answer. So it is effectively a weapon of the state to do state to state intelligence warfare, which is another reason they want to pump up the market. So I’m not arguing against it. I still believe in the long term power of it to intermediate the banking system at a user to user level. But the investment hypothesis, in my view, is a very, very different one than the libertarian one that was sold at the outset.

1:27:17 Hmm. I appreciate that. And yet it has evolved massively over the years. Then, of course, recently now, you know, BlackRock is promoting this and pushing this to all of their, you know, all of their customers. And now I think has the largest holdings of it. And, you know, what they say about JP Morgan and BlackRock being arms of the government. So it is starting to get some strange bad bedfellows. And I appreciate you calling this stuff out because it all needs to be watched. And Circle and Tether are two different animals, but they’re both doing something very similar. One is definitely closer to the government than the other.

1:27:55 But I didn’t know. Maybe. I didn’t know what you were saying about Venezuela. So that’s even, go ahead. But yeah, look, everyone can look that up with Venezuela and Circle.

1:28:06 But yeah, I mean, there’s there’s a lot more there. But but but I think, you know, that’s probably, you know, a good enough for a foray into this. But I agree. It does need to be watched. I think even people who are, you know, maximalists. I mean, the one thing that I would say is we don’t yet know what will happen to the promise of free speech money in the form of Bitcoin when Bitcoin is used at scale by governments deemed to be hostile to U.S. interests, which is to say that everyone thought free speech on the Internet was a sacred cow, untouchable.

1:28:48 It was such a bedrock of U.S. diplomacy. It was it was the reason that the U.S. military effectively gave up its jurisdiction over the military. I mean, the Internet started as a DARPA project and then it was turned over to the National Science Foundation and then made a private sector civilian commercial operation in part because of the utility of a free and open Internet to project U.S. soft power abroad. But then what happened is soon as 2014 Crimea kicked off and the unexpected counter coup in eastern Ukraine and suddenly free speech on the Internet was being used by Russian propagandists to swing Ukrainian hearts and minds. Well, then suddenly free speech on the Internet, which was untouchable for two and a half decades, became the number one threat to democracy. Well, what happens right now, you know, the major stable coins are U.S. aligned. They’re buying U.S. treasuries. They’re being protected by the U.S. Justice Department. Circle, as you mentioned, is formerly regulated.

1:30:00 Tether has the longest leash I’ve ever seen of any corporate entity in my entire life. What happens if Russia starts becoming Bitcoin maximalist? What happens if Russia at scale starts to evade sanctions through the banking sector by pouring hundreds of billions of dollars of its state treasury into Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin? What’s going to happen to the user-to-user capacity to end run banks using Bitcoin at that point? I think there’s a clear case for what’s happening at the institutional investor level because of the utility of cryptocurrency to do intelligence work, to prop up the U.S. dollar. I think there’s an open question about what’s going to happen to the relatively defenseless retail consumer-to-consumer user-to-user level when you start to see – I don’t think it’s been tested yet in terms of the threat it poses to the blob. I think that is when the true face of Bitcoin will really be revealed, and whether it is – if it gets shot in the face, so to speak, at a moment like that, is it going to get up and yell fight, fight, fight, or is it going to mask off and say, well, actually, we were a front for this all along? I don’t know the answer to that. I obviously have my own hopes and desires, but time will tell. Yeah, that’s a great point, and it’s a great analogy you make when it comes to freedom of speech online, and I can see a lot of scary parallels there, especially when it comes to peer-to-peer communication being disrupted

1:31:52 By a bigger force because they see it as a weapon being used by others, and that clearly happened with free speech online. Mike, I want to finish with a question about you. For a guy who is pretty intense and pretty serious about what you do, you also know how to play hard, and you don’t mind putting that stuff online. And I’m always wondering, was that a conscious decision, or is that just Mike being Mike? Because I’ve seen you salsa dance, I’ve seen you play a mean keyboard, and you’re pretty funny on Twitter as well. And that was always an amazing contrast to see because when you’re here, or you’re on Tucker, you’re talking business, but we also get to see the other side of you.

1:32:32 I’m just curious, why show people that, or is that just always you? You must know the answer, Brian. You’re that way too. I think your work is incredibly important. I said to you in person last time we met up that I think you’re a braver man than me, because you have a private business that is actually on the stormy seas of this thing, being directly censored by YouTube, having the advertisers dogpile on it. You are very much a man in the arena on that. And I see you breakdancing, I see you living life. You got to live your life. You got to have fun. You have to be an attractive presence that shows the fullness of life. Nobody wants after a hard day of work to get beat on the head by another way the system screwed you today. Even if the information is completely vital, they don’t want it injected in a way that’s going to cause adverse side effects, so to speak. I think to be an effective communicator and frankly, this is part of the new coalition that we have. All my life growing up, I never joined the college Republicans. I never wanted to be aligned with a certain side of things, because there was no fun there. The party sucked. They never had any cool bands.

1:34:06 They didn’t have a sort of joie de vivre. You have to bring the fullness of life. I think that that is part of winning not just at the persuasive level, but at the cultural level. I think it sends a signal to other people that no matter how bad they screw you,

1:34:29 You can still have a good life, even if there’s a hit piece about you on the A1 Sunday edition front page of the New York Times. Okay, here’s me eating a hamburger and going for a ride in a convertible. That’s not the end of my life. It won’t be the end of yours when they come for you. I think you have to be a happy warrior about this, even when you don’t necessarily want to be, because the fact is, I think history tends to reward the merry little mischiefs. I think Elon is right that the most entertaining outcome is often the most likely.

1:35:05 So, you have an obligation to not just have that sort of torch of freedom that you’re holding up in the face of slings and arrows, but to have a barbecue cookout with that torch of freedom, too, and invite all your friends along to have fun. I think you’re right on that, Mike. I really love watching that side of you as well. Both sides are amazing. And look, I just want to say thank you again for coming to Myrtle Beach and being a part of us screening that film at the Myrtle Beach Film Festival. And I always tell people, Mike, this story, I said there was a theater full of people that were there for the film festival, and there was the guy that ran it, and a bunch of our Academy members flew in.

1:35:51 But there was one person in that theater who I cared what they thought of my movie, and that was you. And I looked over at you about 20, 30 minutes in, and I kind of thought you were kind of smiling, and I was like, what’s he smiling about? And then later you told me, you said, Brian, you were on the tip of that spear, but I knew everything that was happening behind the scenes and that it happened years and years and years before that set you up to take that hit in April 2020. And you were the first person, Mike, that explained to me what actually happened. And that made a huge difference to me, because not knowing sometimes is the worst part, because you’re just confused, but you really allowed it to make sense for me. And it really, I think, in a way, also gave me closure over what happened, so I could just kind of keep moving on and keep things going forward.

1:36:45 And now we ended up premiering that movie on Alex Jones’ show the day that President Trump was indicted. So like you said, the most entertaining outcome that day. And I was there, we premiered the film, and then Alex, he kept me there for two hours and threw me back in the news room and said, get in there, Brian, because he wanted me to commentate on the story of the day. And then we premiered it on X, and it’s been watched like 15 million times. We won 20 film festivals, and finally people know what happened. So thanks, Mike, for being there.

1:37:16 It’s a fantastic film. We will not be silenced. It’s really incredibly unique in terms of how, I mean, you get to see the personal documentation of this. I mean, what I do is so from the other side of it. And I learned a lot from watching the film, not just artistically, but even just the personal struggle against the machine and all the little pivot points along the way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that so uniquely takes you by the hand as you are trying to build and preserve your media channel, a cultural movement, as you’re sort of taking the slings and arrows of it all. So it’s a great film, highly recommend, and I hope you do a sequel. Thank you, Mike. And the story is not over yet. That’s the beautiful thing. And I think the next few years, it’s going to be a to be continued and let’s see what happens next. So I’m super excited. And I’m really glad that you’ve let people know, look, we’ve won the battle, but the war has just begun. We’ve qualified for the title fight, but we still got to win that title fight. And so everyone needs to be vigilant. Everyone has that X account. Make it premium. Start broadcasting. Start getting your opinion out there. Allow these messages to be resonating to everyone in your life, because we’re going up against a media complex that is constantly influenced and censored by these same forces. And they’re just regrouping right now. And they’re going to be more dangerous than ever. And we just got to keep keep up and fight,

1:38:47 Fight, fight. So thank you, Mike. Really appreciate you. Thanks for the time today. Wishing you all the best. And let’s do this again sometime. Likewise. Thanks, Brian. All right. Fantastic.

1:38:58 Follow this man on Twitter. Follow everything that he does. Watch his videos. It’s incredible. And we’ll see everybody next time on London Real. Take care.