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Dec. 12, 2024 - Viva & Barnes

01:46:15

Burisma & Beyond! Down the Deep State Rabbit Hole with Mike Benz! Viva Frei Live!

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Time	Text
	This is twice in one week now.
	I'm at the local studio with another amazing guest and this one.
	I've been boning up on podcasts about the deep state, about the censorship regime.
	It's been amazing.
	You've seen him most recently on Rogan, but there are a slew of podcasts on the internet that are amazing to listen to and might black pill you or leave you with a bit of a white pill.
	Before we get started, we are going to be live on all platforms.
	I'm not going to be checking the chat or checking super chats, rumble rants or any of that.
	I have a way to get to them afterwards, but this is going to be an in-person discussion with minimal distraction.
	I have my phone just in case my wife needs to reach me.
	I'm joking, but I've got my phone.
	But we'll be not interacting with the chat as we do this because we've got Mike Benz in the studio.
	It's going well right now.
	So, we briefly met for the first time.
	Everyone, I know how old he is.
	I've asked that question before we got going.
	I said, can we talk about early life, childhood, to understand how you got to where you are?
	Mike, I will not dive too deep down the childhood rabbit hole, but it's interesting to understand how people became who they are today.
	Born and raised, you said, in a suburb of Philly.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Does this thing, does this recliner go back?
	Should I just, like, full shrink it?
	Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, went to school at Penn, went to law school at UCLA, went to New York to be a corporate lawyer for about seven, eight years, joined the Trump administration, and started my foundation after that.
	Okay, very, very cool.
	Well, the foundation is what?
	Before I forget, but we'll get into that as well.
	The foundation for Freedom Online.
	A suburb of Philly, what does that mean?
	I've never...
	I don't think I've driven through Philly.
	I'm picturing either Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, West Philadelphia, or suburbs as sort of...
	Yeah, there's an area called the Main Line.
	And it's one of the many...
	Sort of like New York has, or like LA has, or like DC has.
	There's a bunch of suburbs around the main metropolitan area.
	It's about 20 minutes outside.
	Okay. And as a child defiant, or a normal childhood, trouble...
	Troubled kid?
	Troublemaker, I should say, not a troubled kid.
	Yeah, no, I've always had obstinate defiance syndrome.
	That's always sort of been the, I think from a very young age, I've had that.
	And, you know, it probably is the reason, I mean, it is the reason I ended up being a lawyer, I suppose.
	I was, you know, I would get in trouble with my teachers a lot.
	And, you know, I didn't initially want to be a lawyer.
	Initially wanted to do psychology stuff, but I thought the whole field was BS and I was frequently at war with my teachers in college.
	Did you get told often as a kid you're going to be a good lawyer when you get older?
	No, I didn't want to be a lawyer because I felt I was so naturally argumentative.
	I didn't want to be professionally argumentative because then there's no reprieve from battle.
	Fate kind of has a funny sense of humor that way.
	But yeah, no, actually, I think it takes a certain deliberate defiance in the modern world to actually be able to think clearly.
	I think a lot of people are feeling this way about food now for some reason, which is like people are sensing that if you just go on autopilot about food, I'm not even...
	Super deep into this, but it's just by analogy.
	You know, if you just eat the processed foods, if you just drink, you know, if you just go on autopilot, you can end up, you know, being sick from what's normally served.
	And I think that that's especially true in the information environment.
	You do need to, I think, walk through life with a certain set of they live sunglasses on to really see the world for what it is.
	And when I said, like, when you're a kid, if they said you'd make a good lawyer, I was argumentative as a kid.
	My kid is now argumentative with me, and I understand now why my teachers were saying, you'll make a good lawyer one day.
	But then you get in that ecosystem and you realize it's not a life for, it's a life for potentially somebody with ODD, but not for someone with independence who doesn't want to be held on a leash.
	What type of law did you practice?
	So, specifically because of that, not wanting to argue all day, which is sort of the litigation track, I was a corporate lawyer, which is mergers and acquisitions, finance, hedge funds, private equity, corporate governance, VC stuff.
	There's the whole universe of helping companies merge with other companies or take over other ones or secure investments.
	But I knew right away it was not what I wanted to do, but I sort of powered through it.
	I think it did actually come back.
	I've been thinking about this a lot lately, actually, how I ended up here.
	And I have actually thought that the weird time of doing something that I knew was not what I was put on earth to do with corporate law probably ended up serving pretty well.
	It's almost like the curse became a little bit of a gift because your job as a corporate lawyer is to...
	You're like a professional dirty tricks artist with...
	Diffusing the dirty tricks, bombs, and contracts that the other opposing counsel is trying to put in there and planting them yourself.
	And you're arguing over the most tedious, inane things all day.
	There's a 150, 175-page purchase agreement.
	And it's got all the terms for company A acquires company B. And you're trying to slide into the reps and warranties, all these little...
	Fake definitions so that it doesn't really mean what you would think it would mean if you were being slightly lazy.
	So if they just accept it for what it is, you end up getting a very valuable provision in there that can be enforced by court later.
	And it turned out that's basically the entire way that the censorship industry has oriented itself, through these little kind of linguistic tricks, these definitions that don't mean what you think they mean.
	And just getting away with it, getting away with it, getting away with it without someone just tunneling in and going through the contract language and pointing out all the BS.
	It's interesting.
	You may not know, but I was a practicing lawyer for 13 years.
	Total, but active for 10 years.
	I had the same life experience.
	Day in and day out.
	I don't know if you hated it as much as I hated it.
	I was litigation.
	If I'm doing this in 10 years, I'm going to be either unhappy or dead.
	But that being said, you do your time, you learn the tricks.
	When I heard you describing this, I forget to whom now, where you're saying you have to sit there and nitpick out the dirty tricks.
	Some people say, well, if you're a dirty lawyer, you put them in.
	But if you're a clean lawyer, you're the one who's got to sniff them out.
	And you spend day in and day out trying to sniff them out.
	Things that can be interpreted one way or the other, depending on how you want to do it.
	And when I'm listening to you talk about the censorship industrial complex, it's exactly how it goes, where one day it's interpreted one day to favor what they want, and then the next day to penalize those who they don't like.
	You do eight years.
	How does it end?
	Do you say, I'm done and going into it?
	I joined the Trump administration.
	I'd wanted to join initially in 2016.
	But it just wasn't really the right time in life.
	So you plug away another four years and then you get in in 2020.
	Yeah, well, I wanted to leave college my first week.
	I feel like a lot of my way in life has been a pain tolerance test, so to speak.
	Where you do something, even though you know it's not where you're supposed to be, or it's not what you want to do, but because you have to kind of put in the time.
	And, you know, I think that was the way of law.
	Okay, and the foundation, I mean, we're going to talk about that just a bit, and then we're going to get into, you know, what you're doing on a day in and day out.
	What the foundation is, free speech online is sort of what your purpose is in life.
	Now, what does the foundation do on a day-to-day?
	Well, we do investigative research.
	We produce comprehensive reports.
	Our job is to basically try to inform the American people about threats to free speech online and provide the kind of tapestry to inform and educate so that people from all stripes can have an open-eyed perspective about how it really works.
	I know from a couple of interviews, you know, you pick sort of the 2014 starting point for the massive online censorship I don't know what the internet was like pre-2014.
	I mean, it was developed, but why is that the important starting date for what you've identified as this government global regime of internet censorship?
	Well, because it's the moment that the unalloyed good of free speech diplomacy became a mixed bag.
	And what I mean by that is the Internet was always a tool from its military origins into its passage off to the National Science Foundation and the World Wide Web.
	There was always a statecraft aspect of the Internet.
	And in particular, in the early 90s, the State Department, the DOD, the intelligence community became fixed on the idea that free speech diplomacy would be a way to help.
	U.S.-backed assets win elections, help them develop their paramilitary capacity, their popularity, help win the hearts and minds soft power influence war.
	I've talked about this many times before, but even something as simple as Google.
	Google was this DARPA grant that Larry Page and Sergey Brin got while they were at Stanford.
	It was a joint CIA-NSA program.
	Everyone can look this up.
	Do the long version.
	You could read Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine.
	If you want the short version, you can look up the Quartz article about Google's origins lying in CIA NSA program contracts.
	And that was for something called the Massive Digital Data Systems Program, whose goal was to track how...
	Birds of a feather flock together online so that the CIA and NSA would have the ability to create a political radar system based on Web 1.0 of the static websites, the blogs, and this is pre-social media.
	This is 1996.
	But they were aggregating the search data, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with a DARPA coordinator at Stanford.
	Google came from R&D, from DARPA, but that was free speech work, fundamentally.
	They were piping the internet into the far reaches of human civilization across the globe, and then using that speech, promoting free speech, because a lot of these countries, after the Cold War ended, that the U.S.
	still wanted to pry open, pry open their markets, topple their governments, increase U.S.
	strategic influence.
	There was state control over media, like Yugoslavia, for example.
	The first time NATO fired an offensive bullet in 1995 and then 1999, you had state control in large part over media.
	And so in 1995 through 1999, the State Department was funding all these Serbian dissident groups, was funding these Albanian groups to use the Internet in order to popularize their message because the U.S.
	And so it was like a propaganda leaflet that could not be put in a paper shredder.
	And so it was very promising from 1991 up until 2014.
	And 2014 was that moment where, after the Arab Spring from 2010 to 2012, it was all systems go for free speech because we toppled these governments in Facebook and Twitter revolutions.
	But that was the moment where it was like, wait a second.
	Actually, other sides have free speech.
	The Russians have free speech in eastern Ukraine.
	That's why our propaganda is not penetrating.
	And so that's when the focus on Censorship really started, and then it came home really in 2016.
	And so we'll back it up just all the way to 48. You've mentioned this in other podcasts, but that was the year where you could no longer conquer via military conquest.
	And so it became sort of the soft influence in terms of establishing or regaining or solidifying global dominance or regional dominance.
	It's an amazing thing.
	I said it for a while.
	Everyone loves free speech until they're in power.
	And then when other people use that free speech to take them down, they don't like it anymore.
	And so in the early days, the government is using the free speech of the internet to penetrate areas where there was censorship via government.
	It was successful.
	But then they found, come 2014, that that very same free speech was being used to gain popularity or at least promote ideas that would gain popularity that would run contrary to what the Western governments had thought That's exactly it.
	And it wasn't just Ukraine itself in 2014.
	It was also...
	So, you know, we assassinate Gaddafi.
	NATO does, effectively.
	The floodgates spill open into Southern Europe with the migrant crisis, as it was sort of known at the time.
	2013 to 2015 was this period of intense political mobilization for right-wing populist parties in Europe.
	Who were upset at the open borders policies of their countries.
	And so you had these sort of Trump 2016 adjacent groups all over Europe that were rising to popularity and challenging Orthodox politics.
	You had the Brexit movement, obviously, in the UK.
	You had Marine Le Pen in France, Matteo Salvini in Italy, the Vox Party in Spain, AFD Party in Germany, all over.
	And, you know, we're seeing in Romania now.
	We'll get to Romania.
	These same political parties that were campaigning, for the most part, on stopping open borders immigration were also, by and large, these working class type parties that wanted economic nationalism and they wanted cheap gas from Russia.
	And so, when 2014 happened, the U.S. State Department and the U.K. Foreign Office led this big sanctions crusade on Russia in order to try to kill their economy, in order to try to win back eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
	This is after what is referred to as the Maidan Revolution.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So, they've overthrown the democratically elected, but call it not Russia-aligned, but certainly not Western-aligned president.
	What was his name?
	Viktor Yanukovych?
	Yanukovych. They overthrow that.
	Overthrow him.
	But then there's still a portion that is loyal to or aligns with Russia.
	And the purpose for trying to crush Russia now, I mean, where is the West?
	Where are we getting energy from at that time?
	Or where is Europe getting it from at that time?
	Europe was getting the overwhelming majority.
	Well, actually, I guess at that time it was probably about half.
	It was like 35% to 50% from Russia.
	But it was previously almost 100% from Russia.
	And it was down to about 3550 because of about a decade of what's called energy security, energy diplomacy, energy diversification, basically this predecessor to the Burisma story, if you will, and a lot of the origins of censorship across NATO around 2014 in targeting those right-wing populist political movements.
	That story sort of starts about a decade earlier when Vladimir Putin first started reasserting Russian influence over the former Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe by using what was called gas diplomacy, which is this sort of concept that because Eastern Europe was at that time almost 100% reliant on Russian gas, if they did not do what Putin wanted them to do, Putin could, in theory, turn off the gas and...
	Give them cold winters, shut down their entire industry, crush their economy.
	This happened in Georgia in 2005, 2006, and in several other places.
	Because oligarchs in those countries were making money from these transit fees or from these deals, you had a lot of the oligarchs in these countries begin to become economically beholden to Russia.
	And so the winds of the Cold War were being reversed in the mid-aughts, but they were primarily in Republican-adjacent places where GOP energy stakeholders were mostly focused, which was Georgia, Azerbaijan.
	There was less of a sort of George Soros energy mafia presence in those countries.
	So that was why Mitt Romney was pushing Obama from his right on Russia.
	I mentioned this a bunch of times before, but it is a funny moment to reflect on that in 2012.
	When Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama, there was that famous debate quip where Romney is effectively calling Obama a Putin puppet on the debate stage, and Obama shoots back and says, the 1980s called.
	They want their foreign policy back.
	And you can't imagine someone saying that.
	I mean, Obama was saying, the Cold War's over, bro.
	We love Russia now.
	Because at the time, Hillary Clinton was brokering these uranium deals with Russia.
	Obama was caught on a hot mic with saying we'll have more negotiability.
	Tell Vladimir.
	What did he mean by that?
	It's like once he gets elected, that he'll be able to negotiate freely because he won't have to worry about the political blowback for not aligning with but being friendly with Russia.
	Right, right.
	Well, what he was saying is something that politicians deal with frequently, which is that in order to win the election, he needed to fake like he was a Russia hawk because the blob.
	That was his deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes' term.
	I know a lot of people think I invented it.
	I did not.
	It was a 70s horror movie about that thing that keeps eating everything and gets bigger and bigger, starting with the homeless person and then going to, I forget who else.
	Yeah, fitting, right?
	So he felt like he was being pushed to be a Russia hawk because of the blob, the foreign policy establishment, which wanted to seize Eurasia and all the natural resources and territory.
	That stretches essentially from Central Europe, all the way from Germany, effectively, to Siberia.
	So he had to sort of fake, he felt, that he was a Russia hawk, but that once the election was over, and the headlines didn't matter as much, and it was his second and final term, he could be free to strike deals and to chart a more neutral course.
	And then, of course, everything blew up.
	Two years later when Russia helped backstop the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine that did not respect the new coup government from Victoria Newland and Jeff Pyatt there at the U.S. Embassy.
	And that's when this whole thing broke open.
	But the point that I was trying to make there was that you had, you know, it is Ukraine in a certain sense, but you had all these other...
	Parties, not just in Ukraine, all the way, you know, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, all these countries had these populist movements that were rising to power, and almost all of them had a domestic policy that was based around nationalism and to some extent maintaining their identity.
	But adjacent to that was a foreign policy neutralism that was completely inconsistent and at odds with the U.S. sanctions policy.
	And so the State Department essentially used these new censorship technologies that were being developed at the same time to take out ISIS to say, well, can't we take out hate speech that way?
	Because these groups are campaigning on open borders.
	So we can monitor them for hate speech.
	You know, can't we do this for domestic extremism?
	Can't we begin to think of populism as an attack on democracy and use our democracy promotion government programs to target them?
	And so then when Brexit happened, you know, a year and a half later and then...
	And then Trump got elected, you know, it became a worldwide phenomenon.
	I mean, I remember it and it makes a whole hell of a lot more sense in retrospect when they blamed Facebook for, forget Russian interference, whatever, they blamed Trump's election on free speech.
	They blamed Brexit on free speech and that if we didn't have access to misinformation, disinformation, none of this would have happened.
	I mean, we'll get into that.
	I just actually want to flesh out the rabbit hole of the energy issue in Russia.
	So, Europe is getting, at some point, 100%, then it goes down to 35% to 50%, not because they're consuming less, but because they're acquiring energy from other countries.
	Which other countries do they, what do they substitute that portion of the Russian energy for?
	Well, a lot of it was, you know, just the North American, you know, the North American market.
	So, you know, about eight, nine years ago, the Permian Basin...
	The sheer extent of what we have in West Texas.
	West Texas, a lot of our geopolitics around Mexico revolve around the huge amount of oil in Mexico and the partnerships with Texas oil companies there.
	That Texas oil power faction has been a huge block in American politics since Rockefeller.
	Famously, the Bush family oil The Dick Cheney World Oil Ventures.
	It's always been a big part of our, especially Republican, power base.
	But there came online the capacity to create something called LNG, liquefied natural gas, which is a totally different way of getting gas to a country.
	There's natural gas pipelines, which are cheap.
	Gas is a commodity product.
	So it doesn't matter.
	There's not really a difference in quality.
	It's just simply about cost.
	And natural gas pipelines are very cheap.
	LNG is when you have to liquefy the gas and then...
	Through pressure, I imagine.
	So you're processing a lot more by way of quantity through its condensed liquid form.
	Yes, right.
	And then you can transport it without needing a pipeline.
	You could put it on a shipping freight.
	You can put it on a container ship.
	And then ship it across the ocean.
	And part of this big grand Ukraine energy play has been through the Baltic Strait, connecting to ports in Poland, and then having Poland connect either directly or through Slovakia into Ukraine.
	And then you can keep the existing gas pipeline architecture that Ukraine has always had because it's, you know...
	Those gas pipelines go from Russia to Ukraine and then, you know, out west.
	And so you can keep all that pipeline architecture, but the initial source point would be expensive American else, because it's much, much more expensive to, you know, freeze the gas, harvest it 5,000 miles away, freeze it, ship it 5,000 miles, you know.
	Deload it, then ship it into Ukraine, and then put it through the gas pipeline, then just have a gas pipeline running the whole way.
	And some of it is Canada.
	Some of it is the UK.
	The Royal Dutch Shell, now just Shell, plays a big part in the story.
	We're actually seeing a very similar type grand energy play play out in Syria right now with Turkey backing these...
	These rebel groups, these al-Qaeda groups that are now the sitting government of Syria, I expect to see that new plucky, spunky al-Qaeda spinoff probably greenlight the Qatar-Turkey billion-dollar pipeline that they've been talking about for a long time.
	It's not uncommon to have regime change.
	Because of pipeline politics.
	I mean, this is sort of a tale as old as time in terms of what we use the military to do.
	I was joking about this the other day because I've been taking on Milton Friedman a little bit lately because he's a guy who's sort of dear to my heart because I grew up with him and I think a lot of what he did is...
	It's very inspirational in terms of the ability to articulate.
	I know which clip you're going to talk about now.
	It's the Milton equivalent of Afuero, but which ones he decides to keep?
	Right, right.
	And so, yes, exactly.
	It's the OG Afuero.
	He did have the charisma of Malay when he did it, but he's like, keep, close, and...
	Yes, close the Department of Education, close the Department of Labor, keep the State Department, keep the Pentagon.
	And then there's a moment where he's asked about the Department of Energy, and he pauses and he thinks a little bit, and he goes, keep it, but fold it onto the Department of Defense.
	Because it's really a subsidiary of the Department of Defense.
	And I think a lot of people who don't really appreciate the metadynamics of Friedmanism and its utility to the blob in terms of blobcraft, they sort of gloss over that.
	Like, ah.
	Okay, keep the Department of Energy.
	Make it more efficient by merging it with the...
	They don't even think about what that...
	Why, Milton?
	Why is the Department of Energy folded under the Department of Defense?
	Which, until 1948, was named the Department of War.
	Because energy is a source of national...
	An issue of national security.
	Right. But we're using our Department of War to secure energy, and that dominates.
	The economics of the energy industry, it dominates all of the downstream issues that flow from states of war, including infringements on civil rights and freedom of speech.
	And so, you know, the story about the energy dynamics of Ukraine and about Burisma and about the public company, Naftagas, there are a story of this military initiative to win the territorial You know, chess game over who controls Ukraine.
	And so, you know, Europe was put through this energy diversification austerity, if you will, for 10 years.
	I mean, this coincided with climate change, interestingly enough.
	Which actually coincides with censorship, oddly enough.
	It's all one big tentacle.
	Well, Inconvenient Truth from Al Gore came out in 2006, which was the exact moment right on the heels of Russia cutting off gas to Georgia.
	It was effectively born as this massive...
	I know that it's got roots back in the 60s and 70s.
	But it became this global issue, the media surround sound, the government really leaning into it, really at the exact moment that there needed to be an energy diversification policy put on Europe to stop the re-rise of Russia and the late-in-the-game losing of the Cold War, which was that all these energy diversification policies included not just expensive LNG, but because LNG is so expensive that it became...
	You know, impositions around different types of energy to compensate so that you were not completely reliant on the Russians for oil and gas.
	And, you know, Europe did suffer from that.
	This is not something they wanted to do on their own, but they were reliant on the U.S. for security.
	They were reliant on the U.S. for economics and trade.
	And so they...
	They were put through it.
	The story of Burisma is so interesting to me because Burisma represented the ability to kind of negotiate with Europe and not have to continue to lose elections or lose popularity by people with grievances over the energy diversification policy because Ukraine had all this untapped shale.
	It had all this untapped Petro capacity in the eastern part of the state, in the Donbass, as well as offshore in the Black Sea around Crimea.
	All of which are territories that are either annexed or under current act of hot war dispute.
	They're the exact areas under dispute.
	And they were since 2014.
	In 2014, the eastern side of the state broke away, including...
	Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea.
	And this is after the Maidan Revolution, where they overthrow the less pro-Western but more pro-Russian president who got elected.
	Overthrown, but you have the breakaway on the east, which is where the resource-heavy area is, and also the area that tends to be more Russian than Ukrainian.
	Right. And this is where all the mining rights were.
	This is where the future of the country, in terms of its utility on the...
	U.S. Empire chessboard was.
	It was the resources in eastern Ukraine.
	And all of the U.S. companies who were attached commercially to this NATO plan had already made significant investments skating towards where the puck was going.
	Infrastructure investments, mining rights.
	It's amazing, actually.
	Now, when you say it, and when everyone's saying, well, just, you know, there'll be a negotiation, they'll relinquish some of the land in the East, and then you hear the West and Ukraine saying, no, absolutely not.
	Not about the people, not about the land, about the resources.
	Right. Right.
	Well, look, from 2011 to 2013, right in the run-up to the coup, Chevron signed a $10 billion deal with NAFTA gas, which is the publicly-owned, the state-owned Natural gas company, if you will. It's state-owned, like many big utility-type companies are.
	You've got Rosneft, the Russian oil.
	You've Gazprom, the Russian oil.
	Petrobras, Brazil.
	Many companies...
	Many countries, because oil and gas are so critical to their economy, have state ownership over their big oil and gas company.
	I'm wondering about PetroCanada.
	Now I'm from Canada, but I'm fairly certain these are crown corporations or nationalized to some extent.
	Yes, right, right.
	And sometimes they'll be partially privatized, so the investors will literally get in bed with the government.
	But sometimes they'll...
	There's a play to fully privatize them.
	That's what's happening right now with NAFTA gas.
	But NAFTA gas is essentially the big feeder.
	They're the ones who collect the transit fees through Russia.
	And so Burisma had these mining and exploration rights in eastern Ukraine and offshore in Crimea.
	The idea is they harvest it.
	They pass it on to NAFTA gas.
	NAFTA gas passes it on to the rest of Europe.
	And now you don't need to...
	Go through this expensive diversification thing, which is leading to the rise of right-wing populist parties.
	And you still have some of that, but you wean Russia off.
	But now all the money is being collected internally by these Ukrainian entities.
	So it's a sell to the Ukrainian people.
	Of course, the catch is...
	Before that happened, they were being forced to privatize it off to Western stakeholders.
	This is why George Soros and his investors have been leading the privatization of NAFTA gas, so that once Russia's pried off, it's not the Ukrainian people who are making the money from this, it's foreign investors from Wall Street and London.
	But Burisma was a way to...
	I think one of the things I was getting at is, just to sort of...
	I guess have a little bit of a peripheral vision about what was going on in the rub to the coup and what everyone was expecting before Russia surprised the world by backstopping the separatist movement.
	Chevron signed a $10 billion partnership with NAFTA Gas.
	Shell, the British major oil and gas company, they signed a matching $10 billion deal with NAFTA Gas.
	To partner on the profits for the incoming infusion of gas there.
	Halliburton got all the contract deals for the oil and gas processing for Ukraine.
	ConocoPhillips, it was just a who's who.
	I mean, Halliburton, where Dick Cheney was the CEO and president.
	Chevrolet Exxon, by the way, had partnerships with NAFTA Gas.
	Victoria Nuland, two months before the coup in Ukraine, when she announced that she'd given $5 billion in financial support to Ukrainian media and civil society organizations that were up to the coup, she did that at a U.S. embassy event sponsored by ExxonMobil and Chevron.
	And so everyone was skating towards where the puck was going, which was that we were going to overthrow the Yanukovych government.
	We would fully plunder eastern Ukraine's resources.
	We would privatize NAFTA gas so that the whole thing is owned by a combination of Soros, Halliburton, Exxon, Chevron, and Russia.
	We could justify using government resources, billions of government resources to accomplish this because it advances U.S. national security, because it neutralizes Russia, because it bankrupts them.
	So there goes their military.
	It bankrupts them because they're no longer selling their gas to Europe.
	That was the idea.
	I don't mean to use a hyperbolic.
	This sounds like economic rape.
	I mean, it sounds like a bunch of vultures looking at a soon-to-be corpse and saying, how do we divvy up the meat of this country that is Ukraine in a way that absolutely deprives the Ukrainians of the fruits of their own nation?
	Well, that's what's frequently, that's the term that's frequently used to describe the U.S.
	diplomatic operations against Russia in the 1990s.
	They call it the economic rape of Russia, which was when Russia privatized, it was put through shock therapy, right?
	This was the moment that the Soviet Union, which held almost $2 trillion in public and that was the communist government that held those assets because in a communist government, you've stayed control over industry.
	when we won the Cold War and Russia, The Russian Federation declared it was going to be a capitalist, you know, small L liberal democracy.
	And they brought in the State Department.
	They brought in the Harvard Endowment.
	They brought in London.
	They brought in Wall Street.
	They brought in George Soros and his investment arms.
	And they, you know, they call that the economic rape of Russia because you had all of these sovereign...
	Publicly held resources for the people of Russia that were sold off at fire sale prices to foreign investors, resulting in a cataclysmic crash of the Russian economy.
	And, you know, Putin rose from the ashes of that.
	It's sort of a dark villain, you know, Bane, origins of Bane type story.
	Well, it explains Putin's rise to power and it explains the West's animosity where, but for that, you know, Russia would be...
	As much of a U.S. satellite, but a U.S. economic satellite as the rest of Europe to some extent.
	And Putin comes in and puts an end to that.
	That's what they're referring to as the Russian imperialism, where he wants to regain Russian independence and Russian dominance over Eastern Europe.
	That's amazing.
	The historical context of that makes it understandable in a way that we might not be allowed to know because of the censorship complex which we get into.
	But Burisma, in all of this.
	How old of a company is Burisma?
	I actually don't know what date it was founded.
	Because we start hearing about it in 2014 when a certain Hunter Biden is placed on board.
	It's a Ukrainian company.
	It's not as though...
	It's a Ukrainian company.
	At the time, it was the largest of about four major private Ukrainian gas companies that...
	All right.
	And now, it's typically said, you know, everybody says it, not tongue-in-cheek, but reflexively, corrupt company in a corrupt country.
	How does that, the corruption materializes in what way when we're talking about energy and gas?
	I mean, bribery, when we're talking about corruption of Ukraine, what is it, what are we talking about, and why was ultimately Burisma under investigation, and for what?
	Well, you know, there's this whole...
	You have this world in the energy space where, I mean, a lot of this, so if you look at Privat Bank and these other types of Ukrainian, you have this relationship between the Ukrainian banks, the Ukrainian energy companies, the Ukrainian government officials,
	where there was this, you know, Ukraine a decade ago was, you know, considered the most corrupt, one of the most corrupt places in Certainly in Europe, if not the world.
	And there was this major tendency for funds that was a big money laundering pit.
	Funds that were supposed to go to economically shore up banks, for example, would somehow get transferred all out.
	The paper trail would disappear.
	And then the banks would still be in insolvency.
	And then what could you do about it?
	You know, if you now just let the bank go under, then there goes all the, you know, the supporting infrastructure of the state that you're trying to reconstruct.
	I mean, my focus on the Burisma side is more on that support structure that went into it, notwithstanding, you know, notwithstanding that.
	Because the fact is, I've been talking a lot lately about USAID and how USAID is...
	Not a charity.
	It has nothing to do with aid.
	Right, right.
	And this is something that, to me, I mean, anyone who's intrepid and interested in this, listening to this conversation, I would be very curious to see what FOIAs would turn up on this, because I just have not seen FOIA documents on this.
	But what was USAID doing funding Burisma?
	What does USAID stand for?
	The U.S. Agency for International Development.
	So it's not U.S. help.
	It's U.S. Agency for International Development, which sounds very much like a philanthropic governmental organization which participates in the economic rape of foreign nations.
	Well, what they leave unsaid is, what are you developing?
	They're developing assets.
	Assets meaning what?
	Assets, instruments of statecraft to be deployed either by the State Department, the Defense Department, or the CIA.
	That is all they do.
	It's the Agency for International Development of Assets.
	And because it's a general aid pool, when you see USAID, you don't know which one of those three it's going towards.
	You don't know if it's an overt diplomatic declared mission of the State Department, i.e.
	the State Department has formally declared that we are going to reconstruct the economy of Ukraine.
	And so USAID money will help different regional pockets that need economic development there.
	So they will fund institutions that will then control those flow of funds and therefore effectively the soft politics of the region and the network connections.
	So you don't know if it's going towards a declared State Department goal.
	You don't know if it's going towards a military goal in the region.
	So this happened, for example, in Venezuela in 2019 when the first Trump administration was trying to...
	Topple Maduro's government, and we were backing Juan Guaido.
	We declared Juan Guaido the president of Venezuela.
	And again, I'm not opining on whether this is a good or bad thing.
	I don't like communist governments.
	I think they suck.
	It just is what it is, though.
	We have to be honest with the American people about what we're actually doing.
	I would prefer honest statecraft over duplicity.
	But the fact is, is USAID trucks were being used to ship weapons to the Juan Guaido aligned paramilitaries so that they could engage in street battles with the cops and the military.
	Those USAID trucks were stopped at the border to Venezuela.
	I don't think that's humanitarian aid.
	And that's a tale as old as time.
	You can see the Al-Shabaab groups in USAID camps.
	This happened in Cuba in 2014.
	We were running...
	We were running small arms munitions and paramilitary fighters into Cuba through USAID HIV clinics.
	So you don't know when you see USAID which direction the op is coming from.
	It could be statecraft, it could be military, it could be CIA, but it's either, it's one of those three.
	And the funding for USAID, taxpayers, I mean, it comes out of the budget of which department?
	Well, it's a standalone agency.
	You know, so it's $50 billion a year, which is more now than the State Department itself.
	But it's supposed to answer to state or answer to DOD.
	$50 billion for international matters.
	This is nothing domestic.
	There's no USAID that goes to the fentanyl crisis in America or the homeless crisis.
	Strictly international.
	Right, right.
	Yes, strictly international.
	And arming paramilitary.
	Paramilitary is a euphemism for what others might consider to be...
	Gangs, cartels, or terrorists.
	It's when you pump up a gang into the size of a small to medium-sized military.
	So small wars are conducted through paramilitaries.
	Okay. Now, how did we get to that?
	Oh, that was the USAID for Burisma.
	What is Burisma?
	Burisma is not a charity.
	Burisma is not a humanitarian group.
	A private energy corporation.
	It's a private for-profit gas company.
	Why are they...
	Why do they have a formal MOU?
	Why are there USAID emails saying that we are supporting Burisma?
	So you've got USAID funding Burisma.
	Query how that happened.
	You have these CIA connections completely all over it.
	Hunter Biden himself was on the board of the National Democratic Institute, which is...
	The DNC branch of the CIA's Most Notorious Cutout, the National Endowment for Democracy.
	So Hunter himself was running through those networks.
	Prior to being on the board of Burisma.
	Yes, and concurrently as well.
	And you had Kovar Black also on the board of directors of Burisma.
	Who's Kovar Black?
	Kovar Black spent 30 years at the CIA.
	He won a CIA Distinguished Medal Award.
	And he was Mitt Romney's Sherpa to the intelligence community when Mitt Romney was running for president against Obama.
	So he was the guy who got the CIA to back Mitt Romney's presidency.
	So you have a longtime CIA major power player right on the board, just like Hunter Biden was of Burisma, put on at the same time.
	You have the Atlantic Council.
	I've got to ask you, people might not know these entities.
	First of all, an MOU Memorandum of Understanding between USAID and Burisma.
	Do we know what the quantum of the financing or the investment was?
	I'm trying to get more details on that because what I've seen is I sense the tip of the iceberg.
	But I need to run down what the exact dollar figures were.
	And Atlantic Council, I hear these names, Council of Foreign Relations, Atlantic Council, I hear some of the overlapping names on it.
	What is the Atlantic Council?
	What was it set up for?
	What has it become?
	And why don't people know about it?
	Yeah, so it builds itself really as NATO's think tank.
	There's think tanks for different industry groups, for different trade groups, for different...
	So Brookings is sort of a...
	The Brookings Institution is sort of a governance think tank.
	The Council on Foreign Relations often represents the interests of multinational corporations and banks.
	The Atlanta Council is really focused on NATO matters in particular.
	When the world order started to tilt on Ukraine in 2014, it really became a major Major, major power player in world politics.
	It was started in the 1960s.
	So NATO was born in 1949.
	And the Atlantic Council was sort of created as a way to have the civil military aspect of NATO accomplished.
	Because much of what the military does is not purely kinetic.
	We have all sorts of subkinetic political aspects of war.
	in Ukraine that prohibits the use of the Russian language on TV, radio, or in public education helps the NATO military advantage in Ukraine because it pries hearts and minds off of Russian propaganda, Russian mythology, Russian folklore.
	you know, Russian news, But NATO is a military organization.
	The military cannot simply...
	Take over control of the Ukrainian government and command that top-down.
	We call that authoritarianism, which is the thing that our plucky democracy defenders are supposed to topple governments for doing.
	So the cute trick around the Atlantic Council is when NATO wants that done, the Atlantic Council sets in motion to have that effectuated in the civil political space to advance that.
	So the employment of propaganda to brainwash the populace to accept or vote in the policy that the military organization wants to implement but can't implement through kinetic warfare.
	I wish it were just propaganda.
	There is certainly a propaganda element to it, but the fact is they are able to leverage network connections and lobbying.
	And, you know, I always...
	Propaganda is...
	It goes into that sort of hearts and minds battle.
	You're trying to win the hearts and minds of people towards your propaganda and away from others.
	Whenever I say hearts and minds, I always make sure to include cash.
	It's hearts and minds and cash.
	Because most hearts and minds work, frankly, at least the stuff that's effective, is not so much just propaganda.
	It's the financial incentives for doing it.
	Hearts and minds change a lot faster with...
	Pallets of cash than they do with, you know, pages of text.
	And so the Atlantic Council, for example, they signed this economic partnership deal with Burisma directly.
	Now, the Atlantic Council gets annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department, CIA cutouts, like the National Doubt for Democracy, the annual funding from USAID, 11 different government agencies, all in this national security.
	Blanket. Give government funding to the Atlantic Council every year with seven CIA directors on that board.
	And they are partnered with Burisma.
	So you have this pass-through.
	So the Atlantic Council gets a budget and then it's not, I mean, it pays salaries, but that's also to allocate to various Atlantic Council projects that are non-military in nature.
	And so they decide to take some of that money, which came from, it's all taxpayer dollars at the end of the day, but it comes from different entities.
	And then they invest or funnel it through Burisma.
	Because they are constantly doing these consensus-building events, drives, initiatives.
	So the Atlantic Council will bring together people from government, bring together people from the private sector, bring together people from civil society and foundations and nonprofits and universities, bring together people from media.
	And they will do this whole-of-society coordination.
	And it's an intricate...
	Lengthy, somewhat complex process where there is disagreement between the different stakeholders, and the Atlantic Council will midwife that process to come together with a consensus, and it will use its clout, it will use its financial heft, it will use its institutional connections in order to, you know, in midwifing that process, everyone is seen as getting their slice of the pie.
	So, for example, in this Grand Ukraine Energy play, while they are They have this partnership with Burisma to effectively help kick deal flow to Burisma.
	They are also being financed, the Atlantic Council, by these Western oil and gas companies that are partnered with NAFTA Gas.
	You have these governments, these private sector corporations who are funneling money into the Atlantic Council, and they're getting a return on investment because they are Also working with other governments to support the sanctions policy against Russia to pry open the market.
	They're pumping up the companies, the private gas companies that are being invested in, or NAFTA gas that's being invested in, in order to capture those profits.
	And so everyone sort of clusters around the nucleus because this is, it's almost like an insider trading operation.
	They know the market is going to be pried open because the CIA is The State Department is backing this.
	The U.S. military is backing this.
	USAID is backing this.
	It's not ExxonMobil is putting up the money to militarily reconquer the Donbass or Crimea.
	It's taxpayer money.
	And so that's all being discussed as this is all ongoing.
	And the fact that Hunter was...
	The son of Joe Biden, as Joe Biden was able to use the heft of the White House itself to protect Burisma politically, to control the prosecutors, to make sure that the whole web could not be uncovered.
	It's a very nasty autopsy of something that is not at all uncommon.
	These kind of burisma vignettes play out in virtually every country of interest to the U.S.
	It's like an incestuous, not vicious circle, but vortex where they create the circumstances through which they can then commercially exploit them and set it up all in advance among interconnected entities, organizations to wholeheartedly and efficiently financially exploit the circumstances that they've created to come to fruition.
	Right. And they can get away with it because at the end of the day, they can make the argument that Russia is a hostile foreign adversary.
	So it's a little bit like the Pfizer situation, right?
	They say that, you know, why does Pfizer get to keep all the profits from these?
	I mean, they made billions and billions and billions of dollars from this.
	It was a captive market.
	Right? There were mandates.
	There was, you know, people would lose their jobs.
	There was economic coercion.
	This was not a free market in any sense, what happened in vaccines.
	You had the sitting mayor of New York, you know, effectively saying, no jab, no job.
	So you basically had to buy this if you had a family of dependents.
	But Pfizer did not, you know, strike some deal with the U.S. government on the back of this that they could only keep 10% of the profits.
	No, they took the whole thing.
	And that was rationalized as well.
	You know, this was it did so much good in the world.
	It saved all these lives, you know, to the end.
	We produce the vaccine where other companies didn't.
	And so to the victor goes the spoils.
	And so they make a similar type argument when it comes to, you know, this Burisma type situation, which is, you know, we have to.
	Fight Russia in Ukraine.
	We have to protect their territorial sovereignty.
	We have to stop them from reconquering the revisionist reconquest of the Soviet Union territories.
	And so we're going to just knock out two birds with one stone, which is while we do that, using taxpayer money, we're going to get privately rich by investing in this operation that your taxpayer money is going to.
	It's not like...
	Not like there's some, you know, public pool that's set up so that the proceeds of Burisma or the proceeds of NAFTA gas are being reinvested in America.
	They're going to the insiders who are clustered around the Atlantic Council and NATO to pull this off.
	It's wild.
	And so, like, Hunter being on the board, the rationale makes it sort of not protected from investigation, but legitimizes it maybe, gives it an air of not...
	So corrupt.
	The one thing I've never understood, we heard the video of Joe Biden talking about having withheld aid to get the prosecutor fired, and the retort to that is, well, he was getting the guy fired because he wasn't investigating Burisma.
	Why would he have done that?
	The steel man retort to that, or even the proper retort to that, is, why did, what is the reason for which Biden wanted that specific prosecutor?
	Was it Porchenko?
	The prosecutor who was looking into Burisma, why did Biden want him fired in the first place?
	Well, I think it's been stipulated that he actually was looking into Burisma.
	I know that there was some sort of very weak Dan Goldman argument that was made.
	That, you know, oh, he wasn't...
	He wasn't doing it well enough, and we wanted to get one who was going to investigate.
	That is what they say on the retort side.
	Well, my understanding was that Burisma already knew that the investigation was underway, but I don't know that there was a...
	You know, I think this is sort of one of these formal versus informal proceedings type thing, where the investigation was already launched and underway, but there had not been formal indictments, you know, They want to stop it from getting to that point.
	That was a big part of the dynamics of that.
	With the Bob Mueller probe, there was the special prosecutor probe of Trump over Russiagate that lasted two and a half years without an actual criminal indictment filing.
	And you had these rent-to-riots ready to go, it seemed.
	I remember reading about this whole Georgetown network and talking about, you know, if Trump fired that prosecutor, again, there had been no indictment yet, but the investigation was underway and ominous.
	And so, you know, that goes into this Burisma story, but the fact is, is there are many, There's been a giant push all over Central and Eastern Europe to control the prosecutors, to control the politics.
	This has been something that is now called transitional justice at state, which is this concept that whenever we transition a country to democracy, or from illiberal democracy to liberal democracy, We have to make a point of arresting people from the previous regime, from the previous elected government, so that they cannot rise to power again in future elections.
	An example that I give on that that everyone can look up is everyone can look up the National Endowment for Democracy white paper in December 2023 about the new Poland government.
	Donald Tusk won the election in Poland in December 2023.
	That very month, the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA cutout, its in-house journal called the Journal of Democracy, provided a list of every single person that the new Polish government must arrest in order to stamp out populism and make sure that the Law and Justice Party cannot return to power in the next elections.
	And so controlling the prosecutors It's a way of controlling the politics.
	And I think in Ukraine, it does go beyond Burisma in that respect.
	This is now something that we do everywhere.
	Norm Eisen, the legal hatchet man behind the Trump impeachment, behind the 250 Trump lawsuits, he himself was the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic before he became this Trump legal hit man.
	So he was the State Department's number one guy for the Czech Republic right there in the V4 in Eastern Europe.
	And one of the things that he was doing out of the U.S. Embassy was this transitional justice, you know, leaning on the Czech government to arrest the political enemies of the State Department.
	And so, you know, the amazing thing is we saw that all come home when Biden took office in 2021.
	And Merrick Garland did the same thing to Trump world here.
	That they did in the Czech Republic, that they did in Ukraine, that they are doing in Poland, that they are doing in Brazil with arresting Bolsonaro, that they're doing in France with arresting Marine Le Pen, that they're doing in Italy with arresting Matteo Savini.
	I mean, pretty much everyone I listed in that group of the start of this, 2014, these right-wing populist movements are all being systematically arrested.
	From what I understand is what's going on in Romania right now as well with Caelan Georgescu.
	They've annulled the election, but then there's talk about whether or not he broke the law, committed election fraud or whatever, and will be disqualified or arrested, jailed, convicted, whatever, and barred from running again because presumably the organic response will be the same the second time around as the first.
	I say, I know you've answered the who.
	It seems like it's the military-industrial complex of the West.
	But they're going after populists.
	What is the regime and what is the ultimate end goal of all of this?
	Well, it's case by case.
	And you have tools and playbooks for each tactic.
	But I mean, I think in everything that we've talked about in terms of the ends here, it is seizing Eurasia.
	Every single one of these things that we've talked about so far have gone into this seize Eurasia playbook, which is that the U.S. State Department and its private sector stakeholders and private banking investment firms have a long-term plan to politically and territorially seize control over all of Eurasia, and Russia stands in the way of that.
	To some extent, China stands in the way of that.
	The most immediate, you know, sizable territory, Russia stands in the way of.
	And so they are trying to stop every force that might undermine the Caesar Asia plan and pump up every force that might assist it.
	The Romania story gets to this because Romania is the major arms tram shipment point into Ukraine, especially from Pakistan.
	I should note that Pakistan went through the exact same thing that we just described about from Trump to the Czech Republic to Ukraine to Brazil to Le Pen to Salvini in Italy, which is that the most popular...
	Head of state in Pakistan history, Imran Khan, is currently rotting away in a prison because the U.S. State Department orchestrated a coup to coup him out of office because he took an aggressively neutral position about Russia.
	Everyone can read about this in The Intercept.
	I like it.
	Aggressively neutral is Orwellian newspeak.
	I mean, that's flat mountain level paradox.
	Right. It's not that, just like with Yanukovych, not like he was a Russian pawn, but he was caught between worlds.
	So Pakistan has been this big, you know, sort of CIA base, U.S. military base for decades at this point.
	It was the main clearinghouse for all things Mujahideen, all things fighting Russia and Central Asia during the Cold War.
	We've turned it into a giant money laundering fountain the same way we did Ukraine.
	Everyone can read about BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which was this big CIA proprietary bank set up with a Pakistani frontman in order to launder all the drug proceeds from Afghanistan.
	The whole thing collapsed.
	The intelligence underworld spiders all scattered.
	It was a giant diplomatic incident.
	Pakistani intelligence services as our allies in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in...
	So we have this giant...
	And so Imran Khan rises to power in Pakistan, and we completely coup him out of office in something that is just unbelievably shameful.
	What does that coup...
	I mean, what does it look like for those who don't know?
	It's military...
	A hybrid governance model, which is that you have a, you know, our president is also our commander-in-chief.
	We have a totally civilian-run government.
	Pakistan's a little bit bifurcated where you've got this democratically elected president on the one hand, but you have this permanent military establishment.
	In a way, we have this here, but they just are a little bit more honest about it, if you will.
	You know, they have an entire side of the government that is...
	He's pretty much a military and intelligence untouchable stalwart, which is totally aligned, coordinated, and to some extent a vassal of the United States.
	And then they've got an elected government.
	Now, Imran Khan was massively popular.
	He was this worldwide celebrity.
	He was a big cricket player and a very charming, very charismatic guy.
	Overwhelmingly won in the elections.
	And then about two and a half years ago, The U.S. State Department set in motion a coup to coup him out of office, and here's how that played out, and everyone can read the leaked cables that came out on this in The Intercept, which was the U.S. State Department was being put under pressure by Congress and by the Biden administration that Pakistan was beginning to rebuff or presenting an issue after the outbreak of the 2022
	Russian This is Imran Khan talking about...
	And I'll connect this to Romania in a second here.
	He makes this big fiery speech where he says the U.S. wants us to cut off trade with Russia.
	They want us to militarily fund the war on Russia.
	Russia is not our enemy.
	Russia is our friend.
	The United States is not our enemy.
	The United States is our friend.
	But we are not the slave of the United States.
	This is what Imran Khan said.
	the U.S., the assistant secretary and his whole network around Iran, To Pakistan, then establishes back-channel communications with the Pakistani parliament and with the Pakistani military and intelligence services and says, we've got to get this guy out.
	We're going to make you an international pariah unless you move forward with a no-confidence vote, which is their version of an impeachment.
	Part of the checks and balances that the parliament can remove the president if they get this.
	We've got the same thing in Canada under the parliamentary system where the parties say we no longer want him as the leader, trigger new elections.
	Right. So the State Department offers carrots and sticks in their own words.
	They say that basically you're going to get billions in humanitarian aid.
	If you do it, you're going to be isolated as an international pariah if you don't.
	So they pry off enough members of the parliament to oust Imran Khan.
	From office.
	So now he's still the popularly elected former president.
	There's no immediate...
	There's a giant power vacuum.
	And elections are coming up months away for a new election, and he can run again, and he would presumably win.
	So Pakistan then cancels elections and says, we can't have elections, because if there were elections...
	He would just be back in the presidency.
	Are they canceling them under the basis of martial law, civil unrest, risk?
	Yeah, so what happens is, you know, Imran Khan immediately begins campaigning after the no confidence vote.
	They arrest him immediately for using hate speech in his campaign speeches.
	They then hit him with something like 195 criminal charges.
	Yeah, the same thing they did to Trump, the same thing they did to Bolsonaro.
	All related to speech, nothing related to actions.
	Now, and by the way, he had also been, I believe, stabbed or shot during this time as well.
	You know, the popular outpouring was absolutely enormous.
	But yeah, they hit him, you know, initially with these speech violations, and then it yawns and spawns into, you know...
	I'm sure they found some tax stuff to get him on.
	Yeah. He's got the support of the people, but not the support of the military, which answered to two different overlords.
	Right, exactly.
	And so that all happened because Imran Khan took an aggressively neutral position on Russia.
	And from NATO's perspective, from the U.S. military's perspective, that would be enough to cripple NATO's ability to fight the war on Russia.
	Pakistan is this major, major, you know, military transit point into Romania and into Ukraine.
	And we have tens of billions of dollars of military equipment in Pakistan that we use as a sort of, you know, flexible power projection into the Middle East, into Central Asia.
	And we redirected all that to fight Russia in 2022.
	I mean, really.
	So if Imran Khan says, hey, actually, we're not going to use any of this to fight Russia, well, then Russia gets crippled there.
	So they got rid of the Imran Khan problem.
	Cooing him out of office and throwing him in jail forever.
	Cooing him out, suspending elections, much like if we're applying this mutatis, what they're doing in Ukraine, just suspend elections indefinitely for similar reasons.
	I presume if there were elections in Ukraine, Zelensky would get ousted with a populist candidate who wants to end war.
	So suspend the elections there, oust the guy that's the populist, and then prevent elections.
	So there's a seabridge and there's an air bridge.
	Romania shares that Black Sea coast with Ukraine, so it's a major point of power projection into Crimea, in the Black Sea, and it's also, you know, the way that arms have been flowing primarily through the Black Sea into Ukraine, which is that they, you know...
	There's no ability for the—because it's a sovereign territory, there's no ability for the Russian government or the Russian naval fleets to intercept this.
	So you've got this safe point to then load up the weapons directly in Romania and pass them on to Ukraine.
	So if Imran Khan had put the kibosh on the military transshipment from Pakistan, that would have decimated NATO.
	So they got rid of Imran Khan.
	This new Romanian, you know— I want to say president-elect, but, you know, an old president-elect, he was campaigning as well on neutrality with Russia.
	Well, we know what neutrality means in State Department speak.
	That means signing your own suicide note because the reason Imran Khan was ousted was because he took an aggressively neutral position.
	And so what's interesting is the predicate for doing this in Romania.
	It's something they actually tried here in the United States and a lot of people forget.
	When Trump won in 2016, everyone can look this up, but between December 2016 and early January 2016, every January 6th we have this bicameral meeting of Congress to certify the election results.
	And there was an attempt after the 2016 election to not certify, to effectively annul the election results because of Russian interference on social media.
	That was all they had at the time in 2016 to delegitimize Trump's victory.
	You had a CIA assessment that Russia had interfered on social media.
	Yeah.
	It's exactly what we've seen play out in Pakistan, where they laid the groundwork a little bit in advance, said, oh, we see a lot of Russian interference.
	Be weary of it, people.
	And then when it happens, they say, oh, it's Facebook accounts, inorganic, unnatural support that must have come from Russia.
	They were talking about the Russia.
	Hacking the emails, which never occurred either, but laying all the seeds so that they can grow into that beautiful forest of lies come time to try to annul the vote.
	Right. And what's so nasty about this is Romania is, shall we say, a little bit famous for a little bit of money going a long way when it comes to bribery.
	It is stock standard for the U.S.
	State Department and U.S.A.D.
	and National Endowment for Democracy emissaries to work with what they call management bodies, EMBs.
	This has been a big push since 2021 to try to control election outcomes by putting the U.S.
	bribery and diplomatic imprint directly on the election management body that decides the outcome of election, but also for the censorship complex to get to criminalize.
	So, for example, this is what they did in Brazil.
	The EMB, the election management body, was something called the TSE, the subset of the Brazilian Supreme Court that adjudicates elections, but that also adjudicates all censorship decisions.
	This is this de Marais Voldemort judge who targeted Elon Musk.
	So the U.S. State Department was working intensely with that TSE court since 2018.
	Right when Bolsonaro won in 2018, we established these back-channel connections to the TSE.
	We helped them create this disinformation task force.
	The Atlanta Council was one of the first entities to join the TSE.
	Disinformation Task Force.
	The Atlantic Council was seven CIA directors on its board and which had held whole conferences on why Bolsonaro has to be taken down and stopped because of his foreign policy that he was articulating for Brazil.
	And so they were working with the election management body in Brazil.
	In their own documents, the SEPs program mentioned something like 25 different election management bodies that they've been working with to influence their decisions.
	Someone should run the traps on what they were doing in Romania.
	It's unbelievable because there wasn't even evidence of actual interference.
	From what I understand, the Constitutional Court came in and said declassified documents from the outgoing president, who now gets to sit there until they figure out what to do with this rerunning of the first round, alleging that there was Russian interference on TikTok, no less, which is why I'm also now questioning the attempt to ban TikTok.
	Or, you know, forced the sale on the states, forced the breakup.
	They just alleged declassified documents that allege Russian interference, and that's sufficient for the Constitutional Court, which is the law of the land, to say annulled, highly unusual.
	I was listening to some podcast where like it was it was highly unusual, but some people were expecting it.
	And I'm hearing your voice in my head saying anybody who was expecting it were the ones trying to, you know, what's the code when you lay fake or astroturf public consent to accept the unacceptable.
	who was a little bit less pro NATO from a Romanian NATO ally with with very important military strategic positions.
	positions.
	Yeah. And, you know, what's amazing is, for all we know...
	If there was bot activity on TikTok, it could have come from the U.S. military in the first place and laid this predicate in advance and backchannel with the election court in advance to have a contingency plan on this.
	The only known Russian bots we actually know, 100% sure, played games in the U.S. We're actually false flag U.S. purchase bots VPNed in with Russian servers.
	Which we suspect is intelligence setting up their own pretexts to do what they want.
	Well, in this case, what I'm referring to is a very peculiar private sector company that was called New Knowledge, New Knowledge LLC.
	And everyone can look this up.
	It's an amazing story.
	This story was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post.
	This group got kicked off Facebook because of it.
	But New Knowledge was the group that co-wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference on social media in the 2016 election.
	So they were working directly with the portion of Congress that oversees the CIA to ratify the CIA's That Russian bots and trolls helped Trump win the election.
	To ratify the hoax.
	I mean, this is making the hoax reality.
	Now get this.
	Then there's this pivotal special Senate runoff race in November 2017.
	Where a Republican named Roy Moore was running for a vacant Senate seat in Alabama.
	I remember a certain slander campaign against one Roy Moore.
	Yes, yes.
	Now, this was a major moment in MAGA versus establishment Republican politics because Steve Bannon at the White House was backing Roy Moore, and there were some indications the rest of Trump world didn't necessarily want to do it, but they sort of put their trust and faith in MAGA.
	And so this whole thing sort of snowballed into, I believe, the series of events that led to Steve Bannon sort of exiting the Trump White House and then the Kushner element sort of replacing that.
	And what ended up happening was they pegged Roy Moore as a Russian asset and that he was being astroturfed in terms of his popularity online by the...
	Internet Research Agency and the Russian Federation, because one weekend, suddenly out of the blue, 23,000 Russian bots all mass-subscribed to Roy Moore's Facebook page and to his Twitter account, and...
	Dozens of headlines saying, just like the Russian bots and trolls, you know, then these Russian, sophisticated Russian troll farms backed Trump in the 2016 election.
	Now here they are back again in the first election since 2016, which is November 2017 Senate runoff.
	And so he was pilloried as a Russian asset, like he was, is there a counterintelligence risk?
	Does the FBI need to open an investigation?
	Comes out about a year later that actually the group that had written, The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference using Russian bots had actually purchased these 23,000 bot accounts and then piped them in with a VPN to look like they're coming from Russia.
	Mass subscribed the Russian bots under their US control to Roy Moore's social media accounts and then went straight to the media.
	To create the story of him being backed by the Russians.
	This is the Steele dossier 2.0 digital version.
	I mean, how do people not go to effing jail for this?
	I mean, this is, it's exactly what they do with the Steele dossier.
	It's a, well, it's a DNC built, paid for lie that they then, you know, run to the intelligence that leased it to the media so they can then rely on the publication to justify their police investigation.
	Yeah, and the people associated that all had backgrounds in CIA and State Department at New Knowledge.
	And the thing was funded by Reid Hoffman, who's the billionaire LinkedIn founder who also bankrolled the E. Gene Carroll.
	Reid Hoffman backed the E. Gene Carroll case.
	And Reid Hoffman is the one who Elon Musk has suggested is very nervous about the Epstein list seeing the light of day.
	And Reid Hoffman also was the one who in 2019 was...
	Through his Bergwin Institute, where he's on the board, was hosting whole panel conferences on how elections are an attack on democracy.
	Elections corrupt the democratic process.
	We need to have councils determine politics rather than voters in elections.
	I didn't realize Reid Hoffman had also financed the E.G. Carroll lawsuit.
	Did he have anything to do with that law that was passed, helped with E.G. Carroll to open the window for her to sue?
	I don't know.
	I thought that that was...
	I know that the legal teams, I think it was...
	I think it was Roberta Kaplan.
	Her attorney was Kaplan who said that with the help of her spearheading.
	I don't know.
	I would not be surprised.
	I haven't seen evidence.
	It's a big, fat, incestuous crime family that has its tentacles in government, military, media, everywhere.
	We're not in control of our lives.
	We're not in control of our policy.
	You don't need to break the law in order for them to break it for you and use it as the pretext to put you in jail.
	Well, that's one of the things that's so exciting about the present moment.
	I mean, having Kash Patel at FBI is a moment where, I mean, it's a real test.
	It's almost like a hypothetical.
	It barely feels real.
	Like, hypothetically, is it possible if you put in an absolute warhammer into that position, someone who's publicly said he wants to shut the whole thing down and turn it into a deep state museum, you know, he's obviously not going to do that, but, you know, the ethos driving through it.
	You know, is a very powerful one for reform.
	Is changing the leadership going to be sufficient to change the institution?
	Or is the rot so deep?
	Are the incentives so corrupt?
	Is the resilience of the bad apple roots of it, is it going to...
	Can you change it even if you try and you have good people in there?
	Who, um, who are committed to taking it on.
	So it's an exciting moment to, I mean, honestly, it would have been a lot better with Matt Gaetz.
	You know, I think, look, I think Pam Bondi's great, but, um, you know, I think Gaetz had that similar mentality.
	I think that, but, but Gaetz, now that I've gone down, who did I go down that, that Gaetz wrote with, um, village crazy lady on Twitter about the Gaetz.
	Extortionist scheme.
	And then they ousted gays.
	Set aside whether or not he's into extracurricular activities that lend themselves to getting into trouble.
	He wasn't guilty of that, which he was basically extorted for.
	Set up for, extorted for.
	And they managed to get him to back down, much like they managed to remove Khan out of Pakistan.
	You know, I say this.
	I believe the they, and I'll put the they in quotes, that it's the system tried to allow a bullet to be put through Trump's head.
	You know, they'll do something similar with Kash Patel.
	They'll go manufacture a crime, use their assets to manufacture.
	Well, that's why the head of the Justice Department is the most important position outside of president.
	And Pam Bondi is really going to be tested on this because...
	There will be pressure for these sorts of ops against Trump world.
	And one of the things that I really respect about this Trump 2.0 term is he's put punishers in these positions.
	That meme about punished Elon, punished Trump.
	You have the sort of red eyes because you've been punished and now your mentality is you are going in as a bit of a punisher.
	Bobby Kennedy wrote the book The Real Anthony Fauci and the Wuhan cover-up about, you know, how HHS is at least partially responsible for creating a bioweapon and, you know, all the corruption.
	Now he's the head of it.
	You know, the guy who called to punish it is now the president of it, or, you know, the secretary, right?
	Same thing with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at NIH.
	I mean, you know, the guy who's called the fringe epidemiologist and should be banned from...
	You know, effectively being cited in medical research as the head of all medical research.
	You've Kash Patel with the FBI situation.
	And Matt Gaetz did have that philosophy about DOJ.
	And I think coming close to death from these things builds your resolve in taking it on.
	the fact that Gates already sort of had stared life in prison in the eye, so to speak, or potential bankruptcy from all the legal fees in the eye hardens you.
	I think J. Bhattacharya is a very sweet and humble man, but I think that there's a part that gets hardened because of the punishment you're put through.
	And so I very much like the idea of having someone at DOJ who had already had their near-death experience with DOJ malfeasance, because that makes you braver.
	Because you have less to lose because you've already been through that process of feeling like they've taken everything from you.
	What's the term when you're not playing with house money, but...
	Oh, geez, Louise.
	Not free-rolling to some extent.
	I mean, this is not to be cynical, and God willing, nothing worse will happen, but Trump is literally free-rolling now in life.
	But for the grace of whatever forces, it would have been very different.
	My concern is, you describe what they do in Pakistan, and they go and get enough of Parliament to vote no confidence.
	You've got a bunch of deep-state rhinos, and people think, like, I'm a right-wing or whatever, but you have a bunch of deep-state...
	Rhino-whatever people who are easy to sway, and if they have dirt on them or they can't stand up to the threats of this lawfare manufacturer of criminality, they will vote down.
	Pan Bondi, I'm not sure about it.
	They'll vote down Bhattacharya.
	They'll vote down Akash Patel.
	What's despairing about it is it really feels like we're absolutely not in control.
	We've lost so much control of the levers, we can never get back into control.
	And then it's just sort of like running and hiding and trying to cover, do the best you can.
	But what do you do about it?
	Well, I think it comes down in large part to coalition dynamics.
	I think that the blob was fractured over the past 18, 12 months, in part because the people who had gone along with it, I think, felt a little bit...
	Betrayed. Like, they were not as bad as they were to their enemies.
	They were not great to their friends.
	I mean, everything that they did, you know, that Google got down on its knees and did for Biden World, at the end of the day, the Biden World, who, you know, is effectively in the process of breaking up Google through the Justice Department.
	Let me stop you there, actually, if I may, because that's the thing where I say that that sort of sanction is illusory to some extent.
	So they'll break him up.
	Good. But these entities work together, whether or not they're officially under the same corporation.
	They work together like we see them working together through the Atlantic Council and how they have their various arms and tentacles reaching out.
	It'll just be a little bit further away, but it'll still be under the same octopus.
	Sure. I don't think Google's happy about it, though.
	They wouldn't be fighting the case if they were.
	I think Facebook feels betrayed.
	I think Mark Zuckerberg felt like they were thrown under the bus.
	That they weren't protected by the Biden State Department from Europe and the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.
	I think Tim Cook at Apple feels betrayed.
	You know, he just got hit with this $15 billion tax penalty.
	Can you explain that for those who may not have heard?
	I mean, $15 billion.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	So basically, you know, Europe under this, you know, this court assessment is, and they're doing this with all the U.S. tech companies, and there's this big push in Europe, something called digital strategic autonomy.
	Where they're trying to build up their own tech sector and try to bring U.S. tech giants into more of a part of an ecosystem and where the spoils of their market capture are distributed more to the European people while they operate there.
	And the force that's supposed to take that on is the State Department.
	But the State Department was...
	Using all its political capital with Europe to force them for these sanctions on Russia and for the military operations against Russia, and leaving nothing on the political capital table for the negotiations in terms of protecting U.S. private sector stakeholders in the tech space.
	And so I think Apple felt rolled after everything they did for Biden.
	I think Facebook felt it.
	I think Google felt it.
	And I think even Biden world and Harris world went to war with each other.
	I just listened to Jill Biden's speech yesterday where she was mocking Kamala Harris and saying, don't we all feel joy right now?
	So great to feel joy.
	You know, you had Biden putting on the MAGA hat and smiling.
	I've never seen Biden happier than the day.
	Right. Right.
	He didn't look demented.
	He looked in the moment and he looked super happy about it.
	Right. So there is a little bit of an internecine battle happening right now among the previously unified counter-Trump faction.
	And so I think they're reforming that.
	I think a lot of this will...
	We'll be galvanized by the specific things that Trump does with power once he's in office in order to reunify them.
	I think the coalition dynamics may look a little bit different when it's reformed this time than it did before.
	It'll be very interesting to see how the Chamber of Commerce turns, for example.
	The Chamber of Commerce, which represents all our big multinational corporations, was always a Republican stalwart.
	It was one of the big power bases of the Republicans.
	The Democrats always had...
	You know, the media, the universities, the unions, you know, the Hollywood culture, and the Republicans always had, you know, basically big military, big energy, and big business.
	And that was always what, you know, was that sort of parody.
	And then about a year into Trump term 1.0, the Chamber of Commerce became pretty much a stalwart, you know, I don't want to say DNC, but they very much switch sides because of Trump's nationalism focus while these are globalist corporations.
	And so we've seen a lot of private sector billionaires and investors tilt towards Trumpism.
	You'll be curious to see if the Chamber of Commerce switches back towards a Republican slant.
	That could throw a big monkey wrench in the ability for the blob to galvanize the private sector as part of its coalition.
	So a lot of this we don't yet know the answers to, and some of it may depend on what Trump does with Russia, what Trump does with Syria, what Trump does with Venezuela.
	What Trump does with the open border.
	Now you mentioned it.
	What does happen with Syria now?
	Assad is out, presumably in exile in Russia.
	You have entities which are going to be worse than Assad, presumably also taking over military infrastructure resources, aligning with Turkey.
	How does that play with Western interests, with Israel's interest in Syria?
	Well, I think Israel's interests have, at least substantially, they've had the strategic interest in blocking the ability for Iran to militarily backstop Hezbollah in Lebanon, which they've been using their alliance.
	Iran was sort of the ground troop repelling force to these al-Qaeda groups.
	During the Operation Timber Sycamore, you sort of had Russian air support, air defense, and missiles, and you had Iranian sort of on the ground, Iranian guard presence in Syria.
	And part of that redounded to Iran's benefit because Iran could then send, logistically, they'd have supply lines to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
	And so I think this...
	The toppling of Assad and making that land bridge essentially inaccessible to Iran has already achieved the strategic interest in quarantining Lebanon and Hezbollah.
	I think with Turkey, you have, it's very likely that you're going to see the construction of a major pipeline from essentially from Qatar to, To Turkey that is going to, you know, trespass through these new, newly opened up, you know, Syrian land, because the only reason that hasn't happened to date has been because of Assad.
	Assad blocking the construction of this billion-dollar pipeline that was going to transmit tens of billions of dollars in export revenue between...
	So I think that that is going to go forward.
	And you're going to have this, you know, it's a Wild West now.
	I mean, you have, I'm very curious to see how Mohammed al-Jalani, what role he plays in the new political governance, given he was the head of the...
	Rebel force that led this military excursion, and yet he was seven years ago under Trump.
	There was a $10 million bounty on his head from the U.S. Embassy in Syria.
	I think that the reason that they timed this is because these are al-Qaeda.
	These are ISIS-adjacent al-Qaeda forces, and Trump's whole thing was wiping out ISIS.
	And so I think they knew that Trump would...
	You know, totally dismantle these assets if he got back control over power.
	And so they wanted to use them while they still had them.
	While they had these cards, they unleashed them all now because Trump wants to wipe out these.
	His own State Department has that tweet live right now.
	So does it happen that Trump comes into power and then starts whacking the new administration of Syria?
	I mean, it would have been easier to do it had Assad still been there and these would have been public enemies or common enemies.
	Now they're going to be the government.
	I mean, can you go in there and start, You know, drone bombing the government of a foreign country.
	Well, you already see Lindsey Graham saying that now we need U.S. military boots on the ground to stop ISIS.
	But they're saying that HTS is not ISIS, you know, because it went through this rebrand, like, yeah, okay, put a wig on, and it has a $5, you know, dime store mustache on, so it's no longer, you know, it's no longer Al-Qaeda.
	But it's...
	I feel like before, while they were rebel groups using terrorism in an attempt to gain power, it was easier to call them terrorists because they were using terrorism to gain power.
	But now they're in power, and we already have the EU, we already have the UK putting out floating potential bills.
	And the UK and EU now saying that they're no longer going to classify, you know, HTS or any of its adjacent things as terrorists.
	And this is happening at the same time that, you know, they're promising a kinder, gentler Al-Nusra front, you know, where they're going to be inclusive.
	And I would not be surprised if you see gay pride parades there led by the U.S. Embassy in Syria under Trump.
	Wager a beer at one point in time over the next several years.
	You will see gay pride parades in Damascus.
	But, you know, it could go in so many different directions because things are so fragile right now.
	Those parades could look like one of two iterations depending on the way they're conducted.
	And I will not keep you too long.
	I think we might have gone over the initial budget of time here.
	This is all popping off like in the last 60 days, 30 days before Trump comes into office.
	Coincidence? Accident?
	Or a provoked accident?
	Well, I think it's the expenditure.
	I think their fear is that HTS would not be supported by Trump.
	Because, I mean, Trump...
	It looks like ISIS.
	It's an Al-Qaeda group.
	And Trump's whole thing was...
	Knocking out ISIS and knocking out Al Qaeda.
	And so I think they felt like we have these forces in Idlib, that we have been capacity building, that we've been funding, we've been arming.
	I strongly suspect that much of that military material that was left in Afghanistan was done so in part so that these supplies could be routed.
	Ends up in the hands of Syrian warlords.
	Yes, exactly.
	Trump would not greenlight this because it would look like ISIS is resurgent.
	It would look like Al-Qaeda is back.
	And Trump was the one who rebuffed the Syria policy in the first place.
	Obama was practically at war with Syria during term 1.0.
	I'm sorry, during that handoff to Trump 1.0.
	So I think they thought, we're not going to be able to do this under Trump.
	Trump would not greenlight this.
	Trump wants to peel back the thing.
	So we have one last shot to do it.
	Let's use all our firepower.
	The timing, you know, is right here because Russia is, you know, Iran has just been decimated by Israel.
	Russia is too tied up in Ukraine.
	Assad, the sanctions have been backbreaking.
	He can't even pay his own army.
	I mean, that was a big reason that this happened is they were so crippled by the sanctions.
	They couldn't even get oil revenue because you had all these ISIS groups that were pilfering the oil lines and sending it up through Azerbaijan and Turkey.
	So it's the perfect time and the perfect crime, and I think they got away with it.
	Now, we'll end on hopefully a good note.
	I am tending to think that populism has a way of rising to the top, sort of, despite all the best efforts.
	We've seen now a Trump 2.0, and ironically enough, had he been re-elected in 2020 under what many people think, We wouldn't even be at this advanced stage of dismantling this system.
	When Kash Patel comes in, do you clean the FBI's house?
	To some extent, I think there's going to be a self-cleaning like we're seeing on Twitter now, where to get rid of the lefty idiots, they're eliminating themselves, so to speak, and going over to Blue Sky and deactivating their accounts.
	To some extent, I expect the very bad elements of these agencies to leave with resign or...
	Maybe get pardoned before Trump comes into power, and you'll be dealing with a smaller entity to reform.
	What can people do?
	And actually, a very curious question.
	On a day-to-day basis, you're looking into all these questions.
	I mean, what are you doing?
	Not what are you doing, but what can you do?
	What can people do to help you?
	And what does a day look like for what you do?
	I mean, I'm pretty much plugged in all day, every day on this, and this has been my life for...
	You know, almost eight years now.
	A little over eight years now, I guess.
	But, you know, I'm a researcher guy.
	You know, that's the phrase that I make fun of a lot because that's, you know, how things are disguised for operations purposes.
	But fundamentally, what I do, you know, I do things beyond just research.
	Obviously, I publish.
	I do public speaking.
	You're an encyclopedia.
	I like watching you when you talk.
	I'm seeing the way your brain navigates information as you're getting it out.
	You have an amazing recall.
	Honestly, it's just being in it all day.
	I think it will look less exciting and less of a kind of encyclopedic thing as more people simply move into the space.
	The fact is everybody Does this with any PhD on, I don't know, some period in Jurassic history.
	They can recite the smallest details about some leaf, that some bug, that some...
	And I think it's just that people have not really seen this particular area excavated like this.
	I think more people are now, and more people are becoming educated and conversational about it.
	And it's kind of just a language that has to be learned.
	In the same way we have classification systems for species and genus and all of that, it's not like you're speaking, you need to become fluent in Latin, but you do have to pick up these terms and become conversational with them to be able to describe the ecosystem.
	That's just been my world that I've lived in.
	And my day is just continuing every day to build that out and to make it clear for people.
	And I'm hoping that in the process of educating the general public, that policymakers and lawmakers can take that as well as a guidebook, as a North Star, to be able to make funding decisions, to make policy decisions.
	And to make the world better through their use of government and policy.
	And now the foundation, does it exist off support from the general public?
	We are not presently taking general open donations, but we're a watchdog.
	We spend our day watching.
	Telling you what we've seen.
	Okay, and so if people want to help you in particular, and the Foundation in particular, follow you on Twitter, what's your Twitter handle?
	It's at MikeBenzCyber.
	MikeBenz with a Z, Cyber, C-Y-B-E-R.
	Yep. And the Foundation?
	FoundationforFreedomOnline.com.
	We have some great, great new reports coming out in the next day to three days.
	If you can whet the appetite on which subject in particular?
	Well, we're publishing a comprehensive list of every single U.S. government program and agency involved in Internet censorship.
	Everything from everything that's happening at the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, FBI, DOJ, DHS, HHS, NIH, Department of Education.
	I think when you read that and you see the size of it, it will help you see like a Hubble telescope to see deep out into the universe.
	Amazing. Mike, thank you very much, everyone out there.
	That will end it for today.
	I'll go back and see what I can get by way of super chat, rants, tip questions that I may be able to answer.
	And if I can't, I'll tag Mike and post it out there.
	Thank you all.
	Tomorrow I'll be live.
	And with that said, people, see you on the interwebs.

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