THE REAL REASON FOR CENSORSHIP IN 2024 - Part 2
The College of Corporations
What’s really happening with Telegram…?
We’ll pick up where we left off in Part 1 …
MIKE: 15.48
Now, getting back to the Telegram case…
Telegram is an instrument of statecraft, and it’s also an instrument of military and intelligence projection. So, on the statecraft side we just talked about how Telegram has been the darling of the CIA, the State Department, USAID, for operations stretching from Belarus, to inside of Moscow, to Iran, to Hong Kong, to China, and all over the world, because it’s got a billion users, and so it’s very easy to get all the native population who you’re trying to recruit to your political cause onto the channels they’re already using. And then, also give them the anonymity and the encryption safety to be able to organize and express their political support safely…relatively safely.
So the problem is because Telegram is also an open playing field, because Pavel has not relinquished — either to the United States nor to Russia — it has also allowed Russian propaganda to propagate, and this is a problem right now in Ukraine.
Just two weeks after your interview with Pavel, Radio Free Europe — which is an institution that was created by the CIA, and it was run directly, for its first 20 years, by the CIA — just two weeks after your interview with Pavel — called Telegram “a spy in every Ukrainian’s pocket”, and made the argument that Ukraine needs to rest control over Telegram, and laid out the following reasons for doing so: it said that 75% of Ukrainians currently use Telegram, and they had been using Telegram – this is up from 20% just a few years ago.
Because of Pavel’s solidarity with the concept of free speech, it’s been highly trusted for many years, but they’re not sure if there’s a Russian back channel now, and they cite several reasons around Pavel’s potential financing from a bond raise several years ago that may have had Russian investors in it. They cite the fact that Russian internal documents promote the use of Telegram for its own military, the fact that over 50% of Russia itself uses Telegram, the fact that…the fact that the Russian military uses it safely and has no problem with it, and the fact that there may be Russian financing of Pavel – this is the argument that they make – that perhaps it was compromised, perhaps the reason Russia dropped its attempt to ban Telegram after the 2018 affair, may have been because an agreement was secretly reached, and if that is the case, then that would essentially make all of the military operations and all of the statecraft and secret channels that Ukraine is currently using be spied on, you know, all communications, the entire war effort, maybe the reason Ukraine is losing is because Russia knows everything Ukraine is doing.
Commercial break…
Be right back…
TUCKER: 20.39
Yeah, I just can’t get over the fact that the Biden administration and the U.S. government, which you and I pay for, which is supposed to be defending the freedom of speech, above all other freedoms, is encouraging its proxy government, the Ukrainian government, to like, seize or take over a media outlet -- I mean that’s so…why is that not illegal?
MIKE: 21.58
Well (chuckles wryly), I mean, this has been part and parcel of our diplomacy for decades…
TUCKER: 22.05
But, that’s just criminal.
MIKE: 22.06
Well, if you recall when NATO — NATO’s first use of military hard power in its entire history — it was created in 1949 — the first time it ever fired an offensive bullet was in 1995 and…
TUCKER: 22.22
I remember it well.
MIKE: 22.23
Well, one of the things we did when we bombed Yugoslavia was we took out its state media propaganda organ – its state media channel, state TV, its state radio broadcaster – we bombed the headquarters of the media building and killed dozens of people in the process…
TUCKER: 22.45
Journalists.
MIKE: 22.46
Yes. And said that that was fair game because they were a key node in Yugoslavia’s war effort.
And so, we killed their journalists in order to slow down their military…
TUCKER: 22.56
So, the whole idea that there’s like a free exchange of information, or a battle of ideas, and may the best idea win — which is really kind of the foundation of American civil society – I mean, that’s what this whole project is based on.
MIKE: 23.13
Yes.
TUCKER: 23.14
They don’t mean it at all, in fact they’re moving in exactly the opposite direction.
Sorry to sound so shocked, but I am shocked, I hate this.
MIKE: 23.20
It’s something for 50, 60 years was very useful to us when other countries did not have robust propaganda or communications infrastructure themselves. One of the reasons that Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty and all those were so effective at the time was because other countries didn’t really have their own developed native programming in radio, or TV, or print. And so, the ability to project that with limited options allowed saturation of the CIA narrative in those regions.
TUCKER: 23.53
Well, I just — I mean this is — I don’t really have any desire to talk about it, but I can’t even control myself since my father was the Director of The Voice of America, and I grew up hearing about this, every day at the dinner table – the whole idea was, at least the public facing idea, the publicly articulated idea was, we’re disseminating news, and/or news ideas, information, facts, and allowing the populations of countries access to this and they can make up their own mind.
I mean, it really was part of, at least publicly and I’m very aware – I know it was more complicated than that, but – I really believed that – that this was part of the battle of ideas and we were winning because we had better ideas.
MIKE: 24.38
Well, we allowed freedom of speech because we were winning, and this is the issue now, which is, everything changed in 2014, in terms of our free speech diplomacy toolkit.
We set up a swarm army of pro free speech NGOs, civil society institutions, university centers, journalists, legal groups, in order to pressure and lobby all foreign countries around the world, to create an “open society” for journalists, so that those could be penetrated by U.S. statecraft and intelligence.
And, until the free and open internet started to backfire on the State Department, that was the unequivocal position of the State Department.
TUCKER: 25.19
Because their ideas suck. And, nobody wants trans kids, is the truth, and they don’t want anymore freakin’ rainbow flags, and maybe if you sold a product people liked, like Marlboro’s, or Big Macs, or Levi jeans, or freedom — or like hot blond girls, or whatever you’re selling — maybe it’s something that people actually want!
But if you’re selling trannyism and, gay race Communism, nobody actually wants that — nobody wants that! Sorry… (laughs heartily).
MIKE: 25.44
Right, well, if support is not rearned, it has to be installed.
TUCKER: 26.51
(Laughs heartily) Exactly. Nicely put.
MIKE: 25.54
And this is one of the great issues here, which is that, it’s these very free speech institutions that were capacity built by the State Department, that have all incorporated this censorship element. So, we still do have a lot of free speech diplomacy.
Just two years ago, we sanctioned the government of Iran for having the temerity to censor its own internet. This is so funny, because you know our own Department of Homeland Security was doing the exact same thing to censor Americans…
TUCKER: 26.22
To us!
MIKE: 26.44
To us! So I mean technically, the United States should be kicked off the dollar for doing exactly what we accuse foreign countries of doing.
But we selectively promote either free speech or censorship, depending on what’s most advantageous for political control in any particular country.
So, for example, if Bolsonaro were to have rose back to power in Brazil, have no doubt about it, free speech would be back on the menu, and Bolsonaro would be accused of censorship over jaywalking on a random street corner, and we would be pumping up through NGOs, and University centers, and journalists on payroll – we’d be pumping $100 million dollars into Brazil’s free speech economy in order to create anti-Bolsonaro sentiment.
TUCKER: 27.17
That’s right.
MIKE: 27.20
But, one of the things beginning – I come back to this Brazil case…
TUCKER: 27.22
Can I ask you to pause one last time – one of the things I’ve learned from you – over the last couple of years I’ve learned a lot from you – but one big picture idea that I didn’t fully appreciate ‘till I listened to your carefully, was that, our foreign policy drives our domestic policy.
MIKE: 27.38
There’s no such thing as domestic policy.
TUCKER: 27.39
Exactly.
MIKE: 27.40
Every country…
TUCKER: 27.41
I didn’t understand – I grew up in a world where there was the foreign policy and like you overthrow [unintelligible] or whatever, maybe that’s good for America, you don’t even think about it, we’re fighting the Soviets, it’s not a problem, because we are an island of freedom, here in the United States.
And, your reporting and analysis suggests – exactly what you just said – there is no domestic policy, everything that happens in this Country is an outgrowth of — a function of — our management of the world.
MIKE: 28.03
Yes. There’s no such thing as domestic policy, because every country’s domestic policy is another country’s foreign policy.
Whatever you do in the United States, whatever any foreign country – a foreign country wants to change its labor laws…well guess what…that impacts the bottom line of U.S. corporations who employ labor pools there.
A foreign country wants to nationalize its graphite industry – well guess what, now America can’t make pencils.
Every internal policy of every other country on earth impacts the bottom line of some U.S. national champion.
Now, how the State Department defines National interest is essentially the College of Corporations and financial firms that are U.S. national champions.
So, for example, if Georgia, or Azerbaijan does something that impacts the bottom line of Exxon Mobile, or Chevron, or Halliburton, that becomes a State Department priority in order to protect U.S. national interests against this nationalization law that’s happening in Georgia or Azerbaijan, and, it’s the same thing with every industry.
And so, I do want to get back to this sort of exporting the First Amendment concept that was such a big part of American statecraft.
There’s almost no better example of this than what happened with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which is the main censorship artery of the U.S. State Department, and also works with a lot of…a million of these censorship NGOs and USAID, and this whole network.
It was set up by Rick Stengel, and Rick Stengel would say that his job was to export the First Amendment, former Managing Editor of Time Magazine.
And, it’s when Donald Trump is elected in 2016, the guy whose job was to export the First Amendment, wrote an op-ed, I believe in The Washington Post, effectively calling for an end to the First Amendment – that it needs to mirror what Europe and other countries have in terms…
TUCKER: 30.02
And then he wrote a book making the same case.
MIKE: 30.05
Right…right, but this was the guy who was the Under Secretary of Public Affairs…
TUCKER: 30.09
This is a very evil man, Rick Stengel.
MIKE: 30.13
Well, the point that I’m trying to make here is, the free speech absolutist who was in charge of U.S. government projection of free speech – all it took was one election for the entire diplomacy architecture, that this principle of free speech was based on to get completely bottomed out.
All it took was for Donald Trump getting elected for arguably 200 years of a First Amendment principle and 70 years of this principle of exporting the First Amendment to be entirely discarded because it was leading to the wrong kinds of people being elected.
Free speech on the internet was blamed for the loss of the Philippines election by the State Department in 2016.
It was blamed for the events of Brexit. This is why the U.S. State Department funds so many London-based NGOs and university centers, and influence operations to stop Nigel Farage and the Brexit movement. It was blamed for the rise of Trump in 2016. It was blamed for the rise of Bolsonaro. It was blamed for the rise of Modi in India.
In country after country, the free and open internet unfiltered alternative news, the rise of citizen journalists, the rise of citizens in those countries who have larger voices than CIA backed media, than USAID funded media, than State Department funded media, has meant that the State Department has lost control of those countries.
And what happened was, after 2016 the technology and the networks were established to be able to add a new toolkit to American diplomacy, which is diplomacy by censorship.
And we have formal government programs at the State Department dedicated to getting foreign countries to pass domestic censorship laws to stop the rise of right-wing populist parties in those countries.
Let me say that again – we have formal government programs at the State Department whose job is to lobby foreign countries and pressure foreign countries to pass censorship laws to stop the rise of domestic populist groups.
So you have truckers in America whose income tax is going to pay foreign governments to censor their citizens.
This is the sort of schizophrenia right now of American…
TUCKER: 32.23
We’re becoming the Soviet Union, which exported poison around the world for all those years – I really felt like the United States was the bulwark against that, but whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, I’m trying to reassess. What is true now is that we’re doing what they did – we’re sowing chaos and tyranny around the world – it’s like I am so heartbroken to see this.
MIKE: 32.46
Well, it’s amazing you say that, because as someone who was sort of present at creation in terms of watching this all get established and spending my whole life monitoring it, and chronicling it, they were very aware of that when they were setting this up – and when I say ‘they’, I mean NATO, the U.S. State Department, the U.K. foreign office.
After the 2016 election, and after Brexit, and they began this whole consensus building quest about how to get all the relevant stakeholders from the government, from the private sector, from Civil Society, and from the media to all come together and create this whole of society censorship coalition – whole of society counter misinformation coalition, technically they call it — but, they were very aware that what they were doing was exactly what they accused Russia and China of doing – intensely aware – and there was much, much hand wringing in the beginning of this, in late 2016, early 2017, that we need to be extremely careful as we are establishing this infrastructure that it does not appear to be what Russia and China are doing, that Russia and China have a — what they said was, effectively, Russia and China don’t have the problem that we have. They don’t have rising populist movements in their countries that are opposed to the state institutions, that are opposed to the state priorities that are winning political power – how do Russia and China solve this problem of domestic populist insurgency? Well, they use – I’m not joking when I say this…
TUCKER: 34.15
(Tucker begins laughing) Giving their citizens political power in other words?
MIKE: 34.18
Yes, yes.
TUCKER: 34.19
Do they ever stop and just ask like, since when is it okay for the people in charge of the government to ban populism? I don’t understand, like, when did we all agree that populism is bad, I thought the whole system was fundamentally a populist system – the Country belongs to its citizens, I thought that was the whole deal.
MIKE: 34.37
Oh, I can answer that, because it’s basically doctrine.
There’s been a redefinition of democracy from meaning the consensus of individuals to meaning the consensus of institutions…
…and this is a very clever sleight of hand re-framing trick that they played after the 2016 election in the U.S. and they were setting this up.
So, just to get…
TUCKER: 34.56
They’re playing with revolution, here – I mean they could…they’ve lost their legitimacy, so I’m not going to try to overthrow the U.S. government – I’m 55, I’m not going to do that. But, at some point, you know, someone’s going to try to do that, and it’s going to be kind of hard to see why they’re not justifies in doing that, because it’s not legitimate – their legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed – that’s our system – and when they no longer have the consent of the governed, they’re not legitimate…period.
MIKE: 35.25
So, all I care about is freedom of speech on the internet.
TUCKER: 35.28
But if you have no freedom of speech, it’s not a legitimate Country.
MIKE: 35.33
So, there’s a lot to get to on all this that I think is maybe actually picking up with where we were just talking about with when they were setting this all up, I think it actually kind of elegantly dovetails with the point that you just made.
When they were setting this up, they said Russia and China don’t have this problem (yeah, because they also don’t have our Constitution…), we’ll have a PR nightmare, a crisis of legitimacy, if we simulate exactly what Russia and China do, which is top down government control.
So, what they did is, they came up with the concept called, the Whole-of -Society framework, that would, in order to Astroturf the appearance of a kind of bottom up, organic censorship industry, that the government would simply fund, and intermediate, and direct, and pressure.
So, this whole society concept is that the government is not the censor; it is simply the quarterback of the censorship ecosystem.
So, it is not like Russia and China in the sense that, you know, the Russian Federation says, this media channel is banned.
Instead, it would be the American government paying — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – all the different censorship ecosystem players, and exploiting that leverage to have that outcome arrive semi-organically.
And, they were very careful in establishing it according to this idea that, what we will do is we will be able to essentially have plausible deniability, but even though we are funding it, we’re directing it, and we are pressuring everyone to join this censorship coalition.
And so, this is how you had tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. State Department funding the private sector popup censorship mercenary firms, funding the Civil Society institutions, the universities, the censorship activists, the NGOs, the non-profits, the researchers, and also on the media side, and all these U.S. funded, USAID funded media outlets, all pushing for censorship.
And, there’s an elegant structure to it, which is that the government pays the Civil Society institutions to do, essentially, CIA work against our own citizens. This is why there’s so many CIA analysts at these censorship universities, the censorship labs – they’ll call them disinfo labs – at 60+ U.S.universities, all funded by the U.S. government. They do…
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.
Continued in Part 3…
END. /