Mike Benz - Weapons of Mass Deletion: How The US Government Funds The Digital Censorship Industrial Complex

Full transcript: Mike Benz on London Real

2:44 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mike Benz, the technology lawyer, free speech advocate, and author.

3:04 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 speech writer and technology adviser under the Donald Trump administration before moving into the State Department as the deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information technology. You have been critical of the government’s role in the social media censorship that has become an increasing presence in all of our lives, with your work being cited in congressional hearings and promoted by Elon Musk.

3:37 Ultimately, you want people to take a stand for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the free exchange of ideas online. You believe that we are witnessing a blatant inversion of democracy that will dangerously increase as we head into the election season. Mike, welcome to London Real. Thank you, Brian. I feel like I have just read the tarot card.

3:58 This is that, that I couldn’t have, couldn’t have expressed. I think what I stand for better than that introduction. The only thing that I would add is that the, the author aspect is an in-process thing. The book that I’ve been writing for 8 years is, still in the unpublished phase, but it is the subject, I think, of what we’re talking about, weapons of mass deletion, and how AI censorship came to dominate speech on the internet and entrapped even Even organizations like your own.

4:27 Wow. Well, that’s going to be a must-read for sure. And look, I can’t wait to jump in here, Mike. You just have some really novel and fascinating and quite frankly terrifying, ideas and concepts and revelations. And, I can’t wait to jump into it, but I’d love it if we could look through the lens of my experiences at London Real, because when I read your breakdown of kind of the censorship apparatus, you okay, going back even to the 40s, but then going up to the ’90s and the naughties and then the teens.

5:00 It, it weirdly parallels my experience on London Real. And I want to give people maybe a quick synopsis of what happened here, and then I want to get maybe your thoughts of what was actually happening, because here I was, you know, an ex-banker in 2011. I decide I want to be the next Joe Rogan, right? Or the Joe Rogan in London. And I quit my job as a banker, and I literally set up in my kitchen and I started talking to people and putting it on YouTube.

5:26 Like, that’s literally what I did. There was no business model. There was no nothing. I was an introvert. I had no experience in broadcasting, but I felt a need to do this, and everything was great, and we were broadcasting along and building our brand.

5:42 No one had heard of a podcast really in the world, definitely not in London. And we started getting a bigger and bigger audience. I always was waiting and hoping to get recognition from mainstream media. It never really happened. But we slowly grew and grew and grew, and maybe even built or helped build some of these networks as we produced this content that was consumed on them.

6:04 Now, clock into 2020, nine years later, I am broadcasting on April 6. I have the second largest YouTube live stream in the world, and I have a 70-year-old man in the chair that’s asking questions about lockdowns and distancing and masks and talking about these potential vaccines that we couldn’t even see coming. And Mike, 30 minutes after that video, that would have gone on to be watched, the most watched video podcast in history, it was trending to beat the, at the time, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk 40 million number.

6:35 That video was deleted and banned on YouTube. I had been broadcasting for 9 years, Mike, and I had never had that happen once in my life. And my initial reaction was bewilderment, and then anger, because I grew up in America, and this felt like a fundamental right that was being taken away from me. And again, I’d never experienced it before, ever. And that started a huge fight between us and YouTube and a lot of the technology platforms who continued to ban our content, shadowban us, actually ban us.

7:09 And again, it, it, it, it culminated in, you know, regulators stopping us, Bank accounts being shut down, and that was all of 2020. And then 6 months ago, we were finally permanently deplatformed from YouTube. And so for us, it was, it was a, a pretty shocking thing to happen. But now that I look back on what happened, Mike, through the lens of what you have seen happen over the last couple decades, it seems really obvious to me that it got to a point where potentially our messages were maybe starting to conflict.

7:44 And so that’s been our story here. We have continued to broadcast, but it’s continuing to be a struggle out there. And once I read the Twitter Files and then learned more about what you do, I I would love to get your thoughts of kind of what I experienced maybe in the early days, when these media platforms were being used to get ideas out there, and then later how they were actually being used to silence people. And so I’m curious, Mike, if you see things that I might not see in my story, because here I am, I don’t really see what’s going on the outside, and yet it seems like you have a good perspective of what was going on on the outside.

8:21 Yeah. Well, the timing of that’s really fascinating. You mentioned it was April 2020, right? That was when that interview was, that sort of got the first, crack in the dam. Well, that happens to coincide exactly with the April 2020 Graphika report on how to stop, conspiracy theories about COVID from floating around on the internet.

8:39 Graphika is a, is a Pentagon cutout. It, it was born in the Minerva Initiative. The Minerva Initiative is the psychological warfare research center of the Pentagon. Graphika itself has gotten $7 million in Pentagon contracts. Prior to COVID, they were principally helping the Pentagon identify social media narratives in conflict zones where the CIA and the Pentagon were operating.

9:03 The, chief strategy officer there had spent 25 years at the CIA. They basically did that military and intelligence, social media network mapping work that became so pivotal, in the run-up to and after the Arab Spring. Then they were repurposed for COVID censorship starting in December 2019. Between January 2020 and April 2020, they spent four months doing a detailed social media mapping of all voices, all political movements, all sort of highly influential media channels all across NATO, US, UK, you know, Canada, and then into central and eastern Europe.

9:41 Identifying all the influential voices and what they were saying, to the extent that it was heterodox with official government messaging on COVID. They published this in April 2020 along with a road map on how to silence these voices on social media. And, I would actually love to go back into that report and see if London Real is mentioned. Although, you know, like I said, that was the same month that that was published, that, that you, apparently, you know, had had your messages, taken off, taken off the internet.

10:10 And you know, the whole COVID censorship story is really a story of the blob. It’s a story of the foreign policy establishment, the sort of joint US, UK, transatlantic national security state, as well as its corporate and financial stakeholders who, essentially have, are now in a kind of open conflict with the citizens of the homeland, the people who live there, versus the managers of the empire, because so much, because their own funding and their own mandate, is dependent on the votes of the people and the hearts and minds of the people. So in order to keep the people controlled, in order to keep the money flowing and the mandate flowing to them, they have become, extremely active in control over social media, because now social media has, is, is where even the reach of legacy media is.

10:58 So I mean, there’s a, there’s a whole lot more there, but you know, the first thing off the top is April 2020 happens to immediately coincide with when the consensus started to form within the foreign policy establishment around the necessity of censoring, alternative views on COVID-19. Can, may I ask also, did you cover COVID origins in addition to vaccines, on that, on that? Yeah, we, we, we pretty much covered everything. I mean, in time we would cover everything, and when speaking with that guest, yeah, I think at the time we started talking about, you know, Wuhan and all the rest.

11:33 I mean, we were covering a lot of things, and it’s weird, Mike, because I have recorded conversations with me and YouTube reps where I’m trying to get to the heart of why I’m being banned, and they’re saying things like anything you say against WHO policy now being is being taken down, but sometimes they contradict themselves, and you know, it’s, it’s, I’m, we’re right at the tip of the spear. Where, yeah. And again, it wasn’t just one platform. It was like everything in concert.

12:02 And I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I always say I leave that to my guests. But when you’re, you know, when PayPal shuts you down and LinkedIn pulls your account and Dropbox removes all your content, even though I didn’t know they were actually looking at my content, and then YouTube pulls you and Facebook and Instagram are shadowban you all at the same time. You start to wonder. Now, later when I saw the Twitter Files, it was like, oh, oh, okay.

12:27 Now we actually know there were people from the FBI and the Senate subcommittees pushing through. But when you talk about this blob, that’s the first time that I’ve ever heard anyone really talk about it in real terms, that there are these real groups that are out there really trying to push this narrative. And, and, and, yeah. Well, I mean, you don’t need to call it a conspiracy. You can just use their own term for it.

12:53 It’s called whole of society. So, you know, all of these government stakeholders, you know, in the US, it’s, you know, things like DHS, Pentagon, State Department, FBI, HHS, you know, our Health and Human Services, and for COVID, and NIDA, and CDC. They have something for control over information online that they call the whole of society model. Now they call it the whole of society counter misinformation, counter disinformation network, but they don’t mean countering it with counter speech.

13:23 They mean countering it by getting all the other aspects of the whole society network to censor it. And the whole society is comprised of these four different categories of institutions. There’s the government side, and they call that whole government. Those are those ones we just talked about. Then there’s the private sector side, which are the private sector companies.

13:40 So those are things like the tech platforms, the financial institutions, the censorship technology mercenary firms that we can get into. And as well as the sort of, you know, corporate social responsibility endowment arms of some of these private sector institutions. Then the third category, you have government, you have private sector, the third category is civil society, and those are the nonprofits, the foundations, the think tanks, the NGOs, as well as basically onboarded activist and researcher, you know, sort of, you know, entities.

14:12 And then the fourth category is media and factchecking, which are basically politically like-minded legacy media institutions, as well as this whole newly built capacity, swarm of government-financed fact checker institutions. Places like the Poynter Institute and other big umbrella groups. So, you know, those four categories, the government, private sector, civil society, and news media and factchecking, all move completely in concert, very, very, very deliberately.

14:43 Again, this whole society model goes back to 2017, which is when it was set up within the, the sort of State Department-DHS axis, which itself sort of has these intelligence origins in places like the Atlantic Council, but it goes back decades before that, because they borrowed that from our counterinsurgency model. Counterinsurgency is what the Pentagon and the CIA do to manage foreign populations who have a political movement rising in a foreign country that might topple a US-installed dictator or a US-installed puppet government. You know, we have counterterrorism, which is when that involves violence.

15:16 We have counterinsurgency, which is when there’s an insurgent political group who might unseat a preferred political party that is giving us a sweet deal on oil and gas, or a sweet deal on rare earth minerals, or is allowing us to have a US military base, or is voting with us in a UN vote. So we have a very special set of skills to manage the rise of political dissidents in a place where we don’t want them to gain entry politically. And that’s called our whole society model for counterinsurgency.

15:44 They basically took that and used it for free speech on the internet. And so now you have, you know, when you have a consensus within the foreign policy establishment, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA, that immediately moves into the financial institutions, that immediately moves into the tech companies. That immediately moves into the NGO swarms and the think tanks. And that immediately moves into the legacy media and the fact checker network.

16:09 They’re all together at the same meetings. They’re all part of this same consensus-building apparatus. And you know, part of this is because they all depend on the government for international favors. You know, a great example of this is, you know, the financial institutions are totally in league with the foreign policy establishment, even in places like Ukraine. You know, it was US aid, which is the CIA’s number one funding conduit for clandestine operations.

16:32 USAID and the US State Department jointly coerced President Zelensky in Ukraine starting in 2019, when he was elected, to use this digital identity app called Diia. And that basically puts every Ukrainian citizen. It’s called a state in a smartphone, where all the state services are all linked up in an app on everyone’s phones. This links their social media accounts and their digital identity to their bank accounts. So if they decide that they don’t like President Zelensky, now they can all have their bank accounts nuked.

17:05 But it was US AID who got them to do it, in partnership with AmEx and Visa, who now have a totally captive market in that region, because their monopoly is protected by the Pentagon. This happens all over the world. All the oil companies, all the gas companies, all the credit card companies, all the tech companies rely on the battering ram of the State Department, the defense department, and our intelligence community to protect and secure their markets and investments abroad.

17:31 I used to be in that job when I was at State, and you know, I’ve talked to all these people in the private sector. They need the government’s favors. So they do favors for the government. When the government says, “Hey, deplatform these people. Take these people off.

17:42 We have a new initiative around misinformation. No funding goes to this.” The advertisers comply, the financial institutions comply, the tech companies comply, because they need the help from the government, concurrently. So when you read the Twitter Files, you weren’t shocked. You were like, “Yeah, this is business as usual in any company, not just to mention a tech company or a social media company.”

18:07 Yeah, I was screaming my head off. This is the tiniest little tip of the iceberg, and you ain’t seen nothing yet. I mean, it’s, you know, but I was a part of those Twitter Files as well. You know, I worked with Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger on helping to sort of, explain that, and you know, it was a very important thing for people to see, because seeing it internally at Twitter gave another layer of depth to what was already available open source through government disclosures from lawsuits, and I think it gave a lot of confidence to the House of Representatives here in the US that subpoenaing for more information is not going to send you on a wild goose chase, because you already know, you know, who’s CCed on these emails.

18:50 You already know, there were leads that I think gave confidence. I think before that, a lot of people, weren’t, weren’t totally sure, you know, how deep the rabbit hole went, or they didn’t necessarily believe it, just when they saw, you know, snippets from YouTube videos or they saw disclosures from lawsuits. And also I think knowing that this was happening week after week for 25 weeks. And knowing that Elon Musk, you know, who was the wealthiest person in the world and had a tremendous amount of social clout from all the different, you know, companies that are mission-critical even to the US government, like SpaceX and Tesla, was willing to turn over the dirty underwear, so to speak, of his own company.

19:36 I think gave a lot of confidence to other actors in the free speech community, at the legislative and at the government level, to keep going, and that was really a huge boon, I think, to the free speech movement. Yeah, it was powerful. Although, since the mainstream media gave it zero coverage, I still bump into people and say, you know, the Twitter Files, right? And they’re like, no, I don’t really know what you’re talking about. I’m like, what?

19:58 I mean, this was such a big thing. I guess I’m in this whole freedom of speech chamber, but it seemed like such a big deal and so revelatory. But they did, they did another, a good job, though, of keeping it quiet by not giving it any coverage. and again, when I saw those, I just wanted to see the YouTube files, and I wanted to see what was going on. And I guess you were thinking, well, there’s also the oil company files and the banking files, and for you this is business as usual.

20:25 But for a lot of people, they didn’t know that. And every time someone would pose that or posit that idea, they say, “Oh, you’re a conspiracy theorist. Oh, that stuff would never happen.” And I guess it’s so easy to wash that, you know, put that under the rug, because they’ve been doing that for decades, right?. Yeah.

20:41 Well, we actually have started to see some of those other files. So Jim Jordan, who’s the chair of the House Weaponization Subcommittee here in our Congress, you know, he subpoenaed all of the major tech companies after the Twitter Files, and it came out, you know, in the Facebook files that the House published. It turned out that the White House itself, Rob Flaherty, who was running the White House digital strategy office, was personally telling Facebook to tweak their algorithm to superpromote the New York Times and to deamplify voices like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire.

21:20 And he was, you know, literally the White House micromanaging the algorithm of Facebook. And Facebook’s internal communications around, God, this is a really weird and harsh request, but we need the government, so what do we do in this situation? Even the Amazon files just came out, you know, because they were included in the subpoena sweep from Jim Jordan. And it turned out that the White House was telling Amazon to ban books that were critical of COVID-19 orthodoxies.

21:49 So, you know, you had a top-down government, you know, manual book burning, digitally. What about Google? I’ve got a big beef with Google, because they broke my heart. You know, I put everything into my YouTube channel, and I have a new documentary film called We Will Not Be Silenced that is actually winning awards and film festivals all over the world. We’ve won 20 film festivals.

22:12 I’ll actually be in Myrtle Beach next month. For a screening of the movie, and I’ll be there for a freedom of speech symposium with Dr. Robert Malone. I’ll be there with Dr. David E. Martin and Robert Kiyosaki, who’s a good friend of mine. We should get you up there as well, Mike.

22:28 And we’ll be talking about these issues, and it’s really important, because six months ago they completely deplatformed my channel, and this had, you know, half a billion views, 14,000 videos, 2.4 million subscribers. And, you know, 99% of the content was content that changed people’s lives and made a massive positive impact on the world, and 1% of it was, quote, unquote, medical misinformation, and it still bothers me, because I feel like my human rights were violated, and my First Amendment rights are violated, and these are felonies, and somebody should go to jail, and I should get reparations, and I should get my damn channel back. Do I have any hope of doing that?

23:13 And is anybody going after Google? And is it possible to go after that company, or is it more powerful than everyone else? Mike, yeah. Google is really the great Goliath in this whole story. You know, Google is, in the words of Julian Assange in an article that he wrote, this is the verbatim title: Google is not what it seems.

23:33 You know, Google, Google. I always, you know, I always joke that it’s not a joke, but I always sort of say, a little bit tongue-in-cheek, that none of the tech companies wanted to go through with the internet censorship protocols that were forced on them by the government between 2017 and 2020, and which continues today. Jack Dorsey didn’t want to deplatform President Trump. He came out later and said it was a business decision. They were forced to do it.

23:57 Mark Zuckerberg said in 2019 in a speech in San Jose that the pendulum of censorship had swung too far, and that, he wanted to swing it back towards freedom of speech, and then ended up censoring more than ever because of, the, you, the sort of government-induced coercion that continued on him. The one exception to this is Google. Did not have to be prodded too hard to do this. You know, they, I think, did it gleefully, and part of that is because Google really is an extension of the foreign policy establishment itself.

24:27 You know, there’s a much clearer line between Twitter and the US government and even between Facebook and the US government than there is between Google. You know, Google itself started, you know, as a CIA-NSA project in a certain respect. I mean, now I don’t think that Larry Page and Sergey Brin would agree with that characterization. It’s a bit glib, but the fact is, you know, Google started in 1996, and it started because of the work that was done in 1995 out of a DARPA grant that the two of them, the two founders, had at Stanford when they were PhD students, working on, you know, the backbone architecture of Google, which was again funded by DARPA, the Pentagon, and specifically a joint CIA-NSA program called the Massive Digital Data Digital Data Massive Digital Data Services program at DARPA, which was this joint CIA-NSA data collection sweep to try to see how, quote, birds of a feather were flocking together in the newly privatized internet.

25:32 So you know, in 1991 the World Wide Web came out, and Web 1.0 was forums and blogs and static websites. And this was, these were immediately piped into dissident groups around the world that were being funded by the CIA and were being liaised with the State Department and were being instrumentalized by the Pentagon in order to help those dissident groups develop their own independent media and communication channels in countries where there was state control over media. So it allowed them to basically popularize their ideas and create a critical mass to overthrow a government that the CIA and the Pentagon, the State Department wanted deposed, so to speak.

26:16 So in order to track the spread of that information, to see how political groups were using this newly open internet, there was this birds of a feather flocking together program that, you know, that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were a part of in 1995 at Stanford. And Stanford is now actually, continues to be the number one place for digital, you know, digital freedom in the 1990s and 2000s. And they were one of the four universities that, you know, when DARPA turned over the internet to the National Science Foundation before the World Wide Web, Stanford was one of the four central university nodes in that web.

26:54 You know, today it’s actually the Stanford Internet Observatory, which is this kind of CIA hotbed within Stanford that is, that was, you know, largely responsible for so much of COVID censorship. They started something called the Virality Project, which chopped up four different categories of COVID dissent. And then we talked about COVID origins, and we talked about COVID mandates or lockdowns, or masks, or even conspiracy theories about individuals like Peter Daszak or Tony Fauci, were all being tracked by this, you know, essentially CIA-State Department cell within Stanford, that captured hundreds of millions of social media content using their you know, sort of AI-powered toolkit.

27:35 That we might get to. These are the weapons of mass deletions I talked about, but essentially, you know, Google started out that way. They started out, you know, being powered by the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon. The only reason that they had the amazing tools that they did, like Google Maps. Google Maps wasn’t this, you know, amazing project that Google came up with.

27:57 They bought the Keyhole satellite technology for Google Maps directly from the Central Intelligence Agency. That was a CIA satellite software that they purchased. The CIA hadn’t come up with that, Google wouldn’t have it. Google became a military contractor in 2004, the first year they went private. They were always an arm of the national security state.

28:19 They always had their monopoly because they were protected by the US government. There was never daylight between government and Google. And in fact, the very start of the censorship industry really comes from Google. You know, it was Jared Cohen who was the man who, in many respects, is sort of the godfather of the censorship industry. This was, do I have, can I have, do I have time to go off on this?

28:44 I’m. Please. I’m, I’m finding this fascinating. Yeah. So, you know, the way we did dirty tricks in the 20th century in the US, you know, empire.

28:55 And by the way, you can make the argument that this was all for the good of the world at the time. I don’t necessarily, you know, believe that. But I think that there are schools of thought that say, you know, you need a department of dirty tricks, because it’s a mean world out there, and if you don’t do it, somebody else will. And you could argue as a US citizen that it redounded to the benefit of the US. You know, the reason that we had cheaper gas than Europe or other countries is because we had domination over oil and gas, which meant, which, you know, was made possible only because of our dirty tricks powers from the Pentagon, the CIA.

29:28 Same thing with our export markets. You know, we had Bethlehem Steel, and how could we export steel to all these other countries? Well, we pried them open using our, you know, department of dirty tricks, so to speak. It wasn’t all arm’s length trading. It was getting favorable governments in place by overthrowing governments who resisted us.

29:45 My beef with this comes, and I’m saying this because, you know, I, wearing my diplomat hat, I think it’s important for people to know I’m not just opposed to all this on principle, because it was weaponized against US citizens. And they did the same tricks to us starting in 2016, when they didn’t like who we were voting for, because they didn’t like, you know, the way we were using the internet and who we were supporting online to circumvent legacy media. But anyway, going back to Google, We ran our diplomacy and statecraft operations, our intelligence underworld, through embassies, consulates, and CIA station houses for the entirety of the 20th century.

30:24 From the 1940s through, you know, basically the early 2000s, everything was done. If we wanted to overthrow a government in, you know, in Iran, for example, you know, we would have an embassy set up there. We’d have consulates. We’d have CIA station houses, and we’d work with dissident groups manually in an analog fashion, you know, or in Tunisia or in Egypt, as we saw with the Arab Spring. With the rise of social media in 2004, you know, you had Facebook 2004, you had YouTube 2005, you had Twitter 2006, and then you had the smartphone in 2007, which made it really ubiquitous and mobile.

31:02 There began to be a new power for running covert operations, for running regime change at a scale that never existed in the analog era. And this really becomes a Google story because of a guy named Jared Cohen, who was this whiz kid, who I think at the age of something like 26 was recruited to basically the inner sanctum of coordinating State Department and CIA operations within the State Department. It’s the Policy Planning Staff. He, this guy, was a Republican.

31:32 Cohen was a Republican pick from Condoleezza Rice. So a, a Bush Republican political appointee, and he looked around in his late 20s, you know, he had done a lot of work. He had created something called Movements.org, or, and you know, had this whole sort of road scholar network where he had been embedded within these sort of Middle East, North Africa groups as a, as a kid, and you know, a lot of what the CIA and State Department do for revolutions is working with youth movements, student groups, young people, because they provide the rent-to-riot street muscle that is necessary for the end stage of running the actual government out of office.

32:10 You know, as you know, you can see, for example, in the footage of Yugoslavia, you know, they surround the parliament building and run out of office. Same thing with the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. So Jared Cohen came to this State Department CIA inner sanctum with a sort of young person’s knowledge of, you know, how people were using this new social media apparatus in the early 2000s, and he looked around at all these 40, 50, 60 year olds who were stuck in the, you know, sort of analog era, and he said, “What are we doing running these operations out of CIA station houses and embassy consulates?

32:48 Everyone we want to recruit’s on Facebook. Everyone’s on Twitter. You got people making YouTube videos. You can get 100,000 people in the street simply by creating a hashtag. Simply by, you know, you don’t need to spend 11 months running money out of, you know, running unmarked bills out of black duffel bags, and, you know, having talks with leaders, and them talking to the lieutenants, and them talking to their own masses in the region.

33:14 You can centralize this all on social media. So he came up with a doctrine jointly with Condoleezza Rice that was known as diplomacy 2.0, or digital statecraft. And this was deemed to be so mission-critical to the State Department’s work that Jared Cohen was kept on at State when there was a changeover from Republican to Democrat, when Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, and you had, Hillary Clinton become the Secretary of State. And so, you know, Hillary Clinton and Jared Cohen kept that game running, and it culminated in 2010, 2011, in the high watermark of free speech on the internet, the Arab Spring, which is when Tunisia and Egypt, and one by one, all of these governments who were declared authoritarians and wanted to be toppled by the Obama administration were all toppled in Facebook revolutions and in Twitter revolutions.

34:11 And at that point, Jared Cohen was the talk of Washington. You know, people were talking, this kid’s going to be president. This, you know, this young guy before the age of 30 was, you know, declared by Time magazine as one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington. He could have done anything. And he sort of surprised the entire foreign policy establishment when he decided to leave the State Department at the height of his power, so to speak, and celebrity, to join what was at the time a company that was not even in the top 100 by market cap.

34:44 It was only 120, I think, in 2010. And it was this midsize midsize company called Google. And Jared Cohen was given a very strange job at Google, which was to sit in a room by himself and stare at a white wall and think about all of the interesting ways that Google could use its proprietary resources and data to solve complex geopolitical problems. You know, this was the moment that Julian Assange sort of, you know, picked up on and wrote about, where he described this as the moment that Google became the shadow state department, with Jared Cohen serving as the CIA-State Department liaison directly to Eric Schmidt.

35:23 You know, him and Eric Schmidt would become Thick as Thieves. They would co-write a book together on the future of democracy in the digital age. And it would be from there that Jared Cohen took a very keen interest in the 2016 presidential election, and would then, turn this one-person think tank, Google Ideas, into a new vehicle called Google Jigsaw, which would go on to create the first retail weapons of mass deletion, the AI censorship technology that started off being funded by DARPA, the same way Google started off being funded by DARPA, essentially.

35:53 And these were the AI censorship tools that would come to ensnare none other than London Real. Wow. I did not even know about that history. How come no one’s talked about this before? Because I haven’t heard these ideas.

36:07 Tucker hadn’t heard these ideas. Most people haven’t. How come it took you to really articulate them to the world? Well, I’ve been screaming about them to the top of my lungs for eight, eight years. Is, you know, I think what it’s taken has been a couple of, you know, sort of strange fortuitous bounces in geopolitical affairs, and in the natural sort of momentum it takes for things to break through, in the sense that, you know, when I first started talking about this in late 2016 and 2017, and I said, “Look at these DARPA grants.

36:39 Look at this thing called natural language processing, which basically treats online speech on the internet like a chess position, looks at moves, and allows you to microtarget every different, you know, misinformation community in the world. This is going to wipe out, you know, all speech on the internet that’s opposed to the Pentagon priorities.” And everyone would say, “Oh, that’s crazy. They’re, you know, first of all, how do you really know? Just because it’s in a DARPA white paper doesn’t mean they’re actually going to do it.”

37:04 And so, well, here they’re doing it. Here they’re funding. Here’s this group. Here’s, you know, here’s the Atlantic Council, and here’s the seven CIA directors on the board. They get annual funding for the Pentagon.

37:11 They’re using this for this. Well, it’s, well, it’s okay. Well, you know, what are the specific accounts, you know, that are being targeted by that? Okay. Well, then it takes a year for that to come out, for that to happen.

37:21 You know, at the time, you know, people didn’t want to believe, by the way, any of this was happening for the first three years. You know, when I was in the White House talking about this and doing my, you know, my morning mecca between the first and third floor telling everybody, you know, that this was the sky was falling down. I was, yeah, I was Chicken Little. You know, people don’t want to, people didn’t want to even think this story was possible, because of how much it would require inverting the pretty little world and the little comforts they could take, thinking that they could take on internet censorship at a much easier level.

37:58 I’ll give you a great example of this. The Trump administration, and I’m not casting aspersions on this by the way. You know, the administration has to deal with a whole different set of pressures that I didn’t have to deal with. You know, dealing with the donors, and dealing with, you know, all coalitions and alliances in Congress, and then dealing with the base and messaging and 12,000 other issues on both domestic and foreign policy. You know, it’s easy to understand the instinct that I think the Trump White House had, which was, if what you’re telling me is true, we can’t stop this anyway, because of all the other things or other balls that would have to drop, or because we need favors from this coalition for this and that.

38:39 So in 2019, 2020 there was something very fashionable around something called Section 230. You may have, you may recall this. This was a, this was basically a protection from defamation and other kinds of tort liability, a safe harbor that was given to internet platforms if they were independent and neutral, that distinguished them from publishers. So, you know, for example, social media, you are, are said to be platforms, are said to be platforms rather than publishers under this Section 230 law, because if I make a tweet that says, hypothetically, defames another person on Twitter, for example, then someone could sue me for defamation on that, but can’t sue Twitter just for hosting that platform, only because Twitter is under Section 230 deemed to be a platform rather than publishing it, that my tweet itself.

39:40 So if the New York Times were to have said the same thing, someone could sue the New York Times. But if the New York Times puts that same article on Twitter, then Twitter won’t be held liable, only because of this platform-publisher distinction. The New York Times is a publisher. Twitter is simply hosting that. So, you know, it became very evident in 2019, 2020, after, you know, 2017 was when this consensus-building architecture really came out.

40:06 2018 was when it all started to really get set up. 2019 is when it really started to snowball, and heads started to fall, you know, online, you know, from the political censorship of early 2019 into the COVID censorship that would happen starting in December 2019. And so, you know, Section 230 was sort of, you know, had a lot of attention in the early days, in 2019, 2020, even 2021, because if you could simply say, “Hey, you know what? These Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, you guys have become publishers now.

40:39 And so we’re going to remove your safe harbor, because you’re making editorial decisions about what is postable on your platforms, in the same way that publishers do. You are really a publisher now, because I can’t publish freely on your platform if I’m a COVID dissenter, or I don’t believe mail and ballots are safe and secure, or I’ve got this, I’m, you know, this perception on things like immigration or other things that were deemed to be, you know, hate speech or misinformation.” So there was a very strong argument to be able to, you know, repeal those Section 230 protections, if you could solve the complex sort of legislative Chinese finger trap of it all.

41:20 And so there’s a natural desire, I think, for people to want to focus on easy solutions at the legislative level that wouldn’t require them to do trench warfare, hand-to-hand combat with the Pentagon or the State Department or the CIA, or 10,000 different NGO institutions on US aid or National Endowment for Democracy payroll, or to sort of, no one wanted to stare directly into the sun. No one wanted to believe it. And so, you know, I think it, it, it took, you know, until late into, once the cancer had already metastasized, for people to actually come to grips with what they were actually up against.

41:56 Wow. You’ve said before, quote unquote, what I’m describing is military rule. That’s a strong statement, Mike. What do you mean by that? Well, you know, it’s bigger than that.

42:06 In the sense that, you know, above the military are the corporate and financial stakeholders of the activity of the military. You know, the military itself, you know, is run by a sort of general class, and, you know, in second or third world countries we call them hunters. In the US, we simply call them, you know, four stars, or, you know, you know, the sort of Mark Milley class. But, you know, above that are the corporations and financial stakeholders who essentially provide, you know, the choice and the staffing of that.

42:45 So, you know, the military is not necessarily where the money is. You know, the reason you become a multi-millionaire as a four-star general isn’t because of your your salary, you know, while working for the military. It’s the work that you do after that. You know, when you go on to be an adviser for, were a, or a member of the, of the board and get a big equity share in Boeing or Raytheon or BAE Systems, if you’re in the UK. Michael Chertoff’s a great example of this.

43:12 You know, he was the guy who was the first full-term DHS secretary here in the US. He’s a guy who is another one of these godfather figures of the censorship industry. He, he was a, the functional head of the cyber, of the Aspen Institute’s cyber working group, which was the sort of central command in many respects for censorship thought leadership. He’s the guy who went on to become the interim head of the Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security.

43:42 Well, what did he do right after he became, right after he became, after he left government under the Bush administration running DHS? He went to become the chairman of BAE Systems, which is, you know, the UK’s equivalent of Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin combined. You know, they, BAE functionally runs the British Ministry of Defence, and, Chertoff also started a private sector group called the Chertoff Group, which does a lot of this geopolitical advisory work, and, you know, the one of the first people they picked up there was General Michael Hayden when he retired from being the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, and being a four-star general for the US government.

44:20 So you have this rotating class between the military and the corporate and financial class. But, you know, they, the mil, when I refer to military rule, it’s because the military, you know, is essentially doing the dirty work of the the corporate and financial class. They’re essentially the executioners of the judicial edicts coming from that, That, you know, corporate and financial aspect of the blob. And, you know, the military does a lot more than just straight military.

44:47 You know, we have four theaters of war, and according to US military doctrine, we’ve got the strategic, you know, which is, you know, the sort of grand strategy for how to win militarily. We have the tactical, which are the specific operations. The third category is something called logistical, which is everything from, you know, how, which is everything from our supply, you know, supply lines to our, our sort of, production networks, to actually running, you know, the, the military equipment in order to support the tactics, in order to support the strategy.

45:15 But the fourth category, something called political, which is the military’s control over hearts and minds, because that is effectively the easiest and cheapest way to win a war is to induce a state of surrender in the political ecosystem of the country you’re at war with. Which is to get their own citizens and their own government to lose support for the war. And so they, their government, in the civilian, at the civilian level, you know, basically agrees to surrender or to put down arms or to reduce funding.

45:46 This is how our military sees the reason we lost Vietnam. Not at the strategic or the tactical, the logistical level, but because we lost political support at home, and, and therefore lost funding and lost mandate for boots on the ground, and so therefore effectively lost at the strategic and tactical and logistical level, because, we ran out of the mandate for the, the strategic. We lost the ability legally to do tactical strikes, and we lost the money to support the, the legit, the logistics.

46:14 And so we lost the war because we lost the political. So after Vietnam, the US military became monomaniacally obsessed with control over media and control over hearts and minds. You know, there’s the famous, famous declaration from George Bush Senior during the Iraq, during the Gulf War in the 1990s, you know, where he said, “By God, we’ve kicked Vietnam syndrome.” And part of this was by doing all these favors for legacy media to make sure that, you know, pictures of kids coming home in body bags weren’t on TV, and that CIA, and that CNN, rode, you know, in the helicopters with them and were glorifying it rather than criticizing it.

46:49 But you know, the mil, but the military has by far the largest budget of any federal government property. You know, our most of our, you know, there’s no other federal agency, of the 17 or so federal agencies in the US government, who comes even within a fraction of the Pentagon. The Pentagon, civil affairs and their sort of hearts and minds operations dwarf anything Of any other government entity, and, you know, they, when the military moves into the media, the media responds, you know, immediately.

47:19 I mean, there’s, this is so in the social media space. You, you had this NATO doctrine after the Crimea annexation in 2014. First it was called the Gerasimov doctrine, then it became hybrid warfare, and this was the idea that war was now a hybrid of military and social media. You had Jens Stoltenberg declare the from tanks to tweets doctrine, which is this idea that NATO has to focus more on tweets than on tanks. Well, when that happens, how is Facebook going to protect its monopoly in the Philippines, or in Southeast Asia, or in sub-Saharan Africa, or in Latin America, if they lose the support of the Pentagon and the State Department and the CIA?

48:00 What happens if, you know, the African Union wants to, you know, bring in some competitor from China that undermines the market share of Google there, or undercuts the market share of Facebook or of Twitter there? Well, if you don’t have the protection of the battering ram of the blob, you lose your market all around the world. You become a tiny little island parked in the US rather than a big bad multinational corporation. So these companies are all stacked in their trust and safety teams with, they, their, these trust and safety teams are all dominated by people from the CIA, people from the Pentagon, people from the State Department, or people from an NGO swarm that’s vetted by the foreign policy establishment.

48:45 So when the, so when the Pentagon says, “Hey, we’ve got this new hybrid warfare doctrine. Your trust and safety teams, your content moderation teams, are going to get rid of misinformation in this region, and if we say something’s Russian disinformation, it’s, yes, sir, may I please have another, not, hey, this is weird. The Pentagon’s telling us to censor stuff.” Right? And with the Twitter Files, it became very clear that there were these CIA, ex-CIA people all throughout that organization.

49:13 And it, it shocked me. I mean, I’m sure none of this shocked you, but a lot of people are like, “What the hell are these people doing there?” And I guess for you, yeah, you’re like, “This is business as usual across all these corporations.” But I remember that for me was surprising, because I’ve been a little naive about some of these things. You’ve said that the two, I guess, greatest, accomplishments of this blob were, I think, COVID, and then the suppression of the conversation about mail-in ballots.

49:43 And these were the things that kind of happened in 2020. You know, fast forward to today. What is their priority now for 2024? Because you’ve got a lot of things happening. You’ve got, you know, this election coming up.

49:56 You’ve got lots of talk going on. Have they focused their attention to other pieces, and then now we also have this AI component, which is much more effective than maybe it used to be, where maybe you had these weapons of mass deletion? I love that concept. But with AI, it might replace those 10,000 people or 25,000 people you used to have in this mechanism with maybe one algo or one AI. So maybe you can speak on that.

50:22 Yeah. So starting with the 2024 election, and, you know, the blob sees it as being much, much, much more than just the election here in the US in November 2024. So my foundation, Foundation for Freedom Online, has published a bunch of the blob’s, blueprints for what they plan to do with 2024. It turns out serendipitously that 2024 actually will have more elections around the world than any other year in human history. I think it’s something like 85 elections, or something between 65 and 85 elections all around the world.

50:53 You have to understand, once this social media censorship power was debuted, you know, really starting in 2016 with this sort of AI capacity and the ability to track emerging narratives, simply by using keywords and having, you know, narrative network mappers on US payroll. You know, they really saw this kind of El Dorado, you know, gold mine for how to control elections all around the world. It became part of our operating mandate, you know, at State, in the NGO swarm, and in, with our liaison in the tech platforms, to be able to manipulate every election around the world.

51:31 Doesn’t matter if that’s US, UK. It could be places as remote as Tanzania or Madagascar. If there’s an election in process, the State Department is going to have a preference about who wins or loses, which means the State Department is going to be reaching out to the, you know, the Facebook and the Google and the Twitter trust and safety teams and content moderation teams, you know, at those regional offices, to make sure that their definitions of misinformation and disinformation, or hate speech, or whatever the toss violation of the flavor of the day is, is going to tilt that election cycle, in order to kick the opposition who’s disfavored by the State Department off of social media, so that the messaging is saturated by whoever is favored by the US State Department.

52:15 And it’s not just the US State Department, by the way. The UK Foreign Office as well. In many respects, and in some regions, the UK actually figures even more favorably, you know, heavily in this, and sort of occupies the senior role, whereas the State Department will sometimes occupy the junior role in a region. Depends on the sort of financial interest that the US and UK have. But this is very much a joint operation.

52:37 It’s, it’s almost an even split, there. But we refer to that as the transatlantic alliance, not, not, interstate collusion. But anyway, getting back to this, you know, sort of story of what they’re doing for 2024. Things are very much in flux right now. You know, after you had the, the censorship of the, the pre-censorship of what they called the red mirage, blue shift event in 2020, which was everything from mail-in ballots to early voting, dropboxes, to ballot day tabulation.

53:09 There was, you know, the COVID censorship saga. And then from 2021 to early 2023, they really set their sights on every sensitive policy issue. They thought that they were politically unopposed forever. This was before the House changed over from Democrat to Republican. And you had these voices like Jim Jordan, and Representative Dan Bishop, and, and James Comer in the oversight committee, before you started to have the House subpoenaing people and holding these hearings, before Elon Musk acquired Twitter.

53:43 And Twitter, make no mistake, even though it’s the smallest of the platforms, it is by far the most significant in terms of political discourse. You know, YouTube is the single highest trafficked website on the internet after google.com, and it’s owned by Google. So, you know, YouTube is effectively the biggest website on the internet by traffic. Facebook has, you know, the most. Facebook and Instagram have over 2 billion monthly active users, whereas Twitter is only a quarter of that, at 500 million, but Twitter is by far the most important politically because of the nature of how information spreads on Twitter.

54:20 Only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of people who use YouTube actually have YouTube accounts or are YouTube content creators. You know, most of that is just passive absorption. When you watch a YouTube video, you don’t simultaneously share a YouTube video. And on Facebook, you know, there are Facebook groups, but for the, you know, for the most part, it’s personal information. And, you know, Instagram is mostly, sort of, you know, photos and videos, and is more about your personal story and personal branding.

54:49 The political discourse, and the reciprocal nature of the retweet button, allows political ideas to spread on Facebook, on Twitter, like no other platform. And in addition to that, because Twitter was the only, social media company that was not, that was not a walled garden, at least until late 2023, and I can get to that, ’cause this impacts the AI story, but until Elon Musk created this sort of walled garden, in late 2023, everything on Twitter was open. You didn’t even need a Twitter account to be able to see things on Twitter.

55:26 And everybody’s Twitter was public. Most information on Facebook, Facebook posts, you need to know that person or be friends of a friend. It depends on the privacy setting of any individual person, Whereas on, whereas on Twitter, everything, you know, was public and still is. There’s, Elon made a change after, in the summer of 2023, where he required an account to log in to actually see, you know, things that are on Twitter. He also imposed these rate limits on the amount of, of posts that you could see in a certain day.

56:05 And, you know, one of the first things that I did that had sort of viral breakthrough on my own ex-handle, which is MikeBenzCyber, I’m highly active there. I probably post 30 times a day. But, you know, I did, I did a video on this in the summer of 2023, where I talked about the impact that this would have on AI censorship. This relates, I know this is a very long way of getting to the 2024 election, but this rate limit policy actually limits the ability for AI censorship technology to ingest tweets in order to create the models that their AI censorship techniques are trained on.

56:43 So, I give you an example. In the 2020 election, these, these four groups partnered with the US government: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Bill Gates University, University of Washington, Graphika, you know, which is this Pentagon cutout from the Pentagon Psychological Operations Research Center, and the Atlantic Council, which is seven CIA directors on its board and gets annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department. They were all part of this consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership.

57:10 And one of the things that they did is they used these AI machine learning training models to ingest 859 million tweets on Twitter in the run-up to the 2020 election. So that’s almost a billion tweets, all ingested, you know, for training a model in order to microtarget anyone who expressed an opinion which was said to quote undermine public faith and confidence in mail and ballots. So it didn’t even have to be false, because this is mis- and malinformation.

57:43 Meaning it’s true. We can’t rebut it on factual grounds, but it still has the effect of undermining public faith in our narrative, the government narrative, that mail and ballots were safe and secure. So their model ingested 860 million tweets. And from that, their model said 22 million of these tweets undermined public faith and confidence in mail and ballots. And so they were able to get 22 million tweets designated as misinformation, essentially sandblasted off the internet, as long as they had someone at Twitter who was willing to say yes, that’s, that is part of our delegitimization toss violation.

58:23 So that superpower to be able to sandblast 22 million tweets off the internet in one single go is only made possible because they were able to ingest 859 million tweets in the first place. This new change at Twitter with the rate limit, you know, I said, runs right into a DARPA rattlesnake, you know, in the sense that now that can’t be done so easily. Now, you could obviously string together 10,000 accounts to simulate that. You know, there’s going to have to be new technological techniques to be able to get that same, that same, you know, AI death star up and running again.

59:02 And that’s part of what they’re reorganizing to do. But part of that is now Twitter does not want to necessarily play ball. They’re not disclosing the same amount of internal data that they were disclosing when Yoel Roth was running the trust and safety there. You know, Yoel Roth came from, you know, essentially the US government in a certain respect, and he went right back into it. You can argue he’s now working at the Carnegie Endowment.

59:25 The Carnegie Endowment was run from 2014 to 2020, 21, so for the past seven years by Bill Burns. Bill Burns, who was formerly, you know, one of the most esteemed diplomats at the US State Department, again, part of that State Department, CIA, DoD blob trifecta. Well, what is Bill Burns doing right now? What did he do? What was his first job when he left the Carnegie Endowment?

59:48 He’s currently Joe Biden’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency. So Yoel Roth went from running the censorship operations at Twitter to the place that was run immediately for the past seven years by the guy who’s now the number one head of the CIA. So rotating right back into that blob. But, you know, they don’t have the same level of access to that data, to the thing that charges the AI death star, to be able to kill tens of millions of tweets in one go, or Facebook posts, or YouTube videos.

1:00:22 But they’re working to get that back through using the law. And there’s two sets of laws that they’re doing that through. One of these is this new NATO censorship law. It’s known as the EU Digital Services Act. This is something that I ran up against while I was at the State Department.

1:00:37 But this is essentially a new extension beyond the simple hate speech laws of Europe, to go, you know, even if something is not hate speech, or can’t be argued to be hate speech, there’s a new component called disinformation, which is basically anything that NATO doesn’t like can be declared disinformation, the same way that the Pentagon and the DHS were declaring, uh, you know, anything that undermined public faith and confidence in COVID vaccines or mail-in ballots to be disinformation. NATO can now do that through this new EU Digital Services Act, which might create a legal requirement for Twitter to censor elections, if NATO designates some, some operation, you know, something strange like ballot harvesting, anyone who challenges ballot harvesting practices, that is, deemed to be election disinformation.

1:01:30 Well, if that comes down top-down from NATO, well, Twitter’s in a real bind. Then they either have to censor the election to favor, you know, whatever party is engaged in that ’bout those, ’bout trafficking practices, or else they might lose their entire EU market. You know, the only ways to get out the only safe harbor provisions for the disinformation compliance under that law are going to be to hire teams of, you know, NATO-intermediated blob monsters.

1:01:58 You know, which is basically you hire the censorship organizations to run your company, uh, to run your trust and safety teams. Some of this is still being codified right now, but the people codifying it are cutouts of the foreign policy establishment. Or you lose your EU market, which is 550 million people. That’s a bigger market than the US. So that’s not feasible.

1:02:18 Or you have to pay them 6% of your global annual revenue, revenue. So that’s probably more than the profit margins of any major tech company. You know, they have huge amounts of global revenue, but they run on, on, you know, significantly less for the profit margins. So they’re going to basically have to do what NATO says. and they’re now at NATO’s mercy for how they define disinformation in terms of how the 2024 election cycles go.

1:02:40 But the other way is they’re doing it through state laws. California just passed this new data transparency law that might force Twitter to turn over all the internal data that will allow these CIA cutouts to recreate these, uh, these AI death stars by getting new access to this data that, you know, Elon Musk foreclosed on. So they’re doing a lot of different dirty tricks. They’re doing it in the US. They’re doing it across Europe, and they’re doing it, you know, for all 85, you know, uh, in-process elections, according to, you know, you can read all about this on the Foundation for Freedom Online website, which I’ll post, you know, after this interview on my ex page.

1:03:17 And what about Elon? Is he an anomaly? Is he a hero? Is he someone they never saw coming? And how much longer will he be able to, you know, be this, uh, this, this, this light for free speech?

1:03:30 Or will that be shut down sooner than later? Elon is a truly fascinating, singular, great man of history in all of this. And you know, I, I wrote, I wrote a piece in, I don’t, I forget if it was Newsweek or Town Hall, uh, right when the Twitter acquisition was announced, and I called it the, um, Deus ex Machina, uh, for Elon Musk. You know, the Deus ex Machina, you know, is this, uh, you know, sort of, you know, per you figure from the sky who falls out of a plot in order to solve all the plot’s problems magically.

1:04:08 It’s sort of known as a cheap trick in screenwriting, you know, when, uh, the hero is in impossibly big trouble, and some, you know, some cheap writers can’t figure out how to solve this thing in a realistic way. So something falls out of the sky to save him at the last minute. That’s completely unrealistic, and, you know, descends on the Greek stage, and you know, Elon Musk basically was the sort of Deus ex Machina of the free speech story in many ways. You know, suddenly, somehow, the world’s richest man falls out of the sky with $44 billion to save us from Yoel Roth and the CIA and the State Department and the Pentagon.

1:04:49 Um, and you know, I did a piece, you know, through our foundation, Foundation for Freedom Online, of the sort of 10 greatest free speech hits of everything that Elon Musk did in 2023. I mean, it’s unbelievable. From firing the trust and safety teams, reinstating, you know, all these banned accounts, creating legal funds for people who are fired from their jobs for tweeting on Twitter. Um, you know, uh, telling advertisers, you know, GFY, moving towards a subscription model to create a sort of economic self-sustainability, you know, with all of this.

1:05:22 I mean, there’s so much that Elon has done. And there’s also a kind of amazing irony from it. Um, I myself, you know, was, uh, you know, took a long time for me to feel like, Elon, you know, there’s a tremendous amount of, you know, initial early-stage optimism about what Elon might be able to do, and it took a long time for me to sort of come over um, to being able to even entertain optimism on that, because I had seen so many free speech, uh, activists and optimists in that world have all these brilliant ideas about how they’re going to save free speech, and then, bonk, the State Department hits him in the head with a $60 billion threat of an advertiser boycott.

1:06:07 You know, I, you know, I had been writing my book when Mark Zuckerberg had given that San Jose speech about free, you know, it’s time for free speech to come back after two and a half years of censorship. And then they bunkered Mark Zuckerberg, and all it took was a $60 billion hit over a single quarter to Facebook’s revenue for him to become, you know, a number one censorship zealot again. So, you know, I was writing at the time of Elon’s acquisition, you know, he, this guy, you know, may mean well, but he has no idea what he’s up against in terms of the size of the apparatus, of the rattlesnake that he has just, uh, unslumbered with this acquisition.

1:06:51 And there’s also the great irony of the fact that many of Elon’s, uh, portfolio assets, that, you know, put him in the position to be the world’s wealthiest man, themselves were either, you know, relied on government subsidies in the beginning, or are essential instruments of statecraft for the US government. You know, so you can argue that, you know, the lithium and the cobalt that they’re relied on for renewable batteries are only made possible because of the activities of the foreign policy establishment in making those supply lines accessible, you know, so that they can be used by Tesla and as part of the green energy revolution. Uh, there were lots of government subsidies that went into those at the early-stage level of business.

1:07:38 SpaceX is an absolutely essential company to US statecraft. You know, something like 1 to 2/3 of all low Earth satellites, I think, are SpaceX. They figure heavily in telecommunications. This is something that I ran into at the State Department. SpaceX always had a seat at the table when it came to State Department activities in telecom.

1:07:58 Things like Starlink are essential for US operations in places where, you know, there’s not organic uh, you know, high-speed internet. Uh, and so you’ve got the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA dependent on Elon Musk properties. You have to some extent, especially in the early days, Elon Musk properties reliant on the foreign policy establishment. You know, it seemed to me like this was, you know, a huge, huge liability for someone like Elon Musk to be able to do free speech activity, because he’s got all these vulnerabilities in the other properties that could be, uh, that could be threatened by the blob.

1:08:34 But in a certain respect, that relationship almost runs in reverse. You could argue, because if Elon Musk got, became the world’s wealthiest person running a lemonade stand, uh, you could argue that because the lemonade stand is not so essential to the Pentagon, to the State Department, the CIA, they could threaten that business and get him to do anything they want. But because they actually need Elon Musk, there’s only so far they can sort of push him before it says, “Okay, well, you don’t want renewable batteries for the green revolution.

1:09:04 Okay, you don’t want Starlink. You don’t want SpaceX.” Now they could, you know, the national security state could at that point up the ante even more by invoking something like CPHAS, which is a law that, you know, basically allows you to nationalize private companies on national security grounds. But then what would happen if CPHAS were invoked to nationalize SpaceX or to nationalize Tesla? You know, could any corporation on planet Earth choose the US over China, or over, or over another country?

1:09:34 If some of the largest corporations in the world can be swallowed whole by the US government, it would undermine two and a half centuries of US statecraft trying to distinguish free market and free enterprise, and the safety of investments in the US, uh, as the lynchpin of our, of our, you know, private enterprise statecraft. So there’s a little bit of a Gordian knot they’re tied in, uh, in terms of how far they can push Elon Musk. I think the ideal situation for them is a kind of corporate regime change, where Elon is essentially simply you know, forced out of Twitter.

1:10:11 Um, but, you know, these folks themselves at the Stanford Internet Observatory, you know, my foundation published a bunch of their internal, uh, you know, internal discussions, where they would talk about how, um, one of the things that might be done in order to coerce Elon Musk to censor Twitter is to go to foreign governments, like go to Germany, and you know, work with potentially the German foreign minister there to put pressure on Tesla’s Gigafactory there, because that is the industrial sort of base of Europe. It’s where a lot of the production capacities for Tesla are. In Germany is also the center of content moderation in Europe.

1:10:50 It’s actually where the State Department first got the US, got the, got the EU to pass these censorship laws in 2017 with Germany’s NetzDG law. So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of state capture that the blob has in Germany. If they can get Germany to put pressure on Tesla in order to coerce Elon Musk to change the content moderation terms, you know, terms of service policies, in order to censor the, the elections there in Europe to stop the rise of right-wing populist parties.

1:11:18 These are all things that the blob is sketched out as part of their plans. Whether they can actually execute them is the other side of the story, because now Germany is partially reliant on that, on that, you know, on those giga, on that Giga Berlin factory for their own jobs and for their own, you know, uh, uh, prosperity of their own workers, who at the same time are being squeezed by the State Department in the natural gas story, because they’ve been forced to sanction Russia, and there’s the, the strangeness of the Nord Stream pipelines being shut off. Uh, uh, so there’s a complex interplay in how that resolves, and that remains to be seen.

1:11:53 Yeah, he’s almost too big to fail somehow, but it’s not stopping them from filing lots of counterattacks and lawsuits in many different, uh, states and many different industries there. Um, so I guess it remains to be seen if they can’t find some way to control him, but right now he’s managed to continue doing what he wants to do with this platform. And, uh, it’s been huge. It’s been huge to have an example of what the world could look like, you know, versus what the world does look like.

1:12:22 And I think it’s, it’s allowed a lot more people to be bold and funny enough, uh, Mike, in their normal everyday speech, and even their speech at places like work, knowing that someone saying it on Twitter, you know, just keeps people and reminds people that freedom of speech is a thing. I think it’s hard to overemphasize the fact that this, uh, Deus ex Machina figure came in and saved us all. It’ll be interesting to see how history looks out. Go ahead. Just one quick thing.

1:12:46 They are absolutely trying the death by a thousand paper cuts, though, in the interim. You know, without a knockout blow, they are still trying to, uh, capacity, him. You know, if they can reduce him to a double-digit billionaire instead of a triple-triple-digit billionaire, I think that would go a long way in terms of their ability to create leverage. So there are seven different legal attacks that the Biden administration alone, seven different regulatory agencies have all filed lawsuits, including, you know, uh, basically punishing SpaceX for not hiring enough illegal immigrants.

1:13:17 I mean, these are the, the sort of things that in a US company being fined millions of dollars potentially for not hiring people who are here illegally. Um, you know, these are the kind of tactics they’re stooping to absent a knockout blow. But I’m sorry if you… Yeah, I mean, when you look at, I mean, I even haven’t gone too deep in the compensation lawsuit, but it, it seems really flaky to me, and it now looks a lot more like what they’re doing to Trump, um, where again they’re just using it as lawfare, which my good friend Jim Rickards talks about, using the law for warfare purposes.

1:13:46 And then some of the other ways that Elon goes to explain some of the trials he was at. He was on Rogan last time. He said, you know, he said the jury was unanimous. He’s like, they had nothing on me. The SEC had nothing on me, but this is the way it works.

1:13:59 You know, if the SEC is successful in taking down a big dog, then they get the job at the Kushy Law Firm. I’m sure you know about it. And he was explaining it all, but to the public, through the mainstream media, he’s still the bad guy doing these supposedly bad things, but it looks like a way of attacking him. And like you said, bringing him down to double digits might clip his wings, although he’s such an anomaly that would probably fire him up some more.

1:14:22 Um, I mentioned AI earlier. You know, it’s something, Mike, I did a deep dive on the last year, and I’ve had some of the biggest voices on AI in this, on this show, including a guy named Mo Gawdat who used to work for Google X, and he left because, even three years, no, five years ago, back in 2019, the advances they were making in AI terrified him so much that he left the company and wrote a book on happiness, and then later wrote a book called Scary Smart that talks about AI. I spoke to Peter Diamandis.

1:14:51 I’ve spoken to Max Tegmark at MIT, who did the Future of Life Institute that asked for the pause. This is growing geometrically. I think most of the world has snoozed since the ChatGPT moment. But what do you see happening behind the scenes that makes this such a more effective weapon than the AI you talked about that was working four years ago, to, you know, look at the algos and things like that? How much more effective has it gotten, and how scary has it become?

1:15:21 Yeah, it’s, you know, and that’s a great point that you mentioned, you know, and because I always like to start this discussion by saying, AI is not some future hypothetical threat in the censorship space. It’s here. It’s been here. You are living in the AI censorship era. You know, before 2016, everything was whack-a-mole.

1:15:39 Everything was reactive. Something had to go viral and be reported before you even had people in position to be able to take it down or throttle it. Now everything is pre-censored, because all of the keywords are mapped, all the networks are mapped, and, uh, you, you have this, you have tens of thousands of people whose full-time job, through government grants at the National Science Foundation or at DARPA, or through some State Department pass-through grant, like a USAID grant, uh, are funded to spend their entire careers mapping the language of people in different so-called misinformation communities: misinformation about climate change, misinformation about immigration, misinformation about the Ukraine war, misinformation about mail-in ballots, or misinformation about public health or vaccines.

1:16:24 There’s full-time censorship industries in all of these, where it combines the computer science, sort of political thought leaders who sort of pick what wants to be censored, the social science linguistic mappers, who create these, you know, complex code books of constantly updated language and trending topics and slang and diction and prefixes and suffixes and hashtags. And then you’ve got the computer scientists who actually translate that into the natural language processing, machine learning, AI, you know, sort of algos and machine-readable scripts made out of those linguistic lexicons. But that, you know, that was the great game changer after the 2016 election here in the US.

1:17:08 Those techniques, which were initially developed in order to help the Pentagon and CIA stop ISIS from popularizing its message on Facebook and and Twitter, because their language was network-mapped, and, you know, censored using these tools that came to be used on Trump supporters and on Brexit supporters and on, you know, COVID critics or vaccine critics. And now, you know, it’s basically anything that’s a sensitive government policy. You have hundreds of people, at least, in any given field who are who are sitting in universities or at NGOs, who, you know, earn their livelihood mapping that language so that computer scientists can turn that into a censorship algorithm.

1:17:49 But where that’s going now is, you know, it’s very analogous to the rise of chess computers, and this is actually how I got into this. It was because I’ve been a lifelong, sort of chess, you know, avid player, and I sort of came of age during the time that chess computers overtook humans, and that Garry Kasparov versus Deep Blue match. But chess computers had been around since something like the late ’70s. People started working on the concept of, you know, hey, computer power can actually be used to analyze all these, all the different theoretical moves.

1:18:21 And, you know, it took a multi-decade process for chess computers to be refined to the point where no, you know, human could come close. I mean, today Um, one of the recent, you know, world champions, Magnus Carlsen, you would talk about how he doesn’t even play against chess computers. Um, everyone uses them for analysis and training, but he doesn’t even play against them, because uh, it’s so disheartening. It’s, it, it kills your instincts. It creates a feeling of hopelessness, because no human today has a snowball’s chance in hell at even coming close to competing against a chess computer.

1:18:56 Uh, that ship sailed immediately uh, once Garry Kasparov lost. And before that, you had a bunch of years where chess computers were beating club players, they couldn’t beat masters, they’re beating masters, but they couldn’t beat international masters, being international, they couldn’t beat grandmasters, and you know, there was this evolutionary process, and the whole way people were saying, well, they’re good, but they’re not going to be that good. Well, they’re really good, but they’re not going to be able to beat the best in the world, then suddenly they beat the best in the world, and it’s like, whoa, there’s no turning back from this.

1:19:25 This is like a human trying to outrun, you know, a 737 or something. It’s a different class. You can’t even think that you’re going to, and it’s the same thing with the power of AI censorship as it is being refined. You know, the, you, when I sort of talk about weapons of mass deletion, what I’m really telling there is the story of the new Manhattan Project. We dropped two bombs over Japan, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

1:19:51 But that wasn’t the end of the story of the development of nuclear weapons. We spent another, you know, decade and a half, two decades, um, refining the power of, you know, weapons of mass destruction, you know, with, uh, atom bombs and neutron, you know, with the, you know, hydrogen bombs, and, you know, we made them bigger and bigger and bigger and better, and more destructive, and more deadly than ever. And then the Soviet Union developed theirs. And you know, we were, we were taking out entire habitats, entire entire island chains with the development that went into, um, the expansion of the Manhattan Project even after the war.

1:20:34 And what we’re currently witnessing right now in the AI censorship space is that period, sort of, after World War II, you can argue. You know, the first test case, they dropped these atom bombs on the 2020 election. They dropped them on COVID-19. Now those two events have sort of receded, and there’s a lot, we’re now in this sort of diplomatic negotiation age, where those wars are over, but there’s a lot, we’re now in this sort of great Cold War. How they got away with it uncontested, because nobody knew what they were doing at the time.

1:21:04 Well, very, very, very small people knew what they were doing. It went politically unchallenged. There was no oversight in Congress. There was nobody in the private sector who said, hey, this is weird. Even to talk about it was like a conspiracy theory.

1:21:17 You know, you couldn’t even say that there was censorship on YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook. To say that was to put you in a category of someone who had to prove that it was really there. You had to pull all the receipts, and every new person you had to give the same speech over again. Now that is more or less uncontested, at least in high-level political circles, and it’s just a question of whether it’s good or bad. But that has created diplomatic vulnerabilities, and their ability to scale this out in the open.

1:21:44 So a lot of it is now being developed, you know, deep within the bowels of these DARPA-funded NGOs, or these, or these, you know, National Science Foundation Pentagon-intermediated programs, like this track F program, and, you know, these, uh, you know, cyber security programs that sort of launder the words, you know, security, into it, to make it look like they’re stopping sort of foreign threats of speech online. But, you know, it’s, it’s moving into this, you know, into this kind of darker pool to develop it. But the grand plan is still the same.

1:22:17 You know, the State Department still wants to rig every election on earth. Still wants to be able to create, you know, the, the all-seeing eye, so to speak, of, uh, you know, this Eye of Sauron that can be trained on any election anywhere. Nigeria wants to elect a new person. That person doesn’t want to give Chevron, you know, a sweet deal on the crude there. Chevron’s got pull on who the secretary of state is.

1:22:41 Okay, we’re going to make sure that political party, you know, is deemed to be in trafficking and misinformation, and we’re going to track every little thing they do, and that’s going to be run through the regional desk at the State Department. The tool is too powerful now to be put back in the box. And now you’ve got the biggest companies in the world: OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT. Well, who’s running OpenAI? It’s Microsoft.

1:23:04 Microsoft is the biggest company in the world by market cap. Number one, and, and who, by the way, is the company that DHS worked most closely with for 2020 election censorship and COVID? It was Microsoft. Microsoft’s Protecting Democracy program is a new program they created in 2018. That’s effectively a CIA cutout.

1:23:24 They’re the ones who rolled out NewsGuard. NewsGuard’s first product. NewsGuard is the number one censorship gargoyle on the internet. On their board is General Michael V. Hayden, head of the CIA, NSA, and a four-star general.

1:23:36 It’s Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former head of NATO during the Obama administration, the number one head of NATO. Tom Ridge, the former head of DHS. Uh, Rick Stengel, the former head of the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, the under secretary for public affairs, who’s the guy who intermediates the State Department’s relationships with the media. So the head of media, you know, uh, media operations of the State Department, the head of DHS, the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, a four-star general, and the head of NATO are all on the board of NewsGuard, while NewsGuard is, uh, you know, is basically operating, you know, is this cutout working with the EU, working with NATO for the Digital Services Act roll-out?

1:24:16 And they’re the ones who are creating these AI censorship algorithms, by selling at the retail level these machine-readable scripts. So, uh, you know, they’re building this AI censorship technology. They’re doing it, you know, with Pentagon grants in tow. And, you know, how do you put this thing back in the box when it’s being co-signed by the biggest forces in the US government? You know, this is a tool.

1:24:41 It creates godlike power. Nobody is, you know, you can almost think of it like the ring in Lord of the Rings or something. It’s too precious. Nobody wants to throw it into the fire. And, um, you, Microsoft is who rolled out NewsGuard.

1:24:56 NewsGuard didn’t have a market until the Protecting Democracy program at Microsoft rolled it out. The head of DHS at the time, Chris Krebs, came from Microsoft, the DHS censorship program. Where is he working now? Back at Microsoft. So, uh, you know, this thing is going to be scaled.

1:25:15 They’re going to be creating, you know, these, um, more and more powerful nuclear weapons, so to speak, weapons of mass deletion, until something forces a nuclear disarmament, so to speak, to happen. In the 20th century, that happened only because some other force was creating nuclear weapons as powerful as our own. It remains to be seen what will force the blob to stop developing these, or if they will. We don’t know if we’re going to win this fight. Yeah, I get very concerned when I look at our top AI being developed by Google, by OpenAI, like you said, controlled by Microsoft, by Anthropic, which is invested in by Amazon, by Facebook and their Llama model.

1:25:55 I get really concerned, because these same people have shown that they will, you know, not hesitate to, you know, execute all this censorship, or they’re working in cahoots with the government. Um, and I’ve seen the power of AI, and most people have no idea, um, what it can do and what it’s going to do. So, it makes me very concerned. Mike, I’m curious, you know, if you could snap your fingers and change the world right now, you know, what do you want to happen?

1:26:21 What is the solution to this, or what is getting in the right direction of this? And would a regime change in Washington potentially get us there? You know, Trump talks about the deep state and all of these actors that even a president has to fight against, and we saw him do that in his administration, fighting against the CIA. You know, he’s also fighting against a company like Google. You know, part of the times when I dream a little dream here, as I doze off to sleep, is that Trump comes into office and goes and cleans house at Google and opens up the Google files and makes them do everything that’s right.

1:26:55 Um, am I dreaming there? And what are your dreams for the future? Well, you know, on the AI side, I mean, you could literally have a law that essentially prohibits, you know, the application of these AI weapons of mass deletion for purposes of First Amendment-protected speech. You know, I mean, you did have AI scan and ban of things like spam and child porn prior to the natural language processing, you know, speech censorship era. There’s definitely a role for automated censorship when it comes to non-speech related, you know, content.

1:27:31 Uh, but you know, you have, um, but you know, this is a weapon that, again, just to sort of put the bow on the last thing before getting to this new one, you know, the Biden administration, just to show what the power of a regime change in Washington can do, is a great example from the AI censorship story. The US government program providing the most financial subsidization of AI censorship technology is a program currently within our National Science Foundation, which is basically the civilian arm of the Pentagon’s DARPA, and it’s called the Convergence Accelerator Track F program. And this is a program that started under Trump, uh, in 2019.

1:28:11 Trump wanted to, the Trump White House wanted to put money from the National Science Foundation towards funding great leaps forward in technology on problems that had stumped scientists for decades. So Track A in this Convergence Accelerator program was for quantum technology development. It’s called Convergence Accelerator because it’s creating a multidisciplinary joint pool, for example, in the quantum, you know, physics space, in the quantum technology space.

1:28:40 You know, you have the physics people, you’ve got the chemists, you’ve got the computer scientists, you’ve got the rocket engineers. You have all these different teams of scientists who might not ordinarily speak to each other, all getting sort of common money to meet and try to solve the problem together, to accelerate that one line of research. So Trump had five different lines of you know, Convergence Accelerator programs, Tracks A through E, though it was not used for censorship during the Trump administration.

1:29:06 The Biden administration gets in office, and they said, you know what, misinformation on the internet is also something we need a great leap forward in technology to be able to censor. So we are going to create a new program in the National Science Foundation called the Track F program, for, uh, for trust, uh, for, for trust of information on the internet, which is basically anything that undermines trust in democratic institutions, which means democratic institutions are defined as the US government, as mainstream media. So if you undermine faith in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or CNN, you are undermining democratic institutions.

1:29:45 And so just in a single calendar year, this Track F program gave $40 million to a dozen different AI censorship technology developers, in order to have them fund, you know, so, like, one of them was a company called Wisdex, which was creating fast, fast, uh, precise and comprehensive AI censorship technology for detecting dissent about COVID-19. This is in 2021. At the time they were very concerned about people undermining public faith and confidence in vaccines.

1:30:16 So Wisdex, you know, was working with the University of Michigan, and it was this, you know, sort of private, private entity which was scanning, which was creating a whole rolodex of terms about people talking about vaccines. Now they were qualified for $5.5 million in funding to create, you know, these machine-readable scripts to sell to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. A company called Course got $5.5 million to create a dynamic digital dashboard of people who undermine public faith and confidence in the news media.

1:30:48 So this is the government paying a private AI censorship firm to create a live heat map of people who undermined the perceived credibility of the New York Times. So this is the New York Times getting, basically, a $5.5 million AI censorship gargoyle to protect its reputation online. The Trump administration, that would, if that happened under the Trump administration, like, that could be, it could be killed, and it probably would be killed, knowing the Trump administration, on the executive level, when it comes to that.

1:31:20 The more difficult thing is on the legislative level, because Trump was pretty good about when things were identified to him, and they could actually appreciate the magnitude of it, getting it killed at the agency level. The difficult thing was managing Congress. Trump spent the first three years of his term under the sort of Sword of Damocles from Bob Mueller, you know, this Russiagate investigation, which required Trump to do things he did not necessarily want to do on foreign policy, because he needed the neocons in Congress to support the MAGA populist faction, so that he wouldn’t get indicted, you know, if the neocons sided with the Democrats in the Russiagate affair.

1:32:05 That pressure put on Trump induced him to do favors for people in Congress. I could very easily see that happening again, where even if Trump wants to get rid of some of the censorship stuff, if he’s, if he’s too reliant, because of pressure put on him, to the side of Congress that he does not have a great relationship with, but sometimes works with, they could be, he could be required to essentially keep some of that domestic censorship operations, even if he wants to get rid of it, just because he needs favors from them to stave off a special prosecutor. I’ve heard this from members of Congress myself, where they said, “We didn’t want to kill CISA funding.

1:32:40 We didn’t want to kill this funding for censorship things at DHS, but we needed to do favors for people in party leadership, you know, under the, the Mitch McConnell, you know, sort of, uh, you know, era. And so people went along even when they knew things were bad, because of the pressures put on them, you know, uh, from the donor class. So it’s a very complex story that way in terms of how we can win. Wow. And you know, what would be your best scenario of change?

1:33:06 You know, how can we start to fix some of these problems? First and foremost, we need a robust whole-of-society free speech alliance on par with, uh, and we need to think of it that way and think much, much, much more long term, to go back to the sort of weapons of mass deletion, weapons of mass destruction analogy. You know, it’s here now. There is a, you know, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle for the next, for the rest of your, your life. If you’ve got 70 more years left to live, you’re a young person, you got 80 years left, you know, left to live, watching this, the censorship industry will be with us forever.

1:33:46 It is never going to be back down to zero, like it was during the golden age from, you know, 2006 to 2016, effectively. And the AI censorship is all, it’s always going to be here. It’s just a question of how, if you can get it down to burning embers rather than a burning flame, uh, and there will be a cyclical negotiation of power and leverage. Our victories will be asymptotic. We will approach a north star rather than ever getting to a final destination.

1:34:17 Which means that the magic in winning here is going to have to come from how robust our alliance is, rather than a particular policy any given year. You know, there’s no one rock that we can, you know, take out the Google Goliath with. We’re going to need a robust network within. So again, looking back at the whole society model, it’s government, private sector, civil society, and media. We are going to need to set up a whole-of-government set of allies.

1:34:48 We’re going to need our allies in the House of Representatives. We’re going to need to build them up. We’re going to need to support those people in the House. We’re going to need to get donor networks in the private sector to fund those people’s campaigns and protect them against crises induced on them. Same thing in the Senate.

1:35:05 Same thing at the state level here in the US. State assemblies, you know, state houses, state, state senates, in Florida, in Texas, in Tennessee, in 26 or seven red states, in a bunch of the purple states. Try to make plays for the blue states, you know, uh, state assemblies. You’re going to need this in the private sector. We now have, you know, X as an ally in the private sector.

1:35:27 That was not possible before. Three years ago, X was part of the whole of society censorship network. Now it’s a hub in the free, in the, the, the, the whole potential whole-of-society free speech network. Well, that’s got to be allied with these, with the state governments, for example. You know, there’s got to be a lens that Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott view the world through, which is not just about the state of Texas and Florida.

1:35:52 It’s about the free speech ecosystem. Now, you’ve also got this new budding ecosystem of university alternatives, as opposed to the main universities. You know, you’ve got things like this University of Austin in Texas, from the, the sort of, you know, um, Bari Weiss, you know, kind of Michael Shellenberger access, you know, Elon Musk is talking about creating, I think he’s sort of, you know, sort of comedically referring to as the Texas Institute for Technology Services.

1:36:20 Uh, I’ll let folks sort of fill in the acronym for what that stands for. But you’ve got, uh, you’ve got in Florida, you’ve got, uh, this sort of joint counter-DEI push, where the University of Florida has purged, you know, its wokeness policies and put Chris Rufo on the board of some of the other, you know, Florida academic institutions. That’s civil society. Those civil society institutions have to be cutting out these media literacy censorship programs and working with X, and potentially even, you know, signing up for premium services that are being sold.

1:36:50 Same thing in the media ecosystem. A robust, the first thing is to look at things at the network level rather than even at the policy level, because that is what will be more enduring, and you need to gear yourself for a five-decade fight here, not a five-month fight here, for the 2024 election. Yeah, really, really well said. It takes everybody, basically. Everybody has to be conscious of this, and everyone has to be thinking about it all the time and moving the ball forward.

1:37:15 Um, I guess the good news is that people became aware of this over the past few years. And that was maybe the system that maybe made a failure is that people saw what happened. And I’d say more people are aware, but then I always remind people when I’m on the streets, and they’re, they’re like, “Oh, you still off YouTube?” I’m like, “Yeah.” And they’re like, “Well, that’s a positive, because it shows what they did to you.”

1:37:35 And I’m like, “No, it’s not. Censorship works. When I’m not on your mind, you move on to other things.” And it’s a real piece. And so, yeah, it does take everybody.

1:37:44 Um, Mike, when’s the book out, and what’s it like being famous these days? Well, so the book is probably not going to be until late 2025. You know, there’s, there’s so much that goes into it. You know, I really want this to be something that lasts generations rather than, you know, rather than, you know, months or years. You know, I’m creating it to be a sort of timeless, almost biblical account of the origins of all this and who the main players were, and all the, you know, I want a lot of this to be video-driven, because of all the, you know, so much of this was done, you know, live.

1:38:20 So there’s a whole complex bibliography and archiving system to be able to, you know, create a companion to it all, to bring it to life. Uh, so, you know, that is very much a work in progress. Uh, before I get to the sort of, you know, I, I don’t really feel, to me, I, I’m the same, you know, as I was eight years ago. I, I can’t forget where I came from in this, because I feel like, um, pursuing this, you know, really kind of took everything for me on a personal level.

1:38:52 I almost don’t, uh, yeah, I went through, you know, a lot of the costs, probably from a different angle, you know, that you talk about in being deplatformed. I, I’ve seen so many of my friends swallowed up or indicted by the Justice Department on BS. And I have no doubt that that’s, uh, you know, going to happen to me at some point. And so I’m, I don’t, you know, I don’t relish, you know, the moment that way. I see myself as a vehicle for a message, and I’m going to keep, you know, singing that song as long as, uh, you know, as long as there’s a microphone in front of me, and, You know, but I do want to say what you said about censorship works.

1:39:31 That is, that is very much a mantra of the censorship industry, deplatforming works. But I will say one other thing, which is really fascinating about this is you are definitely correct that they did not want people to notice it. And even though deplatforming works, um, the, the backlash against it, because people understand the censorship is something that millions of dollars went into trying to stop in the first place. And I’ll give you one great example of this.

1:39:58 In 2019, when the, when the first real big scalp started to be taken on censorship, you know, in late 2018, Alex Jones was taken off of YouTube, for example. And whatever your opinions on Alex Jones are, the fact is, at the empirical level, the, the stats don’t lie. Alex Jones’s YouTube account had more views than all of CNN’s. So CNN was a network that had been around since, you know, the 1980s. And, you know, the they had less views than, than the 27 billion, than one person, you know, Alex Jones.

1:40:28 And so when he was taken off in late 2018, and a bunch of others, you know, high-profile accounts were this backlash, you know, first started, and DARPA, I’m not even joking, DARPA started to pour money. The US Pentagon, the Department of War renamed the Department of Defense in 1948. Our military establishment started funding research science on how to stop the so-called martyr effect of martyred individuals who were censored on social media. And, you know, some of these DARPA studies, and again, because I had to go through all this for, for, you know, the research in my book, to look at all the military origins in the media censorship space, and these DARPA proposals, you know, some of these were amazing.

1:41:12 It was like four different techniques for how to censor without, without creating the, uh, the martyr effect. So, you know, and this is in 2019, and, you know, so you had the classical top-down, but then you had bottom-up. Well, what happens to perceptions of censorship if we don’t censor the number one person, but we censor their lieutenant class? If we network map the person that we’re trying to censor, and we say, “Okay, well, you know, it’s London Real that we want to take out, but London Real really gets its amplification because there are four or five accounts.

1:41:44 They might have 2 million followers, but there are four or five different, you know, people who’ve got 500,000 followers underneath them. If we keep London Real, but we take out those lieutenants, people don’t think London Real is being censored, but now London Real has lost hundreds of millions of impressions. Okay. Well, what happens if we only do a couple lieutenants, and now we, we target the much larger, you know, they, they refer to it as a sort of megaphone, a funnel, you know, where something starts with one content creator, and then it filters out to a lieutenant class, and then it expands into the larger sort of unwashed masses.

1:42:18 Well, what if we take out, if we network map the misinformation community of, say, COVID, you know, vaccine critics? And so we’ve got, you know, we’ve got the number one, the number two, and then we’ve got this, you know, sort of wider funnel. What if we leave the number one and the number two class, but we do a random partial 30% reduction? We basically censor all these tiny accounts who’ve only got a couple hundred or a couple thousand followers. Then that will greatly reduce the message, and no one can say that censorship is happening in the vaccine space there, because why does this person still have their account?

1:42:53 Not knowing that the freaking military itself has come up with a plan to reduce that message, because it’s the smaller accounts, and they’re leaving the figurehead in place, but they’re effectively neutering that one by design, to kill the martyr effect, so that you don’t see the censorship that’s being put in place, and the math that goes into this is extraordinary, by the way. You know, in order to have the computer scientist just translate that, you know, into an actual algorithm. That’s wild.

1:43:18 Not to mention the self-censorship that will be imposed on the number ones and twos. When they see some of the smaller players getting taken out, they’ll start thinking twice about what they’re going to say. Um, yeah, I guess, the advertisers. The government was working with the advertisers to kill the ad revenue. It’s so dirty.

1:43:35 But, you know, maybe store for another day. I, I mean, I never even said it was actually the BBC that actually, uh, blew the whistle on us and kind of pressured YouTube to take us down that day. And you can go really down the rabbit hole on that one. Um, they’re the fourth quadrant in the whole society. They work with the government.

1:43:51 Exactly. Um, look, I really appreciate, uh, everything you’re putting out there, Mike. Uh, this is really again revelatory stuff in a world that’s seen a lot of, you know, our eyes have been opened a lot in the last couple years, but your stuff is fascinating. So I’m looking forward to the book. I’m glad you’re going to spend time on it, and, um, yeah, please keep putting these ideas out there.

1:44:12 For me, it really helps me understand everything that happened. Um, still makes me upset about it. And we’re going to keep going here regardless. So again, uh, we’re going to keep broadcasting. We are still broadcasting, and they can try to ban us.

1:44:24 They can take us down, but we’re just not going to stop. And, uh, again, you never know what’s going to happen. And again, sometimes they can’t silence you. Sometimes when they silence you, it blows up in other ways. Our film is now doing extremely well.

1:44:36 And we’re using that as a weapon. We are using our deplatforming, and we’re actually weaponizing that to go push it back into their faces. And again, look at what Elon did. Look at Elon putting Alex Jones back. You know, there are some real rays of hope out there, and a lot of people are waking up.

1:44:53 So, um, I’m super optimistic. Thanks for doing what you do. It’s MikeBenzCyber on Twitter, right? Yep. All one word.

1:45:00 And I’m hyperactive there. You can find me there every day. I can’t wait to go follow your feed. All right. Great stuff, Mike.

1:45:05 Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. Looking forward to the book. Let’s have this conversation again. Maybe in person next time in London, or maybe in the States.

1:45:13 And again, wishing you all the best. Beautiful. You, too. Thanks, Brian. All right.

1:45:16 Thanks, everybody. We will see you next time on London Real.