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Dec. 19, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:23:41
How the State Department Shapes Global Narratives
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Thank you.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
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Hello there, you awakening wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
My guest today makes me want to become a producer.
Like, I want to step into the shadows and make the show bring your receipts with Mike Benz.
You might have seen Mike Benz on Joe Rogan.
You might have seen him on Tucker Carlson.
You could have seen him in a variety of places.
We've been talking to him for a couple of years, and it's Mike Benz who makes me believe in independent media.
He makes me believe that platforms like Rumble and X can and already have changed the world.
That doesn't mean they're perfect and that they're not subject to their own biases and their own challenges, but they're certainly not the same challenges and biases that impact organizations like Google, Alphabet, YouTube and Meta, Facebook.
They're essentially part of the media machine.
Mike Benz helps you to understand how those relationships operate and work and what the significance are of so many news stories and how they point to the convergence of various interests around power.
In fact, the phrase that I came up with that I'm pretty pleased with in this conversation was Mike Benz helps you to put together a mosaic and with that mosaic you can see the silhouette of power because the blob, the term that he generally uses, is a sort of an amorphous plastic mass that Today we talk about Russia Today,
where it's banned and why it's banned, big tech power, and a story that Mike's just broken about Reuters receiving $300 million of Biden administration money in one way or another, in ways that are quite diffuse.
It's not like a sort of flat up sort of bribery thing, but even his explanation of that gives you an indication, excuse me, how long have I had this cough, by the way, of how power works.
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He's really up there with your Bhattacharias and your Marty Makary's.
And the people that have emerged, but he's more, I suppose, in the deep state corruption space.
He even tells one story about a board that's created to bring down disparage and dispute, corrupt journalistic reporting, and everyone on the board has got secondary and conflicted interests.
I mean, it's an amazing conversation.
It's an amazing interview.
And if you can supplement this kind of information with Christian insights, I believe you are arming yourself Putting on that helmet of salvation.
Holding that sword of truth and that shield of righteousness.
No, it's breastplate of righteousness.
If you have a theological undergirding to accompany this deep education provided by the likes of Mike Benz, you are going to be fully equipped to face a dangerous world.
That's why I do Break Bread.
My most recent conversation was with Brandon Lake and it's an excellent conversation and I suggest you watch that.
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Hey, okay then, let's get into this brilliant conversation where I even cover drones.
I cover the sort of new administration and we cover in incredible depth the ongoing relationships between legacy media, state interests and corporate state interests that amalgamate together to be the blob.
It's a brilliant Mike Benz conversation.
You're going to love it.
Here's Mike Benz.
Mike Benz, it's an extraordinary privilege to be joined by you on Stay Free today.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
You've been up all night because of the Reuters story, which I now know is that in various ways, the Biden administration donated 300 million to Reuters.
Then Reuters won journalistic accolades for their reporting on particular on Elon Musk.
And I suppose what you're suggesting is, is it may ask this question, is this the way that people in our space would assume that Bill Gates making all of those donations to various media organizations, including the BBC, is to one way or another, directly or indirectly, generate favorable reporting. is to one way or another, directly or indirectly, generate Thank you.
Well, we don't know that to be the case in this particular case, but there's a very bad look here and a very bad moral hazard, which is that these are government contracts.
Reuters is a large organization.
It's one of the two main newswire agencies that provide on-the-ground reporting or stories that the wider media universe sources its stories from.
So state, local, and national news around the world will source their stories from Reuters, and Reuters has been around forever.
It's got a very strange relationship with the U.S. State Department and CIA, having been busted several times as working together to filter false news stories to advance U.S. interests on that front.
But in this case, you have...
A Biden administration who systematically targeted all of Elon Musk's businesses.
So there were 11 different federal government agencies that targeted them.
There's the Justice Department, the Department of Transportation, the SEC, the FTC, the FCC, and on and on.
Many people saw this as a political hit job on Elon Musk because he was backing Donald Trump for president and because he had vocally criticized the Biden administration.
They were at odds.
He was not invited to electric car conferences at the White House, despite having the industry leader.
There were conflicts between him and the UAW, the United Auto Workers Union, which is a major Biden backer.
And so Biden actually, if folks recall, about a year ago or two years ago, spoke from the podium at the White House calling for government agencies to look into Elon Musk.
So 11 different government agencies filed actions to take those businesses down, and Reuters, which is a major media conglomerate, We did a systematic investigation of all of Elon Musk's companies at the same time these government agencies were investigating those companies and doing investigative journalism hit pieces on Elon Musk.
And you can obviously see how that helps those government agencies.
It helps them find evidence to bring up in court.
It helps them win the battle of public opinion so that these are publicly favorable actions to bring against Elon Musk because it's reported by Reuters.
Now, we don't know that to be the case that there is any sort of pay to play here.
What I'm suggesting is that The news coverage of Reuters, as well as many other media companies, when they have other lines of business getting government contracts, it's obviously in their interest to do favors for those government agencies in order to secure those contracts.
And there are many examples of that happening with those hard smoking guns.
The reason I dug this up and put this out is because I think it warrants the investigation to see whether something like that may have happened here.
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As is so often the case, the connections are curiously diffuse to the point where you can't irrefutably say the relationship between the Biden administration and Reuters means when it comes to certain subjects, you 100% cannot trust Reuters on these matters you 100% cannot trust Reuters on these matters because it's likely that through various biases and necessary financial relationships, their reporting is coloured to favour the agenda of the powerful or amplify the agenda of the powerful.
their reporting In fact, forgive me dragging this immediately back to myself, but it makes me think about on the day after two British media organisations working together over a series of years, published allegations attributed to anonymised published allegations attributed to anonymised sources.
The head of the regulatory and governmental body in charge of social media wrote to X and Rumble and YouTube and said demonetise Russell Brand.
And you can't prove a direct relationship between the media groups, CRISP, Logically AI, these peculiar sort of NGO organisations that take government contracts and appear to work on behalf of the government on a variety of subjects.
It's very difficult to find all of the pieces in the smoking guns.
But what you can see is there's just a convergence of interests and a preferred direction of travel.
We were reporting in our live show, Mike, yesterday that...
On your story about the various Burisma board members and it just eventually a kind of mosaic appears in which the silhouette of globalist power you refer to and many others, I know you don't take credit for that term, the blob becomes identifiable.
And like the same with the Bill Gates making donations to the WHO or the BBC or George Soros' various business interests that may or not be beneficial when there's a coup or a war in Ukraine.
It's not like you can't just go, aha, but you can go, hmm.
It's more of a hmm than an aha, isn't it?
But it's a hell of a hmm.
Right.
No, exactly that.
And so, you know, for example, it's a very common thing for prosecutors to cite news stories as evidence to the judges, because prosecutors are, they have an investigative arm, but it's a very limited capacity.
They're not a full-blown news agency.
Just again, for the fullness of facts here, most of these $300 million in government contracts from the Biden administration to Reuters were not to Reuters, the news media LLC or their specific news side.
Reuters, like many media conglomerates, has a variety of services and solutions that they provide beyond just the news because Their role in the news has given them proprietary access to various things.
It allows them to do network intelligence or data management services or investigative services that can assist law enforcement.
So, for example, while they do receive government contracts from places like the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which I should note is sort of a hotbed for State Department and CIA coordination with outside media, Reuters does have Millions of dollars in grants for that.
The lion's share of them are for places like something called Thomson Reuters Special Services, which is for network intelligence and data management in order to help the defense, the intelligence, and law enforcement agencies sift through news and be able to have a hub and a portal To be able to use all of Reuters' proprietary data and resources.
And so the investigative news media arm is a much smaller slice of that.
But the analogy that I draw here is this is exactly what we saw with Facebook.
So Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Weaponization Subcommittee, subpoenaed Facebook in March of this year For something called the Facebook files, where we got the internal emails between Mark Zuckerberg and Nick Clegg, who is the, you know, former UK Labor Party fellow who became the head of public policy at Facebook.
Public policy is where censorship policies are You know, coordinated and set at Facebook.
And Nick Clegg tells Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook needs to think creatively about ways to be receptive to the Biden administration's demands for censoring COVID claims, COVID origins, COVID vaccine claims, because Mark Zuckerberg said, do we really have to do this?
And Nick Clegg tells him we need to think creatively about ways to be receptive to their demands for censorship.
Because we have bigger fish to fry on multiple policy fronts.
And at the time, Facebook was highly reliant on the Biden State Department to defend Facebook against the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, as well as on the Biden administration to fend off threats to Facebook on their data monopolies, on their advertising revenues, on the regulatory stakes.
And so...
So we know that at the very, very highest levels of Facebook, they made an adjustment to their core algorithm for distribution of news because of side products That impacted or side issues that impacted Facebook's business model much more than simply,
you know, censoring claims about COVID. And the question is whether there's a similar conflict of interest or similar conversations that happened at Reuters in the sense that Reuters They didn't just do these stories on Elon Musk and all of the businesses that were simultaneously being targeted by Reuters' government customers, their clients.
They won the Pulitzer Prize this year for their work exposing Elon Musk's misconduct at these different businesses, allegedly, right?
This is what they report in their news series.
And so, you know, this was high impact in investigative reporting that tilts the mind in ways, direct or indirect, of the judges, of the juries, of public opinion.
And this is coming on the heels, I should note, of just two weeks ago, an absolutely astounding scandal that broke around USAID's funding of an organization called the OCCRP.
I don't know if you or the audience are familiar with this, but can I hop into this?
Yeah.
I think it's connected.
Okay.
So it's a long acronym, OCCRP, but what it stands for is the Corruption Reporting Project.
Basically, this is a consortium of 200 investigative journalists with 50 different media organizations and 70 different media partners.
They have done some of the most high-impact investigative news scandal reporting over the past several years.
They published the Panama Papers as well as many others.
They've gotten proprietary access to hacked documents somehow to do these stories.
Now, it came out two weeks ago that they receive 50% of their funding on the sly from USAID and the State Department, and that the State Department has a veto right over the senior and that the State Department has a veto right over the senior staff of the Corruption
Now, this corruption reporting project was started in 2008 by the State Department in Bosnia as a pool of U.S. taxpayer funds to write hit pieces about political opponents In the newly sovereign Balkan countries that the US was working to fold into the Western political orbit.
And so you had these oligarchs, you had these power factions that needed to be discredited.
And so the US government paid investigative journalists.
Now this is something that I just broke Last night on stream, but I haven't actually published it.
That was to a private audience, but I'd like to mention it here.
There's a deeper level to this scandal, which I think connects to this Reuters, Elon Musk, Biden administration scandal, which is that if you go to USA.gov and you look at their pages, their grant pages for the corruption reporting project they were funding, one of those pages shows $20 million given To these investigative reporters in Central and Eastern Europe.
And it talks about the highlights of the achievements of the program.
And the highlights include that the result of this reporting generated $4.5 billion in seized assets and fines 538 policy changes to local governments and local civil society actions.
21 sackings or firings of government officials, including a president and a prime minister, And 456 arrests or indictments of targets of the investigative reporting.
Okay?
Now this is on USAID.gov.
And they are bragging about the return on investment for funding outside journalists to write hit pieces.
$20 million netted them $4.5 billion in seized assets.
$20 million netted them 21 government officials being fired, including a full-on regime change, firing a president and a prime minister.
And $20 million purchased 456 political enemies of the State Department being arrested or indicted by local prosecutors.
So this is the US government paying on the sly Independent journalists, this is the largest consortium in the world of independent journalists all working, of investigative journalists all working together, in order deliberately to write hit pieces that will help the State Department by getting their political opponents arrested and bankrupted.
We can't keep streaming this on YouTube because YouTube are part of the blob.
YouTube, Google, Meta, Facebook, these are part of the conglomeration of organisations that create a 360 sphere of augmented reality.
We all live in augmented reality.
It's like Pokemon Go in here.
So click that link in the description.
Join us over on Rumble right now for the rest of this fantastic conversation with the ever brilliant and effervescent Mike Benz.
It's terrifying.
Does this connect to the Trusted News Initiative?
And while you were saying this, Mike, I was thinking, had the Democrats won this election, we'd be in some serious, serious trouble.
The fact that they didn't, given the speculative likelihood that these type of contracts that you're describing and these types of relationship are not unique, and therefore that influence, whether it's in the Facebook example and the Reuters example, whether it's in the Facebook example and the Reuters example, because even though these examples are particular and pertain to specific time frames, it's likely that they are just visible nodes of a network of relationships that amount to an almost 360 it's likely that they
It's astonishing that independent media has been able to overcome that, even if you were to take just the one issue of the recent US election and, And I shudder to think of what would happen if there hadn't been the intervention of the Maga Maha election.
I don't know.
Two, if you are surprised that the election went the way that it did, given the indications that there is control over information in so many of these sanctioned news spaces.
Yeah, the Trusted News Initiative, I mean, even from its name, it's about creating this delineation between...
News that's real news you can trust and news that is fake news that should not be regarded as part of the news industry or part of news distribution.
Because if something is formally designated as not really being news, then you're not censoring the news when you censor that outlet.
And this has been the MO of institutions like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, is to create rating systems of how much you can trust these various news agencies so that AI algorithms can filter them out on social media feeds, so that advertiser Programmatic ad dollars have a filter to automatically block advertisements from going to low trust news sites.
And then you look at what's actually happening with These news rating agencies like NewsGuard and Global Disinformation Index, and turns out they all have government contracts or work with the government.
NewsGuard got a $750,000 Pentagon contract.
Global Disinformation Index is tied into the The State Department Global Engagement Center.
NewsGuard was also a part of this White House Information Integrity Working Group that was partnered with 26 different Biden administration, federal government agencies.
And on the board of NewsGuard, determining who the news is, was Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the CIA, the former head of the NSA, and the former four-star general.
Tom Ridge, the former head of DHS. Rick Stengel, the former head of the censorship arm of the State Department, the Global Engagement Center, and Anders Vogt Rasmussen, the head of NATO. So you had the head of NATO, the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, a four-star general, the head of DHS, and the head of the State Department Censorship Center, determining the credibility of outside news agencies.
I mean, we used to call this Operation Mockingbird.
Now we call it, you know, trusted news.
No wonder that they have to insert trusted news initiative, information integrity, and news guard into their names to mask at the outset the plainly nefarious and manipulative intent of these organizations.
Mike, a minute ago you were going to share your screen, so I'm guessing you want to do that, because the next thing I wanted to talk about is, like, I've got a few follow-up questions, but if you were going to share your screen, I'd love to see that.
Oh, I don't think I hit the button on that, but if there's something you'd like me to bring up, I can bring it up.
Well, all right, I'll just move on with my next question, right?
Because when he was saying that, I was thinking about the, you know, utilizing news reporting subsequently for judicial matters.
It reminded me of the New York Times, a pair of New York Times stories.
One, there was a convenient moment, and I think we discussed it before, where they revealed the CIA bases in Ukraine.
So it was sort of plainly a sanctioned moment and indicated a relationship between the CIA and the New York Times.
And then separately, but similarly, when Jack Teixeira was arrested, the New York Times were kind of present at his arrest.
And I sort of wonder what that indicates in terms of relationship between sort of law enforcement and Judiciary and old school media.
Right.
I believe we saw the same thing when Rudy Giuliani had his home raided by the FBI. I believe it was his case.
It may have been another one.
Apologies if there's drilling going on here.
But when the FBI raided his home at 6 a.m., there was a CNN camera set present.
So who got the tip-off?
Who at the FBI told CNN to be there?
But the fact is we know that this happened in the Hunter Biden laptop censorship scandal because the FBI was the entity in possession of the Hunter Biden laptop and the FBI was monitoring The journalists at the New York Post as they were developing and on the eve of publishing that story.
And then the Aspen Institute exercise is conducted just two weeks before the story breaks with people from the FBI present.
And suddenly news organizations, social media company, trust and safety sensor squads, Think Tank, bigwigs, and the intelligence state,
the FBI, the domestic intelligence arm of the U.S. government, are all sitting together in a tabletop exercise, playing out the best way that they can all work together to censor an upcoming story about Hunter Biden and leaked documents from electronics that he had possession over.
And even pertaining to a scandal of a gas company that Hunter Biden was involved in.
So, you know, you don't really need to squint too hard to say, unless you're dealing with a sort of Nostradamus of epic proportions, frankly, if they had that capability, they would outperform the Nancy Pelosi stock tracker.
But somehow they knew the exact story that only the FBI had access to.
They are not allowed.
You can't the FBI can't just leak documents on, you know, on its investigations to report.
I mean, this is the sort of thing that we put people in jail for when Edward Snowden does it or when it's alleged that someone like Julian Assange does it.
But when our own FBI does it and it advances the Justice Department's goal, well, the Justice Department is not going to arrest their own FBI for helping them out.
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The recent murder of General Igor Kirillov in Russia appears to suggest, again, ulterior relationships between NATO countries and their deep state operatives and Ukraine.
Similarly, it's being reported by legacy media as a kind of Ukrainian victory, an embarrassment for Putin.
But even when I watch Russia Today's reporting, Mike, I was thinking of you because they talk about George Soros.
They talk about Burisma.
And it's difficult not to think that the reason that Russia Today has been banned from trusted news initiative organizations like Google, YouTube, they're one of the members of that group, that it's not in order to protect you from disinformation, but it's in order to prevent you from gaining access to information that might make you but it's in order to prevent you from gaining access to information that might make you lose trust in the media organizations that are Government.
Generally speaking, it seems really that there's a strong bifurcation, dichotomy and separation between government interests and the interests of the people that they're purported to represent.
Perhaps that's the bottom line.
They're not our government.
They're someone else's government.
That's the problem that's being exposed and revealed again and again and again.
What are your thoughts on that assassination?
Well, I don't know too much the particulars of the assassination to be able to really weigh in with, you know, an opinion I'm confident in.
But on the Russia Today point, it's really an extraordinary story, the story of the U.S. government's relationship with Russia today, because it's The argument we're making against Russia today is the argument that we labeled the Soviet Union an autocracy for doing during the Cold War,
saying that there was an iron curtain that had descended over Central and Eastern Europe because media from other countries in the West was not allowed.
And now we are drawing a silicone curtain here in the West to prevent Outside media from penetrating our information space.
What we said for the entirety of the 20th century, and we said this with a little elbow grease in it on human rights violation grounds, essentially we were alleging that these were humanitarian crimes and countries should be sanctioned unless they allow in state media from foreign countries, i.e.
the United States.
I have been very fascinated by the Russia Today I'm going to call it a scandal, frankly.
I think that the diplomatic blowback to the U.S. on what they're doing right now about Russia today has not even begun to be felt because the story is still in process.
And I think by the time it's over, it will be in the history books.
I remember very vividly reading the CIA assessment of Russian interference on social media after the 2016 election.
In January 2017, just two weeks before Trump took office, the CIA published an intelligence assessment that would come to be the basis of the entire intelligence community that Trump's 2016 election was not really legitimate because Russia had interfered on social media.
And before they moved to the bots and trolls argument, there was this like 16, 17 page CIA memo that was published that started this whole thing.
You know, big screaming headline, Russian interference, a lot of sort of table setting about how it's in Russia's interest to manipulate U.S. social media, but nothing actually in the body of the memo that showed that Russia had interfered.
There was no suggestion of bots or trolls or anything like that at the beginning.
All they had was like a two-page appendix affixed at the very end of it, which showed the increase in reach of Russia Today and Sputnik on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, as opposed to their historical relevance and reach,
and as opposed to places like BBC and NPR. And they argued at first that That RT and Sputnik being able to have social media accounts that were gaining in popularity was effectively Russian state interference in U.S. elections because they were gaining a following.
People were retweeting them, including members of the public and members of the political class.
And so Russian state media was tilting the election.
Now, but that's all public facing.
That's not some covert intelligence operation, or else you have to label the BBC. If you are doing influence operations on behalf of the British Crown, you need to register under Farah here in the US. In fact, Nina Jankovic The disinformation governance boards are that sort of fell out in disgrace.
What is she doing now?
She's now at the Center for Information Resilience, which is a British censorship influence shop that seeks to alter U.S. policies on social media governance.
And because that's what it seeks to do, and the UK is a foreign country, She needed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
So if you're going to argue that Russia is doing an influence operation, well then, so is the CBC in Canada.
So is the BBC in the UK. So is every state broadcaster.
But the fact is, they don't care about those because they parrot what the CIA says.
They parrot what the State Department says.
They have a transatlantic alliance.
I mean, it's really a case of Being a sore loser in the information war and trying to change the rules of the game in order to box your opponent out from being able to show up to the match, you know, I sort of think of it,
there was a famous example in the 1990s when I was growing up of Tonya Harding kneecapping, you know, her political, I'm sorry, her figure skating adversary ahead of the Olympics by hiring a Basically a hitman to take out her kneecaps because she didn't want to lose to...
Was it Nancy Kerrigan or whoever the main figure was?
But here you have a figure skating match between U.S. media and Russian media.
And they're competing for hearts and minds in an open information system.
You're not even talking about troll farms and covert influence.
This is just the, they have a Twitter account just like everybody else.
And He who gets retweeted the most wins the influence war, so to speak.
And this we call the rules of the road for the liberal rules-based international order for the entirety of the Cold War in the first 15 years of the 21st century.
In fact, you would get sanctioned if you didn't allow that.
The Biden administration sanctioned Iran for having its government censor news institutions in Iran.
The Trump administration censored North Korea, I'm sorry, sanctioned North Korea for censoring journalists.
We do this everywhere.
But we are now, I mean, in theory, what we're doing to RT should get the United States Kicked off of the United States dollar if we were held up to the standard that we hold on other countries.
But this is very obviously a case of if you can't beat them, hire someone to beat them up.
And that way you don't need to compete on game day.
And they have really weaponized this.
Scott Ritter had his home raided by the FBI, as well as several other journalists, when the State Department and the FBI teamed up to argue that anyone who has overt links to Russia today needs to be investigated for potential when the State Department and the FBI teamed up to argue that anyone who has And that justifies an FBI seizure of their cell phones and home electronics.
And that's terrifying.
something.
Yeah, particularly if the links are overt, that in a way, through its own candour and explicitness, means that it's something, as you say, that's the participation in the open information world.
We're all doing this, we participate.
And it feels to me, Mike, that what we're witnessing is...
As these media spaces evolve, it's being gradually and in fact too slowly appreciated and learned by institutions that were accustomed to using centralised media resources, that those centralised media resources, more rapidly than imagined, are becoming Redundant and eviscerated.
And therefore, in order to compete, as you say, they have to use the Tanya Harding kneecap method rather than the open competition in public.
And in fact, now that you've made that claim, you can almost see it continually.
In the pandemic, instead of a public information campaign along the lines of Hey, we've got this medication that we're developing.
You can take it if you want to.
It's probably beneficial if you've got comorbidities and you're particularly vulnerable to respiratory conditions.
There's no data on how effective it is with children and we might need to be careful about unforeseen side effects.
Instead of that, they shamed people that didn't take it.
And that's, I suppose, why there are so many people that consider that there is much more to that story than meets the eye and is able to magnetise and attract all sorts of other ideas.
And it is then difficult to discern what stories that are connected to that are true because what happened publicly and in plain sight was so dark...
That you can't rule out really anything.
Now I can see that you're looking for some facts just by watching your eye movement.
So hit us up, Mike.
Yeah, and apologies if there's some drilling, if you hear in my building.
It's actually, it's not reaching us.
We're not hearing that audio.
We're not hearing that.
Okay.
Well, so if...
I think your producer mentioned that I could share something on screen.
I wanted to make...
An additional point on the Russia today and what you had said about how You know, they were publishing things that you just don't hear on Western media or that it almost seems as if you're not allowed to hear on Western media.
And so there's an obvious Western interest in preventing Westerners from being able to hear true factual information.
Because if you can simply box out anyone who's not in the club from publishing it, then you don't have to worry about anyone On the inside of your country knowing it.
And so I wanted to give an example here.
Let me just pull this open.
I just did a...
Do you see this share screen right here?
Okay.
So what I've pulled up here is the USAID disinformation primer, a 92-page Censorship blueprint document that was published by the Biden administration's USAID in February 2021, just one month into Biden's term in office.
Now, understand that USAID funds billions of dollars of support to media institutions to create a, as you said before, a 360 surround sound of media in countries all over the world.
To parrot the State Department's preferred narratives circulating in that region to support a particular political candidate.
We mentioned earlier the scandal of the OCCRP, the Corruption Reporting Project, that was paid by USAID to write hit pieces to get USAID's and the State Department's enemies arrested in those countries.
And you'll see here, in the USAID, this is the formal US government program, and the funder of billions of dollars to outside media organizations.
You'll see here, in red underlined and yellow highlight, USAID, the sponsor of the media organizations, instructs the media organizations to, quote, agree policies on strategic silence.
So, To all collude and work together to agree together as different and competing media organizations that they will agree on strategic silence to not publish information and to collectively boycott and blacklist certain scandals or certain news narratives And this is coming as top-down
instruction from their government sponsors.
form a firewall about news stories so that nothing can penetrate the information space, form this, you know, this silicon curtain.
And so you can see if the media organizations all do what the government says and agree on strategic silence.
And then a place like Russia Today, which is not sponsored by USAID or is not reliant on the U.S. government for access or favors or contracts like Reuters is, that they might publish a scandal about Joe that they might publish a scandal about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden.
George Soros, you name it.
And so they need to be boxed out of the entire information environment.
That way, these policies on strategic silence actually work.
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Yes, I see.
You have consensus among the sanctioned news organisations to have an agreed upon silence, which is another word for censorship, or not censorship, like it's controlled information.
It's unbelievable.
And then censorship is the other component.
If anyone is reporting on it, censor them.
Because of new media models, someone like you or me, particularly if we work in conjunction with the legitimacy of your reporting and then additional reach that can be provided by people that...
Might otherwise, in an old celebrity sphere, have been just posting about sneakers, but now can be posting about sneaky activity of government agencies.
Suddenly, you've got a new set of relationships and a new challenge.
And to deal with that, you've got to get into Tonya Harding territory.
You've got to start hobbling your opponents.
You've got to start saying, this one's a racist, this one's a rapist, this one's that.
That whole country is a war criminal.
But the problem is, is because there are so many interconnected nodes now, you can have, well, hold on, how did that war start?
And when did it really start?
And why does Hunter Biden's pardon go back to 2014?
And why is the new Moderna and Pfizer protections that Biden's just offered go to 2029?
Is that to line up with the 2014 maiden coup in Ukraine and the end of Trump's term, the final term, in 29?
It's like we can...
What I realised around, I think when I was hit by it was the Nord Stream pipeline, is that they couldn't do it fast enough.
That's what I felt.
And also that what would be an instinct of the naturally sceptical would now be legitimised through authentic reporting.
So someone like me who sees that Nord Stream pipeline and thinks, why would Russia blow up their own economic pipeline that's beneficial to them?
But, you know, that can just be 360'd out using the template that you just showed us.
Now you can just have, oh, well, look, you know, Seymour Hoffman's reporting this.
And then you can talk to Jocko Willink and he goes, yeah, that'd be no problem for a Navy SEAL.
All of a sudden, like, it's absolutely completely unmanageable so quickly that, yeah, now you need to be able to do things like, like you get this mad stories, like in Australia, they want to censor X, but outside of Australia.
It's creating so many bizarre dynamics, isn't it?
It is, and there are these power block consortiums that are working together on it, but on that point of This new constellation, the freedom that you have on X, the freedom that you have on Rumble, the total erosion of trust in legacy media has allowed the breakthrough of stories that are very much against,
that they would like to form a policy of strategic silence to block out, but unfortunately, there's not enough of them now to control that.
It made me think actually of another receipt that I think may be useful to the audience if I could share on screen, which, do you see this here?
Yeah, that's up.
Yeah, take us through it, Mike.
So this is from that same USAID February 2021 disinformation, countering disinformation blueprint for, you know, how to, and it's not countering it by counter speech, it's countering it by censorship.
It's an incredible document because one of the things that it says in here is that we need to censor unfiltered alternative news because unfiltered alternative news frequently produces narratives that impact USAID programming.
Meaning USAID programming is funding news media in the country to support a political candidate, to support a law being passed in that country's parliament.
To support the approval of a military base, you name it.
And the effectiveness of that USAID programming is being undermined because real people organically talking on social media are disagreeing with USAID-funded media institutions.
And they go through some of the reasons why.
Let's see if I'm trying to zoom here so it's a little bit unwieldy.
Okay.
But Here again is from the US government.
It says, while information on alternative systems, such as conspiracy theories, may seem farceal or preposterous to an outsider, to users, these spaces enable them to collaborate and validate their own claims And interpretations of the world that differ from mainstream sources.
Now, mind you, they're saying this in the context of why we need a formal disinformation program, a whole-of-society program funded by USAID, partnered with private sector companies, NGOs, universities, and media organizations in order to stop this from happening.
And they're saying the problem is, is unfiltered news allows people To collaborate and validate their own claims and interpretations of the world that differ from mainstream sources.
With this, individuals contribute to their own research, to the larger discussion, collectively reviewing and validating each other to create a populist expertise that justifies, shapes, and supports their alternative beliefs.
So what USAID is putting squarely in the target For them to digitally assassinate is the very construct that we just talked about, that there is an ecosystem that allows us to do our own research, to collaborate, to contribute to a larger discussion, to collectively review each other's work, and to validate each other's work, and to create a subject matter expertise.
That we can then use to justify, shape, and support broader supporting political beliefs.
That is the very soul of what USAID, which I should note, is one of the most notorious CIA funding conduits and which has been busted As a CIA front dozens of times in its history, and that is supposed to be a humanitarian agency to support international economic development.
This is what they are saying, that the very existence of what you just laid out is what needs to be nuked from the internet because it's undermining the State Department's control.
You can see how organically your next thought when attempting to undertake such a project is what would legitimise that level of censure.
And you have to start pointing to child pornography, information that leads to violence.
So it's clear that they've done that algebra in advance and then they have to find ways of making connections online.
Of that nature.
I remember when I learned, first of all, and it's just an obvious thing, really, that my audience were ahead of me, is when I think about, it was pre-pandemic, I think, Mike, there was a story about a Facebook whistleblower and how this Facebook whistleblower had come out against Facebook and was saying, you know, Facebook, I work at Facebook and I'm seeing how dangerous it is, you know, and I was like, yeah, finally, someone's standing up to Facebook.
Then I saw the comments to the content we made.
Everyone's going, this person is being used to legitimize censorship.
This is a government plot.
And sure enough, as the story unfolded, the legitimacy of that whistleblower became more and more questionable.
And indeed, the audience, in the way you said, populist expertise.
You know, it's interesting because you can see that that What you were citing there is written to condemn it.
They're creating, they're validating, but validating means make valid, and verifying, and that means make true, and expertise, that means a deep understanding, and populist means en masse, but they're trying to use all these things pejoratively to prevent their opponent, which is everyone and everything, overwhelming their centralised corrupt sovereignty.
That's exactly it.
Because doctrinally, the State Department, which USAID serves, USAID capacity builds the institutions that help the State Department's foreign policy goal.
And they've doctrinally labeled populism an attack on democracy.
Well, USAID is a democracy promotion organization.
So if something is an attack on democracy, they promote democracy by neutralizing that attack.
So it's when they Put populist expertise as an italicized internal jargon term.
They are saying this is a bad guy, subject matter expert.
They are not allowed to become subject matter experts in their own way of thinking, because that allows them to build out an ecosystem of political thought that may take them in a direction we don't want our country to go in, or we don't want a foreign country to go in.
And so it's a war on the ability to even have expertise in a field that, if you had expertise in it, you would know what they were up to, or you would know what's wrong with their policies.
It's populist.
Everything Bobby Kennedy published in the Wuhan cover-up, or the real Anthony Fauci, is populist expertise in the public health corruption space.
Everything that I publish about the censorship industry, these are all true receipts.
They are all validated.
They come from these organizations themselves, but it is a populist expertise.
And so you can justify killing the expertise and knowledge by saying that it's being used by populists and we have a doctrinal mission to take out populism, to stamp out populism.
And so They're trying to get to the very soul of the distribution of information in order to create that blockade.
It's intuition plus investigation plus receipts is their worst nightmare because it exposes something as kind of almost beyond satire as...
They've created a board to oppose corruption, and the members of that board all belong to organisations that are corrupting the information and ensuring that only corrupt investigations are able to take place.
It's beyond satire.
It's beyond Kubrick.
It's beyond Kafka.
It's beyond Huxley.
It's beyond Orwell.
It's like, Oh, no, well, if that was a chapter in 1984, you would question it.
And then more popularly and colloquially, we see it, Mike, in, like, when, during the pandemic, people were like, oh, are you a doctor?
You're not an expert.
Oh, you know, like, that became popular discourse.
And that was the kind of, we'd seen that snobbery before.
With the kind of...
Kind of like class hatred in my country.
All sorts of forms of bigotry and expression of that.
But in this instance, it's being used to oppose the available aggregation of information led by thought leaders, aggregated through online technology, which becomes a sort of an insurmountable obstacle for them.
They have to somehow create a new discourse that undermines that.
And the new discourse is...
Well, you can't just have populist expertise.
You can't have that.
Oh, do your own research.
And then you see people go out a plethora of hired mouths parroting those points.
That's when it gets normalized across talk shows and late night shows.
And you see it again and again.
And even I myself have heard, like, when I see it...
I start to go, oh yeah, maybe that's not true.
Oh, didn't I hear that that person was accused of this though?
And didn't I read that again and again and again?
And I remember that actually, mate, from old school media.
Like when it was newspapers, like print media, newspaper, analogue media was the dominant form of media, right?
I was already in them.
And I'd like read a story about me and go, that's not true.
That's not what happened.
I didn't do that.
Then I'd turn the page and it'd be about someone else.
And I'd go, whoa, what an arsehole.
I'm like, hold on a minute.
You know it's not true because it's happened to you.
But it's so powerful and seductive.
You see, the way that it goes to work is ingenious in a way.
And what's so crazy, I mean, you know, I've had so many hippies about me and some of them are way out there.
Some of them are just sort of like slight mistakes.
And, you know, there have been moments where, you know, as hardened as I am, they'll publish something that I know did not happen or I know I did not say or something or some event I know I was not at.
And I'll see it.
I'll see it in the newspaper.
I'll see it in the New York Times and I'll say, oh, that didn't happen.
But it's right here in writing.
Did I do that?
And it is this 1984 type thing where because it is this imprimatur of authoritativeness that I think Americans, Brits, people all over the world have sort of Lazily trusted because it was collectively trusted.
Thank God Because of shows like yours and information access on X and Rumble, I think one of the most important changes, in the same way that in the 1990s when people used to click on banner ads for scams and pop-ups, and then just over the course of just seeing it so many times and being fooled so many times, you just ignore it.
And then they come up with a new scam, and then you adapt to that.
I think there has been this collective evolution of public inoculation against Against lazily trusting mainstream media and also institutions at large that are connected to this larger blob apparatus, including in the biomedical, public health, and biosecurity spaces.
You mentioned doctors and that phenomenon of saying, you can't opine on this, you're not a doctor.
But then I think what millions, tens of millions of people have woken up to is, well, the doctors are under threat of losing their medical licenses.
For not recommending the thing that we're questioning.
So they are forced to agree on policies of strategic silence, as our own US government agencies insist media companies do.
So there's what used to be a compelling argument about you don't have the credential, you didn't go to school for this, and then you Once there's enough collective consciousness that the only way to graduate from that school is to agree on strategic silence to not talk about those topics,
then you realize really the only way, unless you are a brave whistleblower from the inside, is to be an outsider.
And thank God we now have a much freer internet to be able to, you know, have the outsiders begin to exert enough of a voice that they can influence the course of events on the inside.
And people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, you know, being the head of NIH now, and Bobby Kennedy at HHS and potentially Kash Patel at FBI, you see these, you know, outside flamethrowers now becoming Not just on the inside, but potentially running those government agencies.
So this is a real true test of whether reform is really possible.
Yeah, it really is.
It's exciting.
And when I started seeing people that I've had on podcasts heading up the NIH, the FDA, and Kash Patel, as you say, the FBI, not that I've had him on, but Bobby at the HHS, I was like, is this actually...
If they can make this not good, then man, they're powerful.
Because, you know, and by they, I mean the media, and then you start seeing some weird assassination stuff going on.
And I, yeah, I really wonder how that's going to...
Play out.
Because my understanding of power is that it's mutable, plastic, and able to accommodate that.
And it was you that taught me the phrase, when they say democracy, they don't mean the electoral process of representing the will of the people.
They mean a set of institutions that will be guarded and protected and that they ultimately control, whether that's Ukrainian democracy or American or British or whatever.
And now I... I'm fascinated as to what could happen with people that are just outspoken and radicals.
Like Bobby Kennedy with what he wrote in the Fauci book, being the head of the HHA. I just can't see how something like that can happen this quickly.
It's sort of staggering, isn't it, Mike?
It is, but it's very, very exciting, in particular because of the strength of the outside coalition.
Because a lot of people felt the same way when Trump was elected president in 2016. This outsider who was calling for these totally Seismic reforms to the U.S. government being made the head of the U.S. government.
Someone calling for a completely different relationship with the U.S. military's operations in Iraq and Syria being made the commander in chief.
And we saw how that was stymied through FBI special prosecutors, through impeachment trials, through betrayals of the traditional base of support in Congress.
And so we're going to see this play out at every agency.
We're going to see the careers at the FBI and HHS and NIH. We're going to see attempts to do ethics probes, potential criminal investigations.
We're going to see attempts to bribe or extort the support base that these heads of agencies have, both inside the agencies and on the outside of it.
Like, we're seeing this right now.
You know, we have a...
In the US, there is a Republican incoming president, a Republican-controlled Senate, a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and a Republican Supreme Court majority.
And yet, Kash Patel may not get appointed.
Bobby Kennedy may not get appointed.
Matt Gaetz already had to drop out.
And the reason is, is because there were enough swing people in the middle of the Republican Party on the blob international side who are more financially and politically aligned with Democrats on certain issues.
That they can tank the actions of the executive branch.
For example, there's six to nine Republican senators who have sided with the Democrats on the Matt Gaetz issue.
They may side with the Democrats on the Pete Hegseth issue at DOD. They may decide if Pete Hegseth goes rogue Or John Ratcliffe at CIA goes rogue or Tulsi goes rogue.
The Senate could initiate impeachment inquiries on the basis of scandalous investigative reporting that may or may not be sponsored.
By aspects of the U.S. government.
So there's going to need to be an unbelievable watchdog eye within the White House Office of Management and Budget, within Doge, and from folks on the outside in order to constantly monitor the dirty tricks that are going to be popping up left, right, and center.
But it is...
I think the most exciting time I've ever been alive.
Yeah, you're the one...
It sounds like you believe in reincarnation, just there as an aside.
To my knowledge.
To my knowledge.
To my knowledge, I can recall in this weird, never-ending, eternal, fractal spiral of realities that we're living within, with colliding networks of apparent reality.
Mate, I wanted to ask you, you're like, by the way, the one person who I'd like to see Mike Benz in there somewhere.
You would think, to the point we made earlier, like the mosaic that can be formed that creates a silhouette of this ghostly blob, you would think that if there's one person that they would want to discredit and take down, and when you...
Talk about these centralised, these centralised Republicans, you might say, or these international Republicans that might align with the Democrats against Hegs-Eff or Moeley.
The one you'd think they'd really want to take out would be Bobby Kennedy, given the size and scale of his potential portfolio there at HHS. And given what you're saying, what you're saying is that a likely component would be the journalistic power...
Of those agencies and organisations and the sort of relationships that exist there, the relationships with big tech.
And in a way, what's been created through this sort of diffuse systemic corruption and all these sets of relationships that sort of appear and disappear symbiotically in sort of new forms, like this sort of protean plasma of corruption, which, yeah, blob is that in one syllable, isn't it?
In the end, the only way that was ever going to be opposed was someone like Trump, because the left can't do a version of that.
Let me give you the examples.
It tries Bernie Sanders, a kind of anti-big finance, out-of-the-occupy-moment type of political figure.
He's sucked back in.
Bobby Kennedy emerges as a sort of a potential dream candidate for the Democrat party.
Tulsi.
Like, it just won't have it.
That side won't have it.
And the Republicans, they'll try their best to belch out a Nikki Haley or a Jeb Bush.
You know, but, like, the only sort of crack...
It's going to be some sort of tycoon, populist, all-American, individualist.
By process of elimination, it's like Donald Trump.
That's it.
It's like the one man who has the cojones, the durability.
Who else has endured even a fragment of what he has when it comes to reputational attack, judicial stuff?
I have.
Like one part in the millionth.
And it destroys you.
It tears into your family life.
It's like a nightmare.
It's expensive.
It's exhausting.
Any of your friends that work in areas that make their money steal from that, they've got their faces in the trough, you can forget them, guys.
They're gone.
Because now, in order to support you, they've got to go...
Oh, hmm, well, was it going to be my mortgage or that dude?
Ta-da!
They sort of have to, and then, so that they're not confronted with what they're doing, they have to sort of go, yeah, because actually, thinking about it, yeah, I believe it.
You know, even people that know you.
Like, so that guy is just like...
It just sort of stands, faces it, just faces it.
It's like unbelievable.
It's unbelievable.
It's mythical.
I don't...
Yeah, it's mythical.
It's, you know, I don't know if there's some Austin Powers mojo thing that he...
You have it or he should sell it.
You know, I don't know if that's that new Trump fragrance thing with the...
Jill Biden.
But no, it really is an incredible time to be alive, and we have a true test now.
If you totally stack the deck and get good people in there, you have support from the outside, you have the popular will, is even that enough to take it on and make a dent in it?
The betting markets are now open.
Trump Musk could be the perfect fragrance to capture this essence.
Before we go, what's going on with the drones, Mike?
I don't know.
I've seen a lot of things I don't agree with.
I don't know exactly what I do agree with.
Generally speaking, anytime I see drone or UFO or UAP activity, I immediately think it is a military base.
In this case, I've seen evidence that there are There's a naval base or air force bases in the region, close to where a lot of this has been going off in New Jersey.
And generally speaking, when there are these types of sightings, it's usually an early stage sighting.
Military R&D, research and development project for a new way that the drones can move, a new technique, a new acceleration system or anti-radar system.
And so the It's classified because it's early stage military research.
We don't want foreign countries to know that we have this military technique that may be coming online.
And so we need to classify it and shield That drone activity from being known to foreign countries, which means we need to block our own domestic populace from knowing about it, because if we know about it and we talk about it, then every Russian who reads U.S. news, every Chinese official who reads U.S. news or reads a U.S. news report on it knows it.
And so the military has to censor You know, everything they do in the aerospace field that's early stage technology from Americans in order to stop the people that it might be used against from knowing about it.
And so, you know, I frequently refer to this 2014 documentary called Mirage Men, which goes over just tons of examples of The U.S. Air Force bases and NSA counterintelligence officers going around and telling people,
civilians, U.S. civilians, that the drone or plane activity happening on local Air Force, who live near Air Force bases, That they were actually aliens, including examples where the NSA broke into people's homes and tampered with their computer just to make them believe that what they saw were aliens in order to stop news stories about the nature of the parts that were found.
And so, seeing how hush-hush government officials have been the sort of ominous statements by Trump on this about the government.
You know, I've received these briefings from the FBI and CIA on this.
The government knows what they are.
They should just tell the public.
I think that that's generally the case because I think psyoping people to believe that something is coming from an Iranian mothership or space aliens is generally a bad idea to lie to the public.
They lose trust.
That seems to have been the course of history for at least the last five years.
Mike Benz, thanks for coming on, man.
Thanks for bringing the receipts.
Thank you for bringing the laughs and thank you for explaining such complicated things so beautifully.
I was watching you on the show yesterday's show.
It was clipped up.
I think you were talking to the long-haired Canadian lawyer guy.
He's on Rumble as well.
Yeah, Beaver Fry, yeah.
Viva Fry, yeah, I love Viva Fry, actually.
And I just was like, when I was commenting, I was like, how's Mike Benz remembering this even?
How are you even remembering it?
Well, thank you, Mike Benz, for an illuminating and brilliant conversation.
This is our last show until next year.
We will be streaming 10-15 minute special articles up on Rumble every single day.
But...
We will be back with live stream shows in January.
Please stay connected with us till then.
Get your Rumble Premium subscription ready because next year we are going to be bringing you a whole new show with a whole new flavour.
Indeed, have a look at this trailer that shows you the new depth and breadth of content we'll be bringing you next year.
You're going to love it.
Then insert a trailer that's got bits of break bread in it.
I guess...
We'll discuss who cuts this in the production meeting.
Bits of Break Bread, bits of Mar-a-Lago, bits of the shooting range, bits of the out-and-about meeting people, okay?
That's a trailer.
And then put 2025 on it.
Let's do that.
So Massey, when you see this, get back to me about this.
Okay, then we see that trailer and we're back.
I read in this book called The Sacred of Fame by Murcia Eliard and in this he explains how mankind's original condition was one of recognizing the sacred, making offerings sacred, the act of Eden, the act of making love, the act of birth and death.
I think the most exciting time I've ever been alive.
To my knowledge.
To my knowledge, I can recall in this weird, never-ending, eternal, fractal spiral of reality.
And so, but this is a relationship, it's a journey.
I'm still getting to know my wife every single day.
Falling more and more in love.
And it's the same thing with your relationship with God.
Brandon just said he's falling more and more in love with his wife every day, and I feel the same way that I'm falling more and more in love with Laura.
You're a brilliant wife.
Lovely to meet you, Brandon.
I don't know if you can really change yourself, can't you?
But you can't change us.
Holy Spirit.
Holy Spirit.
We're gonna jump in the ocean.
Grace, it's cold.
Ready?
Why are you not getting in?
- Ah, I've got it in the morning, Ralph. - Some people go, "West Bair's marsh, "sages he normally makes anyway." In your name, you, Lord Jesus Christ, firstborn and mother of the dead, if it's your will, Lord, give Edward the strength to stop drinking and change his life and may be born again.
Interesting that this whole thing is kind of unfolded the way it did.
I'm going to take it as a sign from God to stop drinking.
Well, that was a surprise.
What a beautiful service, what a beautiful dress.
You look so amazing.
Congratulations, Annalie.
Thank you for coming.
Congratulations, Henry.
For the love of God, arrest real games.
Just like the sort of thing I would say.
For the love of God.
It's actually a good title.
Make a note of that.
I believe there's an all-you-can-eat cookie competition.
Good.
- Good.
Nice work.
Mar-a-Lago!
I've been here before then.
It's nice here, isn't it?
Russell Brand is here.
I knew because there were Secret Service here.
I'm very grateful to be in a double act with Mel Gibson all of a sudden.
Come here, you soppy sausage.
Stick to delivering the presents.
Okay, Russell.
Picking up poop on the street to protect the people and their feet.
We're all broken deep inside.
Pick up the poop and abandon your pride.
Thank you very much for supporting us all the way through 2024. What an amazing and incredible year it's been.
How challenging, how ridiculous, how beautiful.
But there's been some incredible highlights.
There's been some wonderful moments.
We will see you next year.
Not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
Until then, happy Christmas, happy new year, and we'll see you in 2025 for more of the different.
Until then, if you can, stay free.
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