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Check out all of our content@tuckercarlson.com. dot here's the episode. So this feels like there've been a lot of arrests in the last few years, including a number of people I know, you know, get arrested for political reasons, but the jailing of the founder and owner of Telegram feels like a pivot point. It feels like a moment in history and probably a harbinger of the next few years or decades. I hope I'm wrong. So the question is, like, what is this? How did this happen? France arrests him on a fuel stop. He's a french citizen, by the way, but he lives in Dubai. Arrests him, that's a big step. Very hard for a bystander without direct knowledge being me to believe that Macron could or would have done that without the encouragement or at least agreement of the Biden administration. You were the first person I thought of, got you here as fast as we could. So I'm going to just stand back and I would very much like to hear you explain what you think happened in this arrest, how it happened, what.

It means, who is involved, we don't know yet. And part of what I've been talking about, which is the suspected role of the us embassy in the arrest or as you put it, I think perfectly. We don't know if it was participation or approval or nothing. And I'll play devil's advocate against my own argument here, but I feel compelled to make this argument because we're not getting the answer from the Congress who should be getting it for us, which is to say that an entity like the House Foreign affairs committee, if it was committed to free speech, would be interrogating whether or not there was a us embassy back channel to french law enforcement or french intelligence or the french government in terms of doing this, because this is a pattern of practice that the us embassy has pursued all over the world, and particularly in Europe, through branding, like anti corruption or whatnot. This is something even dating back to Norm Eisen, when he was the ambassador to the Czech Republic, championing these sort of anti corruption reforms from the czech government, to arrest the politicians who essentially opposed the State Department agenda there.

This is very common if you go to places like the Journal of Democracy, which is the academic journal for the National Endowment for Democracy, which is probably the most notorious CIA cutout in the whole arsenal. They have whole academic journals on how to push the Poland government to arrest the politicians from the PIs party, from the law and order party, especially in the judicial system.

To arrest them.

Yes, yes. To mass arrest. The. We have. We have a concept in american statecraft called transitional justice, which is this idea that essentially, after the US overthrows a country, we make. We arrest all of the opposition politicians, opposition judges, opposition journalists, propaganda spreaders, in order to stop the reemergence of threats to democracy. No, I'm not joking.

You make it a one party state so it can be a democracy.

Right? Well, this is.

Is this China pushing this or the United. Just to be clear, this is the United States.

This is the United States. And we do that to stabilize the democratic institutions and effectively make it cheaper for the United States to manage, because you don't need to manage the constant recurring threat of the party you just vanquished. So this is. This was something that the US State Department was spearheading years before Trump got into office. And it was so effective that these same cast of characters are back for Trump. Norm Eisen was the one who spearheaded the impeachment. He drafted articles of impeachment before Trump was even took the oath of office, and also led the elements of the 2019 Ukraine impeachment, the lawfare that's currently being done with the 90 plus felonies against Trump. So this is a instrument of statecraft, the use of prosecutions in order to bring leverage against and to get rid of pesky people who oppose the State Department's priorities. But in the specific case of telegram. There's. There's a lot going on here.

Let's ask you to pause really quick. We could know a lot more about the Biden administration's involvement through the us embassy in Paris if a single House committee controlled by republicans would just jump on it. I think that's what you said earlier.

Yes, absolutely. And the problem is our congress is not sticking up for us as this is happening all over the world. Just this year, the drama around Brazil has been a huge issue for Elon Musk and X, and the House held a hearing on it and then the House Foreign affairs committee titled the hearing was Brazil a crisis of democracy, rule of law and governance, question mark. But they did not interrogate the US State departments role in censorship in Brazil. It was actually the US State Department who capacity built, spending tens of millions of dollars, the entire censorship ecosystem in Brazil. They spent tens of millions of dollars paying brazilian journalists, brazilian censors, brazilian fact checkers, even members of the legal scholarship associated with Brazil's censorship court. And effectively pressured through that NGO soft power swarm Brazil to set up the entire censorship architecture it now has. They set that up.

Why would the us government, which represents the us constitution and democracy, be trying to end. You can't have democracy with censorship by definition, so why would we be trying to end democracy in country after country? Like, what is the point of that?

Well, this is one of the great ironies of american statecraft. In the post 2016 era, free speech has been an instrument of statecraft since, for us diplomacy, military and intelligence purposes. Since the 1940s, free speech around the world has been something we've championed in part because we believe it, but in part, in large part, I should note, because this is how you can capacity build resistance movements or political movements or paramilitary movements in countries that the US State Department seeks to attain political control over. If there's no free speech, then there's no political movement that you can capacity build to regime change the government or to maintain elements of control over the existing government. And so this is why the State Department capacity built all these ngo's. The USA does it as well, like Freedom House and the whole wing of, for example, the 26 ngo's who condemned Russia for attempting to ban telegram in 2018. Why would 26 us government funded ngo's all say that Russia was attacking free speech in Russia by threatening to block telegram? Well, it was because the US State Department was using telegram as through the power of its encrypted know chat and all the functionality and the fact that so much of Russia was using it to foment protests and riots within Russia, just as they did in Belarus, just as they did in Iran, just as they did in Hong Kong, just as they attempted to do in China.

So Telegram is this very, very powerful vehicle for the US State Department to be able to mobilize protests, to be able to galvanize political support against authoritarian countries. This is why the us government loved telegram so much from 2014 to 2020, because it was this powerful way to evade state control over media or state surveillance over private chats because of the private functions and anonymous forwarding, all these unique features of telegram allow it to have us funded. Political groups or political dissidents get tens of thousands of people to their cause with relative impunity. It's effectively unstoppable by a regime like Lukashenko in the summer of 2020, when the us government was effectively orchestrating a color revolution in Belarus. And let me just take a sip for a second. Telegram was the main channel for that. The National Endowment for Democracy was actually paying the main administrators of the telegram channels who were orchestrating those riots, those protests.

Not employees of telegram, but people by channel administrators. People are using it or organizing others to use it.

Right, right. You would get a telegram channel with a million people in it, and the administrator of it would be on National Endowment for Democracy payroll. And the National Endowment for Democracy, you know, even the head of it, which is. It's a CIA cutout. It was basically created when, you know, in a letter from the CIA director William Casey in 1983 as a means for the CIA to get control, get functions back that it had lost after the scandals of the church committee hearing in 1970, 519 76. The Reagan administration wanted to be able to get back the powers that the democrats in the late 1970s considered to be human rights abuses and too much cloak and dagger stuff. So they put it under the banner of the National Endowment for Democracy as a public facing ngo with the CIA backed channel. Again, the CIA called for this. The founders of the National Endowment for democracy even openly, even openly say that they do what they do now, what the CIA used to do, but they have a. It was literally scrubbed from the legislative, from the original bill that the CIA would not coordinate it.

It's one of the most prolific CIA cutouts in the arsenal. And they were the ones who were paying the telegram channel administrators who were organizing the attempt to overthrow the belarusian government. And I'm not even weighing in on the normative question about whether or not that's a good or a bad thing. I will.

It's terrible.

All I care about is freedom of speech on the Internet. What people have to understand, and this is the point I've been screaming into the wind for eight years now, is that Internet censorship is not some domestic event done by domestic actors intermediated by a domestic government and domestic tech platform policies. Internet censorship came to the United States and has been exported around the world because free speech is a casualty of a proxy war of the blob against populism. And what I mean by the blob is our foreign policy establishment, which is primarily concentrated within the US State Department, the us intelligence services like the CIA, the Pentagon, USAID, and the soft power swarm army that we have through our NGO's and State Department CIA, USAID funded civil society institutions. And what happened was we've had this long range plan to seize Eurasia. Russia has $75 trillion worth of natural resources in it. The United States only has $45 trillion. Just to put in perspective how bountiful the region that we're so preoccupied with is, if you recall, no less than Lindsey Graham, frustrated at the lack of republican political support for Ukraine aid, finally implored, sort of took the mask off a few months ago and said, listen, even if you don't believe in democracy, Ukraine's got $14 trillion worth of.

Of natural resources. So even if it's just for cynical, self serving purposes, the US should support the war in Ukraine in order to control $14 trillion worth of mineral wealth and oil and gas wealth. And this is the story of Eurasia. After 1990, the US, the UK and partners in NATO set on a quest to take political control over the territories of the former Soviet Union, and were very successful until Vladimir Putin rose to power and began to assert energy diplomacy as a means for Russia to reassert political influence over central and eastern Europe. This is one of the reasons that the Nord stream pipeline was the absolute ire of the blob of our foreign policy establishment, because those financial interlinkages to Europe were allowing russian influence over its politics, over its economy, fostering diplomatic ties, all these things which fly in the face of this long range plan to seize Eurasia. And so with the Nord stream case, you had sanctions on it prior to it being blown up. It came out in essentially leaked documents from something called the Integrity Initiative, that the UK Foreign Office had been basically orchestrating PR campaigns to get the Nordstream pipeline killed in 2015.

And so it being blown up is no surprise. But understand it's because of Russia's energy diplomacy with Europe, which is what gave rise to this whole need to kill Russia's energy connections. And if I can just flesh this out a little bit, if you can get rid of russian energy relations with Europe, this was what the theory was, then you bankrupt Russia. You also strip them of their military industrial complex. Russia is the military enemy of the United States, not just in Europe now, but if you recall, the Obama administration tried to invade, tried to invade Syria, and the only reason they were unable to do so is because Russia militarily backstopped the Assad government. And it's the same thing in Africa. Africa is one third of the world's natural resource wealth. There's a mad scramble for the natural resources in Africa, and Russia is the bane of both the us and french military forces there. If you can bankrupt Russia through taking out Gazprom and its oil exports, then you get rid of Russia's ability to be an arms supplier to the rebel groups there. Now, getting back to the telegram case, telegram is an instrument of statecraft, and it's also an instrument of military and intelligence projection.

So on the statecraft side, we just talked about how telegram has been the darlingenheid of the CIA, the State Department, USAID, for operations stretching from Belarus to inside of Moscow to Iran to Hong Kong to China and all over the world, because it's got a billion users. And so it's very easy to get all the native population who you're trying to recruit to your political cause onto the channels they're already using and then also give them the anonymity and the encryption safety to be able to organize and express their political support safely, relatively safely. But the pro. So the problem is, because telegram is also an open playing field, because Pavel has not relinquished either to the United States or to Russia. It has also allowed russian propaganda to propagate. And this is a problem right now in Ukraine. Just two weeks after your interview with Pavel, Radio Free Europe, which is an institution that was created by the CIA and it was run directly for its 1st 20 years by the CIA. Just two weeks after your interview with Pavel called Telegram a spy in every Ukrainian's pocket and made the argument that Ukraine needs to wrest control over telegram.

And it laid out the following reasons for doing so and said that 75% of Ukrainians currently use telegram and they have been using telegram. This is up from 20% just a few years ago because of Pavel's solidarity with the concept of free speech. It's been highly trusted for many years, but they're not sure if there's a russian back channel now. And they cite several reasons around Pavel's potential financing from a bond raise several years ago that may have had russian investors in it. They cite the fact that russian internal documents promote the use of telegram for its own military, the fact that over 50% of Russia itself uses telegram, the fact that. The fact. So the fact that the russian military uses it safely and has no problem with it, and the fact that there may be russian financing of Pavel. This is the argument that they make, that perhaps it was compromised. Perhaps the reason Russia dropped its attempt to ban Telegram after the 2018 affair may have been because an agreement was secretly reached. And if that is the case, then that would essentially make all of the military operations and all of the statecraft and secret channels that Ukraine is currently using, beverage spied on, you know, all communications, the entire war effort.

Maybe the reason Ukraine is losing is because Russia knows everything Ukraine is doing.

We hear a lot from viewers about big tech censorship, and those reports are more frequent than ever right now. Censorship meaning shutting down your access to information, not lies or misinformation, but true things. It's only the truth that they censor facts that get in the way of the lies they're trying to tell you. The net effect of this, of course, is interfering in the 2024 presidential elections. That's why they're censoring more than ever now, because the stakes are even higher. You're probably not shocked by this, but the specific examples of it do throw you back a little bit. We've seen screenshots and videos showing how a Google search to learn more about the attempted assassination on Donald Trump instead, push users to information on the Harry Truman or Bob Marley or the pope, anything other than the relevant truth, which is that they just shot Trump in the face. They don't want you to know that because it might help Trump. We've seen examples where Facebook marked true photos of a bloodied and defiant Trump as misleading. Somehow those pictures were a lie and then limited their visibility. Its AI assistant explicitly denied the shooting ever took place.

This is insanity. But it's at the core of Big Tech's editorial policy, which is denying the truth to you in order to control the outcome of this presidential election. That's not democracy. We've seen examples where a generic search for information about Donald Trump was automatically rephrased to show positive stories about Kamala Harris. Instead, is there any clear example of election interference? So what do you do about it? Well, Parler has been down this road. Parler was pulled right off the Internet for telling the truth. But it's back, and it's reaffirmed its lifelong unwavering commitment to free speech. On Parler, the Bill of Rights lives. The first amendment is real. You can say what you think because you're a human being and an american citizen and not a slave. On Parler, users can freely express themselves, tell the truth, express their conscience, and connect with others who are doing the same. And they will not be interfered with. They will not be censored. Designed to support a wide range of viewpoints, everyone is welcome. On Parler, Parlor is committed to ensuring that everybody is heard. And so it's become a place where independent journalism journalism is protected and respected.

It's protected because it's respected. So is this. Censorship by big tech intensifies standing up for your God given right as an American to say what you think is essential. We're on parlor. That's why we're on parlor. Our handle is Tuckercker Carlson, and we encourage you to join us there. You have the right to say what you believe. So does every american. And you can do it on parlor at the parlor app today, early starts.

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I just can't get over the fact that the Biden administration, the us government, which you and I pay for, which is supposed to be defending their freedom of speech above all other freedoms, is encouraging its proxy government, the ukrainian government, to like seize or take over a media outlet. I mean, that's. So why is that not illegal?

Well, I mean, this has been part and parcel of our diplomacy for decades.

But it's just criminal.

Well, if you recall when NATO, NATO's first use of military hard power in its entire history, it was created in 1949, the first time it ever fired an offensive bullet was in 1995 and 1995. Remember it well. Well, one of the things we did when we bombed Yugoslavia was we took out its state media propaganda, its state media propaganda, organized state media channel, state, state tv at state radio broadcaster. We bombed the headquarters of the media building and killed dozens of people in the process.

Journalists.

Yes. And said that that was fair game because they were a keynote in Yugoslavia's war effort. And so we killed their journalists in order to slow down their military.

So the whole idea that there's like a free exchange of information or a battle of ideas in May the know best idea win, which is really kind of the foundation of american civil society. I mean, that's what this whole project is based on.

Yes.

They don't mean it at all, in fact. And they're moving in exactly the opposite direction.

It's something.

Sorry to sound so shocked, but I am shocked. I hate this.

It's something for 50, 60 years was very useful to us when other countries did not have robust propaganda or communications infrastructure themselves. One of the reasons that Voice of America and radio for Europe and Radio liberty and all those were so effective at the time was because other countries didn't really have their own developed native programming in radio or tv or print. And so the ability to project that with limited options allowed saturation of the CIA narrative in those regions.

Well, I just. I mean, this is. I don't really any desire to talk about it, but I can't even control myself since my, my father was the director of the Voice of America and I grew up hearing about this every day at the dinner table. The whole idea was at least the public facing idea, the publicly articulated idea was we're disseminating news ideas, information, facts, and allowing the populations of these countries access to this and they can make up their own mind. I mean, it really was part of, at least publicly, and I'm very aware, I know it was more complicated than that, but I really believed that this was part of the battle of ideas. And we were winning because we had better ideas.

Well, we allowed freedom of speech because we were winning fair. And this is the issue now, which is everything changed in 2014 in terms of our free speech diplomacy toolkit. We set up a swarm army of pro free speech NGO's, civil society institutions, university centers, journalists, legal groups, in order to pressure and lobby all foreign countries around the world to create an open society for journalists so that those could be penetrated by us statecraft and intelligence. And until the free and open Internet started to backfire on the State department, that was the unequivocal position of the.

State department, because their ideas suck. And nobody wants trans kids is the truth, and they don't want any more freaking rainbow flags. And maybe if you sold a product people liked, like Marlboros or Big Macs or Levi jeans or freedom, or like hot blonde girls or whatever you're selling, maybe it's something that people actually want. But if you're selling trannyism and gay race communism, nobody actually wants that. Nobody wants that.

Right. Well.

Sorry.

Right. Well. Well, if support is not earned, it has to be installed.

Exactly. Nicely put.

And this is one of the. This is one of the great issues here, which is that it's these very free speech institutions that were capacity built by the state department that have all incorporated this censorship element. So we still do have a lot of free speech diplomacy. Just two years ago, we sanctioned the government, Iran, the government of Iran, for having the temerity to censor its own Internet. This is so funny, because, you know, our own department of homeland Security was doing the exact same thing to censor Americans.

To us.

To us. I mean, technically, the United States should be kicked off the dollar for doing exactly what we accuse foreign countries of doing. But we selectively promote either free speech or censorship, depending on what's most advantageous for political control in any particular country. So, for example, if Bolsonaro were to have rose back to power in Brazil, have no doubt about it, free speech would be back on the menu, and Bolsonaro would be accused of censorship over jaywalking on a random street corner. And we would be pumping up through NGO's and university centers and journalists on payroll. We'd be pumping $100 million into Brazil's free speech economy in order to create anti Bolsonaro sentiment.

That's right.

But one of the things beginning, and I come back to this Brazil case.

Just to pause one last time, one of the things I've learned from you over the past couple of years, I've learned a lot from you. But one big picture idea that I didn't fully appreciate until I listened to you carefully was that our foreign policy drives our domestic policy.

There's no such thing as domestic policy.

Exactly.

Every country I didn't understand, I grew.

Up in a world where there was the foreign policy, and like you overthrow Mossadegh or whatever, maybe that's good for America. You don't even think about it. We're fighting the Soviets. It's not a problem, because we are an island of freedom here in the United States. And your reporting and analysis suggests exactly what you just said. There is no domestic policy. Everything that happens in this country is an outgrowth, a function of our management of the world.

Yes, there's no such thing as domestic policy, because every country's domestic policy is another country's foreign policy. Whatever you do in the United States or whatever, any foreign country, a foreign country wants to change its labor laws, well, guess what? That impacts the bottom line of us corporations who employ labor pools there. A foreign country wants to nationalize its graphite industry. Well, guess what? Now America can't make pencils. Everything that every internal policy of every other country on earth impacts the bottom line of some us national champion. Now, how the State Department defines national interest is essentially the college of corporations and financial firms that are us national champions. So, for example, if Georgia or Iserbaijan does something that impacts the bottom line of ExxonMobil or Chevron or Halliburton, that becomes a State Department priority in order to protect us national interests against this nationalization law that's happening in Georgia or Azerbaijan. And it's the same thing with every industry. And so I do want to get back to this sort of exporting the First Amendment concept that was such a big part of american statecraft. I think almost no one, there's almost no better example of this than what happened with the State Department's Global Engagement center, which is the main censorship artery of the US State Department and also works with a lot of million of these censorship ngo's and USAID and this whole network.

It was set up by Rick Stengel. And Rick Stengel would say that his job was to export the First Amendment. Former managing editor of Time magazine and when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the guy whose job was to export the First Amendment wrote an op ed, I believe, in the Washington Post, effectively calling for an end of the First Amendment, that it needs to mirror what Europe and other countries have.

And then he wrote a book making the same case.

Right but again, this is the guy who was the undersecretary of public affairs.

This is a very evil man. Rick Stengel.

Well, the point that I'm trying to make here is the free speech absolutist who was in charge of us government projection of free speech. All it took was one election for the entire diplomacy architecture that this principle of free speech was based on to get completely bottomed out. All it took was Donald Trump getting elected for arguably, 200 years of a first amendment principle and 70 years of this principle of exporting the first amendment to be entirely discarded because it was leading to the wrong kinds of people being elected. Free speech on the Internet was blamed for the loss of the Philippines election by the State Department in 2016. It was blamed for the events of Brexit. This is why the US State Department funds so many London based ngo's and university centers and influence operations to stop Nigel Farage in the Brexit movement. It was blamed for the rise of Trump in 2016. It was blamed for the rise of Bolsonaro. It was blamed for the rise of Modi in India, in country after country, the free and open Internet, unfiltered alternative news, the rise of citizen journalists, the rise of citizens in those countries who have larger voices than CIA backed media, than USAID funded media.

State Department funded media has meant that the State Department has lost control of those countries. And what happened was, after 2016, the technology and the networks were established to be able to add a new toolkit to american diplomacy, which is diplomacy by censorship. And we have formal government programs at the State Department dedicated to getting foreign countries to pass domestic censorship laws to stop the rise of right wing populist parties in those countries. I'm gonna say that again. We have formal government programs at the State Department whose job is to lobby foreign countries and pressure foreign countries to pass censorship laws to stop the rise of domestic populist groups. So you have truckers in America whose income tax is going to pay foreign governments to censor their citizens. This is. This is the sort of schizophrenia right now of America.

We're becoming the Soviet Union, which exported poison around the world for all those years. I really felt like the United States was the bulwark against that. But whether that's true or not, I don't know. I'm trying to reassess. What is true now is we're doing what they did. We're sowing chaos and tyranny around the world. It's like, I am so heartbroken to see this.

Well, it's amazing. You say that because as someone who is sort of present at creation in terms of watching this all get established and spending my whole life monitoring it and chronicling it, they were very aware of that when they were setting this up. When I say they, I mean NATO, the US State Department, the UK Foreign Office, after the 2016 election and after Brexit. And they began this whole consensus building quest about how to get all the relevant stakeholders from the government, from the private sector, from civil society and from the media to all come together and create this whole of society censorship coalition. Whole of society counter misinformation coalition, technically, they call it. But they were very aware of that. What they were doing was exactly what they accused Russia and China of doing. Intensely aware. And there was much, much hand wringing in the beginning of this, in late 2016, early 2017, that we need to be extremely careful as we are establishing this infrastructure, that it does not appear to be what Russia and China are doing, that Russia and China have a, what they said was, effectively, Russia and China don't have the problem that we have.

They don't have rising populist movements in their countries that are opposed to the state institutions, that are opposed to the state priorities, that are winning political power. How do Russia and China solve this problem of domestic populist insurgency? Well, they use, I'm not joking when.

I say this, giving their citizens political power, in other words.

Yes, yes.

Do they ever stop and just ask, like, since when is it okay for the people in charge of a government to ban populism? I don't understand. Like, when did we all agree that populism is bad? I thought the whole system was. Was fundamentally a populist system. The country belongs to its citizens. I thought that was the whole deal.

Oh, I can answer that, because it's basically doctrine. There's been a redefinition of democracy from meaning the consensus of individuals to meaning the consensus of institutions. And this is a very clever sleight of hand reframing trick that they played after the 2016 election in the US. And they were setting this up. So just to. Just to get.

They're. They're playing with revolution here. I mean, they could. They've lost their legitimacy. So I'm not going to try to overthrow the us government. I'm 55. I'm not going to do that. But at some point, you know, someone's going to try to do that, and it's going to be kind of hard to see whether or not justified in doing that, because it's not legitimate. Their legitimacy comes from the consent of the governor. That's our system. And when they no longer have the consent of the government, they're not legitimate, period.

So all I care about is freedom of speech on the Internet.

But if you have no freedom of speech, it's not a legitimate country.

So there's a lot to get to on all of this that I think is maybe actually picking up what we were talking about with when they were setting this all up. I think it actually kind of elegantly dovetails with the point that you just made. When they were setting this up, they said, Russia and China don't have this problem. We will have a PR nightmare, a crisis of legitimacy, if we simulate exactly what Russia and China do, which is top down government control. What they did is they came up with a concept called the whole of society framework that would, in order to astroturf the appearance of a bottom up organic censorship industry, that the government would simply fund and intermediate and direct and pressure. So this whole society concept is that the government is not the censor, it is simply the quarterback of the censorship ecosystem. So it is not like Russia and China in the sense that the Russian Federation says this media channel is banned. Instead, it would be the american government paying to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars all the different censorship ecosystem players and exploiting that leverage to have that outcome arrive semi organically.

And they were very careful in establishing it according to this idea that what we will do is we will be able to essentially have plausible deniability. But even though we're funding it and we're directing it, and we are pressuring everyone to join this censorship coalition. And so this is how you had tens of millions of dollars from the US State Department funding the private sector, pop up censorship, mercenary firms funding the civil society institutions, the universities, the censorship activists, the NGO's, the nonprofits, the researchers, and also on the media side, and all these uS funded, USAID funded media outlets, all pushing for censorship. And there's an elegant structure to it, which is that the government pays the civil society institutions to do essentially CIA work against our own citizens. This is why there's so many CIA analysts at the censorship universities, the censorship labs, they'll call them disinfolabs at 60 plus us universities, all funded by the us government.

They do, and I assume on cable television too. They're everywhere, on all the channels.

DHS actually onboards media organizations into its counter disinformation work. And again, because media is the fourth quadrant in the whole society framework, and it's government, private sector, civil society, and media all aligned like a magnet to create the censorship outcomes. So there's no holes in the Titanic. No one can resist it. No one can stop it. This is the problem. And it was so effective until Elon Musk essentially burst that bubble and until they went a little bit too far with the disinformation governance board. And finally, a certain faction within the republican party woke up and was able to exert some pressure through the House and Jim Jordan in November 2022. But getting back to this point about populism and what this whole counter disinformation, the censorship whole society network does is they did a clever reframing. This is really cute. If you run a Boolean search on Google right now and you look at what places like the Atlanta council and Brookings and the National Endowment for Democracy, we're all saying in the months after Trump's election in 2016, they were making the argument that maybe democracy was a mistake because it leads to outcomes like before.

They doubled down on it. There was a brief window where they said, you know what, actually, democracy leads to outcomes like Donald Trump and Brexit. And at the time, NATO, its biggest fear was free speech on the Internet. In early 2017, NATO periodicals were saying the biggest threat to NATO is not a hostile foreign attack from Russia. They would come to eat these words. Five years later, they argued, conventional warfare is over. The biggest threat to NATO is free speech on the Internet, because it's allowing the rise of Marine Le Pen in France. It's allowing the rise of Matteo Salvini in Italy. It's allowing the rise of the Vox party in Spain, AfD in Germany. So we would have frequesit Greggsit it'll exit, spegs it. The entire EU would come undone, which meant I, NATO's commercial arm comes undone, which means NATO comes undone, which means there's no enforcement arm for the IMF and the World bank. So it would be like the ending scene from Fight Club where the credit card companies all crash down just because you're allowed to speak your mind on the Internet.

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So they had this sort of crisis of, well, what do we do about it? Democracy is the problem. And then they said, well, the problem is our entire diplomatic toolkit. Everything that the CIA does, everything the State Department does everything USAID does, everything that the Pentagon, civil affairs does, is all under this rubric of promoting democracy. This is how we topple foreign governments. We only have two predicates for toppling a government. One of them is aggression, the other one is repression. So if they are aggressing against a foreign country, we get to be the world's policeman, we get to topple them for their military activity. But if we can't nail them on that, we can always get them on repression. We can say they're repressing their own people. So we need to bring democracy there. And this is the lion's share of this is what we did in Belarus, this is what we did in Moscow from 2010 to 2020. This is what we did in all these other countries. I'm not even arguing normatively about whether that's right or wrong, but you have to understand that free speech on the Internet is the collateral damage of this proxy war.

But here's how they rescued democracy. They said, we can't. Okay, we need to stick with democracy, even though we don't like its outcomes, because it would take too long to turn the Titanic. All of our cloak and dagger, black ops, plausibly deniable toppling of governments worldwide is all in the name of democracy. All the NGO's we fund, all the civil society activists, all the media institutions, is all democracy. Democracy, democracy. So we need to simply, instead of getting rid of this concept of championing democracy, we need to redefine what democracy is. We need to make it not about the consensus of individuals, how people vote, but make it about the consensus of institutions. And we will simply define democratic institutions as anyone who supports the us foreign policy establishment and its transatlantic partners in the UK.

So, in the United States, that would mean redefining the system of government from one in which a majority of 350 million people believe something to one in which a group of. What would it be? 100,000 people?

Yeah, about that.

Yeah, maybe 100,000 people, probably a third of whom I know. In other words, it's like they just took all the power from the american population and awarded it to themselves.

Yes. And this clever rhetorical sleight of hand allows unspeakable powers that Americans have no idea about. I'll give you one example. So I said, it's all about institutions now. And if you want to watch a funny clip, I posted this on my x account recently. The Bergeron Institute, where Reid Hoffman is a board member, and they were involved in this whole transition integrity project. Domestic color revolution, blueprint for stopping Trump from being installed as president, even if he won the electoral college. And they contemplated using Black Lives Matter as street muscle. And the whole thing was run by a senior Pentagon official with a CIA blue badge. And they have that conference in 2019. The title of it was how elections erode the democratic process, how elections are a threat to democracy. Because they were moving to this concept that the blob's control over the political and commercial ecosystem of a country cannot be left to the people. If we define democracy to be about democratic institutions, then the popular will of the people can still be categorized as a threat to democracy, which would still, therefore still allow the funding of the billions of dollars worldwide that we have deployed as capital for this.

And I'll give you a great example of this. The National Science foundation is probably the main funding artery for most of the censorship ecosystem in the United States. Now, this comes from a million places.

Wait, the what?

I know it sounds crazy, but listen. The national science foundation is the civilian arm of DARPA. It is, and it has been for.

Those who aren't from DC. Will you explain what DARPA is?

DARPA is the Pentagon's brain. DARPA is the reason that we have the Internet. The Internet started as a military technology to be able to send and receive information digitally, because the Pentagon manages. It's the largest employer in the United States. Pentagon manages the american empire. After World War Two, we had this yawning empire stretching from here to Latin America, to Europe under the Marshall plan, and all the way out to the Philippines and Asia. We had this worldwide empire. We had to manage all these counterinsurgency threats, all the domestic populations that were opposed to us hegemony over their own lands. The Pentagon had to be extremely versed in all the regions, understand what was happening politically, what was happening culturally. And so the Pentagon farmed out to us universities. This is a part of why so much of us universities, so much work, is funded by the defense department and is funded by the National Science foundation, its civilian arm. In fact, the National Science foundation is the leading subsidizer of all. It's the leading source of funding for all higher education funds. People think we have a private higher education market. We don't. It's subsidized by the us government.

And that is a quid pro quo.

But through Dod.

But through DoD, and through the National Science foundation, which is the civilian, which is. But the National Science foundation. And even the story of the Internet, again, it was created by the us military and it was turned over to the National Science foundation. And that's where the dual use comes in. The military developed the cell phone. The military developed GPS. The military developed most of the technology at the R and D level that we now live under. In fact, the military developed all the Internet anonymity software in order to help Pentagon and CIA and State Department backed political groups be able to orchestrate regime change. VPN's, the Tor network, end to end encrypted chat, all these things were Pentagon projects before they became dual use, just like the Internet became dual use. It was a military project, but then the civilian commercial architecture was built on top of it. But the National Science foundation has two major domestic censorship programs, and in the charter documents establishing one of them in 2021, in February 2021, right when the month after Biden took office. This is a $40 million program. And in the charter document, it says that the purpose is to stop misinformation about democratic institutions.

And one of the democratic institutions they define is the media. So understand this. This is the Pentagon civilian arm funding $40 million worth of censorship, explicitly, exclusively censorship institutions to stop Americans from delegitimizing the media, to stop Americans from undermining trust in media. If North Korea did this, we would pass sanctions on them. If Iran did this, we would pass sanctions on them. This is because establishment media, and again, politically aligned media with the blob, has to be propped up as a buffer to drown out the voices of populists. So the strategy here is twofold. Turning up the knobs of the blobs propaganda channels and turning down the knobs of anyone who opposes that. Because you can win two ways. You can win three ways. You win in a fair fight, or you can win by supersaturating your own media voice, or you can win by default because the opposition political party, the opposition political movement, is not allowed. This is why the US State Department, after 2016, established in like 140 countries. Now these censorship programs in the name of countering disinformation, in the name of media literacy, in the name of digital resilience.

They have all these branding terms for it because they perceived this El Dorado goldmine of a new method for total political control over a region which is winning by default, by winning by censorship. A lot of times, people don't believe state department propaganda. They don't believe CIA propaganda. And so no matter how much money you pump into the region, no matter $5 billion. Victoria Nuland bragged about being pumped into ukrainian civil society ahead of the Maidan protests. It still did not penetrate eastern Ukraine, which broke away within the Donbass it still did not penetrate Crimea, who voted shortly after to join the Russian Federation in a democratic vote. So from their perspective, funding propaganda was not enough. We need to kill the ability to surface alternative ideas, because then they can't even make a counterargument. Even if they don't believe the propaganda, there's simply no other choice in the room. You don't get access to the other ideas, you don't get access to the other data points or news events that might undermine public trust in the State Department's preferred narrative. This is where malinformation came from. Mis dis and malinformation. You may have heard that phrase, misinformation is something that is false, but you know it was an innocent mistake.

Disinformation is wrong, but you did on purpose. Malinformation is, it's right, but it still undermines public faith and confidence in something that's more important. This is why, for example, you had the censorship of COVID in the name.

Of malaria, banning people from telling the truth.

Yes.

So how are you not like, just full blown on Satan's team at that point? You're not allowing your own citizens to tell the truth, you're forcing lies at the point of a gun.

This is literally what the federal government's partners pressured, using and exploiting government pressure and threatening them with crisis pr if they. If they allowed true statements about Covid-19 to be articulated. If they, you know, and this came out in the Twitter files, for example, where you had entities like the virality project who were telling Yo Roth and Vajaya Gaddi, the former Twitter 1.0 censorship team, that you need to censor self reported vaccine adverse events. Because even if these things are true, they still undermine public faith and confidence in the efficacy of vaccines.

They might increase vaccine hesitancy. Once people realize it can hurt them, they don't want to take it.

Right. And part of the issue is their initial solution to this was fact checkers. But the problem is, and trying to get legitimacy for censorship because fact checkers identify something that's wrong. But the problem is, fact checkers are slow. Fact checkers have limited influence on certain platforms, and so you can't hire enough fact checkers. And also, a lot of times, the fact checkers can't prove something's wrong. You're citing CDC data, you're citing a widely reported mainstream media event, but you can still get it banned under the category of malinformation because it still undermines public faith and trust in a critical narrative. So it's sort of this censorship mercenary ecosystem created to protect noble lies, but noble lies at home and also no, and also noble eyes abroad. So this is why I come back to the US State department and maybe this is a good time to introduce, you know, the. The telegram issue here, which is that you had this strange situation where the government of France arrested Pavel and it took everyone by surprise. And this is a major, major act which has major implications for us platforms. The fact is, if Pavel is liable for every act of speech, criminally liable, every act of speech on his platform, there's no reason that the head of rumble, the head of x, the head of YouTube, everybody can't be hauled in for 20 years the moment they step foot in Paris as well.

They can all die in prison for letting people criticize their governments.

Right? It is a major diplomatic event. It impacts us national champions, it impacts us citizens, the us embassy in France, its job, the only reason it's there is to protect us national interests, us citizens and us corporations from hostile foreign laws in France, hostile foreign actions by France. And given how critical telegram is to the US militarily, to the US on statecraft grounds, to the US on intelligence grounds, again, as we speak in dozens of countries, telegram is the main artery of the CIA for cultivating political resistance movements. And so the impact on the United States is absolutely massive of doing this. And again, as we discussed, the United States has funded Ukraine with about almost $300 billion. And Ukraine's military intelligence chiefs say that they need to get control over telegram's backend to know whether or not the Russians are in control of it and to get control essentially over its front end content moderation policies to ban russian propaganda channels. Now, mind you, this comes just two weeks after the FBI raided the homes of Scott Ritter and other journalists simply for appearing on Russia. Today. He had his hard drive seized, his phone, his phone seized, other people had the paintings in their own houses seized by the FBI, not arrested, by the way, no charges against them simply for appearing on a russian propaganda channel, a russian state tv channel.

So these are american citizens living in America who simply appeared on a channel from Russia that had their homes raided, their electronics seized, and even their paintings in their own home seized. If they thought a russian painter may have painted the picture here in the United States just two weeks ago, how is that legal? Well, technically, they're not facing charges, but the idea was, because they have overt ties to a russian propaganda outlet, they may have covert ties. And so the FBI now basically has them in the spider web. But understand, this is what I want to say.

Makes me want to go on RT every single day of the year just to make the point. Not because I, for any other reason than to make the point. I'm an american citizen. I can have any political opinion I want and I can speak to anyone I want. But does anyone, any other media outlet, see this as kind of the end of America when people are raided by the FBI for having political opinions?

It's funny you say that, because this is really what started my own journey, which was that I'm not a foreign policy zealot. If the gun were taken off of my head and an apology and restitution made for the destruction of the free and open Internet, I might consider whether or not it is in us interest to fund the war in Ukraine, to pursue the seize Eurasia, to do these things. I don't know. I don't know. I see the arguments on both sides of it. But the problem is the fact that they have destroyed so many lives, the fact that so much pursuing this in my own free speech rights has cost me so much. But I have the same response that you do, which is that, well, because you told me that I can't talk about this. I will not stop talking about this until the Internet is.

They broke into my private text account, the NSA did, to keep me from talking to Putin. And then I just said, I don't care what it takes, I'm going to Moscow. To see Putin took me two years. But they really hardened my resolve beyond, like, any point of reason, like, I was going, period. And I think that's the healthy response. You can. I'm an american citizen. I was born here. You cannot. You are not allowed. It's illegal for you to trample my God given speech rights. So how'd you like to cut your cell phone bill in half every single month? It's probably pretty high. Have you checked it recently? Verizon, at and till, and T Mobile want you to believe that you have to have something called unlimited data. And maybe you're in the small percentage that do need unlimited data, whatever that is. But for most people, you do not need unlimited data, and you certainly shouldn't be forced to pay for it. That's where pure talk comes in. Pure talk only charges you for the data that you want. How about that? If you walked into an ice cream parlor and they said, you can only buy eleven cones, and you said, I just want one, you probably wouldn't go back, would you?

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Well, this is the actual crux of our counterinsurgency paradox, which is that we have two things that we do for political control in a region. One of them is counterterrorism. If we, the military, sets in on a country, if we say there's terrorists there. But if there's no counterterrorism, we still have a doctrine called counterinsurgency, which is managing the rise of opposition political parties in a country and using potentially, sometimes kinetic or, you know, hard power or drone striking people.

Kinetic meaning violence?

Yes. Yes. And, you know, the problem with counterinsurgency doctrine is a critical component of the country does not believe the government, the US installed government is legitimate. So they are organizing a political movement to rise to power instead. We call that a political insurgency. And the issue is Isdev. We want to get them stabilized. We want to make them have nothing and be happy when people have grievances. This is what gives rise to this whole insurgent problem. But the problem is in counterinsurgency is in order to get legitimacy in the government, you need to take out the insurgents. But every time you take out an insurgent, you create ten new ones. Because all the bystanders who didn't have a dog in the fight, who maybe believed what the us government propaganda was saying, just saw their cousin get taken out at the wedding and said, so this is the problem. But this is also where the whole of society framework comes from. The whole society framework comes from coin. It comes from counterintelligence. We have a doctrine within counter insurgency called whole of government whole of society, which means every agency within the us government and then every institution in society.

Again, coming back to this watchword institution, because this is the watchword of censorspeak. This is propping up our institutions and censoring anyone who opposes the consensus of institutions. But this whole society framework is how you stop the counterinsurgency paradox, which is that you take one out, you create ten new ones. If the pressure is coming not just from the us military, it's coming from how you get a job in the country. So we onboard the private sector companies, they'll work either through formal partnerships with the state department or Pentagon, or they'll be funded, or it'll be informal, or will be back channeled through something like the center for International Private Enterprise, which is the chamber of commerce armor of the National Endowment for Democracy. We get the private sector companies, we get the universities, the NGO's, the activists, we get all the cultural figures involved in the counterinsurgency effort and we get the media involved in it. This is where the censorship architecture was. This is what they agreed on. They literally borrowed it from the military doctrine to solve this. Exactly this physiological response that you're articulating right now. But getting back to this issue around the State Department and telegram, it is my contention that there's no way the french government would have done something so absolutely seismic in terms of its implications for the us military, for us intelligence and the US State Department.

US State Department without walking next door down the champs Elysees and telling the us embassy in France that they were going to do this, they had an ongoing investigation, criminal investigation into Pavel before this event took place. McCrone even tweeted that this was part of an ongoing investigation. It is stock common practice for the us embassy, as we discussed, in the Czech Republic and Poland, it is stock common practice for the us embassy in a region to coordinate, to be notified, to be essentially a stakeholder in that country's conversations about whether or not prosecutions in the name of anti corruption, in the name of anything will be done because the State Department effectively has a soft veto power. I mean, you can remember getting back to prosecutions and control of the prosecutors. This was a major scandal with Joe Biden. Joe Biden personally threatened the government of Ukraine. He said this at a council on Foreign Relations, you know, committee meeting. If folks recall famous tape, a billion dollars you want, either you get rid of your prosecutor or you lose a billion dollars in critical us aid to the region. And you know, by golly, you know, they.

They fired the prosecutor control over the prosecutors is control over the politics. So the US embassy in the region is constantly back channeling with the prosecutors. The idea that this event, which is exactly what the State Department has been soft calling for, for months now, since, you know, at least months, I should note, if not arguably a few years, that this miraculous windfall, because they don't have leverage against Pavel, otherwise, he's living in the UAE, and they don't have the attack surface on telegram that they had on WhatsApp. They had this problem with WhatsApp a few years ago because WhatsApp is the other major end to end encrypted chat. There's only two games in town in the encrypted chat space, WhatsApp and Telegram. And I watched this happen with the Brazil story. The US State Department, again, capacity built by essentially bribing through tens of billions of dollars of flooded foreign assistance to all the censorship advocates in Brazil. This plan to stop the use of WhatsApp and Telegram by Bolsonaro supporters in Brazil and Modi supporters in India. Places like the Atlanta Council, which has seven CIA directors on its board, gets annual funding every single year from the US State Department.

All four branches, the us military, as well as CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy. They held a conference in the summer of 2019 about the need to stop the use of WhatsApp and telegram in countries around the world, especially Brazil and.

India, because we can't spy on them as effectively.

Because the state department had already censored social media, had already gotten social media censored in those countries. Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro supporters were effectively booted from Twitter 1.0, Facebook and YouTube. After 2016. There's said to be this international movement of ideas between pro Trump and pro Bolsonaro. So they all, after the state department set up this apparatus that got them censored from social media, they all ran to WhatsApp and Telegram. And so state department sort of created this encrypted chat problem. They could only talk in an uncensored way because the state Department already censored their other main communication artery. And so WhatsApp and Telegram were put in the crosshairs of this USAID program to kill USAID. State Department program to kill political support for Bolsonaro and WhatsApp bent the knee within two and a half weeks because WhatsApp is very vulnerable. It is owned by Facebook, and Facebook is a major, is a major surface attack area for WhatsApp. If you recall, Jim Jordan subpoenaed these emails from Facebook a few months ago, the Facebook files and in the Facebook files, it came out that Nick Clegg, the head of public policy, the head of the censorship terms of service at Facebook, did not want to cooperate with the Biden administration's demands to censor Covid, but urged his team to do so anyway because we have bigger fish to fry with the Biden administration.

So we need to think creatively about ways to be receptive to their censorship demands because Facebook is totally dependent on the US State Department, the intelligence services, and to some extent the long range threat of the Pentagon to protect Facebook's data monopolies, to protect its advertising revenue, to protect it from laws like the EU Digital Markets act and Digital Services act, which is so. And this has come out as well. And I was at the State Department when I was called by nine Google lobbyists who told me that the number one threat to Google's business model over the next five years is the EU Digital Markets act and Digital Services act. They need the protection of big daddy state Department for favors, for their profits. And so they play ball with the State Department's censorship demands in order to preserve that. But they are under the barrel of it. And people like Mark Zuckerberg right now are feeling like they're at their, they're at their wits end because they gave the State Department and they gave the Biden administration everything they asked for in terms of censorship demands and they're still being bullied by them.

So just yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg wrote this letter to Chairman Jim Jordan where he came out in the strongest statement yet that, you know, that the Biden administration forced Facebook effectively to do the censorship, that they. That they pressured them strongly and that. And that the only reason they did these censorship actions, whether that was the joke, the Hunter Biden laptop, or whether that was the COVID censorship. Censoring Covid origins, censoring all issues around the COVID regime, was because of pressure from the Biden administration. And not only that, he said that he regretted doing it and now has structures in place to stop Facebook from relenting from such government pressure in the first place. And while this is great to hear Zuckerberg say, it would have been a lot more useful four months ago when there was a Supreme Court case under deliberation where the Supreme Court effectively argued that there was an insufficient causal relationship between government pressure and platform censorship action. So having a direct letter from Mark Zuckerberg unequivocally saying that there was, as the head of Facebook, would have been very useful to establish a Supreme Court precedent. Believing that aside and the sort of too little, too late nature of that, this is something that had been percolating for a while.

Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg said that he regretted the censorship actions five months ago on Joe Rogan. So it's no surprise that Zuckerberg expressed that in writing. But the fact that he would do it to the republican chairman of the House weaponization committee and the fact that he said he's no longer supporting democrats in this election cycle signals to me that he fears the blob now and feels like the Harris administration's continuity of the Biden administration's pressure policies, that there's no amount of flesh that he can give up as a pound to satiate their bloodlust, and that he's turning, if not towards Trump, then towards something that's against that and trying to provide whatever moral support to that without making a direct contribution to the other side, sort of maintaining the sort of patina of neutrality on financial and messaging grounds. He's not doing what Elon is doing by voicing explicit support. He's not providing financial support, but he is very strongly motioning there because I think he thinks that the neutrality of a Trump administration because Trump was neutral. Trump was completely neutral, frankly, to the point where he should not have been. I mean, you had american platforms who were censoring the american people who had voted for that government and blasting away at our First Amendment in doing so.

The fact is all of the how can you protect government? How can the government protect platforms that are censoring the speech of Americans? This would be like the State Department supporting ExxonMobil and overthrowing governments to get oil and gas for ExxonMobil. While ExxonMobil was cutting half of Americans off at the pipe, at the pump, at a gas station, if they voted for Eisenhower. It's such an abuse. It's honestly the end of this sort of idea that this favors for favors relationship between big government and big corporations has a trickle down effect to help the welfare of the american people. This has always been the justification for the national champion policy at the State Department. That when I, when big government, when the Pentagon and State Department, CIA and USAID and the whole swarm of soft power institutions do favors for ExxonMobil or Microsoft or Walmart or Pepsi, then that means cheaper retail products for us. We have the export markets because we control that government. We have the natural resources, so we have cheap gas, middle class living. But this has completely inverted that because it's big government teaming up with big corporations specifically to deprive Americans of access to those platforms.

But again, it's to protect the institutions against the individuals. It's to protect this constellation of cloistered foreign policy institutions and their international agenda, installed at a regional level on every plot of dirt on earth, from being opposed by people who might vote against them organically in a free and open information market.

What happens to Paveldurov?

It's unclear what kind of pressure may be mounted to set him free. There have been suggestions that potentially the UAE may take some steps unconfirmed. The one player in the room who could exert enough pressure to set pavel free is unfortunately potentially one of the players who may be implicated in his arrest in the first place. And again, this comes back to the us embassy in France, which is why I believe that questions need to be asked by the House of Foreign affairs committee to Ambassador Denise Bauer. Were there previous communications, previous emails, previous meetings, previous dialog with french intelligence, french law enforcement or members of the french government? And when I say were there meetings or communications or dialog, I dont just mean directly by the us embassy. I also mean through the US embassy's back channels, which is that many times this is done directly by the US embassy, but many times it's done by a back channel, which is that instead of the us embassy talking with french law enforcement directly, a back channel, someone from a civil society institution funded by the State Department, like an atlantic council type organization or, you know, a former member of the State department has these conversations, does this lobbying, does this coordination, and then reports to the State Department for updates on the conversations about the anti corruption prosecution.

And the State Department provides guidance to the back channel. And the back channel continues the negotiations of pressure. The sweep has to be total here because the implications of the us embassy either coordinating or at the very least approving this are seismic. Because again, of Telegram's critical military intelligence role in countering Russia and statecraft role in everything that the State Department does. Because again, if Russia does have a backend access to telegram, whether they cracked it through their cyber hackers or whether Pavel had some secret agreement, that means every rent a riot revolution that the CIA does using telegram all over the world is also being secretly monitored by the Russians. And maybe that's why it was unsuccessful in Belarus, maybe that's why it was unsuccessful with Alexei Navalny in Russia. And they do make points about the fact that the russian military uses it freely. Over half of Russia uses it, and they point to questions around the funding in order to make that argument. So you do have these us interests, but you also have french interest.

Again, do they have evidence? I mean, the US funded the creation of signal. It doesn't mean. Right? And tons of people use signal. Right? Do they have evidence of this? I mean, Pavel Durov left Russia in 2014 in his account, and I think this is true, he felt like he had to leave. He didn't want to leave. He's russian.

Right.

But the Putin administration was trying to control telegram, and he famously gave the finger to Putin on camera and left, took citizenship in other countries. So, like, do they, as someone who's been accused of being a russian asset a million times when I don't speak Russian, and of course, I'm not even that interested in Russia, I'm sensitive to that slander. And I just want to know, like, do they have actual evidence that Putin has a backdoor to telegram? Sounds like a lie to me, but.

Well, they argue there would be no other reason for the russian military to use it in such an unfettered fashion for official russian military documents to advocate the use of telegrams.

Of course, there would be another reason, which is it's secure.

Right. Well, if you read CIA media on this, again, pointing to what Radio Free Europe wrote two weeks after your interview with Pavel, it was that things may have. While telegram.

Radio free Europe is disgusting, let me just say, having grown up around it, I'm just shocked by what it's become. It's disgusting. And they should be ashamed of themselves.

Lauding telegram from 2014 to 2020. What they argue is that something may have changed beginning in 2021 with a new round of funding, I believe a debt round, a large dollar figure debt round that was raised. And they argue that there may have been russian investors in that there may have been some payoff. And so because of that, Russia only because for two years they were pursuing banning telegram from. From Russia, but then they stopped it. And at the time, that was considered a major free speech victory by the United States and by the State Department. They applauded the NGO pressure on Russia and the threat of sanctions on Russia for if they went ahead and banned telegram, but the fact that they relented and then ubiquitously used telegram. Actually, telegram usage in Russia massively surged after the ban. There's only about 10% of Russians who used it before the ban, and now it's over 50%. And so they argue between the funding, between the fact that they're losing in all these places where they use telegram now and that Russia maybe may be keen to it, and the fact that the attempted ban was dropped, and then a massive surge in usage afterwards can only mean that Russia began to be pro telegram because of a secret deal between them.

So, in other words, Ukraine is losing a land war against a country with 100 million more people because Pavel Durov has some secret arrangement with Putin. I mean, this is the kind of fantastical, childish thinking that makes empires fall, actually. I mean, the total inability to deal with reality, to assess your own shortcomings, to be honest about anything as it pertains to yourself, to be honest about yourself and how much you suck, those are fatal weaknesses in people and in countries. And I grieve to see the us government fall into that kind of self indulgent fantasy.

Right, but think about the amazing windfall that just befell the CIA. They've had no leverage against Pavel this entire time, and yet the entire russian military architecture is built on telegram. All high level russian military and political officials, the internal workings of russian statecraft and deliberations all happen on telegram. And there has been no window into that because of Pavel's belief in free speech. So now if Pavel cracks under interrogation, if he cracks under pressure, suddenly all communications of all russian citizens and all russian military officials and all russian diplomats that were taking place on telegram for the past five years are now in the hands of the CIA. So this is.

Why don't we just torture him to death? I mean, like, why not just, like, just drop the pretense and just, like, we're North Korea now with slightly better infrastructure. Slightly. And stop pretending, because that's what this is. They're like, torturing a man and in the process stripping us of our God given speech rights and our right to privacy that they're always crowing about, but only when it pertains to abortion? I mean, this is so immoral, what we're participating in. Does anybody, does, like, even occur to all the creeps on the Internet, the Atlantic, Alexander Vindman, all the people who think this is great, does it occur to them that, like, they're no better than North Korea in this situation?

Well, I think from the ukrainian perspective, they say our people are dying. We're being massacred by the Russians. And so, you know, free speech has to be a casualty of, you know, of this war and so.

And religious freedom and the Russian Orthodox Church and, you know, the freedom of, like, priests to celebrate the Eucharist. Like, they're in jail now. So it's like. But a certain point, like, what do you think? Anyone in Ukraine looks over to Washington and says, you know, you promised us this was a good idea where they've lost at least 600,000 Ukrainians. They've lost the right to their land. Their land can now be bought by foreign corporations. They just made that change, and it will be. And like all of that is because they follow the advice of Washington. Do you think they think that?

Well, it doesn't matter what the people of Ukraine think. They're not allowed to have elections.

You're right.

They can't vote their way out of it. There's no elections. And mind you, everyone listening right now can look up something called the red lines memo from the Ukraine crisis media group, which is basically a conglomerate of all these us funded NGO's and civil society institutions in Ukraine. And they sent the so called red lines memo to Zelenskyy when he took office. And they threatened Zelenskyy in that letter that if he took any of the below actions on security policy, on energy policy, on media policy, on cultural policy, seven or eight different buckets of internal policies that Zelenskyy might pursue, that if he crossed any of the red lines in terms of restoring use of the russian language on ukrainian tv or interfering with the privatization of NAFTA gas and things like this, that if he crossed any of the red lines, the policy issues articulated by this us constellation, this US NGO, which is an umbrella for all these other State department NGo's, that Ukraine would face immediate political destabilization if any of those policies were enacted. Basically the same rental riots that were deployed by the US State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency and to some extent, the Pentagon in the 2014 Maidan protests would be redeployed against Zelenskyy if he decided to chart an independent course for the ukrainian people, that he would be run out of office the same way, you know, his predecessor Yanukovych was by the same forces.

If he did something that was in the will of the ukrainian people but opposed the US State Department.

This is so grotesque. I just want to pause now and ask you, anyone who's followed this conversation to this point finds it as probably as compelling as I do. So for people who want. I never do this, but in your case, it's. I want people to read what you write. Where's the best place to follow you.

Much more closely than just your appearances here on xbencyber? All one word at Mikebencyber. I'm prolific. I believe in this. I understand what is probably going to happen to me at some point. But again, my dog in this fight is not changing us foreign policy to change us foreign policy, let others decide what to do in Ukraine, what to do all over the world. I did not. I can understand both sides of the issue. I can understand the sort of anti imperialist, these are human rights violations. We should not be toppling democratically elected governments. I can also understand that it's a big, bad world out there, and if we don't do it, somebody else will. And we need capacities in place to do that. It's a complicated issue. The problem is we don't have a democracy when our entire political structure is about hearts and minds of the people. That's what democracy is. Hearts and minds of the people are determined by the information ecosystem, freedom of speech. And so if you don't have the freedom of speech to be able to influence hearts and minds and the hearts and minds to be able to give rise to a free and fair election, well, then you don't have a democracy.

You have a military junta, effectively. And it's the point that you made before that the legitimacy all falls out. And so all I care about is free speech on the Internet. And so, well, it sounds like what.

You care about is America. You care about the country that you live in.

Yes. Right. And to that point, I want to make another sort of note here, which is that I'm not coming out making a facial allegation that it's. That the United States was the driving force behind Pavel's arrest. I believe that it is highly unlikely that they were not coordinating or encouraging it. And I believe that at the very least, there was approval. And approval is a sort of light standard that's a little bit less damning because all it means is that the US did not, was notified but did not apply counter pressure.

Well, sure. But I mean, you could also say, and I would say, having seen it a million times in my long life, when a foreign country, particularly an ally like France, does something we disagree with, we can issue a note of protest. The State department could say we disapprove of that. We support human rights, including the right to speech and the right to privacy, et cetera, et cetera. And we didn't do that.

No. We can threaten to cut off aid. We can threaten to cut off contracts to french companies or just publicly disapprove.

I mean, it's, France is an ally. If we, if the president has cut out or Tony Blinken or the US ambassador to France and just said we're against this, that would be a lot.

And everyone right now go to the Twitter page of the US ambassador to France on X, there's no public statements about it. There's been no statement by the State department, no statement by the us embassy in France.

When an american citizen called Gonzalo lira was killed by the ukrainian government. He died in prison for criticizing the ukrainian government, a government that we support and control in the name of democracy and freedom. The US State department said nothing. The Biden administration said nothing. They approved, of course.

But again, they're behind this in so many cases that it seems highly unlikely, especially given how amazing a windfall this is to the United States foreign policy establishment on this. But there's two related points I want to make about France here, which is that France does have its own independent reasons for doing this, which is that Frances whole financial empire is dependent on Africa. France still has a sort of semi colonial empire. 14 countries in Africa who basically use french currency and are Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire.

West Africa mostly, yes.

And France also derives the lion's share of its own energy resources. And they have had a big problem in the past.

So the French. The famous french nuclear program. Yes, nuclear energy program, which is, I think, the biggest in the world.

Yes, 70. Yes. 75% of France's energy comes from nuclear.

And that comes from Niger. That comes from a french speaking african country. The uranium.

Exactly. Exactly. So three out of every four light bulbs in France are turned on by the uranium, effectively in Niger and a few other places. And the French lost control of Niger to Russia. Just last year there was a military coup, as there was in Mali and several other places where it was a military coup, if not orchestrated, backstopped by the russian military. In these countries, one after another, you've had four or five french colonies effectively fall to russian military activity in Africa. And so they've lost control over their axis. In Nigeria, for example, they had to close down their embassy. All the french troops which had their largest presence in Africa were all evicted. They lost all of the soft power influence over these countries. And in these countries, the Africans are burning french flags and raising russian flags. In fact, many of these african countries are now cutting off diplomatic ties with Ukraine because of how close their affiliation with Russia is. Because of russian military competence and activity in Africa, France is losing the ability to keep the lights on.

Yeah, so. And it should be noted, however, that Russia is doing this because under Macron, France has been jumping up and down about the Ukraine war and pretending to be a meaningful part of NATO, which they are nothing, and just sort of pretending that they still have a meaningful empire. Everyone cares. Anyone cares at all what they think. And they've annoyed Russia to the point where I think this is payback.

Right? But russian, the russian military is built on telegram. Everything they do now, it's not necessarily public telegram channels, but the private version with the end to end encryption and the anonymous forwarding, the ability to aggregate everybody in a russian private military contract or into a common telegram channel. Only telegram has that capacity. No other. You know, they can't post this on Facebook, and they're not going to use Facebook owned CIA intermediated WhatsApp. All they have is telegram for that. So if, if french intelligence is able to get pavel to sing under questioning or interrogation or threats to spending the rest of his life in prison, France may be able to, you know, finally have a chance to retake the colonies that were lost to Russia.

Okay. Let me just say, though, I would much rather be monitored by the russian military, by the Israelis, by any foreign government, than I would by my own government because I live here. First of all, my government has no right, as I think, a statutory matter, to monitor me. But also the implications of being monitored by a foreign government as an American are not as big a deal as they are when I'm monitored by my government. Do you see what I'm saying?

No, absolutely. Well, actually, there's a great point along this, which gets right to the France story and this intersection between us and French interests, US and French shared military intelligence and diplomatic and economic interests in arresting pavel and finally getting the leverage they have craved for so long to be able to both control telegrams, content moderation practice, to ban all Russian propaganda channels, which are infecting the minds of everyone from Ukraine to Belarus to sub Saharan Africa, but also the ability to get this back end access to read every Russian text message effectively. Theres a great example of this in terms of blowback on Americans. So weve talked about this group, the Atlanta Council, which bills itself as NATOs think tank. Again, a lot of people dont even know. Seven CIA directors are still live, let alone all clustered together on the board of directors of a NATO think tank. But it gets annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department, and CIA cutouts like the national down for democracy, as well as USAID. There are eleven different federal government agencies who all provide federal government funding every single year to what is effectively the civilian influence arm of NATO.

Now, in March 2018, the Atlanta Council published a set of white papers called Democratic Defense against disinformation. And in the March 2018 version of it, the COVID photo, again, this is funded by the United States Pentagon, United States State Department of United States Intelligence service conduits. The front page of this memo called Democratic Defense against Disinformation, which called for this whole of society playbook about how the government could organize civil society. Censorship from the civil society side, censorship from the private sector side, censorship advocacy in media organizations. The COVID of the memo was a giant network map, a network narrative map of the french election. Because at the time, WikiLeaks had published something called the Macron Leaks, which were these sensitive, politically embarrassing emails involving Macron when he was neck and neck in the race against Marine Le Pen in 2018. And the front page of it had in red, all these narrative network maps of french citizens and Russians. But there were two big green network nodes that were highlighted at the front of the memo. And one of them was a big network node saying WikiLeaks. The other one was a big network node saying Jack Possobiek, just so you understand what's going on here, WikiLeaks had published these McCrone leaks.

And Jack Besobiek at the time was this large us based, us citizen social media influencer who was one of the first and most aggressive to popularize the distribution of these Macron leaks, social media. And that was considered an attack on democracy by effectively the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, NATO. They were not targeting Russians, they were not targeting French. They were targeting a us citizen for amplifying now publicly available documents that might undermine political support for NATO's preferred political puppet in France.

By telling the truth.

By publishing true documents.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So what I'm saying is there was no allegation. It wasn't like the hunter Biden laptop. In the first weeks where this isn't real. No one contested the fact. These were real. These were real. You just weren't allowed to see them because you can't know the truth because it might make you harder to control.

Well, this is the issue, is these. This is a us citizen. This is a us funded institution. Gets millions of dollars every year. It has seven CIA directors on its board. The army funds it, the Navy funds it, the air force funds it, the USAID funds it, the State Department. And in the crosshairs of the COVID page of the memo is a us citizen. For doing what? That wasn't even a us event. It was an american citizen publishing about a election in a galaxy far, far away. How much is it going to take? If we colonize Mars and there's an election on Mars, can the Central Intelligence Agency organize the censorship of an american citizen because the CIA's preferred puppet for the electoral race on Mars is being undermined because of a social media post from someone living in rural Montana. There's no end to this.

There isn't a. It's been ongoing much longer than I realized. And I think that's part of the problem is that people who consider themselves non liberal or opponents of the Democratic Party, I've certainly considered myself that, were the slowest to figure out that the DoD, the Pentagon, the military, and the intel agencies, particularly the CIA, also law enforcement, FBI, DHS, that they were threats to the country and to us, and they reflexively supported them. And that's all a 49 year old hangover from the church committee hearings in 1975, where it was like all the conservatives were like, oh, shut up, you're not patriotic. But actually the left knew right away that what matters is the institutions that are armed. Guns matter. Guns matter more than anything. And so you want to have the armed institutions on your side and use them to oppress your political opponents. And they did that. And it took republicans, well, they still haven't figured it out. They're like, you know, checking the box on funding DoD to like, you know, more than any military in the history of the world to lose war after war for 80 years. And they don't understand that they're signing their own death warrant and the death warrant of american democracy.

It's like freaking infuriate. It must drive you crazy. As a former federal employee.

Well, I mean, you nailed it there. What they are doing to populism is what they used to do to communism, if you remember. What actually, you know, started the church committee hearings. What gave it the political legitimacy to finally have its day in Congress was the fact that the CIA and the Pentagon and the FBI were all interfering in domestic politics and the Democrats to stop the anti war faction in a big way. Domestic political support for, you know, for anti Vietnam is what was killing the funding legitimacy for the war in Vietnam, and it was killing the political mandate. And so we have this doctrine, the four theaters of war, the four domains of war. This is us army doctrine, which is theres the strategic, the strategic, the tactical, the logistical and the political four ways you can win or lose a war. On the strategic side, its the grand strategy of it. On the tactical side, its who are you going to attack? How, when the logistics is, how do you get the supplies there? How do you get the funding for it? And the political is, do you have political support at home to be able to fund the logistics, to be able to do these particular tactics.

If the war is not popular at home, you don't get the funding for all the logistics that you need. You don't get approval for certain tactics that would be deemed human rights violations or war crimes. The us military establishment believes that we lost Vietnam. This is famous called Vietnam syndrome, because we lost in the political domain. This is why the US State Department and the CIA fund anti war movements domestically within countries that we go to war with. We pump up the anti war voices in the country, the anti war parliamentarians who might be in control of that country's budget in order to undermine their own ability to capacity build the war. And this is what's happened here. This was this George Hw Bush quote, by God, we kicked Vietnam syndrome when he brought CNN onto military airplanes to propagandize how great the war was. And this is why the media has been so intensely onboarded in all Pentagon operations since Vietnam.

Warren and yet they're still very unpopular. They're extremely unpopular. The Iraq war, looking backward, whatever the hell we tried to do in Syria, whatever we did in Libya, the 20 years in Afghanistan, those are all seen as failures by a huge percentage of the american population, despite the relentless propaganda. So that should really matter. If the majority of the public is against something, we shouldn't do it because we're supposed to be in charge of the government.

Well, this is where I come back to doctrine. When you are a part of this apparatus, you are now taught that what democracy means is the institutions, the democratic institutions, the government institutions, the NGO institutions, the media institutions, and any private sector companies.

It's a really deep and important insight. You said that about what, a year ago? You first said that. I heard you say it about a year ago, and it changed my thinking completely.

But this is also because I'm hearing you react to how evil it all is multiple times. No, no, no.

I didn't control myself.

No, I'm glad you did, because I think this is a useful point for the american public to understand, which is that when youre in this thing, it doesnt look like it does from the outside, because the language of censorspeak is a very unique one. In the same way that Marxism rose to some level of cultural mainstream because of a decade of incubation in universities developing this esoteric jargon, you know, this sort of Lego tower of abstractions and concepts that went, when it was finally rolled out to the public, the public could have a sort of set of frameworks to rationalize and support it. There is a thick lexicon of censorspeak that totally takes the human element out of it. So when you are a part of this censorship apparatus, you don't really feel like you are censoring people. I'll give you an example. They don't refer to people who they censor as citizens or people, they refer to them as cyber threat actors. Okay. So when you are censored, when they.

Kill them, they don't say they kill them, they liquidate them.

Right?

Right.

Yes. Or neutralize. Yeah. When you, they don't refer to your tweets or your Facebook post or your YouTube video. They call those incidents.

So because your opinions are a crime.

Right. When you capacity build with tens of millions of dollars, us funded censorship, mercenary firms, you are not funding censorship. You are building digital resilience. You are engaging in a media literacy campaign.

Is it all girls running this? Because you're using the very feminine language here.

It's quite egalitarian, I would say. It's an interesting blend in terms of the cast of characters. But the one commonality is they are all vetted, they are all financially dependent on the resources of the blob of the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, and the related swarm army of NGO's who then trickle that down. As I get back to, for example, the National Science foundation is whos funding all the universities. The Pentagon is funding countless censorship mercenary firms. USAID, again, has these entire programs with thousands of these censorship promoting media organizations, censorship post flagging disinformation experts. And so you enter this kind of cloistered world with its own language. And theres also a sort of moral justification because these people have unbelievable amounts of power over a kind of godlike feeling over the political ebbs and flows of every country on earth. And yet they don't necessarily make very much to reflect what they do. I mean, think about the power that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency has and yet makes less than, Tony Fauci makes less than a six year associate, junior mid level associate at a New York law firm. And yet this person determines the rise and fall of virtually every country on earth, or at least has significant influence over it.

So the money networks are very important because this has become a boonfield. I call it the censorship industry because that's the most useful way to understand what the glue that keeps everything together. It is a censorship industrial complex, but it is the industry that keeps all the cogs in the wheel going. The private sectors make bank because they do government favors. That's why Microsoft, for example, is such a huge player in the censorship apparatus. They're a huge private sector partner in the whole society network under the private sector banner is hugely dependent on foreign markets, hugely dependent on the US State Department to negotiate on their behalf to be able to stop foreign laws that might undermine their profitability. They have almost 10% of their profits coming from China. So they will join these national endowment for democracy censorship ecosystems in 2018, when all this was at its adolescent stage of getting created and when the real concrete of the bricks was getting laid down, while there's still some mortar that would be developed in 2019, 2020, Microsoft created this protecting democracy program, which became this major in house censorship incubator. And they participate in all the DHS censorship meetings.

All of the CIA cut out censorship meetings through the National Endowment for Democracy because Microsoft's financial interests are dependent on the government, and they are putting a favor in the favor bank to the government by doing it. And the government will in turn reward them by telling that foreign government, whose political prospects are now protected because all their opposition is censored, to do favors for Microsoft. And this is why there's such a huge stakeholder apparatus in all of this. One of the four I've talked about the National Endowment for Democracy many times here they have four cores that they call it the NDI. This was the DNC branch of this CIA cutout. Hunter Biden was on the chairman's advisory board. Nina Jankiewicz was a part of it. Just so you can understand the pedigree of this, the International Republic Institute is the RNC branch of it. Mitt Romney's on the board.

Iri, John McCain's old group.

Exactly. Started it and ran it for 25 years. And the third one is their union branch called the Solidarity center. So this is basically the CIA intermediary. CIA back channeling with unions, because unions play a major role in the rental riots in Belarus, for example. This is how you get workers without a lot to lose who a little bit of money goes a long way. These are the people who are in control of how the trains work. Part of this playbook for destabilizing a country is you shut down all the instruments the government could use. You shut down the railroads, you block the highways, the hospital workers all walk out. The teachers from the teachers unions all walk out. And so the CIA has to have a back channel to that. So that's the solidarity center, among other links there. But the fourth one, the fourth of the core four is called the center for International Private Enterprise. And this is the us chamber of commerce, commercial interests, in the region that the CIA is orchestrating a regime change operation in or is putting influence on the existing government. And so it was a major event in the republican party when the us chamber of Commerce turned against Trump.

The only parity that the republican party had against Democrats for the past 100 years has been the fact that while Democrats had the media, Hollywood, music and culture, unions, and to some extent finance, Republicans had the war industry, the energy industry, and the chamber of Commerce, because these chamber of commerce companies preferred republicanism for its free market enterprise, free enterprise and low tax structure. The problem is Trump sort of stepped on a rattlesnake with this idea of making America first and american nationalism to the extent that it cut back on american interventionalism, american constant democracy promotion abroad. He was the first president 40 years not to declare a new war effectively. So you had all these chamber of commerce companies whose the lion's share of the revenue is dependent on foreign markets or whose supply chains are sourced in foreign countries. And they need a big bad CIA, they need a big bad State department, they need a big bad USAID and a big bad Pentagon if necessary. And so Trumpism became a sort of threat to the bottom line of the us chamber of commerce. And so I come back to this because the commercial interests here are sort of driving whats happening at the intelligence and military and diplomatic policy level, if that makes sense.

For example, take Ukraine. Right, Ukraine. It was not just the overthrow of the government in 2014 there, yes it was a state Department operation. Yes it was USAId funded Ciade directed operation as well as with the british government. But who are the financial stakeholders? Why did they do it? Well, the ukrainian government had just rejected a us embassy IMF trade deal and sided with Russia. They were squeamish about privatizing NAfta gas. And at the time, the US College of Corporations, these chamber of commerce companies, the oil and gas companies had all made massive investments in the ukrainian energy sphere because the long range plan was to bankrupt Gazprom and take the trillion dollar market that Gazprom has into Europe, cut them off, and have NATO based energy companies take their market for them. The plan was beautiful. If you kill Gazprom, first of all, you have a national security predicate for doing it because if you kill Gazprom, there goes the russian military. So now Russia's threat in Africa is neutralized. Russia cant oppose the Pentagon in Syria and in other places. So theres a lot of national security Pentagon reasons to pursue that. But then you had all these us companies Inc.

All these deals between 2011 and 2013 with the ukrainian energy sector Chevron signed a $10 billion deal with Nafta Gas which is the state owned ukrainian gas company. Burisma was the largest private gas company it was the feeder to Nafta gas shell from the United Kingdom it was Royal Dutch Shell but now its basically headquartered in London so Shell Shell also signed a matching $10 billion deal with Nafta Gas, the state owned gas company Halliburton. Dick Cheneys where he used to be CEO and chairman of the board and also George Soros had a large equity share in Halliburton. Halliburton owns the oil and gas processing rights in Ukraine. All of these companies were invested in resources that were solely situated in the Donbas and in Crimea the Donbas in the mountains and Crimea offshore. And then what happened after. So we overthrow the government in 2014 because the ukrainian government was not giving everything that the State department wanted we thought we wrested total control of it and now all of these people who had made these, all these us corporations who made these investments make bank but then we dont expect this counter coup that happens basically just a few months afterwards when the Donbass broke away and Crimea voted to join the russian federation and the whole thing was purportedly backstopped by the russian military.

You have tens of billions of dollars of investments by us oil and gas companies whose investments all go to zero because now how does burisma mine shale on the Donbas? How does Nafta gas get the profits from that mining if Russia controls the territory? How are you going to do offshore drill rigging in Crimea when Crimea belongs to Russia? You have these commercial interests driving the State Department policy in the region. When Victoria Nuland in late 2013 gave that famous speech where she bragged about the $5 billion that the us government had pumped into ukrainian civil society, the very civil society that would go on to overthrow the government. Just months later when she gave that speech she was at a us embassy event being sponsored by Chevron and Exxon.

Really?

Yes, yes. You go to my ex feed. I got the picture in hd, 4k blown up for everyone to see. So again you have this relationship between the commercial. So it's not just that like we have a rogue State department, we have a revolving door between big government and big corporations. And the idea of putting american first, America first in a world where those corporations are primarily multinational means that nationalism is a threat to multinational corporate interests and so multinational corporate interests will sponsor the State Department activity and use the battering ram of the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, and NATO to achieve those corporate interests. So we have a much bigger problem here, which is why I call for reform, because our whole financial ecosystem is actually bent on this.

And thats just the nature of globalization. I mean, that was always going to happen. If you thought it through for me, I mean, why would Brexit be seen as a threat to us interests? Ok, we could go on for hours, but I want to end, and we could actually do hours on this specific topic. I want to end on the question of Elan, who I think is one of the most significant figures in modern history. Obviously, he is, but very much a current player. A lot depends on what hes doing now on the question of speech with x. And, of course, he has an incredibly complex life where hes tied into all kinds of different things with all kinds of different companies that rely on government contracts, etcetera, etcetera, holding the line in demonstrable ways. Everyone I know who watched the dura of arrest this weekend first thought, oh, man, who's next? Do you think that the blob you so vividly describe can tolerate Elon Musk, allowing the world's population to say what it thinks through the election and beyond? And what implications does this arrest have for him?

Well, it's a complicated issue because Elon is very unique. I wrote about this when he announced the acquisition, before it even closed. I wrote an article where I described how Elon is actually quite unique in this relative to other billionaire owners of social media companies who folded to pressure. And I cited a few reasons. One is, again, the strategy on this, apart from prosecutions, is whole of society, contortion of the economics. So what you do is to get Facebook to do what you want. You offer carrots and you threaten sticks. So if you do what we want, you'll get bribed, you'll get rewarded. If you don't do what we want, we'll bankrupt you. And so they fastidiously organize the whole of society so that pressure is applied from the private sector. Pressure. So advertiser boycotts. USAID has a formal disinformation program focused on getting advertisers to cut off revenue to purveyor misinformation sites and purveyors of misinformation. And I have seen, I mean, they have this formally published. In fact, my organization, foundation for Freedom Online, even published the formal disinformation primer in February 2021, one month after Biden took office, where in a 97 page USAID disinformation program memo.

31 times they mentioned the word advertisers as being necessary to kill the revenue to any social media site or any social media account or any independent webpage that spreads misinformation. So USAID is contorting the economics of the entire news industry in order to get platforms to censor lest they go economically bankrupt. And remember, this is the major threat to Elon still to this day, but particularly these advertiser boycotts, which crushed the ability. This is why they had to turn to subscriptions and they had to make this dollar eight a month dollar twelve a month type thing because of all the ad boycotts. And again, USAID is a formal program to coordinate that in a whole society fashion. Getting back to Elons uniqueness for a couple of things, as a triple digit billionaire, he may be more insulated from these kinds of whole society encirclement, economic pressure tactics that someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey had tolerance for. They were only double digit billionaires or Zuckerberg, whereas as a triple digit billionaire, that actually may be robust enough to resist that. Getting back to this Mark Zuckerberg letter in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg was making public speeches saying that he thought censorship had gone too far on Facebook.

That was 2019, I remember. But then he got hit with a very interesting boycott that was called hash changetheterms. And it basically was economically coercing Facebook to change the terms of its terms of service, effectively to ban Trump supporters and Brexit supporters and anyone in Europe who is supporting a right wing populist party there. And Facebook lost $60 billion in market cap in 48 hours under this boycott. And so Facebook folded like a lawn chair and gave them everything they asked for because 60 billion was enough to break Zuckerberg's back. At the same time, there's.

Who paid for change the terms?

Oh, that's. How many hours do you have?

How about 60 seconds? Just bottom line it for us.

I mean, nominally it was the ADL and color of change under this kind of hate speech idea, but it was joined by dozens of USAID funded, us state department funded NGO's, civil society institutions who were all creating the base of that. So nominally you had these ADL color of change and it's about hate speech on social media, but the buffering substructure for it were all these us government intermediaries. And you have this issue where what they said was hate speech, but they, as part of the change the terms campaign, anyone who criticized open borders was considered to be doing hate speech. Against Hispanics because of the disproportionate impact on that. Anybody in Germany or France or anyone who opposed, anyone who was a part of this pro right wing, populist NATO skeptical faction. Again, this whole Brexit, spexit, it'll exit domino. That all started because of the migrant crisis after we assassinated Gaddafi and there was a giant influx of migrants into european countries. And this gave rise to a right wing populist political opposition force. And they were the ones who were challenging all the NATO preferred political candidates in those regions. And so this was a proxy attack on all the political enemies of the blob.

But Elon is unique because the US State Department needs Elon, or at least they need Elons properties. You have a pavel problem here, which is that they don't care about pavel, they care about telegram. But to break into telegram, to get access to the backend, to be able to censor the sort of front facing and spy, right. You need control of the personnel because the policies of the platforms are personnel is policy. With Elon, I don't think they want to take him out. What they want is corporate regime change or him to play ball. And I think they allowed the acquisition because they assumed that he would play ball as everybody else who opposed them in the past did. Jack Dorsey came out and said that it was a business decision. You know, why they censored Trump and that he was squeamish about it. But, you know, they were under the gun of the financial pressure. That was the reason Mark Zuckerberg did all the censorship.

Dorsey, I can say with some authority, I think, really hated censoring Trump. Not because he loves Trump, because I think Dorsey really was opposed to censorship, like, on a philosophical level.

Right? So I think they thought, oh, Elon's talking a big game now, but they all did, and everyone folded. And he'll be just like the rest of them because he has a wide surface of attack as well. Elon has Tesla, Elon has SpaceX. These are critical, critical companies for us statecraft. So the US Pentagon intelligence services, State Department is hugely dependent on SpaceX for all low earth satellites, for all telecommunications.

I was at the State Department rescuing stranded astronauts.

Like, actually, yes, no. And Tesla is hugely important to have a us national champion in the green energy revolution. The renewable battery technology is a huge part of us leadership in the climate change transition. One of the reasons that they viewed him as a huge hero up until he became a free speech advocate. And so I dont think I can say any better than one of the writers from the National Endowment for Democracy, the very CIA cutout that weve talked about dozens of times now in this dialog, which is that one of the writers from the National Endowment for Democracy wrote just a few months ago that Elon Musk is a greater national security threat to the United States than Russia. This is a few months ago. This is post outbreak of the war 24. And that Elon is a greater threat to the United States and us national security than Russia because his proximal impact on us politics and allowing opposition political movements to rise will cause changes in us government that are more likely to make us lose the war on Russia than Russia itself. It's the same thing NATO said in 2017.

He said, though, we're in a pickle because the us government is so dependent on Elon's properties and so, you know, basically called for a kind of death by a thousand paper cuts type strategy. And this is. This is what we're seeing.

And wrote this in public?

Yes, you can look it up. This is a. You know, this is national. You can. I believe the. The author of it was a man named Dean Jackson, his current or former National Endowment for Democracy fellow. He's a part of this whole censorship industry apparatus that I've talked about that is done through the whole society network. And I can actually post the article on my ex account if folks are interested, right after this. But yes, arguing that. And again, but the National Endowment for Democracy gets its funding by the us government. It is not only it is accountable.

To Congress, but imagine a more anti american belief than american citizens shouldn't be allowed to talk, american citizens shouldn't be allowed to vote, or their votes shouldn't be allowed to count. The american citizens shouldn't be allowed to choose their own leaders. I mean, imagine thinking something like that and imagining that you're an american.

Right, but understand as soon as you accept the frame that democracy is about, the institutions.

I know, but wake the fuck up.

These people.

I mean, come on. I mean, like, I get it. I understand. I used to drink too much. I'm very familiar with ways that we justify unjustifiable behavior to ourselves, but on some level, are you ever staying in the shower thinking, wait. In the name of democracy, I'm preventing my fellow Americans from giving their opinions out loud, or I don't think their vote should count. Like, is there. No, they have no souls, obviously. I'm sorry to get upset. It's just, like, so crazy.

Well, the reason that I keep coming back to that is because I'm trying to arm everybody watching this with the language necessary to fight it.

Well, and you're spinning me into a frenzy, as you always do. I'm sorry. So let me just ask one last question, okay. Once again, do you think that X will stay open through the election?

Stay open in the US? Yes. But the State department is coercing foreign governments to shut down x operations around the world until X censors everyone the State Department wants censored. Take the EU Digital Services act, which I've been screaming for years now, is the number one existential threat to Elon and to X. This is a law. This new just came into effect in the Eudez after years of pressure from NATO for the EU to advance this, which goes beyond the typical european hate speech laws and creates a new sort of category for disinformation, which requires all social media platforms to do disinformation compliance and the us censorship industry, they did a conference, there was a big 150 page consensus memo that hundreds of these people all sort of co signed, and then they did a launch event where they all talked about it on a live stream afterwards. And in that livestream they said that they would be in a full blown panic because of Elon Musk losing X and Elon's policies getting rid of all the censorship provisions they had. Because 2024 has more elections than any year in world history. I think it's something like 65 elections or happening all over the world.

So the State Department, its control is at risk in 65 to 85 different countries in the calendar year 2024. And they said that wed be in full blown panic, but we can panic responsibly because we have basically a trick up our sleeve. And these are us censorship professionals, many of them paid by the us government through grants. And what they are State Department grants. And what they said is the trick up our sleeve is that we have the EU Digital Services act and that will force Elon to rehire all of the fired censors and it will force him to basically restaff the censorship apparatus unless hes going to lose xs participation in all of the EU because that imposes a 6% global revenue fine for anyone who doesnt comply. The EU has come out and said theyre currently non compliant and the EU has a larger market in the US. Theres 500 million people in the EU. It is more than the US. If X is kicked out of the EU, they are no longer a global platform. It's absolutely existential. And part of the requirements for that compliance is for the same disinformation. Experts and researchers to vet the flow of information, to spot disinformation, demand its takedown.

And if X doesn't take it down, then they're kicked out of the EU. So this is a massive, massive lever of power over elon. And the only question is, will the US State Department, the only organ we have to defend US interests against Europe, will they actually oppose it? The problem is, as you're hearing me say, they're the ones who have been organizing these censorship provisions to begin with. So the very, the only people that we have to be able to defend us from the threat were the people who organized it in the first place.

So I don't have time to ask you about the effect of all of this Biden administration censorship on the presidential race. But let me just, final question. If Trump wins, will you have any hand in helping the new administration roll back the censorship regime and returning us to some sort of constitutional foundation?

As a country, my purpose in life is to do everything I can to promote freedom of speech on the Internet. It's a very dear thing to me. It has been since, you know, since I was. Since I was a kid, and I don't consider myself a political person. I know I had a political appointee spot. I would be equally comfortable in an RFK style, or, I get it, sensitive Democrat type thing.

You're a one issue man.

I am. I am. But you need to understand these other issues to know what you're up against and to. And this is, you know, I get a lot of pushback. Oh, you're against the us military, against the intelligence agency. I'm calling for reform so that this specific, narrow, new capacity that has become one of the biggest financial boon markets that government grants do in such a short period of time. It is newish. It's not a baby anymore, but it's still in its adolescent stage. This can be rooted out. It's not like you're rooting out the US War Department here, the FBI, which is around since 1789. My purpose is to pursue that to the best ability possible in whatever that means. So I don't know what role might even be more useful within the government or if it's more useful for me to simply publish what I publish, provide the insights that I do, and have my, you know, have what I do, simply be what I've been doing. I don't know. You know, and I can answer that question when the fog of war has lifted more. But, you know, I. I'm not a political person.

I'm a one issue. I'm a one issue guy on this and that touches political matters, but I'm going to be true to that purpose.

It would be nice to see a free speech speech czar since it is the first right enumerated in the bill of rights.

The free speech ambassador.

Yeah, yeah. Mike Bent, amazing conversation and I'm sorry you got me so emotional about eleven times in the middle of it. But thank you.

Thanks, Tucker.

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