What’s really happening with Telegram…?
We’ll pick it up where we left off in Part 2…
TUCKER: 37.55
And I assume on cable television, too, they’re everywhere, on all the channels.
MIKE: 37.58
Yes. DHS actually onboards media organizations into its counter disinformation work – and again, because media is the fourth quadrant in the Whole Society framework, and government, private sector, civil society, media – all aligned like a magnet to create the censorship outcomes, so that there’s no holes in the Titanic – no one can resist it, no one can stop it.
This is the prop…and it was so effective until Elon Musk essentially burst that bubble, and until they went a little bit too far with the disinformation governance board, and finally, a certain faction within the Republican Party woke up, and was able to exert some pressure through the House and Jim Jordan in November 2022.
But, getting back to this point about populism and what this whole counter disinformation, the censorship, whole society network does is – they did a clever re-framing – if you, and this is really cute – if you run a Boolean search on Google right now, and you look at what places, like the Atlantic Council, and Brookings, and the National Endowment for Democracy, were all saying in the months after Trump’s election in 2016 –
they were making the argument that maybe democracy was a mistake
because it leads to outcomes like – before they doubled down on it, there was a brief window where they said, you know what, actually, democracy leads to outcomes like Donald Trump, and Brexit. And, at the time, NATO, its biggest fear was free speech on the internet.
In early 2017, NATO periodicals were saying the biggest threat to NATO was not a hostile foreign attack from Russia — they would come to eat these words five years later — they would argue, conventional warfare is over. The biggest threat to NATO is free speech on the internet, because it’s allowing the rise of Marine Le Pen in France, it’s allowing the rise of Mateo Slovene in Italy, it’s allowing the rise of the Vox Party in Spain, AFD in Germany — so we would have Frexit, Grexit, Italexit, Spexit — the entire EU would come undone, which meant NATO’s commercial arm comes undone, which means NATO comes undone, which means there’s no enforcement arm for the IMF and the World Bank.
So, it would be like the ending scene in Fight Club where the credit card companies all crash down just because you’re allowed to speak your mind on the internet.
TUCKER: 40.02
(Tucker laughing) This is so sick.
MIKE: 40.20
So, they had this sort of crisis of, well, what do we do about it, democracy is the problem. And then they said, well, the problem is our entire diplomatic toolkit. Everything that the CIA does, everything the State Department does, everything USAID does, everything that the Pentagon Civil Affairs does – is all under this rubric of promoting democracy – this is how we topple foreign governments.
We only have two predicates for toppling a government: one of them is aggression, the other one is repression.
So, if they are aggressing against a foreign country – we get to be the world’s policemen, we get to topple them for their military activity – but, if we can’t nail them on that, we can always get them on repression. We can say, they’re repressing their own people, so we need to bring democracy there.
And, this is the lion’s share of – this is what we did in Belarus; this is what we did in Moscow from 2010 to 2020; this is what we did in all these other countries –
And, I’m not even arguing normatively about whether that’s right or wrong. But, you have to understand that free speech on the internet is the collateral damage of this proxy war.
But, here’s how they rescued democracy: they said we need to stick with democracy, even though we don’t like its outcomes because, it would take too long to turn the Titanic.
All of our cloak and dagger, black ops, plausibly deniable toppling of governments worldwide – all in the name of democracy – all the NGOs we fund, all the civil society activists, all the media institutions – is all democracy, democracy, democracy.
So, we need to simply – instead of getting rid of this concept of champion democracy – we need to redefine what democracy is. We need to make it NOT about the consensus of individuals, how people vote. But, make it about the consensus of institutions. And we will simply define democratic institutions as anyone who supports the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and it’s transatlantic partners in the UK…
TUCKER: 42.10
So, in the United States, that would mean redefining the system of government from one in which a majority of 350 million people believe something, to one in which a group of – what would it be – one hundred thousand people?
MIKE: 42.46
Yeah. About that.
TUCKER: 42.47
Yeah, maybe a hundred thousand people, probably a third of whom I know – in other words, it’s like, it just takes, they just took all the power from the American population and awarded it to themselves.
MIKE: 42.36
Yes, and this clever, rhetorical sleight of hand allows unspeakable powers that Americans have no idea about.
I’ll give you one example: so I said it’s all about institutions, now – and if you want to watch a funny clip, I posted this on my X account recently – The Berggruen Institute, where Reid Hoffman is a board member, and they were involved in this whole transition integrity project, domestic color revolution, blueprint for stopping Trump from being installed as President, even if he won the electoral college, and they contemplated using Black Lives Matter as street muscle, and the whole thing was run by a senior Pentagon official with a CIA blue badge, and that conference in 2019 – the title of it was, “How Elections Erode the Democratic Process” – how elections are a threat to democracy.
Because they were moving to this concept that The Blob’s control over the political and commercial ecosystem of the country cannot be left to the people. If we define democracy to be about democratic institutions, then the popular will of the people can still be categorized as a threat to democracy, which would therefore still allow funding of the billions of dollars worldwide that we have deployed as capitol for this.
And, I’ll give you a great example of this: The National Science foundation is probably the main funding artery for most of the censorship ecosystem in the United States.
Now, it comes from a million places…
TUCKER: 44.12
Wait…what…?
MIKE: 44.14
I know. It sounds crazy, but…listen…
The National Science Foundation is the civilian arm of DARPA. It is, and it has been since…
TUCKER: 44.24
For those who aren’t from D.C., will you explain what DARPA is?
MIKE: 44.26
DARPA is the Pentagon’s brain. DARPA is the reason that we have the internet. The internet started as a military technology to be able to send and receive information digitally, because the Pentagon manages – that’s the largest employer in the United States – the Pentagon manages the American empire – after World War II, we had this yawning empire, stretching from here, to Latin America, to Europe under the Marshall Plan, and all the way out to the Philippines and Asia – we had this worldwide empire – we had to manage all these counterinsurgency threats, all the domestic populations that were opposed to U.S. hegemony over their own lands.
And so, the Pentagon had to be extremely versed in all the regions, understand what was happening politically, what was happening culturally.
And so, the Pentagon farmed out to U.S. universities – this is a part of why so much of U.S. universities – so much work is funded by the Defense Department, and is funded by the National Science Foundation, its civilian arm.
And in fact, the National Science Foundation is the leading subsidizer of all – the leading source of funding for all higher education funds. People think we have a private higher education market, we don’t – it’s subsidized by the U.S. government. And that is a quid-pro-quo.
TUCKER: 46.43
But through DOD.
MIKE: 46.44
Through DOD and through the National Science Foundation, which is the civilian…but…the National Science Foundation – and even the story of the internet, again, it was created by the U.S. military, and it was turned over to the National Science Foundation, and that’s where the dual use comes in.
The military developed the cell phone; the military developed GPS, the military developed most of the technology at the R&D level that we now live under. In fact, the military developed all of the internet anonymity software in order to help Pentagon, and CIA, and State Department backed political groups be able to orchestrate regime change. The VPNs, the TOR network, end-to-end encrypted chat – all these things were Pentagon projects before they became duel use, just like the internet became duel use. It was a military project, then the civilian commercial architecture was built on top of it.
But, the National Science Foundation has two major domestic censorship programs, and in the charter documents establishing one of them in 2021, in February 2021, the month after Biden took office – this is a $40 million program, and in the charter document it says that the purpose is to stop misinformation about democratic institutions. (The Blob itself!) And, one of the democratic institutions they define is the media.
So understand this: this is the Pentagon civilian arm funding $40 million dollars worth of censorship – explicitly, exclusively – censorship institutions to stop Americans from de-legitimizing the media – to stop Americans from undermining trust in media.
If North Korea did this, we would pass sanctions on them. If Iran did this, we would pass sanctions on them. Because, establishment media – and again, politically aligned media with The Blob – has to be propped up as a buffer to drown out the voices of populace.
So, the strategy here is twofold: turning up the knobs of the blob’s propaganda channels, and turning down the knobs of anyone who opposes that. Because you can win two ways: you can win – well, three ways – you can win in a fair fight, or you can win by super saturating your own media voice, or you can win by default, because the opposition political party, the opposition political movement, is not allowed.
Stay tuned for Part 4…
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