OB #47 - Mike Benz
Mike Benz, AKA Frame Game, appeared on Stay Free to tell us all how the 2020 election was really rigged. Spoiler: it was The Blob. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand Buy a magnet! - ohyeahlookitthegold
Mike Benz, AKA Frame Game, appeared on Stay Free to tell us all how the 2020 election was really rigged. Spoiler: it was The Blob. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand Buy a magnet! - ohyeahlookitthegold
Time | Text |
---|---|
This is propaganda live. | |
I only suggest how she's taken out a vote. | |
Extraordinary cultural moment. | |
Already iconic. | |
Already iconic. | |
We love you. | |
You're welcome here. | |
Where did this guy come from? | |
It looks like he's been doing it for ages. | |
He's very confident. | |
Plainly, and this is a matter now of fact and record, I'm right wing. | |
I feel that Christ may have had a better vision. | |
Is this misinformation or is Vivek Ramaswamy in the lavatory? | |
That's sort of like a poem. | |
Is this Eminem? | |
Man, if we didn't come together in that stream, I'm assuming it was just the Pete. | |
Now these are the kind of conversations I think that the legacy media can no longer compete with. | |
Win win win win win win win This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of one Russell Brand. | |
I'm Al Worth and each week I go through an episode of Brand Show with my co-host Lauren B. That's me, Lauren B. And I don't know what we're going to cover today, but it's usually bad. | |
Yeah, it's almost invariably bad, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing. | |
Lauren, what is your good thing before the bad thing this week? | |
My good thing is basically I, so I consign a number of places in Chicago. | |
It's very difficult to balance online and consignment, just because everything I make is one of, I'm too extra. | |
And I basically made it a habit of shooting myself in the foot. | |
It's part of my creative process. | |
And-- | |
(laughing) | |
Thought through pain. | |
(laughing) | |
Oh, it's easy. | |
Can't brain says no, even if even if body is willing, but I have like it's it's a little easier to track inventory some places than others. | |
So and there's this just like one spot. | |
I mean, everybody's got a different micro clientele, which is wild, but There's a place that, you know, they've been very supportive and generous and kind and giving me, you know, this like space where I can kind of do whatever. | |
And so I finally actually made a whole ass display. | |
I made freaking shelves out of like a weird piece of wood that I salvaged from a dumpster. | |
White shelves shouldn't be this exciting, but I'm thrilled. | |
And I sewed up a banner and You know, I do embroidery and applique the wrong way. | |
Don't do it my way, but I like what it looks like. | |
And I finally got it done. | |
It's at Andersonville Galleria in Chicago. | |
And I have pictures on my Instagram that are going to come up. | |
I'm going to put a reel up actually today. | |
Nice! | |
Showing it all off because I'm going to be doing a new inventory drop, balancing that online madness with the in-person insanity on March 24th. | |
But if you want to get a head start and you happen to be in the area, that's where to go because I put a bunch of stuff there that I can still keep track of. | |
Remotely, which is helpful. | |
And I'm stoked on how it came out. | |
And I don't use any new materials at all. | |
So, again, I make life much harder for myself. | |
But I'm also incredibly obstinate, and that's just how it works. | |
And so, it's awesome. | |
It looks cool. | |
It didn't take that long, but it sat for, oh, a good five months until I actually had an At least five. | |
Until I had an opportunity to actually sit down, think about it, make it make sense, get all the measurements, do all the things, make my little weird banner, and do some nesting in that space, which is very, very cool. | |
I'm so, so happy that I actually got it done. | |
Yeah. | |
And that it looks cool. | |
It looks great! | |
Thank you, thank you, thank you. | |
Go to Lauren's Insta at may.by.lauren.b and have a look because it's super cool, super cool. | |
Thank you. | |
Try some good stuff. | |
Thank you. | |
And yeah, and I mean, everything will be like, well, not everything, but kind of whatever. | |
Like I have a whole separate kind of chunk of stuff that is available, that's going to be available on March 24th on the shop Any Old Where. | |
So there's that's so you don't have to feel left out if you're not in the area, but it is it is helpful in the short term. | |
Right. | |
So what is your good thing? | |
My good thing is that I have finished fucking moving. | |
At least for now. | |
Yes! | |
Dude, it's the worst. | |
Oh, it's horrendous. | |
If hell is real, it's moving. | |
That's gotta be. | |
It's been hell week. | |
Hell two weeks, actually, for my life, pretty much. | |
And this last weekend just gone, especially, that was the crunch moment of getting everything done and clean and all of that. | |
Horrible, horrible stuff that was just, oh my god, exhausting. | |
Just so little sleep, so many energy drinks. | |
That is all you are doing, sleeping on a blow-up mattress in a cold house. | |
Good times, but I'm fucking done with it. | |
It's awesome! | |
I could not be more thrilled. | |
It rules. | |
Great. | |
I am going to have to move again in the near-ish future, but it should hopefully be much less intense at that point. | |
The worst is kind of behind me, which I'm feeling good about. | |
Totally! | |
Totally! | |
Because you're still, like, we're packed, you don't have to, like, completely unfurl. | |
Yeah, most of my stuff is still in boxes, really. | |
Yeah, exactly. | |
Yeah. | |
Yeah. | |
Yeah, because I'm in a little stopgap with family at the moment, so that's, you know, that's okay. | |
I've got my essentials out, got all my music stuff, piano next to me, drums next to me, all that good stuff. | |
But yeah, a lot of it's still boxed. | |
So I'm like, cool, you can stay the fuck over there. | |
Yeah. | |
The process of chipping yourself out of the place that you've lived is just, you know, just like, just inch by inch, just slowly scraping your whole life out of this box that you were in. | |
Oh, it's the- I'm so happy for you, that's wonderful. | |
Thank you, thank you. | |
Yeah, it's delightful. | |
It's terrible! | |
We're in through at least half a tub of spackle just filling in holes and shitting the walls. | |
Oh yeah, oh yeah yeah yeah. | |
Most of them weren't even me that put the holes there, but there we go. | |
It's just like, alright, it's a whole thing. | |
Anyway, glad to have that done and out the way. | |
Now we have got a show to do, but first we should thank some new patrons. | |
So first up we have, in fact, it's just the one slash two actually, | |
Steven and Cindy Dymek, you are now an awakening wonder slash awakening wonders. | |
You are indeed an awakening wonder. | |
Thank you, Stephen and Cindy. | |
Thank you so much to both of you. | |
To both of you. | |
We are deeply appreciative. | |
Thank you. | |
And if anyone wants to support us in what we do, become an Awakening Wonder, join the Invisible Hand or donate on an elevated tier, head to patreon.com slash onbrand and you will have our eternal gratitude. | |
It is this which allows us to be editorially independent and ad free. | |
As a patron, you will also get a shout out on the show and access to our patron only show Offbrand, where we discuss Anything but Russell Brand. | |
This week, Lauren led me through the events surrounding Next Benedict, the trans youth who was murdered, and the criminal empire P. Diddy has seemingly been running for some time. | |
Yeah, it's a little heavy in places, but definitely worth your time. | |
Really interesting discussion, and you get a bit of me reacting in the moment and being slapped with a wet fish compared to Lauren. | |
Yeah, well, and it's all very relevant to what we talk about. | |
I think it's, you know, unpleasantness. | |
I mean, also, we need to accept that what Lauren thinks is a good time is different. | |
That's fine. | |
But I think, again, as always, knowledge is power. | |
And I think that if we're examining this stuff, we have to look at the brighter context where it all fits in together. | |
Absolutely. | |
Absolutely. | |
We went through legal frameworks, I think. | |
Yeah. | |
Which is a lot more, I think, sterile. | |
Listen, you can find the salacious stuff everywhere. | |
Past and present, in fact. | |
Things have been flying around for P. Diddy for quite some time. | |
But I tried to keep it as, like, technical as possible and not, like, you know, get in the muck of it. | |
Like, not do the, you know, I'm sorry if you're into salacious gossip. | |
There's gonna be some ugliness, but not very much. | |
Yeah, I think trying to maintain a level of objectivity is better for delivering the information, you know, and I think that's theoretically the purpose of the lore in a lot of ways, is to try and be like, right, let's look at the facts of the situation. | |
So yeah, super interesting to go through. | |
And it'll be unfolding too, because there's a lot of stuff pending. | |
And I think the legal also just like understanding what we're getting into because this is going to be in the headlines a lot and it's going to be it's I've already seen a bunch of like clickbait headlines that are kind of distracting and don't make with next Benedict as well as like there's clickbait and there's stuff that like we don't really know but it sure generates a lot of traffic for news websites and I'm also glad they're covering it that's not bad but and Just kind of having a background before it all, like, pops off, I think is useful to get ahead of that kind of story. | |
Very, very helpful stuff. | |
So head to patreon.com slash ombrand to check that out. | |
And please note that while you can easily listen to our audio version anywhere you can find podcasts, you can also watch us on YouTube, or if you listen in Spotify app, the video will come up there too. | |
So, what do we have in store this week? | |
Well, in many ways it's been a bit, you know, kind of same old same old, though Russell has been slightly more mask off in terms of going after the COVID vaccines. | |
It's old territory in terms of information, so not really worth covering, but it is at least worth mentioning that a couple of times this week he's been like, Hillary? | |
"Yes, death rates, it's the vaccines, myocarditis, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," rather than | |
just insinuating it like he has previously. | |
So that's a notable step. | |
Other than that, it's been a lot of "Hillary bad, Trump good, Biden bad." | |
Okay. | |
So- Hillary? | |
Yeah, he will not leave Hillary alone. | |
And I'm like, "Who gives a shit? | |
When was she last relevant? | |
Please, someone tell me." | |
Eight years ago. | |
Yes, exactly. | |
Yes, exactly. | |
Easy answer. | |
Easy answer, Civil War. | |
Right, so what are we going to be looking at today? | |
Well, Russell usually drops his big interview on a Friday. | |
That's usually his system. | |
He'll have the big one for the weekend to have everybody talking about it. | |
And this last Friday was someone I wasn't overly familiar with. | |
So let's let Russell introduce him. | |
Hello there you Awakening Wonders. | |
Thank you for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand and what a fantastic show it is. | |
We're talking about the new and emergent wall of silence around COVID. | |
As people begin to grapple with and tackle the sad fact that we've been lied to on an astonishing scale and to help us to understand that In new and extraordinary terms is Mike Benz. | |
This is an interview that's going to change the way you understand reality, media, and the deep state in particular. | |
For the first 15 minutes or so, we will be on YouTube, but then you're going to have to watch us exclusively on Rumble, but precisely because Mike Benz is dismantling the state before your very eyes. | |
Let me know, to win a mug, what is the phrase he used to describe the nexus of interests that control the world? | |
Is it the slab? | |
Is it the git? | |
Or is it C, the blob? | |
You could win a mug if you answer that correctly! | |
Oh, Russell honing in on Stephen Crowder's territory there. | |
Mug's a Crowder's thing on Rumble, Russell. | |
Be careful where you might be subjected to the wrath of the Mug Club. | |
The whine of the Mug Club. | |
Oh boy. | |
The whinge. | |
Yeah. | |
So do you have any concept of who Mike Benz is? | |
No, but I want to guess Blob. | |
I guess Blob now. | |
Yes. | |
You win a mug. | |
Congratulations. | |
Because of course it is. | |
I win! | |
My information being sold is what I win! | |
Yeah, congrats! | |
So Mike Benz is a former lawyer who later was a speechwriter for Ben Carson before in 2020 going on to the State Department to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Technology For less than a year. | |
Quite a leap from being a lawyer, and I might be able to explain that a little bit later on. | |
But anyway, after this he repositioned himself as a pundit and cyber expert of sorts, railing against the censorship industrial complex, as they like to call it. | |
Then, in 2022, he set up the Foundation for Freedom Online, a group which self-describes as a free speech watchdog offering, quote, non-partisan insights and assistance to all peoples taking a stand for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the free exchange of ideas online. | |
That said, curiously, the site mostly seems to act as a vehicle for articles parroting right-wing talking points on the issue. | |
Mike Benz is good buddies with Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, and is often publicly supported by Elon Musk. | |
Schellenberger even touted Mike Benz to Joe Rogan when he was on the show, describing Benz as the head of cyber at the State Department, a senior guy named Mike Benz. | |
Neither of which are true. | |
He was not senior, nor was he head of cyber at the State Department. | |
Benz has also done dozens of interviews with the likes of Fox News, OAN, Real America's Voice, and the Epoch Times. | |
And as if this parade of red flags wasn't quite enough, why does Russell have him on the show? | |
Because Benz was very recently on Tucker Carlson's Twitter slash X show. | |
So that's, that's all that is. | |
It's a little bit of, a little bit of Tucker fucker. | |
You know, just. | |
Yeah, and just prior to going on Stay Free, Benz was also on Dan Bongino's show, in what Benz described as the biggest stream on the internet. | |
To get the, like, community support of, like, a right-wing grifter. | |
Man, oh man! | |
Just to have that, like, Unwavering cycle that you can go through, man oh man. | |
Yeah, unquestioning. | |
Just like, yeah, we love this guy. | |
It's pretty incredible. | |
It's really, I mean, and obviously it's short-lived and superficial. | |
By all means, I'm being facetious to a degree, but at the same time. | |
Yeah, yeah. | |
Man, oh man. | |
It does kind of offer him credibility within all these circles, doesn't it, you know? | |
Well, it just gives him a place. | |
Yeah, exactly. | |
To hawk his wares, you know? | |
Yeah, yeah, and these chuckleheads don't give a shit. | |
They're just like, yeah, great, say more of that stuff, Mike! | |
You know, hanging out with, like, art friends, and this is just, you know, and I bet a lot of listeners, I bet you can relate, because it's not just art, right? | |
The arts is certainly rough, but just, you know, we've been, you know, the weather's a little bit better. | |
We've been able to go and, you know, have some hangout time and some just making stuff together time, and I've got friends that, Little bit of like space they've made for themselves and privilege that they have they can they wield it to the most like to the nth degree like they do everything they possibly can for their community and it's so we just we make so much out of these little morsels and just watching this kind of stuff is like | |
Yeah, it's painful. | |
It is. | |
It is painful. | |
It is. | |
It is painful. | |
Yeah, so very, very different. | |
Right. | |
So let's see the opening clip of Mike Ben's on Stay Free with Russell Brand. | |
Mike, thank you. | |
Thanks, Russell, for having me. | |
Mike, your interview with Tucker Carlson has, I think, moved the needle when it comes to understanding the deep state, when it comes to understanding censorship, continuing the important work of Martin Goury, the former CIA analyst and author of the book Revolt of the Public, and helps us to understand that we're living in a moment where global authority is recognizing that their monoculture is under threat and that there is a kind of natural inertia | |
towards more decentralized power, more communication, more free speech, and this surge | |
towards authoritarianism, even if it's under the auspices of liberal ideas, is a | |
response to the possibility of true freedom. | |
Does that, broadly speaking, fit your analysis of what's happening on a macro level, Mike? | |
Yeah, that's completely it. | |
And it appears through that with a little bit more specificity. | |
You have basically this foreign policy establishment, is what it's typically referred to in Washington. | |
These are the elements of our national governments, both in the US and in the UK and in NATO countries, that are supposed to be foreign-facing to manage the empire, so to speak, but are supposed to be for the benefit of the citizens who live in that country. | |
And what they've basically discovered is because of free speech on the internet, they've lost control over the bumper rails around democracy when media was typically controlled or intermediated by the state. | |
And so now you basically have the foreign policy establishment against domestic populism, which is not a partisan issue. | |
Left-wing populism and right-wing populism both flank This kind of globalist or neoliberal sort of structure that we're describing. | |
And so it's really not a partisan issue. | |
It's not a Republican Democrat thing. | |
It's kind of a universal human experience now trying to fight against this blob. | |
Ha! | |
Yes, you again, mug to you. | |
That phrase, the blob, is one that Benz likes to use often, and Russell does at this point go on a jag about how Mike coined that term, and Russell thinks it's great and likes to use it all the time before Mike has to be like, oh yeah, that wasn't me, that was... | |
Ben Rhodes, the Deputy National Security Advisor in the Obama Administration. | |
But just for anyone not in the know, the blob denotes the US foreign policy apparatus slash community as a whole these days. | |
It used to be referenced to a specific, particularly hawkish neoliberal segment of it, a la Hillary Clinton. | |
But basically, if you hear the blob now, it has a much more broad definition. | |
Of those in government, think tanks, academia, NGOs, etc., who work in foreign policy. | |
The reason I bring up this term is because, well, it's kind of been expanded to the point of near meaninglessness in practical terms, but especially in the way that Mike Benz is about to be using it, and he will be using it often. | |
Every right-wing talking head has their operative phrase for whatever the big bad is, be it globalists, neocons, liberals, the deep state, or whatever, but Mike Benz's choice is the blob. | |
That's pretty much all he uses it as. | |
I was like, oh, so it's code for deep state. | |
I mean, I'm not mad because the branding opportunities are spectacular. | |
True, true. | |
Listen, there's several good blob movies, and there's a song that's incredible. | |
I really feel like... Yeah, I think just marketing-wise, that's a good move. | |
Oh, it would be great if only he was doing any of that. | |
At least that would make him... I know, it's sad! | |
I'm like, it's all there in front of you. | |
It would at least make him more entertaining, but no. | |
If he was like, hey, here's this blob keyring! | |
I'm like, well, I do enjoy a blob keyring, that is true. | |
The song is wild. | |
Look it up. | |
Everybody. | |
It's amazing. | |
It's so fun. | |
I will have to do so. | |
It's wild. | |
It's wild. | |
Yeah. | |
Anyway, we're gonna skip ahead just a little, because it took me a minute in this interview for me to really properly hear any significant red flags in what he was saying. | |
He took a minute to get going, and then came this clip. | |
So Victoria Nuland herself, you know, I just read the quote from her husband, you know, respect the blob, learn from the blob, love the blob. | |
Victoria Nuland, when she was the head of the U.S. | |
Embassy in Kiev ahead of the 2014 coup that was jointly orchestrated by the U.S. | |
and UK governments, Victoria Nuland was on a panel where she publicly discussed how they pumped the State Department, pumped $5 billion into Ukrainian civil society in the run-up to that coup. | |
So that is, they capacity built a regime change instrument with $5 billion in taxpayer money, and that gets distributed to a network of NGOs. | |
So for example, there's an entity called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. | |
I talked about this just last night on Dan Bongino's show. | |
We had the biggest stream on the internet going through this, where we discussed the so-called Red Lines Memo. | |
This was a memo by the Democratic Institutions of Ukraine. | |
It was a 60 or 70 undersigned Civil society institutions who all got funding either directly from the U.S. | |
State Department, USAID, or CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy, or through the George Soros Networks, who's partnered with the State Department and NATO, where one week into Zelensky's election in 2019, they described all the red lines that if he passed them in terms of policy in Ukraine, it would cause so-called political instability, meaning that they would overthrow his government. | |
He would become as unstable as his predecessors were. | |
And it was on security issues, financial issues, cultural issues, national identity issues, if they wanted to change the language laws and allow Russian as a speaking language back in the state, that these 70 plus State Department and UK Foreign Office funded NGO swarms would destabilize the country. | |
But that's what they mean by democracy. | |
They mean a consensus of those institutions, not the people who live in Ukraine. | |
Okay, big swing there. | |
So, we had a few. | |
They're red flags, that is. | |
So you've got the 2014 revolution in Ukraine actually being a US-orchestrated coup, according to this guy. | |
You've got the NED being a CIA cutout, and we've been over that one extensively. | |
George Soros' name came up for a minute and you've got accusations that Ukraine is undemocratic and in fact is just being run by all of these NGOs around the world. | |
Okay. | |
As for Victoria Nuland, because they did spend quite a bit of time talking about her and will do shortly, There are plenty of genuine criticisms to level at that lady, given that she's been involved in foreign policy for 30 years or so. | |
But the issue that this guy's taking with her is that she's been incredibly vocal and a key opponent of Russia invading Ukraine, both in 2014 and the current ongoing war. | |
Her position as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs made her the third highest ranking US diplomat, and she's been pretty important in shaping US policy on the Russo-Ukraine war. | |
Mike Benz is, shall we say, sympathetic to Putin's cause. | |
Now, back to Soros. | |
Mike Benz is himself Jewish, and I believe still practices Judaism, and so anti-Semitic dog whistles are something one might brush to the wayside when dealing with someone like this. | |
If you think, well, He's Jewish! | |
I mean, he can't possibly be going down that road! | |
I don't! | |
That's just me! | |
I also don't like to give the benefit of that doubt, because, yeah. | |
Yeah, Mike Benz has an interesting and storied past. | |
You see, prior to becoming a speechwriter for Ben Carson, Mike Benz used to operate on YouTube and social media under the pseudonym Frame Game. | |
He avoided showing his face the entire time, and you can see why, given that his videos would regularly promote the Great Replacement Theory as an example. | |
Oh, so not like framing tutorials? | |
I've had to do a lot of framing in my life. | |
That would be a delight. | |
Like of pictures? | |
That would be lovely. | |
You two have been very helpful in my efforts. | |
Yeah, the only pictures he would be framing is of Hitler or the KKK. | |
So he said in these videos that he was a white identitarian, railed against the very concept of diversity, and urged his white viewers to unite under the banner of race. | |
In interviews with white nationalists, he blamed Jews for controlling the media. | |
He also said, quote, if you were to remove the Jewish influence on the West, white people would not face the threat of white genocide that they currently do, unquote. | |
Already, it's a lot. | |
He self-described at that time as, quote, a Jew who is deeply sympathetic to the alt-right's accurate depiction of the double-edged nature of Jewish influence on Europe and America, unquote, and also called himself alt-light. | |
He credited Milo Yiannopoulos as being the one to open his eyes to the problem. | |
Yeah, okay, that tracks. | |
He was regularly touted by the likes of Richard Spencer, the guy who led the Charlottesville Tiki Torch Nazi Rally, and he affiliated with leaders of Unite the Right. | |
Many yikeses. | |
And to cap it off, we have another delightful quote here from Frame Game, quote, If I, a Jew, a member of the tribe, Hebrew-schooled, can read Mein Kampf and think, holy shit, Hitler actually had some decent points, then no one is safe from hating you once they find out who is behind the white genocide happening all over the world. | |
Sir. | |
Wow. | |
Sir, we need to take a break. | |
You need to take a nap. | |
Okay. | |
Oh dear. | |
Oh dear, that's a lot. | |
And not quite what I was expecting to find about this guy. | |
Yeah, I'm surprised. | |
Color me surprised! | |
Mike Benz was outed as Frame Game in October 2023 by NBC News, who compared clips of him speaking in interviews to the live streams as Frame Game. | |
As well as noticing multiple slips on frame game live streams where he would show as logged in as Michael, even showing his Facebook profile picture one time of him and his then-wife. | |
Oops! | |
Yeah. | |
Oops! | |
Benz responded because, you know, the jig was up at that point. | |
He responded by claiming that the account was actually a covert effort to combat antisemitism. | |
Uh, quote, the accounting question was a project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews. | |
Unquote. | |
Gotta say, Mike, you got a funny way of going about it, buddy. | |
And then in 2018, Mike shut down Frame Game, made all the videos private, and seemingly | |
stepped away right before going to work as a speechwriter for Ben Carson and then being | |
brought into the State Department under the Trump administration. | |
Wait, wait, wait. | |
So he was doxed in 2023, but he shut down in 2018? | |
He did. | |
Oh, okay. | |
Well, yeah, that would explain, okay, getting the job. | |
Exactly! | |
But also, maybe not. | |
I mean, maybe he'd be fine anyway. | |
Perhaps not. | |
Yeah, maybe it was just, oh, random lawyer, you know, gets a job as a speechwriter for Ben Carson. | |
But then also, you know, it wouldn't shock me if one could parlay credentials as a social media, you know, kind of person into that kind of Position. | |
So, I mean, we may never know, but, you know, it looks a little suspect, let's put it that way. | |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
This guy's a lot. | |
Well, so this is when, I think, this is when we listen to activists of color, always, and We listen to that argument because it informs how we approach the world and how we approach these people and we approach information. | |
The phrase, not all skin folk are kin folk is something that people of color are very used to bringing to the conversation and the discussion because they have a long history of infiltration and And various other, you know, various other challenges to their own activism. | |
So this is, I think, how that... Yeah, yeah, it's very applicable to both Mike Benz and Ben Carson in this case as well, actually. | |
Yikes. | |
Yeah, it's, yeah, yeah, just pretty grim. | |
To move on, I know in the back of your mind you have been deeply curious as to the state of Russell's FOIA requests, because I know you like a good FOIA request. | |
Should I lie and say no? | |
Is that embarrassing that I am? | |
No, no, no. | |
I've been curious too. | |
We are nerds. | |
It's what we do. | |
It's fine. | |
I love a FOIA! | |
I love a FOIA! | |
Here we get a little update anyway. | |
Yeah, that's extraordinary. | |
to learn of more of these peculiar marital partnerships like the one described between | |
Victoria Newland and her husband in our country, Dame Caroline Dainich, who's the head of our | |
Department of Culture, who demanded successfully actually that YouTube demonetize me, and whose | |
department has a lot of information on me that even Freedom of Information Act requests have not | |
yet fully revealed. He's got nothing. In that clip, he's like, "Oh yeah, they got tons of | |
information on us that somehow FOIA requests hasn't revealed." Like, dude, I want to see | |
these requests and which department they were supposedly sent to, because he keeps saying that | |
Dame Caroline Dainich is the head of Department of Culture, Media, and Sport, and no, she bloody | |
well is not. | |
She's the head of a select committee, who theoretically wouldn't hold any information on him anyway. | |
Like, that's not how those things work. | |
So if he's been sending FOIA requests to the select committee, I'm like, yeah, that makes sense as to why you're not getting anything back. | |
That makes complete sense. | |
Yeah, yeah. | |
One, I don't think he did it. | |
That's actually where I'm at. | |
I don't think he did that. | |
I don't think he FOIA requested one, so I don't think he did it. | |
But if he did, oh, a banner day! | |
Even if just it was true, I'd be thrilled to find that out. | |
But also, if a FOIA request, like if the information you're looking for Isn't where you're asking about it. | |
And I know this is a technical, you know, obviously there's a million different technical considerations for a FOIA request, but if you, if you're, you can't, to borrow a term, witch hunt, like you can't, or fishing expedition, you can't fish with a FOIA. | |
So if he's asking the wrong question in the wrong place, That's a great way to claim persecution by not getting your FOIA request fulfilled. | |
Yeah, it's true. | |
They'll just say, we don't have that here. | |
Yeah, it's absolutely true. | |
Asking for something that doesn't exist. | |
I would love to see it, but I get the feeling if he ever did actually release the images of the requests that he apparently put forward. | |
I have little doubt that we would be able to be like, yeah, here's where you went wrong, fucknugget. | |
Try again. | |
And also, I somehow doubt the actual Department for Culture, Media and Sport gives a shit about Russell anyway. | |
Yeah, I mean, give a shit about a citizen who's filing a FOIA request, always. | |
Sure, yeah. | |
Yeah, we're talking about the grandiosity of narcissists thinking that this is a sinister deep state plot against him, not just credible accusations of criminal conduct. | |
Yes. | |
Yeah, the information that they supposedly have on him. | |
Yeah, okay, okay, I'll believe it when I see it. | |
Anyway, Mike Benz has a habit of, let's just say stretching. | |
I heard that! | |
The biggest dream on the internet? | |
Yeah, right. | |
I don't like hearing those out the gate. | |
I think the biggest stream on the internet is probably that guy that caused, like, a mob and a riot trying to give away a gaming system in New York. | |
I think that's probably... Probably, yeah, rampant consumerism. | |
More of the biggest stream on the whole ass internet. | |
The whole internet. | |
I bet that guy's got... No, it was Mike Benz and Dan Bongino, that's who it was. | |
Yeah, even in the minutes that they were streaming that. | |
I'm positive. | |
He's a fan of a big stretch and connecting dots that are really fucking far apart, and this is one of my favorite examples of this. | |
So whilst these institutions are what the Synecdoche democracy now represents, it is a truly global phenomenon. | |
Do you know much about Caroline Dynadge or indeed Mark Lancaster and do you see similar themes in the USA and UK when it comes to crushing dissent, control and controlling public discourse? | |
Totally similar themes. | |
It's uncanny, actually. | |
This is what's referred to as the Transatlantic Alliance. | |
The US State Department and the UK Foreign Office, the There's almost no daylight between them. | |
And in fact, one of the favorite tricks for U.S. | |
citizens to be censored by the U.S. | |
State Department or by the U.S. | |
Pentagon, which is supposed to be foreign-facing, is for the State Department and the Pentagon to sign contracts or give grants to British censorship organizations. | |
So almost all of the major U.S. | |
censorship heavyweights have connections to the City of London. | |
So, the Atlanta council, for example, which has seven CIA directors on its board, | |
annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department and CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy | |
is London based. | |
You have the Center for Countering Digital Hate, London based. | |
You have the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, London based. | |
And every time these domestic censorship institutions, when you look up the chain, | |
they are either US or British intelligence, US or British diplomacy, or US or British military, | |
So it's either defense, diplomacy, or intelligence. | |
None of those are supposed to be impacting domestic citizens in either the U.S. | |
or Britain, but they do because the foreign policy establishment needs the money, and it needs the mandate of the people who live here. | |
You know what? | |
He's got a point. | |
A lot of things do seem to be London-based, don't they? | |
It's very mysterious. | |
Almost like. | |
It's the biggest and in many ways most important city in Europe where our financial institutions, government and heads of industry sit in the UK. | |
For perspective, it would be like if New York was actually the U.S. | |
Capitol and government was there rather than D.C., you know, as well as the banks, as well as every fucking thing else, you know, like it was back in the 1700s and whatever. | |
And then someone saying, like, huh, a lot of these organizations seem to be New York-based, don't they? | |
As though it was a grand conspiracy. | |
Yes, you colossal idiot. | |
He was straight up just talking about location, huh? | |
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
That's wild. | |
Like, because that's the thing is like, oh, up there, you know, Mr. Smith goes to Washington, right? | |
We know that that doesn't mean just for sightseeing, but in fact, to talk to government. | |
So I assumed that he was saying London, but then that just was... | |
A location specifically? | |
Just actually, like, just the place? | |
It's where all this stuff is! | |
Yeah, and the thing is, like, these places do have offices there, but most of them aren't headquartered there. | |
Which I think makes a difference. | |
I do want to briefly touch on the Atlantic Council, because Benz brings it up more than once. | |
So the Atlantic Council is an NGO think tank that was formed in 1961 and is designed around providing information and insight on NATO and issues therein and kind of involving those countries, etc. | |
International kind of issues, generally speaking. | |
Mike Benz does not like NATO. | |
Again, very sympathetic to the cause of Putin, and so is not a fan of a think tank supporting NATO. | |
Ben's in that clip there asserted that seven former CIA directors are on the board of directors for the Atlantic Council, which does sound like a lot. | |
In fact, when you picture, like, when I picture a board of directors, I think of a boardroom and a big table. | |
And at that point, one would assume that the table would be mostly made up of CIA directors, right? | |
Except, well, Lauren, I'd like you to guess how many directors are on the board of directors for the Atlantic Council. | |
Oh. | |
When are there a bunch? | |
And any number is fine. | |
30? | |
That sounds crazy. | |
That sounds nuts, yeah. | |
The actual number is 200. | |
What? | |
There are 200 names on that list right now. | |
Can I be one? | |
Maybe. | |
Seems like you're giving them out like candy. | |
It does feel a little bit like that. | |
Because the people on the list have backgrounds anywhere between entertainment, business, and actively having run a country, with former key names including the likes of cowboy actor Tim Holt, former president Gerald Ford, and reprehensible demon Henry Kissinger. | |
So, yes, Mike Benz, there are seven former CIA directors on the board of directors of the Atlantic Council, but they're seven out of 200, and their opinions are presumably given equal weight of cowboy movie star Tim Holt. | |
So, maybe let's not start freaking out here. | |
That's bonkers. | |
But also, like, I think that we, you're absolutely right to point out the kind of like picture we have in our mind of like eight, you know, main power suited people at a big mahogany table when, and even what we just talked about in off-brand, Part of those technical issues we run into is how Chaya Rychik, who has only visited the state of Oklahoma one time, managed to be given a position within the education department by the superintendent of Oklahoma schools. | |
And it's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, what? | |
That's not how we understand these things to operate. | |
And so, pointing out, there's 200... that's a lot. | |
That's tough. | |
Yeah, it's a lot. | |
That's quite a few. | |
Almost to the point where you might think they probably don't have much individual power as it is, you know, they might not have that much sway over things. | |
Yeah, that did tickle me. | |
So, from here, Ben starts comparing Ukraine to the Vietnam War, which, terrible comparison, and then Russell decides to ask a question from the locals channel. | |
You've helped me once again understand the true nature of these intersectional institutions, that it is the function of the media to ensure that in terms of public opinion there is a degree of legitimacy for the ongoing, non-consensual, undemocratic foreign policy of the military, industrial, complex in order to ensure that another Vietnam does not | |
occur. | |
When we begin to learn more and more about the true history of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, | |
it becomes more and more difficult to support the war financially. | |
And the idea that we have no, we have no, there is no mandate and we have no access | |
to policy, even though we fund those wars. | |
Is it astonishing to hear that it's ultimately similar to countries that we might regard somewhat derisorily like Pakistan? | |
Like we always say, oh well Pakistan is a different post-colonial nation, but actually we have Very similar institutions. | |
Victoria Newland, this is a question from a member of our community, Judy Denmark. | |
They're watching us now. | |
These are our supporters, our most important and most beloved audience. | |
Judy Denmark asks, Mike, what is your opinion of the impact of Victoria Newland's resignation? | |
Is it itself an indication of a change of policy that the people are understanding these | |
issues in a different way, or is it just a sort of a coincidence? | |
So thanks for that question. | |
I can't see through the fog of war of this. | |
I have basically three sort of speculative senses, but with not a particularly high confidence interval in any particular one, but I'll run through them. | |
So number one is, you did just have this scandal where the German government was caught plotting to bomb the main bridge into Crimea. | |
The German government would not do something like that without the approval of the U.S. | |
State Department. | |
And this is a major international scandal where it would be a major, major escalation of the war directly by NATO against Russia. | |
And there may be some people who need to fall on grenades in order for the U.S. | |
State Department to say, well, that was a bad idea by a bad apple, so to speak. | |
I don't think they're going to go that far with Victoria Nuland, but the timing of that is quite interesting. | |
Is it? | |
Okay. | |
This guy likes to talk. | |
He was asked a simple, almost yes or no question, really, to which he says he has a three-part answer that is speculative and he can't possibly tell whether Victoria Nuland's resignation is significant or not. | |
And then he starts harping on about Germany bombing a bridge, And what happened there, by the way, was that one of Putin's | |
allies in the Russian press published an audio recording that she claimed was a | |
conversation between German generals plotting to blow up the Crimean bridge, which is a key supply point for | |
the Russian army. So... | |
[LAUGHTER] | |
Because an audio recording? | |
Was it on a cassette tape? | |
Okay. | |
It might have been. | |
Are we still doing that? | |
Man, oh man. | |
Yeah, we are. | |
The authenticity of it has not been confirmed yet. | |
And it has been a minute, but the German government was apparently investigating and apparently was also, according to some articles that I read, scrambling to see if their communications had been intercepted, which doesn't quite paint the picture of innocence. | |
Now, I don't speak German. | |
Shout out to the I Don't Speak German podcast, which returned recently, by the way. | |
But from what I can tell, the recording itself is actually a conversation about how to covertly move Taurus missiles into Ukraine, something which German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been against, saying, quote, if used incorrectly, they could reach a target in Moscow, unquote. | |
And then in the recording, these people are apparently like, hey, so maybe we should get Ukraine some of these missiles. | |
Whereas the Russian media are saying it's a plan to bomb the Crimean Bridge. | |
Yeah. | |
Personally, I'm not overly mad about the situation. Like, you're at war with the country, | |
you should expect your major cities and your major seat of power to be a target. | |
You know, it's not like, "Oh, we can only do the war thing in Ukrainian territory, | |
you can't come into Russia." That's not how that works. | |
Either way, embarrassing for Germany, if this is in any way legitimate. | |
Um... | |
I do also want to say that this is specifically Germany doing this, not NATO, like Mike Benz is saying. | |
Not like this is a NATO-sanctioned kind of conversation that's happening. | |
And the German government do not need the approval of the U.S. | |
State Department to do literally fucking anything unless it involves U.S. | |
territory. | |
Like, that's just some American exceptionalism bullshit taken to the next level. | |
Like, oh yes, all these sovereign countries must of course ask us before they do anything to situations we're somewhat involved in. | |
Get the fuck out of here. | |
I feel like every day, the likelihood of that is just less and less. | |
I feel like a lot of countries or homes are receding into the bushes when it comes to the US, and these days in specific, which is kind of fun. | |
All right, okay. | |
Yeah, I didn't hear anything about that scandal, so I can't really speak to that. | |
I will say that accusing this man of liking to talk, our glass houses will be in peril. | |
I don't think that's necessarily fair. | |
And I feel like it's also worth getting his bills paid. | |
And frankly, in that regard, he's way ahead of us. | |
Yeah, I mean, I want the proof. | |
Did they do it? | |
Is there a memo? | |
Because people can talk about whatever, literally whatever they want, and then say, oh, we're not going to do it. | |
Yeah, it's true. | |
Even the conversation happening in any sense is not proof of something actually being, you know, actioned in any way, even if that thing exists. | |
And yeah, you will discover throughout this show that Mike Benz is not particularly great with citing his sources, let's put it that way. | |
Sure, because even if it got covered and it was a scandal and then it got stopped, that would be efficacy in journalism. | |
If that was a thing that was going to happen and then it didn't, yay journalism! | |
We avoided that. | |
I'm not going to put my stamp on that. | |
Yeah, it doesn't seem to be what was occurring at all. | |
Now, part two of Mike Benz's answer, and well, it gets stupider. | |
The second one is, I've been maintaining for some time that ultimately, a military-to-military skirmish of NATO against Russia is simply not going to work out well for NATO because of the logistics of it all. | |
The US having to ship fighter jets and tanks 5,000 miles across an ocean, having to deal with the logistical nightmare of You know, as far as you can get on the world map from the homeland versus Russia, it's basically an adjunct of their own territory in terms of it being right on the border. | |
So, according to Mike Benz, the US getting involved in a ground war with Russia, if that ever happened, would be an impossible situation because of the logistics. | |
I mean, firstly, he's talking about transporting fighter jets to Russia and, well, they're planes, Mike. | |
They fly there very fucking quickly at that. | |
Secondly, if you're telling me that the largest and best funded military in the entire world cannot cope with travelling across the world, you're a fucking idiot. | |
Like, it was managed in World War II, but in a World War III situation, well, we just can't do it! | |
It's too hard! | |
Shockingly, I do think we have the case here of a vicious racist and anti-Semite also being a moron. | |
Surprising, I know. | |
Well, I mean, as far as, like, I can see his tenduous, like, I can see his Charlie Day strings as, like, the logistics of the Vietnam War, right? | |
Because he's invoking the Vietnam War, and so he's, like, the logistics of, you know, like, an entrenched, um, Like native population, like a ground war. | |
Yeah. | |
I'd say that the USA track record is like pretty shitty and we don't learn lessons from these efforts. | |
And yeah, forever wars are like kind of our bag. | |
So these are all feasible in like in Feasible complaints, certainly. | |
But I'm not really seeing why that... | |
I'm not seeing why that's a thing to bring up. | |
I don't see the relevance in the conversation. | |
Like, yeah, it'd be a really bad idea. | |
It'd be a really bad idea! | |
The idea is, oh, you can't defeat Russia. | |
You know, it's feeding into that kind of narrative. | |
You know, you can't possibly beat Russia there. | |
indefatigable enemy, you know, it's impossible, and you're much further away from the conflict than they are. | |
It's like, well, yes, that is true, but also, if it came to a full-scale war between the two countries, which touch wood will never happen, But, you know, if that was the situation, I don't think the U.S. | |
would be, you know, on the back foot, let's put it that way, in terms of military capability. | |
I also don't think that, I mean, that's just not going to happen. | |
We're not going to do that. | |
No, it's also just not going to happen. | |
We're just not going to do that. | |
Like, the thing is, especially with Ukraine, like, it can be a legitimate struggle, right, for the people of Ukraine. | |
It can also function For whomever needs it to be or wants it to be, it can be a proxy war. | |
It can be both. | |
It can be posturing. | |
It can be both sides. | |
Any of the sides, because there's not even both. | |
There's kind of a lot of sides, actually, because life is complicated, and foreign affairs are especially complicated. | |
So everybody can have an agenda. | |
Everybody can have an agenda, have an angle, And have a proxy position. | |
It doesn't seem like the United States military would be involved if they didn't have a proxy interest. | |
I don't see us as actually being magnanimous in any way. | |
This is not a charity. | |
No, no, no. | |
Strategery, right? | |
Absolutely. | |
So sure, sure. | |
Let's take that idea. | |
I can say that idea right now on this podcast. | |
And I would like him to have some evidence that is more than what I can just conceptualize in this conversation with you right now. | |
You know? | |
Yeah, I think you're asking too much. | |
Too much. | |
You're asking too much of Mike Benz. | |
What do you know? | |
Yeah. | |
So now we get to the third part of Mike Benz's answer, which, what does this all have to do with Victoria Newland's resignation again? | |
I mean, she's retiring for the record. | |
That's the reason she's stepping down. | |
But what does this all have to do with that or the question? | |
Let's see if this clip gives us any more clarity. | |
But you have the situation where the military affairs in the country have turned very sour for the optimistic hopes that NATO had even a year ago, and territory continues to fall. | |
I think three new towns just fell last week, and I think ultimately a ceasefire, something like the Minsk Accords that were struck after the 2014 Crimea annexation, are going to have to be signed by NATO in order to stop the bleeding, so to speak, of territory continuing to fall. | |
And I think at that point, what you're going to have is less statecraft and more intelligence work. | |
I always describe the blob as being the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon all moving as one, and they're completely interchangeable. | |
Whenever you see the State Department, that means the CIA and the Pentagon are there, you just don't see them yet. | |
If the CIA is there, that means the State Department and Pentagon are there, you just don't see them yet. | |
It all moves through something called the interagency process. | |
They never separate from each other. | |
Okay, so the State Department, in fact, basically is the CIA, or at least works with the CIA on such a close level, and the Pentagon, in literally everything in all cases. | |
And we're expected to believe this because this man spent about 10 months in the State Department as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of International Communications and IT. | |
Yes, I'm sure he was privy to many a high-level discussion due to his incredibly senior deputy assistant position in IT. | |
Well, then I would think that he'd have access to all kinds of proof and evidence that he could bring from a whistleblower perspective. | |
Documents? | |
He could be a whistleblower! | |
You're right! | |
Right? | |
Why didn't he think of that? | |
We should tell him. | |
We should let him know. | |
Mike, you should try blowing a whistle. | |
You'd be great at it. | |
Let's see. | |
I'm saying evidence first. | |
Ah, see. | |
Here's the problem. | |
He cites no evidence for this claim or any of his claims, actually. | |
He's much more of a take-it-as-read kind of guy. | |
Yeah. | |
Sure. | |
Throwing that aside, however, it is cute that he's suggesting we draw up a new Minsk agreement, given that it was Putin who threw the last one out the window, and he's also said that his next phone call to the President of the United States will be once he's won the Ukraine war. | |
Yeah. | |
There is also the deeper question of, even if he signed it, could you trust this guy to stick to a ceasefire, you know, given that he completely ignored the last one after it became inconvenient? | |
Yeah, I just it's so frustrating that like, you know, the my my media intake right is I'm I'm kind of getting you know, and again, I mentioned the the skeptical inquiry that we're in this phase of right in my home. | |
And Like, having this parallel experience in my, like, real, actual life really drives these kind of, like, ridiculous points home so hard for me, personally, that, like, when I'm reading about this, if I'm learning these things, it's someone who's investigating, finds evidence, has to vet the evidence, has to, you know, like, and when they find evidence, they're like, oh my god, why is this here? | |
Oh no! | |
And they show me the thing, or they have the thing, or the things, or the pattern of things that they're citing, their claims have evidence behind them. | |
They have a paper trail, they have witnesses, whatever. | |
Mm-hmm. | |
And it's hard work. | |
It's really difficult to do, and it takes a long time and a lot of resources. | |
It's so specifically eye-spitting in my eyeballs to me to listen to over and over again. | |
The people that are on Russell's show, and I'm sure, obviously, like you just said, a lot of other fucking shows, too, that I would be thrilled to see the proof, to see the evidence, to see the actual connection instead of just, well, it doesn't look good. | |
That's witch trial shit. | |
That's spurious. | |
Yes. | |
Completely. | |
Completely. | |
And that's pretty much all this guy has to offer, which is exhausting. | |
Because as you say, there is some serious legitimate fucked up shit that the CIA is and has been doing. | |
But all that this guy's doing is just hand-waving. | |
He's just gesturing at me. | |
The thing is, whenever there's CIA meddling that becomes uncovered, it's because people find proof. | |
It's because there is a documentation of, say, the president saying something we didn't realize before, and then these documents are uncovered over 50 years or whatever. | |
There are They start with the proof. | |
I'm so spoiled with my media consumption that I get to be skeptical, and then people are like, well, no, this is the thing that I found. | |
And then even if there's so much evidence that is still missing and is incomplete, and they acknowledge it, At the end of their like when in their conclusions they're like well this is something like we can point to all these circumstances but if we never get to really know we never get to know. | |
Yeah. | |
Yeah, yeah. | |
My intelligence is so much less insulted by where I learn things from. | |
Exactly, exactly. | |
So, in this next clip, in a roundabout way, we finally get back to Victoria Newland. | |
But they play different roles and what we just saw last week with the New York Times CIA story is very interesting. | |
The New York Times published a story about these 12 CIA bases on the outer rim of the Ukrainian border. | |
Now this was not declassified intelligence, right? | |
This is not publicly accessible. | |
These 200 plus interviews the New York Times conducted were on a top secret CIA base, one of the 12 in Ukraine, which means the CIA had to have invited them in and cleared them through security. | |
This was a CIA story that was given to the New York Times for the specific purpose of getting Republicans to fund more CIA activity. | |
The New York Times even specifically targeted Mike Johnson and the Republicans in the House of Representatives who are holding up A, you know, 60 to 100 billion dollar new, you know, infusion of taxpayer cash into Ukraine. | |
So this was a selectively leaked story of highly, highly classified intelligence by the CIA in order to manipulate the, you know, the votes of our legislature in order to provide more funding to the CIA. | |
Now, I think that part of that story and emphasizing the critical importance of these CIA bases is that we will be moving from a, from A Pentagon State Department overt statecraft role in Ukraine into much more of a clandestine small wars operation, you know, of the type that was done in Nicaragua and Iran-Contra. | |
And so I think Victoria Nuland's role may actually be less salient. | |
And I would, where she goes next is going to tell this story. | |
If she goes over to someplace like the Atlantic Council, which has seven CIA directors on it, that means that, you know, she'll be coordinating the CIA aspect of those political affairs. | |
So, you know, it's, We should be paying attention to her next landing strip. | |
That will clear the fog of war, I think. | |
Ah, yep. | |
If she goes to the Atlantic Council, her and cowboy Tim Holt will be controlling the CIA aspect of... talking about NATO, I guess. | |
It's never entirely clear what Mike Benz thinks the Atlantic Council does, but suffice to say he does think it's bad and powerful. | |
It's a think tank, Mike, you doofus. | |
I think I probably agree, but give me a reason. | |
Like, give me an actual reason. | |
I bet I have a bone to pick with most NGOs. | |
Like, just... | |
Sure, there's probably something in there that we'll disagree with. | |
I, in looking into it, I couldn't find anything immediately problematic, but sure, there's probably something. | |
I mean, you know, you can't have Kissinger on your board and be squeaky clean at the end of the day. | |
In fact, that alone is a bone to pick, to be fair. | |
As for the New York Times story on the CIA involvement in Ukraine, did you see this, by the by? | |
No. | |
No. | |
I have no idea. | |
It's really interesting. | |
So for anyone who didn't see this, it is an interesting and long story where the New York Times kind of got access to some CIA-funded bases in Ukraine and interviewed over 200 people, you know, kind of involved in that. | |
So, since 2016, the CIA have sent equipment, funds, and have been training Ukrainian intelligence officers in what was coined Operation Goldfish. | |
We spoke in our CIA off-brand specials about how these operation names are often meaningless. | |
Paperclip, for example. | |
But in this case... Oh, artichoke! | |
Artichoke, right. | |
Ellen Dulles' favorite food. | |
That's it. | |
Exactly. | |
In this case, it's derived from a joke about a Russian-speaking goldfish offering two Estonians wishes in exchange for its freedom. | |
And then the joke ends with one of the Estonians bashing the fish's head in with a rock, explaining that anything speaking Russian couldn't be trusted. | |
The operation name feels a little bit more pointed here. | |
They're not supposed to be that way! | |
That's fucked up! | |
I don't like that either. | |
Yeah. | |
Damn it! | |
They're supposed to be unrelated! | |
Yeah, it's kind of worse. | |
That's why you have a code name! | |
Jesus! | |
It's kind of worse. | |
But then they're publishing it in the New York Times anyway at this point, so who gives a shit, I suppose? | |
Well, but also, yeah, there's a lot of very fishy shit. | |
Didn't mean to say fishy, sorry. | |
I was going to say! | |
There's a lot of fishy shit. | |
I have a lot of Unanswered questions about the New York Times and the CIA or just intelligence in general and the connections there. | |
That's a massive problem that is not being reckoned with. | |
But what is the result? | |
You know what I mean? | |
What are we getting from this? | |
what is the result? | |
You know what I mean? | |
Like, what are we getting from this? | |
I wanna hear the real news version. | |
I wanna hear the real news about it, not this joke. | |
Yeah, exactly. | |
It says, the CIA funded intelligence bases and conducted joint operations with Ukrainian intelligence under the condition that they wouldn't help the Ukrainians conduct offensive lethal operations. | |
To quote a former senior US official from the article, quote, we made a distinction between intelligence collection operations and things that go boom, unquote. | |
Cool. | |
Cool. | |
Cool thing to say, adult. | |
Obviously, Russia invading formally in 2022 changed things quite a lot and the CIA are now involved in providing intelligence for lethal offensive action to the Ukrainian military. | |
It's an interesting read, the whole thing, though obviously take a good chunk of it with a big grain of salt given that it is a piece sanctioned and ultimately will have been proofread by the CIA. | |
So, you know, it's... | |
Which we did cover also, and the stuff we talked about in the CIA opera that we did was the pervasive... Basically, the CIA was the most effective in infiltrating journalistic outlets. | |
Absolutely. | |
And this was a while back. | |
They had 800 publications that were pretty much Doing their bidding? | |
That's like, that's something to be skeptical about. | |
That's something to be, but like, there's got to be something. | |
I don't know. | |
Okay. | |
Yeah. | |
I don't trust anyone. | |
Great. | |
No, no, exactly. | |
Exactly. | |
You know, again, huge chunk of salt, but it is an interesting read. | |
Now, according to Mike Benz, the piece was specifically targeting and mentioning Mike Johnson, though it didn't mention him by name. | |
In an attempt to release the $100 billion of funding to Ukraine, which Benz is conflating as being funding to the CIA. | |
And Republicans are oh so easily pressured and convinced by the New York Times, apparently. | |
His culture warshit! | |
That's his bargaining chip for culture warshit. | |
It's totally, I mean, would be a great front, I guess. | |
Sure, sure. | |
And then apparently the CIA are going to get much more involved on the ground in Ukraine, supposedly a la Nicaragua or Iran-Contra, and where Victoria Newland ends up working is what's going | |
to signal that happening. | |
That will be like the that'll be letting them know. | |
Whole thing feels a little bit convoluted. | |
Just a little. | |
A little bit. | |
Alright. | |
Okay. | |
That's weird. | |
Yeah. | |
It's weird and dumb. | |
CIA is like, the one thing they're really good at is hiding shit. | |
But, you know what? | |
They've thrown out their own naming convention, so who knows? | |
True! | |
Very true, very true. | |
You know who doesn't know? | |
This guy. | |
Benz has another silly point to make here about the New York Times, actually. | |
But just one last thing on this is, you know, how much grief did Tucker Carlson get just a month ago when he did the Vladimir Putin interview? | |
Because Putin had denied interviews to people like Christina Amanpour and CNN. | |
And we were told that only foreign authoritarian dictators will selectively give, you know, interviews to hand-picked journalists. | |
Well, do you think the Central Intelligence Agency would have invited Tucker Carlson onto the base in order to have those 200? | |
This wasn't a general all-access media invite to a highly classified CIA base on the outer rim of Ukraine. | |
They handpicked the New York Times. | |
Who was, by the way, the star of the show of Operation Mockingbird from the 1950s to the 1970s with the Sulzberger family, when the CIA had 10 to 12 designated editor spots to be able to write CIA scripts for the New York Times. | |
I mean, this is just the classic pass-through relationship. | |
We were told only foreign authoritarians do that, that picking winners and losers to make sure there's glowing review of that. | |
And this is not just a foreign authority. | |
This is our own taxpayer money. | |
They're asking for $100 billion more after $200 billion. | |
It'll probably be a trillion by the time we're done. | |
We can't even ask our own state how they're spending the money unless it moves through the 37th leg of a CIA centipede in the form of the New York Times. | |
No! | |
They're not even mine! | |
I've observed facts, other people have worked very hard for it. | |
That's crazy! | |
Truly, the thread, I am noticing here, and I mean, you probably, you watched the whole thing, you could maybe elucidate this, like, Vietnam, 50, you know, like, Mockingbird, which, yeah, we talked about that. | |
That's real. | |
He's talking about stuff that's, Decades old, and the thing that I keep hearing, and I keep, you know, like, again, like, in the media and the, like, reading and listening that I'm doing, is a lot of scared investigators wondering what we're up to now, because we know it's gonna look different. | |
It's gonna look very different than the 50s and 60s, or even 70s, whatever, 80s. | |
It's gonna look a lot different, and we don't know. | |
So using that kind of antique model, it gives all the room in the world for speculation, but doesn't really inform the way that things are happening today. | |
No. | |
It's just, it's a cluster of inclinations, right? | |
Yeah, do you know what? | |
That's an accurate description of this entire interview with Mike Benz. | |
It's a cluster of inclinations and insinuations and that's pretty much it with zero grounding, pretty much. | |
Yeah. | |
I know he's read The Devil's Chessboard because, well, or at least says he has because he posted as much on his ex account. | |
So, New York Times reporters talking to and being invited by the CIA is not quite the same as Tucker Carlson talking to Vladimir Putin, and it does seem obvious, but I will clarify why. | |
Firstly, Putin is a world leader. | |
By his very nature, he is public-facing, as all leaders of countries are, and is thus supposed to be responsive to scrutiny about the way he runs his government. | |
It is pretty normal for journalists of all stripes and sides to interview world leaders, both to support and to criticize. | |
Vladimir Putin has very famously denied access to pretty much all American journalists, no, in fact, all American journalists, but decided to allow Tucker Carlson to interview him. | |
Why? | |
Because he knew Tucker would be a fawning idiot and would let him control the narrative of the interview. | |
Which was already going to be glowing because of the amount of celebrating Putin Tucker Carlson had already engaged in by that point. | |
Tucker Carlson is also not a journalist. | |
Yeah, I was screaming that in my head. | |
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
He's a pundit and a talking head. | |
Though after the fact, Putin did describe Tucker as weak, which tickled me. | |
The New York Times reporters Adam Entus and Michael Schwartz, who wrote this piece on the CIA, on the other hand, are both credible, credentialed, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, meaning they are far more likely to enter this scenario with the CIA, with a healthy degree of skepticism. | |
Assuming that they aren't, in fact, CIA assets. | |
Okay. | |
And of course, these CIA-funded bases are covert, hidden, and are classified. | |
There is a huge degree of trust required with whatever journalists they invite to go and check these places out. | |
and interview all these people and Tucker Carlson is not the type of person anyone could credibly | |
trust to keep his mouth shut if he went to places like this. | |
You know, he would just be rattling off details on air, this guy. - I don't think he'd know what he | |
was talking about. | |
Probably that too. That's even worse. That's even more dangerous. He's... | |
Yeah. - Yeah. | |
But he doesn't believe anything anyone tells him. | |
He'd just be like, uh-huh, okay, meow, meow, meow, sure. | |
Yeah, it's true. | |
But they are just entirely different situations, you know. | |
And there's a reason that Tucker wouldn't get invited out to secret CIA-funded bases, just as there is a reason that Putin won't be inviting legitimate journalists to interview him any time soon. | |
Very different situations, calling for very different things. | |
We made fun of him for smelling bread that you could get at Walmart anywhere in the country. | |
We made fun of him for not knowing how money works. | |
Yes. | |
Come on. | |
-Yes. -Come on. | |
That's-- That's honest. I mean... | |
That's what everybody was making japes about, is his ridiculous little jaunt into the supermarket. | |
Terrible interview. | |
Terrible interview. | |
Amusing supermarket jaunt. | |
Oh dear. | |
Now we have a change of subject and a question from Russell. | |
Do you feel that the reason that we're seeing new hate speech laws in Canada that appear to be designed to generate legitimized censorship in the country of Ireland, in my country, the UK, proposed within the EU, precisely because Independent media has the capacity to continually stymie and attack these conventional traditional legacy media outlets and their ongoing and traditional propagandist propensities. | |
Is that what this censorship industrial complex is really about? | |
The fact that it's now impossible to control these stories? | |
For example, the New York Times CIA deal that you've just outlined for us is already in these kind of circles understood to be a propagandist endeavour. | |
Something like the Nord Stream pipeline was immediately Debunked when it was claimed that it was an act of Russian sabotage. | |
The pace and agility of independent media means that legacy media can no longer dominate these spaces with state-sanctioned propaganda and dissenting voices are facing, usually at the hand of government-funded proxies like Logically.ai and some of the other groups that you've talked about, Precisely because they have the potential to mobilize and inform a population to the point where they become unmanageable. | |
So, what we mostly have in this question here is a self-aggrandizing and a self-victimizing question of, oh, aren't we independent media people so dangerous and influential? | |
Is that why governments keep trying to attack us? | |
I've covered it plenty of times, it's bullshit, but it does spark Mike Benzoff on a bit of a weird tangent here. | |
That's exactly it. | |
In fact, the US government, as well as their counterparts in London, have a framework that they refer to as the whole-of-society framework, the whole-of-society counter-misinformation or counter-disinformation. | |
By the way, it has nothing to do with countering Mis and disinformation has to do with censoring misinformation. | |
So you can just think of it as the whole society censorship network. | |
And what this refers to is conjoining four different categories of institutions within a society. | |
The government institutions, the private sector institutions like the platforms and firms like Logically AI, civil society institutions. | |
These are the universities, NGOs, nonprofits, foundations, activists. | |
And then the fourth category is media institutions. | |
So government, private sector, civil society and media. | |
Those four categories all moving as basically fused into the nucleus of a single cell so that they can move as a whole of society apparatus and they can all lend their own resources to that censorship apparatus. | |
So I watched as this was all being constructed from 2017 to 2020 and it was fascinating because the media was always invited to these consensus building meetings with this whole society model. | |
So you'd have the Department of Homeland Security here in the US, | |
which had a cyber censorship center called CISA. | |
You had the heads of the trusted safety teams at Twitter and Facebook and YouTube invited. | |
You had the major sort of CIA cutouts in the civil society area, | |
like the Stanford-Irwin Observatory or the Atlantic Council. | |
And then you had hand-selected journalists, often from the national security | |
or the intelligence bureaus of the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR, CBS. | |
And they would be consensus building the ideal mechanisms for domestic censorship | |
to make sure that all four categories of those institutions are on board. | |
Now, much of this is available just on my foundation's website at foundationforfreedomonline.com, If you just go to my Twitter, and you just type in Whole of Society, you'll see compilation videos I've done on all this, as well as links to all the source documents and receipts. | |
But the media was very much on board, not just because of preserving their access media. | |
The New York Times has access to the CIA. | |
Tucker Carlson does not. | |
This is because of this decades-old favors-for-favors relationship. | |
Whew! | |
Cite your sources, Mike. | |
I mean, he kind of tried to, except when you go there and have a look at them, it's actually... it's bullshit, basically. | |
It's just a lot of Charlie Day string. | |
Charlie Day string just across the board. | |
That's pretty much it. | |
It's connecting very far away dots. | |
So yeah, according to him... There were papers under those strings, though. | |
There were still papers under those strings. | |
Don't besmirch Charlie Day in this scenario. | |
It can't just be like a post-it with a word. | |
There were pieces of mail under those thumbtacks. | |
Yes, that is very true. | |
I would never wish to besmirch the name of Charlie Day. | |
I mean, he's also a genius musician. | |
Anyway, so yeah, according to this guy, groups of journalists were apparently getting together with government, private sector, and civil society institutions to make sure that we really ramp up censorship and all agree on how to move forward in shutting down independent media. | |
That's what he's saying there, that there were all these big meetings that took place to confirm that. | |
And I'm like, well, Why is this the first we're hearing about it? | |
Is my first question. | |
And maybe it's a little bit because it didn't happen. | |
Well, here's the thing. | |
What he's complaining about... I'm sorry, if you've got more on this, go ahead. | |
No, no, no, go ahead. | |
I have a thought. | |
Let's hear it. | |
Let's hear it. | |
So, what he's complaining about... | |
Like because he's also like he's looking at the surface right he's he's looking at these disparate parts and he's making these connections that it's some kind of like concerted and organized conspiracy and I I. | |
Have and will continue to argue that he's just complaining about the consolidation of corporate power. | |
They can all get in a room, like Kraft Foods and Boeing and Raytheon can all get in a room because there's only like fucking four companies now! | |
That's like- Yeah. | |
The destruction of antitrust laws and the ability to consolidate corporate power, that's what this all looks like. | |
That's why you can still demonize Davos and Bilderberg and all that kind of shit, because they are doing evil shit. | |
It's just not the evil shit that they're talking about. | |
Specifically, dudes in suits with red ties like that guy I'm looking at right now, he is This is an age-old mediocre dude in power trick, not all just men but I say dude, of like a myopic view focused on like | |
A lot of conflation and a lot of fear mongering and, you know, scary words like CIA and operative blah blah blah, putting all that stuff and like focusing in way too specifically and to the point where he's going to explain and explain and explain. | |
And the average person is like, you have ceased making sense to me. | |
I guess I just don't understand. | |
And then they bow out. | |
That's a great way to alienate someone and then also establish your own authority when you don't actually have any evidential leg to stand on. | |
I think that's a really Because I also understand that consolidation of corporate power and capitalism, obviously, that's an oversimplification on my part, but I'm not the one making these claims that this dude is. | |
I'm not going out of my way to assign an intention when it's just what happens when a couple of people get all the money and all the power. | |
That's the system that we have in place, yeah. | |
Right. | |
Yeah. | |
You picked up on something pretty astutely there about Mike's communication style. | |
Like I said, he likes to talk. | |
And you know, one of the kind of top comments on Rumble for this video was, oh wow, Mike Benz's stuff is so information dense, you know, I had to watch it twice with a notepad so I could make sense of it. | |
I'm like, good fucking luck! | |
Good fucking luck! | |
He has his own logic, and you need to take notes because it doesn't, like... | |
This is why I'm spoiled. | |
I listen to people that do investigation and research in good faith and then explain themselves because if you understand, like if you understand something, and I know I'm terrible. | |
I have my moments where I'm like looking truly awful at explaining things because we got the train of thought and I give the engine the caboose and then all the cars are missing in between. | |
I'm highly aware of that. | |
So no one is exempt from this kind of like, Impulse, right, is to not get all the parts in, but he's putting in other parts that kind of don't... Sometimes a person can sound smart and make no fucking sense, and you need to just not listen, because he should be able to explain... He's dragging things in from all over the place, you know? | |
It's too broad! | |
Like answering the Victoria Nuland question by being like, well, Germany were maybe bombing this place over here. | |
What fucking relevance does that have? | |
And it doesn't have any except making him sound possibly smart or current to the people listening. | |
Or like more informed. | |
Because like, oh, well, you don't know anything about Victoria Nuland, so you are ejected from even being able to participate in this conversation. | |
I'm like, I don't need to know anything about her. | |
Yeah. | |
To locate where your complaint is. | |
And it's because that myopic... Because it's also about control, wanting to control the conversation, control the narrative, if you have a very specific myopic view. | |
And if you find yourself keep saying, well, I'm not talking about that. | |
I'm not talking about that. | |
It's like, yeah, but I'm trying to test your theory in the context of regular old logic. | |
And very often, someone that Investigates and understands an issue. | |
Explain like I'm five, you know, like explain, explain, like, can you, can you explain this? | |
Like I'm a kid. | |
Yeah. | |
Then I trust that you understand it. | |
Yeah. | |
And yeah, it could sound like an oversimplification without context, but you have to be able to get granular and understand where you're coming from or admit where it's confusing and where you are lacking information, but then you should be able to zoom out into the macro and explain it simply. | |
Bummer for this guy. | |
I have an explanation of a consolidation of corporate power. | |
That's what you're complaining about. | |
And you're just, you're finding every reason to not say that thing. | |
He's got a conspiracy instead. | |
So it is worth noting at this point that Mike Benz has previously asserted that disinformation doesn't exist on the internet, which may help explain some of his views. | |
That's insane. | |
It's nuts is what it is. | |
So do you know what the whole of society approach is or like the whole of society framework as it's sometimes called? | |
That sounds like a weird excuse for him to fill in some gaps, is what I was hearing. | |
Well, I mean, that's certainly how he's using it. | |
So usually it's in reference to resilience and civil protection, but the framework can broadly be applied to things like healthcare, public integrity, or pretty much anything that has a wider effect on society itself, because What a whole-of-society approach actually means is taking into account the whole of society and ensuring that the framework and policy therein considers and is largely agreed upon by the whole of society. | |
The reason it's coming up here is that, generally speaking, if you ask the whole of society, is misinformation and disinformation a bad thing? | |
People will say, Yes, that seems like a very bad thing, especially these days. | |
And people like Mike Benz and Russell both make their living out of parroting misinformation and disinformation so they inherently disagree. | |
But instead of just being able to come out and say that, Mike Benz has to insinuate some grand conspiracy, calling various organizations CIA cutouts and saying that the phrase whole of society is itself negative and indicative of a plot to shut down independent media. | |
Yeah, that's weird. | |
That's weird. | |
It's funny, if you didn't know about Mike's frame game past, you'd probably be wondering what the fuck skin in the game this guy ever had to be railing against censorship so much. | |
But back in the day, he mentioned I've been watching this since 2017, back in the day he would complain about his YouTube videos being censored or deamplified. | |
The ones with titles like, How White People Turned Alt-Right. | |
And then it becomes clearer after that. | |
You're like, ah, this guy's mad he can't engage in hate speech on social media. | |
OK, I get it now. | |
OK, this is much clearer. | |
Much clearer. | |
Oh, dear. | |
That's OK. | |
Yep. | |
Yeah, OK. | |
That's like, all right. | |
Yep. | |
That's what he's done. | |
This matters a lot. | |
I can't. | |
Now, from here, Russell asks a surprisingly pointed question, actually, and Mike Benz has another silly answer. | |
That's unbelievable. | |
With this amount of deep state leverage applied through various agencies, why is it still necessary to manipulate the outcome of elections, specifically the 2020 election? | |
What evidence is there that this election was rigged? | |
And do you think comparable electoral maneuvering takes place in countries like ours? | |
Is that too a global practice? | |
And why is it necessary if you can manipulate true power in the manner that you've described? | |
Well, the manipulation of that power without these new techniques | |
that we saw around the 2020 election, such as mass censorship using AI censorship technology | |
and these complex partnerships between the government and the private sector to censor all dissent. | |
Before that was rolled out, you had this very diminished ability, actually, because the conduits for the intelligence world, the conduits for the blob, were all badly weakened. | |
When the media lost so much of its credibility in the UK during the rise of the Brexit movement, Nigel Farage basically rose to power in large part on the back of YouTube. | |
It was his viral speeches saying that Herman Van Rompuy looked like a low-grade bank clerk. | |
It was the same way that Ben Shapiro became popular initially, with these slam-dunk contests on YouTube that drove his popularity. | |
Ah yes, Nigel Farage, YouTube star, the Ben Shapiro of the UK, said nobody. | |
Right, again, myopic. | |
Because this analogy does not bear out into the wider world. | |
It has nothing to do with what they're discussing. | |
That's what I'm saying. | |
It's so specific and kind of off the wall that, yeah, if I was trying to follow it, I'd have to draw a graph and a diagram too. | |
Yeah, I can see why you need a notepad. | |
I can forgive Mike Benz this absurd characterization of Nigel Farage's success because I'm quite sure he's just conflating how he discovered Nigel Farage with how Nigel Farage actually came to prominence in UK politics. | |
Bingo, bitch! | |
Yahtzee! | |
Yes! | |
That is absolutely the fucking... Yes. | |
I sign off on that a thousand percent. | |
So the actual answer is, for a start, Farage was at it for a long time. | |
He was first elected to European Parliament in 1999. | |
Secondly, his party, UKIP, was pretty well funded by people who stood to gain financially from the inevitable turmoil a Brexit situation would cause, and just by the right in general, because anyone sucking air out of the room to promote right-wing causes means fewer people talking about left-wing causes. | |
But the biggest nail in the coffin really was that the UK media just kept interviewing him. | |
It was under the guise of, oh, we should hear both sides of the issue. | |
But at a point where 90% of people were pretty much fine with being part of the European Union, so it seemed kind of harmless putting Farage on equal footing with genuine prominent political figures. | |
Fast forward to the 2014 European Parliament elections, where Ukip got 24 members of European Parliament elected, after riding a wave of xenophobia and racism and Britain First à la Tommy Robinson. | |
After that, he'd become too big a monster to stop, and Farage almost single-handedly drove the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to embracing Brexit rhetoric come 2016, and then the country fell apart and hasn't really recovered since. | |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's yeah. | |
Yeah, that's where we're actually at with this guy. | |
Yeah, and we should definitely go ahead. | |
Go ahead. | |
No, he now has a show on GB News, you know, where dear old… Neil Oliver? | |
Yes, Neil Oliver, thank you. | |
Scottish Scarf is what I was thinking. | |
Scottish Scarf Man. | |
Oh, I'll remember. | |
That's the job I want. | |
I'll be mad till I'm dead. | |
Forever angry. | |
The historian job, not the GB News job, right? | |
Oh, yeah, yeah, oh my god, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
He had the job. | |
I won. | |
Yes, he had the gig. | |
And he could have just done that. | |
And he didn't even do it well. | |
And I thought that was, again, I thought that was me. | |
I thought I was being unfair to him. | |
And now I find out it's a person I hate till I'm dead. | |
I don't think about it, but when confronted, I'm like, oh, right. | |
Fuck that guy. | |
Oh, no. | |
Fuck that guy. | |
All the way. | |
Fuck that guy. | |
Man oh man. | |
Oh boy. | |
The dancing they do to not look at the forest for the trees is infuriating. | |
Okay. | |
Let's go. | |
Let's party. | |
It's a constant. | |
So many dances. | |
So next we get another hot take from Mike Benz. | |
I don't know how else to describe it. | |
But, you know, that offset You know, the traditional conduits for the traditional cutouts of the blob class in terms of being able to control hearts and minds. | |
So, you know, it's not a it's not a perfect power. | |
It is fallible when the soft power projection mechanisms start to falter or lose credibility or lose funding. | |
And as you know, as we saw the rise of social media actually undermined The revenue models of third-party websites like the New York Times used to be a free site. | |
They had to move to a subscription model because people were accessing so much New York Times directly on Facebook and not going to the third-party site, not making it their homepage, so to speak. | |
It's changed the business models of the news. | |
And so we've had to now support these media institutions through government partnerships. | |
That's been a big story of what's happened in the US, UK and Canada. | |
But, you know, essentially what we're describing here in 2020 is the control over perceptions of legitimacy. | |
Really, Mike. | |
Social media and the internet changed the business model of the news. | |
Lauren, had you heard about this? | |
I had no idea. | |
No, no, no. | |
Here's what happened. | |
Here's what fucking happened. | |
Facebook changed their monetization model and they ruined so many outside websites because they were actually doing really well and Facebook's like, no, I want that money. | |
And instead just like, And again, anybody that listens to Behind the Bastards or any of the Some More News, they talk about it all the time as they were part of this Facebook demonetized or changed their monetization model that was working. | |
I think maybe they had complaints at the time, but in retrospect, it was working pretty fucking well for all of these news organizations and comedy websites. | |
We used to have more than three websites. | |
Consolidation. | |
Corporate consolidation. | |
It's, that's, again, that's your complaint, dude. | |
This is not, like, that's, it's money. | |
It's money, and we know who did it, and we know when it happened, and there are witnesses all over the world who lost their jobs and watched this happen in real time and complained about it, and sorry that you weren't in on it, and you want to just make shit up and, okay. | |
So yes, I did hear about it, but I heard about the real thing, not his fake thing. | |
So according to Ben's, his version of it happening, is why there are more media partnerships now, as though things like the Trusted News Initiative are profit-based, whereas actually, no, that's truth-based, buddy. | |
But if you're anti-truth, can't really say that. | |
So it's all actually a financial conspiracy to shut down independent media because they're just too competitive with the legacy media. | |
And that's kind of the angle that he's driving at here. | |
Which, yeah, great. | |
I listen to so much independent media that it's hard for me to hear and then hold on to the ideas he's putting forward. | |
Well, I don't think you are, because they're trying to be shut down. | |
They're being shut down, Lauren. | |
I guess. | |
Well, but like, that's the thing is, I'm like, really, I guess, and I'm learning through the process of this podcast that like, maybe I'm a little more plugged in than your average bear to these discussions. | |
And like, it's so fucking obvious to me. | |
And this guy is like, but what if it was the Deep State? | |
What if it was the... It was the blob! | |
It's Mark fucking Zuckerberg! | |
He's right there! | |
He's right there! | |
Yep, yep. | |
Rampant capitalism, my friend. | |
That's your problem. | |
Now, this question about the 2020 election, because that's what we're supposed to be talking about here. | |
Okay. | |
Oh man. | |
It prompted a 10 minute answer from Benz. | |
An uninterrupted 10 minute answer from Benz. | |
No. | |
I'm out. | |
Yes, so I'm going to skip ahead through some bullshit, some more bullshit he was saying about the CIA, again stuff from back in the 50s, and I'm going to get to a portion of his actual answer as to how supposedly the 2020 election was rigged. | |
So, before the whole of government, you know, I described the Whole Society Censorship Alliance, you know, the full term is Whole Society Whole of Government, which refers to not just those four categories, government, private sector, civil society, and media, but whole of government, meaning every agency within the federal government has to lend whatever resources it can in order to help that censorship alliance. | |
So, here in the U.S., it's not just the Department of Homeland Security anymore, it's the Department of State, it's the Pentagon, it's the Department of Justice, it's the FBI, it's the National Science Foundation, It's HHS and CDC on COVID censorship issues. | |
In the 2020 election, they were very concerned when mail-in ballots became the main... When it was decided that mail-in ballots were going to be a universal thing in the COVID era, and that Democrats were going to disproportionately vote using mail-in ballots, there became an anticipated crisis of legitimacy where Joe Biden, to win the election, In an unprecedented way that, you know, that they called the red mirage, blue shift phenomenon, which was this idea that red mirage would mean that Donald Trump would win on November 8th, 2016, or November 3rd, I guess it was. | |
And this will be a red, it would look like, like Republicans had won, but it would actually be a mirage because it would shift blue in the days that followed as mail-in ballots were counted. | |
Now this, Again, the blob has a license, you know, I refer to them also as the Department of Dirty Tricks, because they have a license to rig elections around the world. | |
In fact, they sort of have a mandate to do that. | |
This is one of the things that the CIA was created to do. | |
Oh, okay. | |
So the CIA has a mandate to rig elections and therefore they must have done so in the United States, with it having something to do with this red mirage blue shift in the 2020 election because of mail-in ballots. | |
We following so far? | |
How we feeling? | |
Okay, okay, okay. | |
This is the thing that we see all the time. | |
We've seen a lot, and I am so over the same fucking ramp-up again of basically like delegitimizing votes and the voting system. | |
I know who anticipated the election rigging narrative. | |
It was Roger Stone, and he's been doing it for decades. | |
Infamous rat fucker, Roger Stone. | |
And there's tons of proof that that's the angle he's been working on. | |
That's his political project, and it's working. | |
It's not a theory! | |
It's a conspiracy. Okay. It's been very effective. | |
Yes, yes. Okay, so how did the CIA do this, right? That's the crucial piece of information | |
as far as I'm concerned. That's what I want to know, Mike. | |
So let's let Mike Benz tell us in this next slightly longer clip. And it's a little all over | |
the place, as is his method of communication, but let's try and keep track. | |
So what the U.S. | |
government did under Trump's nose, because at the Department of Homeland Security coordinating this was an Atlantic Council, you know, and I'm not making this partisan, you know, this applies just as well to Democrats as to Republicans, but you had this alliance between the neoconservative foreign policy establishment, Blob Right, And the mainstream Democrat party who is mostly captured at this point after Occupy Wall Street by the foreign policy establishment. | |
So you had this basically neocon, never Trump, conservative Department of Homeland Security. | |
The back channel to create this vast censorship apparatus, it's called the Election Integrity Partnership, was one of their top partners on this. | |
They wrote a 292-page tell-all memo. | |
And you can read, you know, I wrote a 10,000-word report with 25 embedded videos with all their confession notes to how they did this. | |
But what they did is they ingested 860 million tweets In that run up to the 2020 election and designated 22 million of those tweets as being misinformation in terms of service violations around a new policy that they forced the tech companies under threat of government breakup and of crisis PR to adopt called de-legitimization. | |
So, if you were censored, if you thought it was a little funny, if you were on the toilet seat on a Thursday at 9.30 p.m. | |
and said, hey, it's a little weird that mail-in ballots are going out to everybody. | |
Do we have any checks and balances on whether that's actually a safe and reliable form of voting? | |
You are now committing a cyber attack on U.S. | |
critical infrastructure, according to the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S. | |
Because you were undermining the perceived legitimacy. | |
You were delegitimizing a future Red Mirage, Blue Shift event. | |
And the EIP folks, on their own videos hosted by the Atlantic Council, on the Atlantic Council's own YouTube page, and again, the Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its board and gets annual funding from the Pentagon and State Department, They bragged about how they got the tech companies to adopt this delegitimization term. | |
They said none of them would have done it without our pressure. | |
What we did is we threatened them using our allies in government. | |
They faced huge regulatory stakes if they didn't do what we told them to do. | |
Then we put them all on a grid, And we basically threatened them with crisis PR, which would result in advertiser boycotts, if they did not adopt this best-in-class censorship provision to stop any tweet or YouTube video or Facebook post that delegitimized mail-in ballots. | |
Five to seven months before the election even happened, so the people in charge of administering the election pre-censored the ability to challenge a funky result around the election. | |
It's putting the fox in charge of the hen house. | |
By God. | |
By God indeed. | |
Interesting. | |
Interesting stuff. | |
Okay, so the CIA set up the Election Integrity Partnership, who then in turn went to Twitter and went through millions of tweets flagging 22 million of them as misinformation, threatening the election's integrity apparently, and they did so five to seven months before the election even happened, which is impressive given the EIP was only formed 100 days before the election. | |
And they did this to quash any discussion that mail-in ballots could have been fraudulent on social media platforms. | |
And that is how the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, apparently. | |
And in fact, the title of this video on Russell's channel is "How the 2020 election was really | |
won, Mike Benz's explosive revelation." | |
Okay, yeah. | |
And, yeah, according to Mike Benz, the EIP were threatening all these social media companies. | |
Okay. | |
Evidence for which is me. | |
And that's the best we get. | |
At least Matt Taibbi has spurious emails to point to and misrepresent. | |
This is less- At least Matt Taibbi writes an article on his sub stack and pretends he has a source. | |
At least he's got the gumption to do that. | |
This guy is just like, I've got all of these things that these people have said that they've done and I've written them down and look at how proud they are of their work. | |
Yeah, okay, okay. | |
That apparently proves any of the things that you're saying. | |
Of course, what we're supposed to extrapolate from all of this is that mail-in ballots, all of the mail-in ballots that voted Democrat were all fraudulent, and that Trump actually won the election, and that the EIP censored debate over mail-in ballots on social media to make sure no one questioned Joe Biden's legitimacy as president. | |
As we all know, it went really well and no one attempted a coup or anything. | |
Right. | |
Yeah. So for the record, there is nothing particularly nefarious that I could find | |
about the Election Integrity Partnership. | |
It was formed out of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, Grafica, with a K, and the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. | |
In their own words, the ERP's primary goals were to 1. | |
Identify miss and disinformation before it went viral and during viral outbreaks, 2. | |
Share clear and accurate counter-messaging, and 3. | |
Document the specific misinformation actors, transmission pathways, narrative evolutions, and information infrastructures that enabled these narratives to propagate. | |
The results of their findings were pretty obvious and clear that the primary repeat spreaders of false and misleading narratives were verified blue check accounts belonging to partisan media outlets, social media influencers, and political figures, including President Trump and his family. | |
Mike Benz describes the EIP as bragging about having influence on social media companies, and sure thing, because they should be ashamed of highlighting bullshit on these social media platforms where the platforms themselves had apparently failed to deal with it. | |
That's what they actually did. | |
This all relies on the assumption that conservative voices are more censored. | |
And we know that is fundamentally not nor has it ever been true it's just not true and you need to have because I was way you know you read off that list of their objectives and I didn't hear. | |
And if you're going to insinuate that that's on the list, you need to prove it, not just say, oh, well, more of my team got slaps on the wrist than the other. | |
Would you like to give me numbers? | |
No, I'm already gone. | |
I've said the thing and I'm leaving. | |
That's how this is going and it drives me fucking crazy. | |
There's no proof of censorship affecting the message. | |
The message still got across. | |
That's like, because at the end of the day, this corporate consolidation problem, they are like, we forget. | |
And I think we, everybody forget that even like the platform we are on right now, where you could be watching this video or probably listening to it, all of the social media companies, the terms of service are disproportionately applied. | |
Because of money. | |
Because all of these platforms are here to sell ads and make money. | |
So if they're making money, and again, if corporate advertisers don't want to pay for hate speech or whatever, they don't have to. | |
And as a person who, as far as censorship goes, it's more of a copyright issue that I have to see and interact with Fucking constantly? | |
I know what's happening, at least on my little weird corner of the internet. | |
The intimidation that is handed is this kind of corporate consolidation of like, you can threaten somebody with a cease and desist, you can threaten somebody with a lawsuit that has nothing to do with fair use, and they're just going to do what they're going to do. | |
Honestly, YouTube is a lot better about it than any other social media site that we use these days, which is fucked up, but whatever. | |
Fair use, all these, like, legal protections that we do have as citizens, right, like, are out the window, and it seems like, like, it can feel very, it can feel very 1984, it can feel very Big Brother, but you have to be objective about it and understand that it's because there are these corporate partnerships and you are just a user. | |
If you are not helping generate ad revenue, and even that, like, that's not even enough. | |
Like, they're just, It's all building in plausible deniability for their corporate structure and further consolidation of power. | |
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right, you know, and we confront the copyright issue on a weekly basis, and I've lost count of the number of copyright strikes that we've received and fought against and won. | |
We haven't lost a single one. | |
It's wild to see how different it is on YouTube than it is on Instagram, because I guarantee you, it would just, it would most likely, I can't guarantee, that probably would go the other fucking way. | |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
I mean, I told you in an off-brand once about my rendition of Claire de Lune being copyright struck, and I'm like, motherfucker, I performed this! | |
Like, you can't just copy- What? | |
What? | |
Yeah, this is classical music. | |
You don't own it, ya bitch. | |
Yeah, it was a whole thing, you know, and, you know, I know a few kind of prominent music YouTubers and, you know, like, quite, like, semi-big ones, and they run into this issue still because they are not as massive as the corporations, you know, kind of at the top. | |
Or TikTok, like, just, like, taking all UMG music. | |
Off of just like, oh, no, all of your videos, I guess, I don't know what the resolution was. | |
I don't remember necessarily, but like either there's no music, which would be the right thing to do. | |
If you provided the music as the social media site, and you're like, just push this button, we gave you this thing. | |
And you're like, cool, I'm going to use it. | |
And then later, you can just take the music off, not put a copyright strike on my video that I made of all the thing. | |
I'm not talking about one specific one on Instagram that still show the thing. | |
They remind me of the same copyright strike that they could just take the music off every two months, and I'm like, I used the song that I picked on your... You let me use. | |
You hosted it. | |
You gave it to me, and now you're trying to punish me for using it, which is fucking bonkers. | |
And that's the notification I get instead of your message. | |
Probably. | |
Everyone, if you're gonna say hi to me, guess what? | |
I get the fucking UMG instead, and that managed to pop up constantly. | |
That's the thing. | |
The problem is happening, but it's from a different place. | |
What are we doing? | |
I mentioned in the Off-Brand when we were covering P. Diddy that I'm not a big fan of Universal Music Group, and there is another reason. | |
Yeah, and them kind of posturing over money with TikTok. | |
Yeah, it's an interesting situation. | |
And guess what? | |
The owner of Claire de Lune isn't... The dude who made it is not the one complaining. | |
No, he's very dead. | |
Yeah, this used to be very fucking different. | |
Most of my life, Fair Use, was completely fucking different. | |
It has changed dramatically in the last five years, and everybody's like, I understand if you don't want to be upset about this kind of stuff, because it doesn't make me feel good necessarily. | |
Well, you know what? | |
Jury's out. | |
I say that, and I don't necessarily mean it. | |
I'm glad that I know, but it doesn't feel good to feel like I am with a tinfoil hat screaming into the wilderness about this for a very long time, and now magically everyone cares. | |
I'm like, I'm good! | |
Go play now! | |
It's been right there! | |
Disney's been at it, y'all, since I was a kid. | |
We should have been watching the whole time. | |
And again, this is another fucking... Also, what he's talking about is liberal... To me, at this point, I don't think left or right, whatever, the neolib establishment will see a problem and be too little too late. | |
And this is another one. | |
The barn door's been open for quite some time on a lot of these problems, and he is assigning, like, this kind of orchestrated conspiracy when it's really just a bunch of fuck-ups that we gotta live with at best. | |
And we're not fixing anything! | |
Pretty much. | |
And we're moving way too slow to be able to deal with any of it in anywhere near enough time. | |
Yeah. | |
And do you know what else I didn't see on the EIP website's list of objectives? | |
I didn't see rig the 2020 election. | |
I didn't see that one either. | |
Just throwing that out there. | |
Now, Russell has some points to make about the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell. | |
With an event like the self-incendiary protest of Aaron Bushnell, the American service personnel member who set himself on fire, in particular in protest of events in Gaza, but I see it in a sense as a disjunct between even the military themselves and somewhat understandably given the poor conditions under which many active military service members live, let alone the 40,000 homeless vets in the United States. | |
I'm astonished that that event was able to be so successfully removed, scrubbed as it were, from social media. | |
Do you think that these interests, these various proxies that operate on behalf of the government, are able to censor, control and eliminate events like that? | |
Events that have the kind of symbolic power to sway a nation's interest, to even perhaps help the general public to awaken to Mass, if not disobedience, certainly loss of faith in, for example, this current administration. | |
Is it interesting how that event has been? | |
I'm speaking from personal experience. | |
We did a story on it on YouTube. | |
They went, this is adult content. | |
They slowed it right down. | |
And I've just noticed, it was in fact a member of our team here who runs our content, Gareth, who said, you can't find that image anywhere already. | |
And I know from personal experiences, like trying to get Freedom of Information Act requests, how the online spaces can be expensively managed. | |
It's expensive, but possible to almost completely eliminate information from the internet. | |
Do you think this is an example of that happening? | |
So, according to Gareth Roy and to Russell, you can't find information or the images of Aaron Bushnell self-immolating anywhere on the internet. | |
Now, I don't particularly recommend anyone Google it, but literally, if you just type his name into a Google image search, the self-immolation is the third result. | |
And without much effort at all, in other corners of the internet, you can find the video as well. | |
Again, do not recommend. | |
The leftist complaint about the news was that there were like the major like legacy media outlets were misrepresenting or not mentioning why he was doing it. | |
Like, that's the complaint that was happening, but it was very, like, the news was everywhere. | |
It wasn't censored. | |
That's insane. | |
Yeah. | |
YouTube apparently, according to Russell, slowed Russell's coverage of Aaron Bushnell right down, saying, this is adult content, which is interesting phrasing. | |
See, When you upload something to YouTube, there's a checkbox where you have to say, this is made for kids, or no, this is not made for kids. | |
Naturally, our show is not for children. | |
So I always click the no option. | |
But this leads me to believe that Russell is actually saying that his content is made for and suitable for children to be viewing it on YouTube. | |
Remember, he doesn't swear in any of the stuff that goes out on YouTube either for exactly this reason, and for advertising as well that he used to get. | |
And then YouTube flagged the Aaron Bushnell content of his saying, nope, this is definitely for adults, because of course it is, as is literally all of his other content. | |
I think he is uploading his content with a, yeah, this is fine for children! | |
No, no, because it changes the way that you can, like, Interact with it, like you can't put comments, like, I don't think that's... I think that he's saying that, like, he's conflating adult content with graphic content, is what I heard. | |
Maybe, maybe. | |
Because you would know, like, I've, uh, especially with, like, the PragerU stuff, um, I've tried to interact with, you know, like, I've tried to, um, use it like I would a normal YouTube video before, and it's like, if it's for... Yeah, yeah. | |
Kids, if it's like labeled for kids, then you can't... Oh, the PragerU kids ones, yeah. | |
Yeah, like it's very obvious, like on the actual video, like if you can interact with all the features, obviously they can limit their features, whatever. | |
Yeah, that's pretty easy to, like that's not a thing, but like, and also that wouldn't apply on Rumble, but the... No, no, no, on Rumble... I would assume that he's just conflating adult content with graphic content, because yeah, a lot of the videos were censored Rightfully so. | |
I'm stoked that I don't have to see the grisliest part of that event right away over and over on my feed. | |
I can make that choice. | |
Like on Instagram, I can make that choice. | |
And even then, the gnarliest parts aren't there, but you can find them, but they're not there. | |
They're not being fed to you through your algorithm. | |
And again, I know that my algorithm is very tailored. | |
But yeah, you would know, because it would have like a very, there's a very specific kind of like, constraint that YouTube puts on kids content, which like, that's really, yeah, I think he's just conflating adult with Because if he says graphic content the jig is up because he'll be like, oh yeah if you're flagged for graphic content that's why. | |
Adult content is a vague word to use to kind of feed into his narrative. | |
So he, in his featuring, in his discussing Aaron Bushnell, he didn't show any of the footage. | |
He didn't do anything I think that could necessarily be described as graphic, even in the thumbnail. | |
In the thumbnail or in the video? | |
I'm hoping that you are correct, because, you know, my big problem with YouTube and, you know, with kids especially, and there's a reason that my daughter will never be able to watch YouTube in my house until she is 18, because, or at least, you know, Yeah, because it's incredibly dangerous, and you do not know what the algorithm is going to throw at you, and there are so many malicious actors out there labeling risky things as for kids, and you really just don't know. | |
You do though, because you can see the way that it's set up for like, and it comes up under YouTube Kids, like there's a way to find out like how the videos are like specific, but obviously it's per, you know, like it's YouTube Kids is in kind of a separate track. | |
It's not a good system. | |
It's not a perfect system by any stretch. | |
But like, yeah, the interaction and the way that it's set up is different. | |
We'll put a pin in this for now, and I will come back to everyone next week with hopefully more of an answer. | |
I hope so, I hope so. | |
I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. But I will do my best to check. So the broader point | |
anyway here is that Russell is trampling over a dead man's legacy right now. | |
He is obfuscating and expanding the reasons that Aaron Bushnell self-immolated, acknowledging, yes, Gaza, before then explaining it away as a more general form of protest over the way service people and veterans are treated as a whole and blah blah blah. | |
Aaron Bushnell did this very specifically in protest of the government and American military supporting the genocide happening in Palestine. | |
It was very pointed, very deliberate, and most media outlets, certainly over here, will show his final comments just prior to the act should anyone wish to seek them out. | |
You know, he said free Palestine just before he died. | |
Oh, so many times. | |
Yeah. | |
Yes. | |
It's easy to find, it's easy, and I would recommend that you just find the words, If you want to watch the video, there's a lot of him just talking and it's, you know, there's plenty of... That's still tough to watch. | |
It is tough, but yeah, you don't have to watch all of it to get the pertinent information. | |
Exactly. | |
Even the Daily Mail, the most sensationalist website on the planet, didn't show the actual act. | |
The coverage that Russell mentioned that he did very much went the same line as what you're hearing now, but throwing in a bunch of Ukraine war skepticism, extreme obfuscation and conflation of the issue, and using that same video to sell supplements. | |
It was gross and is very much just kind of capitalizing on this, you know, what many people have described as a heroic act. | |
And I would have covered it last week, but honestly there isn't that much to say other than this is awful. | |
Russell's coverage of it is horrendous and there's no other way to put it really. | |
Yeah, I mean, I think mentioning it is still important as far as like... I kind of assumed that if he was going to talk about it, it would be... It's weird, though, for like a dude who is so into like Eastern spiritualism and monks and stuff, and the actions and choices of monks that are, you know, to be like, well, My ideal orientalized guy can do it, and I respect it a lot, about a war that, oh, we all agree. | |
Oh, so bad. | |
But this American military personnel person who doesn't look nearly as spiritual, like, oh, that's completely different. | |
Come on. | |
That's the other thing. | |
Self-immolation is a well-documented form of protest against atrocities. | |
Yeah, it's probably one of the most extreme forms out there. | |
Oh, for sure, yeah. | |
Yeah, it's incredibly gross to me that Russell then just used it to mostly talk about the Ukraine war. | |
I'm like, oh, okay, come on. | |
Yeah, that's nuts! | |
Protesting wars in general! | |
It's like, no, that's not what this was! | |
Oh, so he did the exact same thing. | |
He's actually worse, because whenever the mainstream media, if they were not addressing why Aaron Bushnell did what he did, That's an omission. | |
That's a lie by omission, but he was just straight up lying about it. | |
Cool, cool, cool. | |
Cool. | |
Tight. | |
Great job. | |
Rusty. | |
Great job. | |
Yeah, he never directly said, oh, this is why this was done, but it was, oh, protests over walls! | |
And then starts talking about Ukraine. | |
That's fucking underhanded. | |
Yeah, it's disgusting is what it is. | |
In my opinion. | |
Cheers, Russ. | |
Anyway, let's get to Mike Benz's response to this question from Russell. | |
I don't have any information about the Bushnell situation in particular, but that capacity absolutely not just exists, but it's capacity built by the US and British governments. | |
It's something they refer to as RRUs, Rapid Response Units. | |
These are a phalanx, an NGO swarm to be able to monitor emerging narratives On any number of sensitive policy issues, and in particular around national security and Ukraine matters. | |
In fact, the Department of Homeland Security here in the U.S., the very agency that partnered to censor the 2020 election and partnered with outside groups to censor the COVID-19 pandemic, came out in the Chuck Rassley House Oversight Committee PDFs that were disclosed around the time of the Disinformation Governance Board, if you remember the Nina Jankovic affair. | |
That the Department of Homeland Security had moved beyond just election misinformation and beyond simply, you know, public health misinformation, but actually into misinformation about Ukraine and about the war effort in Ukraine. | |
And so the fact that you had these government documents as early as 2021, which was before the conflict even broke out, right? | |
That conflict with Russia broke out in 2022. | |
But in 2021, the Department of Homeland Security was, you know, had internal files around basically working | |
with outside groups to stop people from undermining public faith and legitimacy in support for | |
Ukraine. | |
So we do have a rapid response unit in the UK to disinformation and misinformation. That | |
is true, because you know the saying, a lie can get halfway around the world before the | |
truth has even put its pants on. And so it is important to respond quickly to bullshit | |
on the internet depending on the context. | |
But the the big smoking gun here according to Mike Benz is ah They'd already mobilized in 2021 to be addressing misinformation around Ukraine before the war had even happened And that makes it a big conspiracy by the deep state or the blob let's Leave aside the fact that Russian state media propaganda sites like RT were already posting videos and articles to social media in the West propagating Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories. | |
Let's put even that obvious thing aside and address for a second how wars work. | |
See, Mike Benz apparently can't comprehend this, but wars aren't like a race where there's a starting gun that fires and every soldier has to get from wherever they currently are in their country to the assigned battleground. | |
Troops are moved prior to engaging in warfare, and by the 13th of November 2021, around 100,000 Russian troops were already at the border of Ukraine. | |
One might think it would already be necessary to address misinformation around the issue and potential oncoming war. | |
You know, I do think there's a little bit of a validity to their belief that people don't plan ahead. | |
I believe that to be true. | |
Like, oh, well, I don't plan ahead. | |
So nobody else does either? | |
That's kind of how it sounds. | |
Maybe, maybe. | |
In any way to at least entertain the idea and allow yourself to continue in your bad faith stance is like, well, I don't plan. | |
I show up and just kind of move some pieces around in busy work and make people think that I did a lot of work, but I actually just threw this shit together, so… everybody does that? | |
The telling on themselves a little bit? | |
To me, it's a little bit of projection. | |
In addition to the misinformation. | |
Does everybody not just yes and and grab whatever current news items they can think of and throw them at the wall? | |
No? | |
Is that not everyone? | |
Is that me? | |
Well, he does have a deeper well, I think, than most. | |
He feels a little Rumsfeldian, just from my memory. | |
That's not a backed-up research claim. | |
It's a vibe. | |
And I know that we're coming at somebody for vibes. | |
I want to acknowledge my vibe-based choice, but it's very like, you've got these kind of, | |
like he's got his talking points and buzzwords and people that he's got a deeper bench, I think, | |
than a lot of people we normally see on House of Lords. | |
Yeah, yeah, that is fair. | |
He does come prepared. | |
That is fair. | |
In a way. | |
In a way. | |
He comes prepared to talk. | |
For his job that he's doing. | |
Yes, yes, exactly. | |
So, next we have a little bit of rewriting of history from Mike Benz here. | |
Because if you remember, the 2019 impeachment of Trump was because they alleged that he was threatening to withhold military support. | |
Because at the time, you know, the CIA and the State Department and the Pentagon were backing the coup government in Ukraine to militarily reconquer the breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine who had declared themselves independent. | |
You know, this is kind of the precursor to the 2022 Russian invasion was the fact that The U.S. | |
was actually invading eastern Ukraine before Russia was. | |
The U.S.-backed Kiev forces had killed 15,000 ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine trying to take back the Donbass. | |
But the fact is, when President Trump was evaluating that military support, you had a Pentagon, CIA-led impeachment of the president simply for even thinking about it. | |
It was the Vindman brothers at the Pentagon level, and it was Eric C. Amorella at the CIA. | |
Um, you know, who are now all rotated into the Carnegie Endowment, which is the, uh, which is the exact NGO where Bill Burns led. | |
Bill Burns is the current CIA director. | |
So, you know, you have this, this, you know, CIA hotbed who wanted to make sure that domestic support and domestic dollars kept flowing for the war in Ukraine before there even was a war. | |
Show me where they said it! | |
Show me where they said it! | |
There was a lot of Russian propaganda in that clip. | |
Oh, that's actually the proof that's there? | |
Maybe a little bit. | |
So, I mean, yeah, the conflict had been ongoing since 2014, ya ding dong. | |
Anyway, so the 2019 Trump impeachment, according to this guy, was CIA-led because Trump wanted to withhold funding to Ukraine. | |
It was just that. | |
Nothing else. | |
No possible reason in addition to that. | |
To jog everyone's memory, Trump's first impeachment took place after a formal House inquiry found that he had solicited foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. | |
presidential election to help his re-election bid and had then obstructed the inquiry itself by telling his administration officials to ignore subpoenas for documents and testimony. | |
The inquiry reported that Trump withheld military aid and an invitation to the White House from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in order to influence Ukraine to announce an investigation into Trump's political opponent Joe Biden and to promote a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind interference in the 2016 presidential election. | |
That's what actually occurred. | |
Well, and the impeachment just didn't get it didn't pass the Senate. | |
No. | |
So it's not like it was thrown out like these new impeachment attempts that they're making on Joe Biden, which are hilarious. | |
Yes. | |
Yeah. | |
Yeah. | |
If they weren't so fucking expensive, using my goddamn money to do these goofy pantomimes, but like, And honestly, I feel like the impeachments weren't that much less of a goofy pantomime because they're so fucking ineffective because you can just wield your bipartisanship like Mitch McConnell. | |
Yeah, pretty much. | |
It's one of those things of like, oh, if this had had teeth, it would have been great. | |
But it didn't, so it wasn't. | |
Which one are you talking about? | |
The Trump impeachments. | |
It's like, if the partisanship wasn't a problem, and it was like, oh no no, we actually have all this evidence of this guy doing all this stuff, and everyone was like, huh, yeah, let's get the fuck out of here, because there is this evidence of this guy doing this stuff. | |
Like it couldn't pass the Senate. | |
Exactly. | |
Exactly. | |
So it was more that, like, it was defanged, because it had teeth, but could be defanged kind of arbitrarily and with partiality, right? | |
Yeah. | |
Yes. | |
Yeah, exactly. | |
Exactly. | |
Whereas, yeah, the current ones against Joe Biden are just... | |
Nonsensical. | |
Oh god, where do we live? | |
So we've got one final clip here and it's Mike Ben's leaving the show and I play this clip because firstly it demonstrates Russell's reverence for the guy and secondly because, well, it gets a little bit weird. | |
Thank you so much for joining us today. | |
I'd love to talk to you endlessly and in a way own you, but you should have your own podcast. | |
There's no doubt about it. | |
You should be doing your own show. | |
It's absolutely fantastic what you're doing. | |
And I'm privileged to get the benefit of your insights and eloquence. | |
Thank you, sir. | |
Russell, you are a singular voice. | |
The work you are doing is mission critical for anyone who loves freedom on planet Earth. | |
I continue to be very deeply inspired by everything you're doing, and I would love to talk again soon. | |
Let's text each other after this, because I've got some questions to ask you, as you might imagine. | |
Thanks, Mike. | |
Not sure how I'd feel about texting a guy who just said, I'd love to, in a way, own you, unless I was expecting a very kink-based relationship. | |
Uh, yeah, that, that, uh, that, that, a little strange, but I dare say this probably is not the last that we'll see of Mike Benz. | |
Russell seems to really like this guy. | |
Sounds smart. | |
White man in suit sounds smart. | |
And agree with me? | |
Party time. | |
Perfect. | |
Okay. | |
Man. | |
Man, oh man, oh man. | |
I'm great. | |
I'm SMH-ing. | |
I'm SMH emoji right now for our listeners and not viewers. | |
Yes, yes. | |
That's all I got. | |
I got SMH emoji. | |
Lauren is head in hand at this exact moment. | |
Yeah! | |
Yeah! | |
Interesting guy. | |
Interesting guy. | |
I look forward to seeing... | |
Yeah, yeah, right, right. | |
Man, they covered a lot of stuff. | |
The thing that, like, I wrote this down right off the bat, and Russell said this, it wasn't, I can't attribute it to this person. | |
I do think catching these pundits on the upswing, I don't know, I mean, I guess he has been kind of making the rounds, but I... | |
I'm glad to be aware, especially if he's getting the play that he's getting. | |
Anyway, the beginning, Russell said, move towards decentralized power. | |
It is such a fantasy to think that, I mean, I guess he means that there is a public Desire to move towards decentralized power. | |
And that's what he's talking about because power has never been more consolidated in the history of our species. | |
Like, it's not actually happening. | |
And if he wants any thinking that like his, his followers and listeners, they want decentralized power. | |
Wow, no, they don't. | |
They just think that they do because of the way that you framed it, sir. | |
It's not actually Like, he has this far-off notion that, like, he can just talk about, you know, his satellite ethnostates or, you know, whatever. | |
These, like, small pockets of people that sound a little post-apocalyptic to me, frankly, if that's how we're going to accomplish it. | |
Because there's a whole lot of people on this earth, so you need, like, a lot of organization to keep everybody happy, healthy, alive, and fed. | |
Yeah. | |
And we're also not doing that, which sucks. | |
He doesn't want that. | |
He wants to centralize power around him right now. | |
Yeah, pretty much. | |
If you want to decentralize, don't stay on YouTube. | |
Rumble can be your place. | |
Why are you on YouTube? | |
And even then, where do you draw the line? | |
Is Rumble getting too big? | |
Because Rumble's quite big now, you know? | |
Yeah. | |
Maybe you should decentralize further. | |
Set up your own website. | |
Set up your own InfoWars, you know? | |
Your own band top video. | |
Do that. | |
And when the hypothetical answer to our questions is no, why don't you want to do that? | |
If you build it, they'll come. | |
If you build it, they'll come. | |
Why not? | |
Why would you want to support? | |
He vilifies YouTube every 10 minutes. | |
Why would you participate? | |
If you believe in your convictions, why would you participate? | |
It's an excellent question. | |
It's an excellent question. | |
Sounding convenient! | |
As a disparity between these two concepts. | |
That's just me. | |
I'm a little extra about it. | |
Also, they're the only ones still talking about COVID. | |
They're the only ones still talking about COVID. | |
Which, like, that's also wrong. | |
I have a complaint about that as well. | |
Deaths have been... I don't know about numbers in the last maybe month, but COVID deaths, it was like 2,000 a week or something still here. | |
It's still raging. | |
Yeah, crazy, huh? | |
There's a whole other conspiracy that... Or at least, again, The left knows where the conspiracy is coming from and it's not going to attribute, if they're responsible, they're not going to attribute this kind of like deep state machinations, they know that it's corporate greed and power and money and that's not like COVID, like responsible COVID journalism does not pay the bills, it does not, like that's that's not the cash cow that they're looking for. | |
True, yeah. | |
Yeah, that is the unfortunate thing, you know, because you're absolutely right. | |
It is a problem that only the right are really talking about COVID, you know, because all of their coverage of it is bullshit. | |
Yeah, it fills the space, you know. | |
Nature abhors a vacuum, and that's exactly what they're doing. | |
They're filling it in with their own, like, they're the only ones still talking about it, and they get that much more of that market share. | |
Which fucking sucks. | |
It's the same thing with the disparity in application of terms of service from social media conglomos, right? | |
Because the application of the terms of service strikes against your content, because it is so Disproportionate and irregularly applied that gives enough space just that alone gives enough space for people like Russell for pundits for you know conservative kind of like mouthpieces for them to | |
Attribute a like that's that's all they need to know is that well it's not fair and it's unevenly applied so there must they can they can apply whatever nefarious intent they want to because there's a black box that you're talking to and it happens like it's and also anyone can claim to be shadow banned. | |
Yeah. | |
Maybe your new video sucks, dog. | |
Maybe it's the wrong color. | |
Maybe you posted at the wrong time. | |
Maybe you didn't start it the right way. | |
There's a million reasons. | |
And I've done almost all of them, if not all of them, for your post to fucking fail. | |
That's the masterclass I could teach, is how to do it badly. | |
I know all about that, and I'm not going to attribute that to anyone else but myself. | |
I did kind of think that about frame games complaints. | |
I'm like, oh, maybe just your content sucked. | |
Maybe it was that. | |
People don't like you, bye! | |
That's it! | |
Yeah, yeah. | |
Or maybe you're great and you're underappreciated because you're, I don't know, like you're Picture is weird and people don't like it, or your intro is very off-putting. | |
And maybe that's why I haven't learned a lot of skills on YouTube. | |
Specifically, I don't... You're unappreciated in your time, like a great artist. | |
That's what's happening. | |
Or you've got a weird intro! | |
Or you've got a- Maybe! | |
Maybe! | |
I mean, he never showed his face, he was anonymous and his logo was a green hoodie. | |
I don't know, there's not much that's appealing about that to me. | |
He didn't keep up with the trend. | |
Yeah, YouTube left, or wherever, left him behind, and he got cranky about it, and now we have this! | |
You didn't keep up with what people want to watch on YouTube. | |
Maybe a couple of Louboutin shoe hauls and you would have been back up to the top. | |
You don't know, sir. | |
Try it. | |
Some Red Bottoms could have taken you right back to the top where you wanted to be. | |
You don't know. | |
Maybe. | |
I will say I can't quite decide which I think is worse, like Frame Game or the current iteration of Mike Ben's. | |
Because the current iteration definitely, you know, there's a lot more success, there's a lot more viewers compared to Frame Game. | |
I don't know that, picking one better than the other, I think they're I don't think we have to. | |
Equally terrible. | |
Equally terrible. | |
Yeah. | |
Yeah. | |
Maybe. | |
Maybe. | |
He adapted though. | |
That's the thing. | |
He adapted to what's going to get him back in the mix. | |
That's exactly what he did. | |
Because yeah, the green hoodie and the not showing your face turns out The algorithms also as a person who makes art that both has faces on it and then doesn't what I can tell you is that human faces and the algorithm are a match made in heaven and if you make something regardless of how good or bad or whatever it is. | |
Like, he didn't adapt. | |
Gotta be in his bonnet. | |
And now he has adapted to the algorithm. | |
So, bully for you in that instance. | |
You crack the code again, dog. | |
And you're talking to Dan Bongino. | |
Like, okay. | |
Tight. | |
Cool. | |
That's what he's doing. | |
Dan Bongino and Tucker Carlson. | |
He is trying to get on Rogan as well. | |
Which, I mean, yeah. | |
Fair enough. | |
I bet. | |
I bet. | |
Yeah, um, yeah, I don't know. | |
It'll be interesting to see this guy's trajectory. | |
Maybe, yeah, we're seeing a rising star here. | |
Maybe he'll flame out and disappear. | |
I don't know. | |
The photo suppression thing. | |
Yeah. | |
Listeners, let me know if you're in the same place. | |
I need commiseration at this point. | |
I'm already so fucking sick to death of hearing it. | |
I know that we're starting on E with a lot of this election stuff, but Jesus H. Christ. | |
It's so tired. | |
If you are unsure of how secure votes are, I implore you to work in a polling place once, just the once is fine. | |
You'll get it. | |
And there's something that like it didn't come up in the CIA thing, which I'm kind of glad that I can bring it up here. | |
I'm probably going to say this a lot and harping on this. | |
You and I talked about the Ernie Secret, the photographer that was from Memphis that was in the civil rights movement, kind of like the FBI, CIA. | |
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
The Martin Luther King photographer. | |
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
And there was a lot of interviews with people that were with the movement, contemporaries of him, that talked about something that gets lost. | |
And sorry, I know this is a tangent, but it's like fucking super important, and this is a place I get to talk on the internet. | |
I've got to say it! | |
There was a move to push black people to be able to be registered to vote once it was legal, and it could be recognized even though it was incredibly fucking dangerous on a neighborhood level. | |
PBS has done a lot of coverage. | |
I don't need to explain post reconstruction Jim Crow to 1964. | |
I'm not the one to explain it to you. | |
But something that I have not heard a lot of is registering to vote. | |
And regardless of how you feel about voting, honestly, I am more receptive than ever to people that are Uncomfortable with their options in this upcoming election. | |
I understand it. | |
I hear you. | |
I get it. | |
I think that the undecided, uncommitted movement, like we did our version here in Illinois, For the primary, I think it's a much more responsible way to try to get the point across, because you're not just not voting, you are making it known. | |
You are actually being counted in a way, and Decoding Fox News made a really great point about it. | |
I'm sure other people have said it too, but she said that This is, like, you know exactly where the county is, where the city is, who the person is that is protesting, instead of just, like, protest votes just not existing, and so they're not protest votes, you just aren't being counted, whereas a specifically, like, an uncommitted or, you know, like, not voting for Joe Biden in the primary, people know exactly where, which, I mean, it's a dumbling sword if we are also fucking CIA skeptical like me, | |
It's a weird feeling, but at the same time, it actually is a protest vote. | |
You are being counted as this is a movement that is specific, right? | |
So I'm not telling you what to do other than register to vote. | |
Please register to vote. | |
Yeah. | |
Because, and this is a point that was made, I think there was like one or two episodes with specific action in Arkansas, the reaction in the civil rights movement in the 60s to not just register to vote to be able to be counted, but it gets you in the jury pool. | |
So going to serve for jury duty, also what a fucking like disservice that Sitcoms for the last fuckin' 40, 50 years have been like, ugh, jury duty, Liz Lebed is gonna dress like Princess Leia, which, it was funny, it's fine, but like, bitching about jury duty, when you should just go, like, if no black people are registered to vote, no black people will be on juries. | |
You know who shows up on juries? | |
The people that are registered to vote. | |
So if you want any kind of, like, semblance of equality or any representation in the legal system, Unfortunately, I mean, that's how this works is like registering to vote is what gets you in the jury pool and then you can actually participate in the justice system in any way. | |
I'm sure they're going to kick me out immediately if I show up for pretty much whatever case. | |
I know that you can be struck from a jury and there's no guarantees that you're actually going to be on a jury ever, but you have to fucking try. | |
And so don't Like, bitch, or try to get out of jury duty if you can, and register to vote, because it's not just voting. | |
It is also our legal system and our representation in court for people, like, that, like, I know if I go to trial, and it's very specific, but, like, I know no one's gonna look like me. | |
If they do, I'll be fucking shocked. | |
Yeah, yeah. | |
Think about the people that are wielding their votes and their voter registration to the fullest extent, and understand that that's part of our job as citizens, and to get Black people registered to vote. | |
vote. That was another factor that we don't really talk about, you know, in this kind of, | |
you know, Black History Month kind of like lip service time, I think, for minorities. | |
Yeah yeah and and same applies to this country obviously it's an election year here as well um you know and and fucking worldwide you know I've been most elections in in in one year in world history or whatever it was um most people affected by elections I don't know if it was actually most elections in in it might be it probably is I don't know. | |
It's a big one but just be counted. | |
It's certainly it's it's it's the big the biggest one that will probably ever happen in our lifetime that's that's probably Right. | |
Well, and I feel like I owe my, like, I have to use the, like, it's safe for me. | |
I'm not undocumented. | |
I, you know, like, I don't, I don't, I'm not disenfranchised. | |
I'm not actively disenfranchised from the process. | |
And I feel like I owe it to everyone who is to stand up and be counted. | |
And, and there's, there's, there are, There's a lot of different steps that maybe we don't necessarily think about, because a protest, like just an absence isn't a protest. | |
But I also, you know, like, y'all have to make your own choices. | |
But I'm just saying, yeah, there's more stuff going on. | |
I'd never heard that argument really. | |
No, it makes sense. | |
If someone's not counted, then it's counted as apathy rather than a protest. | |
It's counted as, I don't care either way. | |
So if you do want to be counted as a protest vote, then yeah, you do need to be registered for that. | |
Yeah, I agree with you. | |
I think in both of our countries, yours more than mine, it's a lesser of two evils situation that is really difficult to quantify in terms of harm reduction and that kind of thing. | |
It's like, well, who the fuck do I pick out of this? | |
And again, it's Yeah, it's a difficult choice. | |
It's a difficult choice that we are going to face. | |
Well, and it's the Democrats. | |
I mean, you know, you have to kind of acknowledge the fact that, like, this is the Democrats. | |
On paper, I don't even know. | |
I'm not sure where I would put this thought, but, like, it's their election to lose, and they're trying really hard to lose it. | |
And that's tough to reckon with. | |
Yeah, yeah. | |
And so far, Keir Starmer of the Labour Party is not trying hard enough to win an election. | |
That's true! | |
That came across among my feet, too! | |
At least it's fucked up everywhere. | |
Great. | |
Yeah, great! | |
Wonderful. | |
Okay, more of the same. | |
Let's do it, everybody. | |
Alright, if you want to support us in what we do, head to patreon.com slash onbrand. | |
We'd love to have you. | |
We'd be super duper grateful. | |
If you want to get in touch, drop us an email. | |
It's theonbrandpod at gmail.com. | |
We'd love to hear from you. | |
We'll get back to you at some point. | |
If you're on Facebook, there's a cool Facebook group called On Brand Awakening Wonders, similar to Human Beings there. | |
If you prefer anonymous browsing, perhaps, then go to Reddit, r slash onbrand underscore pod, and there's some fun discussions there. | |
People talking about English comedians that I couldn't name. | |
James Acaster is the one that I named, but there were some others named in the... | |
Because our lovely, gracious, wonderful guests did the most effective engagement trolling I've ever seen in my entire life by saying there were no good British comedians. | |
Have you all noticed I was like- English, English, English. | |
English. | |
Well, anyway, have you all noticed that I was like, Monty Python? | |
And then I was like, y'all are trippin'. | |
This is hilarious. | |
Wow. | |
Wow, guys. | |
I mean, you know, sketch comedy and stand up to, you know, different arenas. | |
But other people mentioned, you know, Stuart Lee, Bill Bailey, that kind of thing. | |
And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
I think that whole fun exchange was a bunch of characters having a time. | |
It was a hoot. | |
It was the most, again, the most effective engagement trolling I've ever seen. | |
Come by honestly is even better. | |
Yes, yeah, yeah, absolutely. | |
And if you want to find us on socials, it's the Ombra and Pod, everywhere except for where it isn't. | |
Look for the logo, everybody! | |
And personal socials, I'm at alworthofficial and Lauren is at may.by.lauren. | |
How many dots have I said? | |
B. May.by.lauren. | |
It doesn't get less confusing, I'm sorry. | |
And we also, we have magnets. | |
I don't know if there's a wild magnet about to... | |
Yeah, we sell actual gold and I ship it to your leaf to your house. | |
Um, yeah, that and I will actually be adding more magnets to the shop by the time this comes out. | |
And they'll be out in force. | |
And I have, oh, I have volumes. | |
And effectively gigantic amount of new shrines this we got a Freddie Mercury I want to break free video awesome this is a less well I mostly was really happy about how the top of this bad boy came out I've been doing these little collage moments that are like. | |
Kind of buck wild. | |
It's like nice jewelry that's old and trash and parts of stuff. | |
Anyway, some shells, antiques, just kind of glued into a mess. | |
So yeah, that's going to be March 24th that I'm going to have. | |
And they're all one of a kind. | |
So snooze you lose, kind of. | |
But yeah, so they're going to be the new drop is going to be on March 24th. | |
And then hopefully I'll be able to do more regular ones after that. | |
If that works out, that's what I'm doing. | |
So hit the link in the description for a magnet, and then have a little look around Lauren's shop and see what else you can find, especially around March 24th. | |
Yes! | |
All right, everybody! | |
Patrons, we will see you for some Off-Brand circa Sunday, and the rest of you, we'll see you next week for whatever we have to deal with then. | |
The next thing, the next bad thing. | |
We hope you had fun, we love you very much, and see you next week. | |
Bye! | |
Thank you, take care, bye! | |
Have a good weekend, bye! |