Big Tech Censorship: An Industry Developed by the Government | Real Talk

Any dissident voice was deemed to be an attack on critical infrastructure. If they succeed in that argument, the First Amendment is legitimately dead in this country. When you say they, is it Democrats, Republicans? It is the empire. Would you say that their agenda is nefarious? It actually ends the idea of America. How is this legal? The birth of the CIA was about this exact thing. It's ironic that they use the word democracy because they don't actually believe in democracy. Mike, thanks so much for coming in. There is quite a bit to talk about. We can talk about NewsGuard and how PragerU has been a victim of their unbelievable censorship. But just to get started, I'd love to get into just your background. How did you become a person who we deem is an expert on social media censorship? Sure. So it started while I was a corporate attorney and I had been following the 2016 election quite closely and some of the censorship issues that were starting to develop at the time. I mean, it really started with an interest in chess, if you will. I was an avid chess player as a kid and I sort of came of age at the time when chess engines were starting to be better, starting to defeat humans. And I lived through that era where chess engines just went from sort of being a little bit laughed at to just dominating and changing the game of chess forever. And in late 2016, I came across essentially AI censorship technology development white papers that were essentially doing for speech online what chess engines were doing for chess moves back when I was a kid. And this was this idea that you could use these mapping techniques to be able to create maps of political groups online to censor the words that they speak, to map their language, and then to grade them all on a sort of numeric scale to create a toxicity score threshold for any political statement. And I thought, well, this is going to be the end of Western civilization in the same way that chess computers were the end of a human ability to compete with computers on chess. There's going to be no way out of the censorship regime if AI censorship becomes the law of the land on the internet. And so that took me into a path of trying to understand what was behind the AI censorship development. And I came across what I now refer to as the New Manhattan Project. It turned out that the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence services, what we call the Foreign Policy Establishment, or the BLOB, as President Obama's National Security Advisor Deputy Ben Rhodes termed it, it was essentially an instrument of statecraft to be able to control speech on the internet, to be able to control internal domestic political affairs, to be able to rig them in favor of the Foreign Policy Establishment. That work took me into the White House, then into the State Department, and then into the work that I do now in the nonprofit space. What did you do for the White House? So I was a speechwriter for President Trump, primarily on technology and foreign affairs issues. And then at State, I essentially ran the cyber desk. It was Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Technology, which is a long way of saying everything that connects to the internet and the economic bureau that involves U.S. statecraft negotiating with Europe or taking on China issues in the IT space and working with our big tech companies as U.S. national champions. So that was essentially my role at State. And what I see doing now with my nonprofit Foundation for Freedom Online is essentially a similar role with respect to promoting education about free speech on the internet and the emerging threats to that primarily on the government side. Was social media censorship a concern of President Trump? And is that something that you guys worked on? It became one, but too late. The Trump administration, I think, was massively taken off guard by the Foreign Policy Establishment, by the BLOB. And again, when I refer to the BLOB, I'm referring to the Foreign Policy Establishment's two factions that comprise it. Internally within the government, that's the State Department, the Defense Department, and the intelligence community, like the CIA and the NSA. These are all, we have an American homeland where we live. And then we have an American empire, which stretches around the world and in a globalized economy. There's the Milton Friedman quote about the pencil, for example, and what it takes to make a pencil. And the gums come from a tree in South America. And the graphite comes from a mine in sub-Saharan Africa. And everything that it takes to make a simple little instrument of the economy. Well, what happens if a foreign government doesn't allow you to basically access that supply? Or what happens if they change their labor laws to make it prohibitive to operate there? What happens if they pass a law to box out? The role of the State Department is to essentially pry open and make other governments reasonable to U.S. commercial interests. The Defense Department does that on the security side. And our intelligence services do all the little dirty work operations that are formally deniable by state or DOD. But at the end of World War II, when we set up the rules-based international order and this globalized sort of world that we live in today, we, early out the gate in 1948, essentially declared a Department of Dirty Tricks doctrine that we would empower our foreign policy establishment to do dirty things on the world stage to other countries for the interests of Americans. Because if we didn't do it, the Bolsheviks would. So famously in 1948, George Kennan, who's one of the godfathers of the CIA, 12 days after we rigged the Italian election in 1948, wrote a CIA memo calling for the inauguration of organized political warfare, saying we need a foreign-facing dirty tricks power because if we don't do it, the Bolsheviks will. We need to continue to be able to control other countries' internal affairs. But the catch is it's going to be for the benefit of the people of the homeland, and it's not going to be used on them. And the issue is, is we're now living in an era where the empire managers, the blob, are using that same toolkit that was only supposed to be used abroad against their own people who are voting now under this sort of populist nationalist emergence for policies focusing on domestic priorities rather than foreign policy. And this is essentially what Trumpism is in the US. It's what a lot of the populist movements in Europe are doing. It's what's happening right now in Israel with a relatively nationalist government there. It's what happened to Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary. All these are being targeted by the blob for regime change and for suppression and for censorship because they threaten essentially the economic interests of the blob stakeholders. And just beyond the State Department, DOD, and IC, you have the corporate and financial stakeholders who draft off of the operations of the government, whose markets are pried open by them. So that's really sort of the meta story behind the construction of the censorship industry here in the US and even institutions like NewsGuard. I'd imagine that the idea that governments would try to control information is not a new thing, right? And try to spread democracy, try to... I mean, the New York Times has been really controlling information both here in the United States in particular and abroad. But what you're saying is that the United States would use information and communication in order to impact other countries so much so that it would even launch into possible wars or regime changes based on impressing onto the population a certain idea. Yeah, absolutely. People forget how revolutionary social media really was. It was really the first time we had a free and open information economy in this country. It was not until the internet allowed peer-to-peer communications that there was ever really a back door to escape the intermediation of the foreign policy establishment of our empire managers in mainstream media. And I don't think they anticipated that because the initial rollout of the internet was to promote free and open internet in other countries in order for us to have a sort of new voice of America. So more specifically, we had something called Wisner's Wurlitzer in this country. This was named after Frank Wisner, who was one of the CIA godfathers. He bragged that he could play international media like a Wurlitzer, like a long sort of piano organ and create a symphony of news cycles around the world because of all the different media proprietories under the CIA and State Department's control. That was essentially one of the main reasons the internet was handed over from the military. I don't think they were anticipating the day when their own citizens might have nationalist thoughts in opposition to their policies and we would effectively become dissidents. And that's essentially what ushered in the censorship age. Can you explain what Grafika is? Because I think that's connected to what you're describing. So Grafika is a company that was initially doing, it builds itself as a social media analytics firm. To be able to draw, they sort of look like spherical balls of yarn where you take any narrative that's being spread on the internet and you chunk it into nodes and links between nodes in order to create a network map of who's spreading a particular narrative. So for example, ISIS was said to be recruiting on Facebook and Twitter in 2014, 2015. And so the State Department and the intelligence services would want to know, well, who are the main ISIS recruiters on Facebook and Twitter? And who are their sort of lieutenant class amplifiers? And how is the information spread from there? And using a technique called natural language processing, you can draw a network map of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, essentially, all rolled up into their role in the amplification of a narrative. And so Grafika was created as essentially a military contractor to help the Pentagon and the intelligence community create these kind of intelligence, political heat map radar systems in conflict zones that the military or intelligence services operate in. Then in 2016, Russiagate hit. And this conflation of foreign threats and domestic politics really came together in a big way. And Grafika was onboarded into the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative, which is the formal psychological warfare research center. And the issue was, is Grafika essentially went from being this foreign-facing spy agency on social media at a granular level, targeting individuals and links between individuals to targeting U.S. citizens who were pro-Trump because the foreign policy establishment viewed Trump's Russia policy, his monkey wrench thrown in the blob's long-term plan to seize Eurasia. They viewed that as a massive domestic threat. Basically, they were hired by the blob to preserve the perceived legitimacy of a strange Biden victory through mail-in ballots. And then as soon as the 2020 election ended, they formed something called the Virality Project to censor COVID. And in fact, here's another really crazy aspect of Grafika. Again, Grafika is deep in that spawn of the Pentagon and CIA. Their chief strategy officer had worked for 25 years for the CIA. They'd done a lot of CIA work in their contracting. They started censorship of COVID. According to their own documents, they said on December 16th, 2019, that's four days after the pneumonia-like symptoms broke out in Wuhan. A Pentagon psychological operations warfare unit partnered with NATO's psychological operations center. It was called the Center of Excellence. It was set up after 2014. We're censoring and drawing these complex narrative network maps of who in the United States, who in Europe, who all around the world were accusing the COVID origins of being a military lab leak of coming out of sort of a Pentagon or USAID or anything that blamed the U.S. Government. This was the U.S. Government PSYOP center being deployed to censor social media rumors about the role of the U.S. Government. That to me is a very, very smoky, shall we say, set of circumstances that this is essentially the first mover in the censorship space of COVID. How is this legal? How can our own government use social media to censor a political opponent? This just sounds like something that they obviously crossed the line and how are they getting away with it? And I know that NewsGuard ties into this because supposedly NewsGuard is an entity that is not part of the government. They claim that they're a private entity, but we have had so many bad experiences with them when we talked about COVID or we don't dare to question mail-in ballots. We have received so many threats from NewsGuard and we have spoken to many attorneys about what our legal rights are vis-a-vis the First Amendment. And the answer has been, well, you have no illegal rights because they are a private entity and so they can do whatever they want. Can you just explain the connection between Grafica and NewsGuard and how are they all getting away with all of this? What we're talking about essentially here is the structuring of an intelligence operation. There are front companies and there are cutouts and there are formerly deniable links through capacity building outside organizations to do the work that the State Department wants them to do. And this is actually the birth of the CIA was about this exact thing. We created the CIA in 1947 under the National Security Act for the purpose of allowing the State Department to have plausible deniability with the cloak and dagger work that's the underside of U.S. diplomacy. In terms of the legality of it, some of this will now turn on the Supreme Court case on this. Certainly at the trial court level, it was ruled that this was not legal to do. And we know that the government did not believe that it was legal for them to do this directly. I'll give you a great example. Are you talking about, by the way, Mercy versus Missouri? Yes, exactly. So a great example from that case was the censorship of the 2020 election. The blob had wanted to park this government censorship power initially at the State Department. So what they did is they did a really cute trick. They said we have 17 intelligence agencies. Only two of them are domestic, the FBI and DHS. Well, DHS is not attached to DOJ. DHS is its own independent equity. So you don't need suspected lawbreaking to do it there. So we are going to create a new center within DHS that will essentially combine the foreign facing powers of the CIA on censorship in the media space with the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI. And it'll just be a fusion center within DHS. And that was what CISA was. And CISA was the main architect of censorship of Trump voices in the 2020 election. What they did is, starting in April 2020, they got together with four outside entities, which would call themselves the Election Integrity Partnership. Grafica was one of the four entities there. And they said, we want to pre-censor anyone who might delegitimize an upcoming Joe Biden victory seven months from now. But we lack the legal authorizations. The head of the Election Integrity Partnership, Alex Deimos, was on camera. And this is my organization who listened to hundreds of hours of their talks. And we clipped them on this and it was played on the congressional jumbotron. DHS knew this would be illegal. So they set up an outside organization to do the dirty work. And it was a plan straight from the government to evade the First Amendment, to use a cutout, to use that same sort of structure you do for intelligence work. So they basically created a for-profit industry for censorship. Yes. They argued to themselves after the 2016 election that free speech on the Internet was the greatest threat to the rules-based international order. Because free speech on the Internet didn't just cause the Trump election. It caused Brexit in the UK. And at the time, Marine Le Pen was winning in the polls against Macron in France. They were afraid Frexit was going to happen in France. The Vox party was rising in Spain. They were afraid Spexit was going to happen in Spain. The EU would come undone, which means NATO would come undone. EU is essentially the commercial arm of NATO. That would mean there'd be no enforcement arm for the IMF and the World Bank and the international creditors. The entire rules-based international order, our democratic institutions would all be destroyed simply because people would be voting for who they wanted to on social media. So what they did in 2017 was basically 10 months of tight consensus building between in order to come up with a game plan for how to censor social media to bring the media landscape back under the control of the blob. And specifically, the linchpin of that strategy was to kill the ability for the financial capacities of alternative media. And that meant creating a censorship industry. This is why I refer to it as the censorship industry, rather than the censorship industrial complex or rather than the censorship enterprise or things like this, because it really does come down to the industry of it. If you kill the ability to operate professionally as a media organization, you kill the ability to produce news stories. It's much easier. And this is what they did. They said, well, we can't stop every single bad news story. But there's these media institutions, which are the font of all this funnel. If we just go upstream and kill their ability to operate profitably, then we kill all the opposition news stories. And this is where NewsGuard crawled out of. This is where GDI, the Global Disinformation Index, crawled out of. This is where Check My Ads. And there's hundreds of these censorship mercenary firms. They're funded by the government. They're funded by the National Science Foundation. They're funded by the Defense Department. They're funded by the State Department. They're funded by USAID. They're funded by NATO organizations. They're funded by British intelligence. And it's all to kill populist, nationalist populist news allies in order to bring social media back under the fold of the blob. When you talk about the economic suffocation of these media organizations, it's basically by saying advertisers will no longer advertise with these media companies or Visa won't work and process with you anymore, etc. Right? That's exactly right. Can you go back and just explain this very important case, Murthy versus Missouri? I just think I'm not sure if all the listeners know the details, but it's a pretty significant case that's happening right now. Yeah, I think it's the most important free speech case this country has ever had. When the El Dorado gold mine of internet censorship was discovered, and again, just to back up a second and put things in perspective, we did have a censorship apparatus domestically in this country. As we discussed, there were the CIA and the war department and the state department all had back channels into all of the major news distributors in this country from the 1940s until the 1990s. The power of social media censorship is it goes even beyond killing a story at the top down publishing level. It kills your ability to even talk about it peer to peer. You can't even send text messages on many of these things, for example, because WhatsApp is now under the fold of the blob and they've moved into encrypted chat apps and things like this, but all communication is essentially moved online peer to peer. This ability to stop even peer to peer sharing of information is a power that the blob could only dream of in the 20th century. What's at issue with this Supreme Court case is whether or not it's legal to have this censorship laundering apparatus. What the Biden administration is arguing is that the First Amendment did not anticipate social media and that the First Amendment, as it's classically interpreted, can no longer hold. They're essentially making the argument they make with the Second Amendment that, yes, the Second Amendment may have anticipated muskets, but it didn't anticipate these high powered rifle type things. The Second Amendment doesn't really apply to these high powered automatic weapons. They're making that argument about social media, that social media has overwhelmed the First Amendment and the government needs to be able to essentially have a control mechanism over the spread of misinformation online. The issue is if they succeed in that argument, the First Amendment is legitimately dead in this country. If there is not a constitutional check on this power, you will never have a free election in this country again. So basically Biden or Murphy, they're claiming that it would be just absolute anarchy. We'll have a situation where there'll be just fake news, disinformation, people just run around believing in things that are bad and dangerous. What does Missouri claim and why is it Missouri? Well, because it was the state attorney general's office of Missouri and Louisiana. It was essentially an alliance of two state attorney general's offices arguing against the federal censorship structure of the federal government. So this is essentially a federalism issue. These are state attorney generals who essentially brought this suit and there's a number of plaintiffs who are involved in this. The case initially started around COVID censorship and the White House censorship of COVID-19. And then basically everything that was unveiled both from my work through the Foundation for Freedom Online and through things like the Twitter files, the much larger superstructure of this whole of society apparatus turned up. And the case expanded from being simply about federal censorship of COVID to being about federal censorship of every sensitive policy issue. Because once they got away with it for the 2020 election and COVID, they expanded this to climate. They expanded this to abortion. They expanded this to immigration. They expanded this to Ukraine. Any dissident voice on any sensitive policy issue, it was deemed to be an attack on critical infrastructure if you expressed misinformation online about it. When you say they, is it Democrats, Republicans? It is the empire rather than the homeland. It is the people whose jobs are in the managerial class of our international relations rather than those whose are the domestic priorities of people of the homeland. So this is a much bigger issue than Democrats versus Republicans. Would you say that their agenda is nefarious, that it's not in the best interest of America? What is their agenda? It is so much worse than that, I would say. Because it actually ends the idea of America. The whole concept of democracy, the reason we say democracy is the most legitimate form of government over an authoritarian one is because it's government by consent of the governed. We say that our media is civilian controlled. Our military is civilian controlled. We don't live under a military dictatorship. The military answers to the civilian-run government. We determine the civilian-run government by a vote of the citizens who get our information about who to vote from, from citizen-run media. Well, here you have this financial stakeholder class of the blob, all the multinational corporations, all their financial investors from the BlackRock and vanguards of the world in the New York private equity firms and London banks and all the investors in our corporate class who are in bed with our military industrial complex and our energy sector and our chamber of commerce to be able to have this sort of international empire. And there was this idea that our State Department, our DOD and our intelligence services, our FBI, our CIA, our DHS could all move into the media space because now Russia was threatening hearts and minds. We need to control our own citizens' hearts and minds more than Russia does. And while we're at it, we're controlling American hearts and minds. So we're just going to bend them on who to vote for in order to make sure that they don't vote for something that opposes the foreign policy establishment's agenda. And so when you could make this argument that half the country was an insider threat, a counterintelligence threat, and that we needed to control their hearts and minds at the military level to counter the Russian military level, well, that now means we don't have a civilian run government anymore. That now means we don't have a civilian run media. That basically puts the same dirty tricks departments for controlling foreign governments of our own. Well, then who's in charge of the country? How can you call that a democracy when you've got the military control over media, which means military control over the government, which means we don't consent to this government. You're not allowing us to even talk amongst ourselves in peer-to-peer communications about who to vote for. I can definitely see your concern about them completely overreaching. But I would also say that they would probably argue, well, isn't it dangerous that China has access to American minds and they're manipulating us and making us think certain things? The Iranians are certainly not shy to try to infiltrate through social media. Clearly, social media has become a frontier where there is a war on ideas and these wars on ideas ultimately impact elections, as we know Americans have done in places around the world. Now, places around the world are now doing it on Americans. And so would your vision to just be completely hands off and let the Iranians, let the Chinese just take over our youth that's on social media and impact the way they think? I mean, we see these videos go viral that are pro Osama bin Laden or pro Hamas. What should we do? What is a pragmatic balance between complete anarchy allowing other foreign governments to infiltrate American minds versus autocracy, which is what we've experienced during the post-Trump election? Yeah. Well, I think it's important just as a preliminary matter to establish that the censorship industry in this country was formed under cover of Russiagate, that all of the domestic censorship that was done for the 2020 election and for COVID-19 and for climate issues and abortion and immigration in Ukraine, all this stuff was first laundered in through that exact predicate that Russia had rigged the 2016 election by all of its influence over US social media. And it's important to sort of stipulate upfront that that was a totally unsubstantiated lie. It was totally bogus from the beginning. They never, that was not a close call. At the outset, the first mover on the Russiagate space was the CIA, who published a 15-page memo on January 6, 2017, that was then ratified through the 17 different intelligence agencies and said that Russia had this complex information operation on social media. I read that report the day it came out in January 2017. There was nothing there. There was no there there. All it had was an appendix. They basically said, well, it would be hypothetically in Russia's interest for Trump to win the because he was arguing for a sort of neutrality with Russia. So because there was a sort of motive, there must be something under it. Oh, and how we can empirically validate that is RT, Russia Today, and Sputnik, which is the sort of the radio version of Russian media, had much higher engagement during this election than they had in previous election cycles and were gaining in sort of competitive influence over other comparable state-run media like BBC. Well, you know, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but RT isn't. Actually, it's just a public facing. It is Russia's version of BBC. That's not evidence of some complex intelligence operation. And again, coming back to the 2016 situation, that predicate was very dirty because by arguing that it was a Russian intelligence operation, they did ultimately, after the fact, after they already started setting up all this censorship infrastructure, tried to expand it. They said, oh, you know what? Later on, months later, they said, you know, we found an intelligence connection. It's the Internet Research Agency in Russia, a little known subunit dedicated to influence operations. And the Justice Department filed suits against 12 different defendants there. And there was a lot of hoopla about the role of the IRA and all of this. Well, the moment two defendants in that case who didn't even need to defend themselves because the DOJ didn't even have jurisdiction over the matter, filed motions for discovery. The Justice Department dropped the cases because it said, if we need to tell you how we know your Russian agents, then it'll undermine national security. So there goes the Justice Department confirmation of the Russiagate hoax. Even the dollar amount we accused the Russians of doing for this was $150,000 in Facebook ads. That was the sum total. That is one middle class salary in the US. We're supposed to believe that Russia rigged the 2016 election with the salary of one middle class American salary. $1.3 billion, by the way, when the Hillary Clinton campaign, but $150,000 was enough. By the way, even that was split 50-50 between pro-Trump and anti-Trump. So instead of saying that bus or hypothesis that the Internet Research Agency was rigging it for Trump, they said, well, you know what? Actually, Russia's purpose was actually just to sow division, just to sow general division just so that they could preserve their idea that this was an intelligence operation. Not that half of the whole thing actually killed their entire hypothesis. When you give the intelligence community this God button to censor any speech they want and say they can do it for counterintelligence purposes, but the people in charge of that counterintelligence capacity have a skin in the political game, there's no checks and balances on it. They're not held accountable and the public has no idea. It's not like the church committee where we can at least hear what's going on. Peter Strzok was the head of FBI counterintelligence, the head of counterintelligence for the FBI, the head of the folks doing this at the FBI. Peter Strzok was texting his mistress that they were working on an insurance plan to stop the president from being elected. These are the people in charge of counterintelligence. Counterintelligence is a way of using the dirty tricks powers of intelligence on our own US citizens by slipping in that word counter in front of it. What I would say is when it comes to the Iran issue, because I totally understand the concerns, or when it comes to the China issue, we do not have evidence I think at this point of any sort of sophisticated influence operation in that regard. What we do have evidence of is the financial capacity building upstream. For example, Iran is tightly aligned with Qatar. Qatar is a massive font of funding for US NGOs and US universities who form the sort of thought leadership of influence and who get a lot of people essentially on Qatari payroll into these kind of pro-Iran, pro-Iran narratives. Those people then take to social media and have this kind of quasi-organic spread on that. I don't know that we've, for example, got a meticulously detailed digital forensics record of Qatari intelligence doing this. What you have is an infusion of cash that is tantamount to essentially a bribery scheme to get huge portions of our own population to be pro that narrative, and then they themselves take to that narrative on social media. The larger issue is the funding upstream. To target that, we'll keep our First Amendment intact rather than allowing this tanks to tweets doctrine of NATO to just kill any sort of political faction that wants to oppose infinite wars. Where do you go from here, Mike? What do you suggest that we do? The number one thing is the formation of a and the consolidation of a whole-of-society network defense on this issue. The blob understood the magnitude of what it would take to achieve a censorship industry in 2017. I remember because I was in on these people's Zoom calls and I was spending my whole life chronicling everything they were doing in 2017, and I remember how exasperated they were in the months after the 2016 election. They would have these huge international conferences on what to do about social media mis and disinformation and the rise of alternative news and the displacement of legacy media. At these conferences, you'd have these very high-ranking officials and very senior influential folks in government and military and politics and media and industry throwing up their hands saying, God, there's a First Amendment. What can we really do? These private sector companies, they have a mind of their own. There's a whole legacy of libertarianism in Silicon Valley. They're very skeptical of the media in the first place. What they did is they came up with this whole-society plan to say, okay, you're right. It is bigger than just the government. What we're going to do is we're going to create a partnership and we're going to create a surround sound. We're going to use a combination of carrots and sticks and we will fuse together. Rather than in a purely top-down government way, we're going to have this four-quadrant model of government, private sector, civil society, and media. We're going to just gradually over time, we're going to expand this alliance and it'll be one thing and then we'll simply be able to quarterback that alliance. In any given issue or in any given moment, we'll be able to tap into our vast partnership network to be able to pull whatever levers in their capacity are most useful. I have been crusading about the formation of thinking of it at the whole-society level and creating our own whole-society network. Free speech allies in government, working together with free speech allies in the private sector, working with free speech allies in the civil society space, working with free speech allies in the media, and inflating the power ball of that coalition, bringing in more and more partners. We have a lot of new assets, if you will, in that alliance that have come on board essentially in a totally informal way, by the way, in the past 18 months. When the House turned over in November 2022, that was a big moment. Jim Jordan has fired off a lot of subpoenas, brought in a lot of people for transcribed interviews. That's the federal government side of the whole-society. State AGs have taken on this issue in a powerful way. You have the private sector allies. When Elon Musk acquired Twitter and paid a significant price for that, that created a massive private sector ally for the government side of that free speech coalition. The fact is the Twitter files were totally helpful to the Jim Jordan committee and being able to legitimize and know where to dig, where to fire off the subpoenas, who to bring in for transcribed interviews, because you have these hard forensic receipts from the private sector role. Well, we need 25 more private sector company allies of the Elon Musk and X network. Building up that robust thing, we need to start poaching things from the other side. By the way, the state governments can play a huge role in this, particularly at the procurement level. I think the states of Florida and Texas should be passing free speech legislation to make it so that above a certain minimal viable product level, that you can only qualify for state government grants, or you can only qualify for the state pension funds as a private sector company if you are not tagging NewsGuard. NewsGuard is partnered with Garm, the World Economic Forum, and all these different chamber of commerce companies. Well, guess what? Those are all funded from the Texas state pension fund and the Florida state pension fund, the state pension funds of 27 red states. You pass a human rights law in those states that say no procurements, they're going to cut off their relations with NewsGuard. They're going to make it hard for them to do business with that side. Then you bring in the civil society organizations. There's a lot to be done here. But that work took years on the other side. We're just now in the beginnings of it, but it's a very exciting time. Yeah. Well, I think people are waking up and starting to ask a lot of questions. Mikey, you used all kinds of words and definitions that I can't take for granted that people who are listening know what you mean. Is it okay if I just read some of them to you? Some of us who are not as knee-deep as you are in some of this, I made a collection. We'll do a Rorschach equat test, yeah. Let's do a quick just kind of explanation of some of these terms. What is civil society? Yeah. Civil society is gongo. So we talked about government-organized, non-governmental organization. What you think civil society means is you think civil, okay, so they're nice people across society. Now, civil society comprises university centers, NGOs, foundations, community leaders, and activists and researchers. So for example, in the censorship industry space, there's over 60 U.S. universities that are funded by the U.S. government in order to do full-time professional internet censorship work. So you basically have the military funding universities like the Stanford Internet Observatory, which is one of the four entities partnered with Grafica and the Atlanta Council for 2020 election censorship and for COVID censorship. The University of Washington was another one of those universities. Harvard gets this funding. MIT gets this funding. Berkeley gets this funding. It is a major, major growth industry. Today, one of the fastest-growing majors on college campuses is internet censorship. They don't call it internet censorship. They'll call it media literacy, or they'll call it computational linguistics, basically working at the intersection of algorithms and social science to create this network mapping, or they'll call it sometimes the advanced physics departments because of the AI side of this. Young enterprising kids at Georgetown used to go into international relations if they wanted a high-level international diplomacy job thing, and then from there, they would go to work for an NGO at the U.N., or they'd go to be like a staffer on the Hill, and it would be a long climb because you don't make a lot of money in those initial roles before it really pays off. Now, they're all majoring or getting PhDs in internet censorship because that immediately puts them at the nexus of big tech and big politics with high impact right out the gate. Instead of going to work at some NGO, U.N.-affiliated NGO out of a Georgetown IR degree, they'll get their degree in computational linguistics, and they'll start their career over at Google interfacing with the U.S. State Department. They'll make a lot more that way. It is a huge growth field. And what you're doing, though, is you are making the next generation's professional prospects ride on internet censorship as a growth industry. And this is a massive, massive problem because they're going to make the argument, as I even saw in lobbying letters when I was at the state, that if you shut down internet censorship, it's like closing a coal mine in West Virginia because so many U.S. jobs are involved in the content moderation space. It created an entire industry that's based on censorship, really funded by the bloc. Right. But civil society is essentially the university and NGO side of that. Well, when we talk about words that sound really good but really manipulate people, there's no better word than the word democracy and how that is used because everybody wants democracy, but the way they use the word democracy is to really manipulate us. Right. So democracy is the watchword of the blob to overthrow governments. The blob gets to activate and deploy its department of dirty tricks under two conditions. When we say a country has engaged in external repression, I'm sorry, aggression, when they have aggressed against another country. And so we say that's for national security reasons. We will work to overthrow that country's government because they are aggressing externally. But if we can't nail the country on that, but we still want to take over that country for political or economic reasons, we say there's internal repression. And democracy is the use, is the essentially the activation word for that, which is why a lot of our regime change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy have that democracy word. And our NGO blob, our NGO swarm is activated by the use of democracy and the perceived threat to democracy. But what democracy really means is once free speech on the internet started losing the blob elections, once it lost them Brexit, once it lost them the Philippines election in 2016, once it lost them the Trump election, and when they were losing very badly in Europe ahead of the 2018 parliamentary elections, they changed the classical meaning of democracy, which had, you know, since the French Revolution, democracy had always sort of meant a consensus of the individuals. And so what they did is they did a cute trick to say democracy is no longer about the consensus of individuals. It's about the consensus of institutions. And when you redefine it that way, something absolutely devastating happens to the liberties of the people, which is that if the individuals perceive in their own internal consensus, that the institutions are failing them and that the institutions need to be reformed or that they should take a different track, they are now committing an attack on democracy because they are undermining the consensus of institutions. And by the way, it's important for folks who are not in the blob world to understand there's a lot of work that goes into forming that institutional consensus to get the military on board, you know, to get with the energy stakeholders, to get the energy stakeholders on board with the other chamber of commerce companies, to get them in, you know, on board with the London banks and the Wall Street investors, to get them on board with the folks at USAID, the folks at the National Endowment for Democracy, the folks at the State Department, the folks at the CIA. There's months and years of consensus building work to create that democratic consensus. If at the end of the day, the individuals decide that they think some truck driver on social media who tells funny jokes is, you know, is a better candidate for president because they make them laugh more than Hillary Clinton. Well, you can imagine what that looks like from the from the blob's eye view. We did all this work, you know, in order to have this very sensitive thing get consensus built. Now we can't execute it because they thought somebody was funnier on Twitter. Well, you know, and because of that, we're going to lose Eurasia. Now, you know, Ukraine will become a colony of Russia. You can see from their perspective why they why they did this. But they think people are stupid. That's what it is. And they need to make the decision. It's ironic that they use the word democracy because they don't actually believe in democracy. Well, this is a really funny thing. If you run a Boolean Google search for the period between November 2016 and about February, March 2017, and you can find the dates to that period and you look at at democracy and disinformation, what you're going to see is actually for the first few months after the 2016 election, they argue the exact opposite, which is, oh, my God, maybe democracy is not what we should be promoting anymore. Maybe actually democracy, you know, if it can it's maybe democracy is what's going to kill the rules based international order. Maybe we should actually reframe the way we talk about these issues because of, you know, disinformation's threat to democracy. And then after a bunch of consensus building meetings and saying, oh, my God, this actually makes us look like authoritarian countries who were, you know, were capacity built to overthrow. But what they did is they simply did this cute trick of taking this gravity loaded term of democracy and then just, you know, redefining what it meant and but then still using the same capacities. Can you explain the hybrid warfare doctrine real quick? Yes. So hybrid warfare doctrine means military control over media. So when when the U.S. State Department and the CIA and the DOD and the blob overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014. And just to be plain speaking, that's what's happened. That's what happened. Victoria Nuland bragged on tape that the State Department had flooded Ukrainian civil society with five billion dollars worth in capital, the same right sector groups that that took to the streets to overthrow that country's government. They were not expecting the countercoup that happened after this. They were despite five billion dollars worth of U.S. aid and NAD and State Department media to control the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people being flooded into the region. After that coup in 2014, there was immediately a countercoup where the eastern side, the Russian ethnic side of Ukraine broke off from Ukraine. It did not respect the newly installed State Department installed Ukrainian government from Kiev. Donbass declared itself to be a breakaway state. And Crimea independently voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation. And when that happened, they said, OK, why do we lose the hearts and minds of people in eastern Ukraine? Why are we losing them all across central and eastern Europe with the rise of these right wing populist parties? We are also losing ground in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, all the way from central and eastern Europe. We were said to be losing hearts and minds because the media ecosystem was said to be increasingly pro-Russia. And when the Ukraine annexation happened in 2014, they said we're losing the military fight against Russia, not by fighting tanks to tanks. We're losing it by tweets. And so the hybrid warfare gave birth to this NATO doctrine called from tanks to tweets. This idea that NATO is we're losing wars because we're losing governments and the government funding authorizations and governments making alliances with Russia when they should be cutting them off and sanctioning them. And so hybrid warfare was the excuse for the military to control social media. So they set up these NATO centers of excellence all over central and eastern Europe. These are the same institutions that would come back to us to censor the 2020 election and censor COVID-19 here in the US. But this was basically, you know, this idea of hybrid warfare is a trick to be able to stop the rise of populist nationalist political parties who undermine the foreign policy goals of NATO. Wow. I think people just underestimate the power of social media. The government hasn't underestimated, but I think people probably do. Which leads me to my final question to you. Many of the people listening are probably parents and they are hearing things like media literacy education. It's become something that's part of our schools. It's in our curriculum. I know that NewsGuard is behind media literacy education. Can you explain just very briefly what we need to look out for when it comes to media literacy education? What is their agenda there? Yeah. Media literacy is the North Korea Clockwork Orange program of the blob to be able to control what news media your children can read or that's accessible on social media. So when you hear the phrase media literacy, you attach to the word literacy and think, well, you know, we have a literacy problem in this country. We want to teach, you know, underprivileged inner city school children how to read and become more literate. And we're going to do that through teaching them with media tools or something. No, it's the opposite of that. The focus on the word literacy there is the idea that if you read the wrong media sources, you are media illiterate and need to get your mind right by reading state approved, government approved, or government cut out approved media sources. And only then will you be deemed media literate. So it's basically about purging any institution that's got a low score on a NewsGuard rating. And NewsGuard, as we've talked about, is partnered with the American Federation of Teachers, 1.7 million teachers. There's state laws now mandating these media literacy programs in California, New York, Illinois, Chicago, Rhode Island, and others. They have a plan to mandate this in all the blue states and purple states. And it's also in red states now, too. And again, what this involves is preventing your children in K-12 schools and in universities from being able to cite to Prager University or being able to cite to the Heritage Foundation or being able to cite to any sort of news institution that's deemed to be sort of vaguely pro-nationalist, pro-domestic homeland as opposed to the international empire. And the cute trick for these media literacy scores is... So NewsGuard's role in this is really interesting because NewsGuard is a cut out of the blob. It calls itself set up by two journalists, Stephen Brill and Gordon Krovitz, and they just do independent media rankings. Well, who's on the board of advisors of NewsGuard, which is partnered with the American Federation Teachers to make these media literacy designations about what news sources make you literate or illiterate? Well, let's see who's on NewsGuard's board. It's General Michael V. Hayden, who was the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, the head of the NSA, and a four-star general. It's Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former general secretary of NATO, the head of all of NATO, the pan-military alliance. Rick Stengel, the head of the Global Engagement Center for the State Department, which is the censorship center of the State Department. And Tom Ridge, who's the head of DHS. So behind who's censoring what your children can read in K-12 schools is the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, the head of the military, the head of NATO, the head of the State Department, and the head of DHS. It is that perfect aggregation of the blob, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence community. And this is another one of these things where the state treasury offices and the state AGs can be very effective, and especially to send a message that not a single dollar of any institution that has any affiliation, direct or indirect, with media literacy has to be cut out of the public dollar. Because these new laws, for example, on media literacy that mandate it in schools, that now creates an industry of media literacy professors. How many different hundreds of thousands of jobs for professional teachers who teach media literacy? Those people are no longer going to be engineers. They're no longer going to be doctors. They're no longer going to be EMTs. They're no longer going to be speech pathology therapists. They're going to be professional censors. And this media literacy program is going to take the 200,000 censorship jobs we have in the country and move it up to 2 million, because it's going to be every public school is going to have to have a teaching class for this. So it's going to, you're going to get to a point where if it's not challenged now, judges will not want to rule against media literacy because they're going to see the damage it's going to do to the system with all these people being put out media literacy jobs. That's what they did with the early sexual education. It's what they've done with so many social, emotional learning that people don't realize what a Trojan horse that has been in our schools. And I'd say that those who are listening, who are wondering what can they do with something so overwhelming? I mean, there's just so much overwhelming information that you share. There is something little that everybody could do. And that could be, you know, go onto the school board and prevent the school from integrating this media literacy into our classrooms. Like let's hold the line and stop that there. Let's talk to people don't realize that through this lovely sounding language, they can actually create a lot of damage, long-term damage, as you described. Yeah. Well, I think the Chris Rufo DEI strategy is a great model for this, you know, being so first of all, X-raying through it. When I hear media literacy, I don't think for a second about that phrase. I immediately think, okay, this is the North Korea Clockwork Orange program. This just says, if you read anything I read, you're deemed illiterate by your own school. You'll get docked on tests if you cite something that I read as regularly as a news source. And, you know, when DEI was able to be successfully X-rayed through so that people could see it for what it was, and, you know, that took a lot of work. That took years of work. It took constant exposure of all the different scandals happening at the universities, happening at the hedge fund level, happening at the corporation level, to be able to really create that national awareness. But now the tide really is turning on that. It also took a lot of lawsuits, by the way. America First Legal Foundation has been instrumental in this, you know, and I think something similar could be done, you know, in this respect. But, you know, that tide is turning. A lot of corporations are now, you know, decimating their DEI departments. A lot of states, you know, the state of Florida has basically forced, you know, Florida University and FIU and FIAU to all, you know, basically shut down their DEI programs. And people hear the word DEI now. They don't think diversity, equity, inclusion. They think racial discrimination, or they think didn't earn it, or they think any one of the monikers that are so clearly, you know, and empirically validated by the trove of investigative work to break all of this. And, you know, the same thing can be done here on media literacy. And, you know, it is very fragile. You know, it does rely on people, you know, and on the DEI space, you know, Bill Ackman and the activation of folks in the sort of, you know, activist, you know, capital class is very powerful. And, you know, the fact that Elon Musk has been onboarded in the free speech fight, I think is very powerful in the media literacy front. And I think, you know, the Bill Ackman type types, you know, part of what charged him up was the conversion of his own daughter, according to his own tweets, you know, at Harvard to becoming this sort of hardcore Marxist and, you know, through these type of programs. Well, guess what media literacy is going to do? There's no opposition media to that, you know, under media literacy thing. So bringing in that whole society framework, you know, to go after the issue, I think is imperative. Well, I always say that I believe that America has it in its DNA to fight for its rights, right? Everybody from around the world, they'll come here to PragerU and they'll say, you know, America, you're still the best hope. It's something about the DNA of Americans that we won't let them take away our freedoms. And I think the work that you're doing and many others, as you mentioned, Chris Rufo, is so important. And so I just want to thank you for coming in today and enlightening us and educating us. And I think really reminding us that it's worth fighting for our freedom. Well, thank you to you and to Prager's leadership. You guys have been at the vanguard of this for a very long time. And your intrepid work on all these things, you know, has, I think, been a light to a lot of other people as well. It's a pleasure causing trouble with you in the best way possible. Good trouble.