Latest / Man in America Podcast / How the US Gov. Is Using Digital MK ULTRA Against Us — Fmr. State Dept. Official Interview

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How the US Gov. Is Using Digital MK ULTRA Against Us — Fmr. State Dept. Official Interview · Man in America Podcast

• 1:33
  Seth Holehouse: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Man in America. I'm your host, Seth Holehouse. We are in an information war. It's fifth generation warfare. I've talked a lot about this.
• 1:44
  We're in a war of censorship and narratives and digital control. And the enemy, whether you wanna say it's the CCP, our own state department, any culmination of that or the globalist, one of their primary goals is shutting us up. They don't want people like me talking to people like you because we're the counterinsurgents, we're the ones that are screwing up their plans for a one world government, and so they're really clamping down on censorship. They've got some really nefarious plans, And so joining us today to understand those plans, understand really the makeup of this and look at where we're at today and how it ties into the MK Ultra programs, how it ties into the counterinsurgency programs that were happening in The Middle East, and then how this ties into just the current censorship and where they want to take it is Mike So Mike Benz actually has a really impressive resume, but one the things he did is that he was in charge of all things cyber for the State Department. So this is a anything that do with the internet for the State Department went straight to him.
• 2:45
  He was, you know, regularly talking to Google and these big companies on, you know, tech censorship and everything. But since then, he's left, he's formed his own organization, he's fighting back against the internet censorship. So this is gonna be a really amazing interview, and I'll encourage everyone watching, and you'll see towards the end we kind of touch on this is what we can do, but sharing this kind of information is really, really important. And this is the kind of interview that you can share with your friends and family, regardless of what side of political aisle they're on, because it doesn't have to do with that, it has to do with what the loss of our freedoms, what the destruction of the First Amendment really means, and how that could turn our country into a modern day communist China. So folks, enjoy this interview with Mike Benz.
• 3:26
  Mike, it is great to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining us.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
• 3:32
  Seth Holehouse: So we're going to be diving into what I think is probably the single most important topic we can talk about right now. And I think it's also the most the biggest threat to our freedoms and that's censorship and really technocracy. It's it's the the government or whatever bad powers there may be using technology to put us into a prison, a digital prison that eventually leads us into being a physical prison. And you are, I think, one of the most knowledgeable guys on this, and you have a very extensive background in this. So, why don't you start by giving us just a quick background of the work that you did with the with the with the government and the White House, and then your organization, the Foundation for Freedom Online?
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: Sure. So I came into my role in this sort of digital free speech crusade from my time at the US State Department where I was the cyber DAS, it's what it's called, deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information technology, which is a long way of saying that I ran everything connected to the Internet at the State Department, towards the end of twenty twenty two, and witnessed their sort of the fusion between big government and big tech companies. And I was sort of the guy that Google and Facebook would call when they needed favors internationally for the US government to bring its power to bear on foreign governments to help our own private sector companies, while at the same time these private sector companies were cramming down and and mass censoring the very people who voted for that government. So at the time, I found all that to be extremely inflammatory from a moral perspective, and I found it to be something that needed to be there needed to be resources marshaled against because I thought it would also jeopardize America's posture in the world really for for generations to come, because it was basically the abandonment of any sort of free speech principles by our government while forming this unholy alliance with the with the private sector to do it.
• 5:40
  So then I started this foundation, and we're trying to educate essentially policymakers and the American public about the nature of the censorship industry and its various abuses against long held American civil liberties.
• 6:00
  Seth Holehouse: And this is really important because, obviously, you know, most of us are aware of what the First Amendment is, right? It's the the right for us to speak freely. I think that that becomes extremely important when we have to have the ability to question those that are leading our country. We have to be able to question an election. We have to be able to question the ethics of a politician, question whether they're being bribed or controlled by a foreign adversary like China as an example, or whether they've got a laptop full of very damning information that shows that they're probably not fit to be related to someone running for president, Like there's these are some major things.
• 6:41
  And I think that for a lot of people, because of the psychological operation and the softening up, they might look at internet censorship like, Okay, well, maybe you shouldn't talk about the vaccine stuff or, you know, you're an election denier. They've used these coin phrases, these, you know, CIA conspiracy theory phrases that they've very intentionally created to demonize people. And so a lot of people I think don't really understand the severity of it, but this is really what it is, is, you know, this day and age, as I understand it, the internet is the public town square. This is it's not like, you know, say a hundred years ago where there's maybe someone that printing is printing off a newspaper, or there's a protest, they'll show up with, you know, placards, they march. It would really be the equivalent of a government going and saying you can no longer come and speak publicly, you can no longer hold a sign in public, you can no longer express your opinion in a way that more than say five people can see it.
• 7:34
  You know, we would instantly say, gosh, that's like communist China, if we saw that same thing happening here in America, but actually it is happening. And it's even worse because it's tied into everything digital, which then ties back into the biometric and the biological, and it's it's just a frightening scenario. So this is why I said that in the beginning that I think this is such an important topic. And if you bring in central bank digital currency, the central credit systems, I mean, is the makings for a George Orwell, you know, dream is what this could turn us into. And so, you know, one thing, one thing that you've done in watching some of your work and following you on Twitter is that you've connected a lot of this to our own government working together with private sector, either controlling private sector companies or influencing in this private sector, whether they're companies like Google or Twitter or even, you know, schools and education systems like Stanford.
• 8:29
  So why don't you just kind of give us a a synopsis of what you're seeing or what you've seen happening in terms of the overreach from our own government and their ability to control what we the people are able to say?
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And that's a that's a great way that you had a a framing it just there. So you started by talking about the, you know, the sort of public square and how the Internet is the new public square. What's been what's really fascinating is when you when you really dig into the internal conversations, documents, and videos of the national security state, you know, the Defense Department, the State Department, the intelligence services, as well as their NATO corollaries. You see the way they talk about this issue sort of acknowledges that the Internet is the new public square, but they draw a distinction by saying that it is a version of the public square that is sort of a public square on steroids and therefore a kind of different thing.
• 9:29
  Because unlike a normal public square where it's, you know, a hundred or a couple hundred people standing in a park, now you get millions and you get everything at lightning speed. And so it allows information to ripple through a democracy and for magnet alignments for political galvanization of things that you couldn't really do if everything had to be analog. And because of that, there's a lot more democracy. There's a lot more people power on in a free and open Internet. In fact, this is the reason the Internet was actually exported to the world in the first place.
• 10:10
  It was a US, essentially, foreign policy soft power influence projection to be able to to be able to use the freedom of the Internet to evade state media control in in countries that we were working to regime change or destabilize. That's maybe a separate conversation. But what you see is that is that the government was actually the driver of this store of the censorship story from day one. Now to their credit, they were also the drivers of the Internet freedom story. Like I said, not necessarily for the most charitable reasons, as I just said, but but the it was the US government who funded the Freedom tech I mean, obviously, they produced the Internet itself through ARPA, DARPA, and the National Science Foundation, and then it was rolled out privately.
• 11:02
  But all the Freedom technologies like like, you know, VPN to to hide your your IP address or end to end encrypted chat so that you can be, you know, spied on by a government, ironically. And and Tor, you know, in order to access a dark web to to be untraceful. All of these things were developed by the Pentagon to help Pentagon backed dissident groups abroad organize resistance to topple their governments. So freedom was a big meme by the national security state from 1991 until 02/2016. The problem is is in 02/2016, Internet Freedom started toppling a lot of their own interests, first with Brexit in The UK in June 2016, and then with the election of Donald Trump in November 2016.
• 11:53
  So what you had is you had a bunch of NATO allied commanders, you had a bunch of Pentagon critters and State Department diplomats and and and, frankly, a whole crusade of of CIA folks who all got together in a in a bunch of these stakeholder meetings, and and and there's there's so much here to dig into. But they essentially said, listen. This is now right after the twenty sixteen election. They said, listen. This is all happening because of a free and open Internet.
• 12:26
  This is the that's the that's the only reason that Brexit was able to happen and that the Trump election was able to happen. You know, Trump got no newspaper endorsements in the entire country for an election cycle, unprecedented. The TV completely against it. They they had talk radio and the Internet, and yet managed to win in the election of the biggest, you know, most important election in the on on the globe. They looked around and they said, okay, If we don't stop this free and open Internet thing, it's going to get worse.
• 12:55
  And it's going to lead to Brexit in France with Marine Le Pen's movement, it'll exit in Italy with Matteo Salvini's movement, Brexit in Greece, Spexit in Spain, and the entire EU would break apart. Therefore, NATO would break apart. Therefore, the entire Western military alliance would break apart. And so we need to censor the Internet and stop the rise of alternative media, or else the entire rules based international order set up after after World War two, everything from NATO to its economic enforcement arm, the IMF, the World Bank, all of these institutions are, you know, are democratic western world, and empire management institutions would all dissolve because people would naturally just simply vote for a different set of of institutions, different set of of world order essentially than than what had been ordained to them by a sort of military establishment after World War two.
• 14:01
  Seth Holehouse: Folks, I've got a quick message for you. Right now, the world is very, very actively going through a process that the experts are calling de dollarization. And look, I've been talking about this for well over a year now, but maybe you're now starting to see it in the mainstream because they're now talking about it because it's really happening. What does this mean? Well, there's a few factors, but there's two main factors.
• 14:23
  One is that the BRICS nations, okay, this is Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and a whole coalition, they are actively getting rid of the US dollar. They're stopping their trade in the US dollar and this is significant because the dollar's losing its status as the global reserve currency and as the petrodollar. This is what gives our dollar its value. But the other thing is that we have an enemy that's within our own government, Biden and his administration, they are actively working to destroy the dollar. And you can see it in their actions that they're not trying to save the dollar, they're actually trying to destroy it because they want to roll out their central bank digital currency.
• 15:02
  So you have these two forces coming in both the same time working to destroy the dollar because what happens when that dollar gets destroyed? Well, literally your life savings, if they're sitting in the dollar, whether it's in a savings account or a bank account or the stock market or an IRA or a four zero one k, those savings, that money could literally be wiped out in a matter of days, weeks, even a couple of months. We're already seeing it with inflation, which is gonna be much, much worse. If you're seeing the writing on the wall and you're thinking, what can I do to protect myself? Well, there's a few recommendations that I always have.
• 15:38
  One is just to make sure you've got your food, if you have land, you know, ammunition, whatever it takes, real tangible assets. But fundamentally, the thing I recommend most is precious metals, gold and silver. Look, precious metals have survived the collapse of currencies, the rise and fall of civilization, and also a big factor in this is that the BRICS nations, their new currency they're introducing to replace the dollar, a lot of experts are saying it will be backed by commodities like precious metals, and so you can see there's gonna be a stabilization and I believe a dramatic increase in the value of precious metals. Not to mention, look at the back the past six months, we're seeing, you know, 30% plus increase in the prices of silver and gold. So if you would go back and say you put a hundred grand in the silver six months ago, it could be worth well over a hundred and 25, a hundred and $30,000 because the dollar is losing its value.
• 16:28
  So folks, if you want someone that you can trust for buying your precious metals or gold and silver, I would highly recommend Doctor. Kirk Elliott. So Doctor. Kirk Elliott is a good friend of mine, but he's a strong Christian patriot. He understands what's happening in the world.
• 16:44
  He's got two PhDs, one in theology, one in economics. So it's the perfect blend of understanding realistically money in the end times. So if you want to set up a free consultation with Kirk's team, head on over to goldwithseth.com. So again, that's goldwithseth.com or call (720) 605-3900. Again, it's goldwithseth.com, you go to the website, you scroll down, there's a simple form that you fill out right there.
• 17:14
  You put your email, name, contact information, and that sets you up for a free wealth consultation. We can talk to either Kirk or one of his experts to really understand what your options are. Or you can just call (720) 605-3900 to take action today. I think that a lot of things changed in 2016, like I think that they did not anticipate Trump winning and a lot of people that I've talked to and even some whistleblowers have recently come out. There's one guy in particular that's come out from, I think it was the UN talking about how much that disrupted their plans.
• 17:49
  And then you saw Trump put the screws to the CCP with the, you know, the, all the different tariffs. And you saw that he really started laying waste to a lot of their long established plans. And I think that right now they're in this frantic catch up mode because they lost four years, they have these deadlines. But I think most importantly, I want to hinge on what you said there is that they have to control the information to control the society. And this is I think an important thing that I've had to really remind myself of is that as much as I feel like we're living in an era where the government is encroaching on us in a lot of ways, similar to like the CCP with their own people, we're still actually a pretty free and open society.
• 18:30
  I can go purchase a gun, I can drive across state lines, we still have a lot of our freedoms, they don't control us physically, they don't have us in concentration camps, they don't have us in with guns to our backs or boots to our heads. And so, though, because they don't have those systems in place, the only way they can control us is by controlling the information. And that's, that's key. And so, if we, if they can't control that information, like for instance that we talked about, if, like with Trump, great example in 2016, we know they control the major news media, the newspapers, etc. But what you saw was this entire other system of information sharing that got Donald Trump elected.
• 19:10
  Like that's a massive threat to any regime that wants to bring in some sort of totalitarian system. That that's an existential threat for them. And so, it makes sense that in 2016, that's when stuff started because they realized like, wow, we have to really crack down on this. And so, before the show we were talking and what you were explaining is that that's when what you referred to as the digital MK Ultra started. And that I really want to hear your thoughts on that because I've, you know, had Kathy O'Brien on, I've talked a lot about MK Ultra and Operation Mockingbird and, and, and really how a lot of that ties into a lot of the Nazi techniques and the Nazis coming over and Operation Paperclip and teaching us how to brainwash people.
• 19:51
  I mean, is, this is deep, you know, and we're dealing with what I believe to be the some of the best talent from totalitarian regimes across history that are that are actually working to carry this out. So when you describe the efforts after 2016 as being digital MK Ultra, what do you mean by that?
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: Sure. So the MK Ultra program, which is sort of, you know, famously unearthed during the church committee hearings of 1975 and 1976, were it a program involving National Security State, primarily the Central Intelligence Agency, but also with the Department of Defense. That was primarily about control and influence over the hearts and minds of of citizens in a democracy in order to mobilize for some purpose. In fact, most of the MKUltra research that was done was on the manipulation of crowds and crowd psychology. And at the time, you know, this was during the height of the Cold War, and America was just getting its feet under it for how to manage insurgency and counterinsurgency movements in order to manage its own world empire.
• 21:11
  You know, we became a world empire after the Spanish American war in 1898 when the when we went from being just sort of a mainland to acquiring Cuba and acquiring The Philippines essentially. And then after World War II, our reach expanded across the globe, and we had populations to manage while we had essentially installed leaders, I'll say, in in various countries. Oftentimes, we would exploit natural resources there. Our actions were not necessarily all charitable. Locals would get very angry.
• 21:54
  They would want to get rid of somebody we installed. We just saw this happen in Afghanistan, by the way. You know? And there was a military and intelligence perceived compelling need to be able to influence the psychology of crowds to be supportive or antagonistic towards different kinds of concepts and different sorts of political and philosophical mental tapestries. So there were there were tens of millions of dollars that are poured into this program across between forty five and sixty universities of of different sort of tiers for different kinds of social science research about the nature of the mind and experiments that could be done in order to shift the mind to believe or not believe certain things or to adopt or not adopt certain kinds of behavioral attitudes.
• 22:53
  So what happened after the two thousand sixteen election was you had this you had this pesky thing called the First Amendment, which was which made it ornery and difficult to straight up mass censor the Internet right away, especially after twenty five years of full throated endorsement of it as the as the projection of America's freedom abroad. What what was instituted after 2016 was this initiative that goes by a couple of different names. So call it media literacy, digital literacy, information literacy, sometimes they call it information integrity. It is a it is a concept, it is a it is a program, it is a field of academic study, which involves how to a lot of people see this. I remember I'll start.
• 23:49
  I'll finish the story, and then I'll I'll tell it personally and go here. So when you hear the phrase media literacy, a
• 23:57
  Seth Holehouse: lot of
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: people first think, oh, okay. Well, these are probably underprivileged inner city kids who may not be up the literacy standards, say, in Detroit. They may not be at a certain reading level, you know, these or or or in DC. This has been a common theme about how to the government can help with literacy efforts. But when they say media literacy or digital literacy or information literacy, they're not talking about whether you can read.
• 24:21
  They mean you are media illiterate if you are reading the wrong news sources. You need to come back to CNN. You need to to be literate. You need to come back to the New York Times. You know, there's there's something called the SIFT method they developed, which is to simply sift through the first ten results of a Google search.
• 24:42
  Don't go down the rabbit hole. Stick to Wikipedia. And they've rolled this out to in public universities all over the country, but it goes much, much deeper than that. So this is about the science of you know, they call it psychological inoculation. They and when I say they, I refer to this whole of society network that involves the US government, the civil society institutions.
• 25:15
  And these are these are, as I mentioned I've documented 42 US colleges and universities who have received funding for the censorship or political thought control against designated so called misinformation topics, totaling $40,000,000 which is about the same amount of money, about the same amount of universities, and basically the exact same purpose as the MKUltra program, except instead of using, say, LSD in its most pernicious forms is one of the things MK Ultra became most famous for with some of the drug experiments that were done. But instead of using LSD, or, or intensive, say, trauma induction, they're using digital algorithms through through the deployment of essentially government paid software developers or computer engineers, network scientists, and while also studying the effects of, say, you know, ways to restructure a newsfeed, or ways to present alternative news to debunk it in order to sort of inoculate it so that citizens never believe their own eyes when they see evidence from a non authorized source. And you wouldn't believe some of the experiments have gone into this, but that's sort of the roundup.
• 26:45
  Seth Holehouse: And so let's just okay. For someone, especially in a modern day today, we form our pictures and our understanding of reality through the information that we bring in, right, whether it's understanding, okay, the Ukraine war, who's good or bad? China, who's good or bad? Is, you know, gender affirming surgery, is it a good thing or a bad thing? Is the COVID vaccine helpful and does it protect you or is it harmful and it might give you myocarditis?
• 27:12
  I mean, are major decisions and I think we live in an age where most people, you know, aside from talking to a doctor or a friend, they're receiving inputs and information all over the place. And so let's just say that hypothetically, let's talk about one of the big hot topics is the COVID vaccine, right? Or now they're coming up admitting a lot about it, but just say a year ago, I was a person that was thinking, Okay, should I get this or should I not get it? And I might have watched, I turned on cable news and watched some TV about it, mains more mainstream TV. I went to Google, I did some research about it.
• 27:44
  I was on Facebook, I read some posts on it. I went on to Instagram and did some searching on there. I went to Wikipedia. So that I think that kind of mix of information probably represents as an example, how a lot of Americans are forming their opinions on things and making very important decisions for their future. So how much of that interaction with that information, right, even listening to the to a radio show that comes over, you know, your FM station.
• 28:15
  How much of that information do you think is being controlled and manipulated to to basically to guide people towards the the the only direction the government wants them to go towards?
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: Oh, it's extraordinary. That's where that's where the game shifted in 2018. You know, 2017 was this big sort of consensus building year between the national security state, the private sector, and civil society in order to sort of all get on the same page. But right away in 2018, in fact, it was actually 2017, which is when there were three things that all got started to roll out exactly what you're talking about. Before 2016, there the way Google worked was was was almost totally algorithm driven with no with no manual curation of specific fields other than for paid advertisers, know, who might be who might be upweighted.
• 29:20
  There was no you know, through through Google AdWords and whatnot. But what started to happen was Google started something in conjunction with the US State Department called Project Owl, which was a which was a project designed you know, they they looked around and they saw their own allies in the journalism industry getting totally crushed by alternative news. You know, at the time, a lot of people thought Breitbart was going to be as big as Fox News because it it had surged so much during the twenty sixteen election, and social and all these independent creators who were allowed to get channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers or millions of subscribers, and there was nothing the government could do about it, it seemed. They were, you know, I tell a story about, you know, there there was a a highly there's a very senior NATO and Pentagon official who made a talk to the German Marshall Fund in 2019, where he said that the that the entire rules based international order will collapse if if face I'm sorry, if the New York Times is reduced to a medium sized Facebook page. And this was the this was their concern is that the traditional liaisons, the traditional gatekeepers to information all went through institutions for the entirety of the twentieth century that were connected to the national security state.
• 30:52
  There was always a guardrail. There was always a well, that's their phrase. There was always a container box on democracy by the, you know, the War Department, the State Department, and after 1947, the intelligence community. It was not until there was an alternative to that containment box that they started to really mobilize to kind of simulate the the the control mechanisms they had over editorial desks and and over information distribution that they had during the twentieth century. But, yeah, I well, I'll I'll I'll pause there, but there's I guess what I was actually I'll I'll continue just to say that what I was trying to build to was Project Owl was this Google project to rejigger the way the way people could obtain news on Google and on YouTube through something that they called authoritative sources.
• 31:59
  Now this is very different than authoritarianism, don't you know? No, no, no, it's not authoritative. It's authoritative ism. And the idea was is if you were an authoritative source, you got super upranked. And if you were not an authoritarian, I'm sorry, if you were not an authoritative source, you got super downrank.
• 32:21
  And what you can do, you can just go back into the wayback machine now, and you can type in any URL address for a controversial or sensitive policy topic and set the Wayback Machine for that URL to before 2017 and after 2017. After, I think it was August, November '20 '17, which is when Project Al got rolled out. And you'll see a a spike where suddenly all of the top YouTube results will switch to MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post Live. They all got, you know, they basically created this sort of cartel system, almost like OPEC did with oil. They they were sort of a, you know, a a news pack kind of a setup, and it just so happens that all of these leading institutions work very closely as the water carriers for the for the US national security state when it comes to foreign policy.
• 33:20
  So you had this foreign policy, a lot of people say, you know, we use the term globalist, which is totally fair, but you have this this set which draws its power and its influence from globalization and from the and from essentially management of the American empire abroad. And then you've got the people who actually live here, who are whose own democratic capacities are totally subverted by the internationalist set.
• 33:52
  Seth Holehouse: So this is, I mean, it's, it's substantial, you know, the control of really most of what we see. And that's interesting, actually, because so I came into the game with my show, in 2020, right after the election. And at that point, the censorship was already very heavy. And from day one, I was very heavily censored and still blacklisted heavily on Google and YouTube and even Twitter still. You know, it's still, I'm on some list there.
• 34:20
  And, you know, you could see that it was in full swing by then. But I I want to look at there's a tweet that you put out recently, and I'll pull this up for folks here. And so you're you shared this other guy's tweet who said, the true dystopia would be take a photo of a crowd, face recognize all people, look up their phones, freeze their WeChat accounts. It's like a human EMP knocks the fight out of a crowd and is technologically possible now. And I think this person, you know, obviously they're mentioning WeChat, so they're referring to how this could work in China where we know they've got a very advanced surveillance state and their social credit scores and everything.
• 34:59
  But then what you said, which really got me thinking is that DHS is prepping this for America. This is the purpose of biometrics. This is why TSA housed under DHS is moving to facial recognition and iris scans. Read any US counterinsurgency guide from Iraq occupation onward. They think this is the way to shut down any protest.
• 35:23
  So I want to dig into this because I've, I've covered a lot of information about central bank digital currency, I cover China a lot, the social credit system, the, you know, warning of this, the early warnings of a vaccine passport, digital ID, these are all things that to me are just giant red flags that lead us into a state of technocracy where everything about our lives can be controlled. And so I wanted to see because from your perspective, you know, you could say people say, Oh yeah, you focus on censorship. But I look at it as that censorship is just the first step. Because once they connect censorship, which is really to censor people, they have to monitor everything about you. If they connect that to social credit scoring, if they connect social credit scoring to your digital ID, to your biometrical thing, to whether you're vaccinated or not, but then further, if they connect that to your bank account, to a central bank digital currency, I mean, that's that's a really, really bad place for us to go to.
• 36:20
  And so, know, for what are you seeing there? Are you seeing that as you mentioned in that text that that the Department of Homeland Security is is leading us into that future, that that's where they want to bring us?
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: Yes. I would say that there are many people within the US national security establishment, and especially at DHS, who are deliberately angling us that towards towards exactly that scenario you laid out. And part of the reason they're angling us towards that is because that is what they do. And I'll tell you what I mean by that specifically. What was described right there in the, you know, in terms of the the China style sort of management of crowds is essentially the north star of The US counterinsurgency doctrine after they discovered the magic of biometrics between 2011 and 2013.
• 37:23
  When I described I mean, what we're really talking about here is digital counterinsurgency. You know, when we talk about censorship, it's sort of a subset of that. And so just a quick word on on on that that word for for listeners about what counterinsurgency is. It's a different thing than counterterrorism. Counterterrorism is when you have violence and, you know, attacks on civilians, and so the US Army, you know, steps in and and, you know, blasts the the terrorists into oblivion and saves the day.
• 37:56
  Counterinsurgency is a field that's connected to counterterrorism, but very different. Counterinsurgency is when there is a political movement abroad that threatens to the the government that has been installed or is favored by the US government. So for example, when we installed Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, and his brother ran the entire essentially heroin trade for, you know, for for the world, and the we essentially occupied the country, took it over. A lot of a lot of institutions actually deteriorated during our our occupation. The many aspects of quality of life actually went down after we took over Afghanistan, not up.
• 38:45
  People were left with nothing and were told to be happy, to to borrow a phrase. But often the natives are not happy when the US government comes in, takes their takes all their resources, all that goes to foreign direct investors in Wall Street in London instead of the people who actually live there. And they live under a US enforced quasi military dictatorship. And so oftentimes political movements, pesky political movements rise up to try to unseat the government we want in place there. When that happens, we snap into action our counterinsurgency folks.
• 39:22
  Counterinsurgency folks, they proceed through this process that they call shape, clear, hold, build transition, which is which is sort of a five step process for how to get a population to turn against a political upstart group and turn back towards the, you know, The US installed dictator often. And that's done through a when biometrics came to the market as a way that could be used for intelligence purposes, by biometrics, I mean, at the time it was really, it was face scans, iris scans, and fingerprints. But what US Defense Department and intelligence community did when this rolled out was to obtain the biometrics of about 85% of the population of Afghanistan in order to have a real time heat map, essentially, of everybody who appears on video and whether they were friend or foe, because their face was in a Pentagon database. Now this gets back to something we just talked about, which is very, very important. Anonymity and why the heck the US government cares so much about it.
• 40:43
  We sort of started this by talking about how the Internet was exported to the world by the Pentagon and by the US National Security Establishment as a means of soft power projection abroad, and that all of the anonymity technologies were funded by the CIA, the NSA, and the Defense Department in order to help unseat foreign governments we wanted to topple, so political movements could be built using anonymity online, and then they could get to a point where they reach that cluster mass where they can actually take on the system. And that anonymity the national security establishment is intensely aware that anonymity is how guerrilla movements turn into full fledged, you know, politically dominant movements. We've weaponized anonymity for three decades now online in terms of our own insurgency work. So counterinsurgency and this combination of Internet censorship, biometrics, and, you know, what we may talk about with the central bank digital currencies are all pillars of a counterinsurgency toolkit in order to suppress any sort of democratic or political challenge to effectively a a governance rule set. Then I'll pause there.
• 42:16
  Seth Holehouse: So basically, and this is interesting, is so if you look at Afghanistan as an example, a lot of, you know, say Iraq, a lot of the Middle Eastern countries where we had what you described as a military dictatorship, which really makes sense. You know, we bring our military and we say, Okay, look, your leader's corrupt, and so we're gonna overthrow them, and we're gonna ensure peace, but it's really, it's occupied, you know, it's us occupying their land with our military. And we now know that there were no weapons of mass destruction and that the military was really being used to protect oil interests and all the things that was used to do that were not the fault of the soldiers and the patriots that were fighting to uphold the constitution, but really the the corrupt people in charge, the Dick Cheney's and the Halliburton etc. And so in that process of them kind of going in and taking over, they might have say a popular, you know, kind of say wealthy Iraqi guy, you know, that he doesn't like what he's seeing. And so he starts building a political movement and talking to people and saying, Hey, look, this isn't good, they're occupying us, you know, our quality of life has gone down.
• 43:18
  And he might be building something that is more of a guerrilla movement. And you mentioned so the anonymity is so important because then they can meet in secret, you know, the government doesn't know what's happening. And so the what described as digital counterinsurgency were the techniques that they used, and I think also merging the biomedical because I saw that in some of the things you're sharing on Twitter showing them taking pictures of the eye, you know, irises and iris scans, fingerprints. So they're trying to remove anonymity basically, so they're forced, so that way they can track them. And so they built all of this technology and methodology for cracking down and dispersing anything that would threaten their control over that country.
• 44:06
  And then, so basically then after they saw what happened in 2016, when that really the there is a massive counterinsurgency that happened, which was we the people voting in Donald Trump, which was not according to their plans, then they kicked into high gear and they said, Okay, let's take all of this information, let's take all this research, not only from just what they had done over in The Middle East, but we're talking then M. C. A. T. A.
• 44:33
  MIND CONTROL, CROWD CONTROL, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. And they turned all of that on us, the American people, so that they could get rid of the counterinsurgency of patriots wanting the country to be run, not by criminals, but by people who respect the constitution. So did I piece that all together appropriately?
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: Yes. In fact, it's not just the same playbook. It's the same players. You know, it's not just that it's they're adopting the counter they're trying to bring the counterinsurgency doctrine for occupying Baghdad to occupying Boston, so to speak. It's it's literally counterinsurgency people doing this.
• 45:15
  The head of the Internet censorship agency at the Department of Homeland Security, now they're trying they're sort of moving away from that currently. It's called CISA. My foundation, FFO, has published essentially the definitive accounting of how DHS developed the first ever domestic censorship agency within the US government, and then and then deliberately set up a bunch of private sector and civil society cutouts in order to, quote, fill the gaps of the censorship work that DHS could not do itself because it lacked the legal authority. That's a direct quote from the head of the censorship consortium DHS set up, and then the head of that DHS agency then started a two man consultancy with that very private sector person who led that outsourcing group. But the current head of CISA, that agency was a former counterinsurgency, former NSA counter insurgency czar.
• 46:26
  One of CISA's top, top, top advisors who helped craft the domestic censorship regime within CISA, this guy named Clint Watts. He was a he was a, you know, former FBI special agent, former army guy, but he was also former counterinsurgency. And they all talked very explicitly, you know, and this was before January, wait, this is 02/2008, they were making comparisons between MAGA and ISIS. And they were saying that that, you know, we need to treat the sort of domestic extremism threat as a kind of ISIS threat, and we have a tool kit for taking on ISIS, don't you know? And in fact, we're the people who helped develop this tool kit.
• 47:13
  We can solve these problems at home, and these people were installed at DARPA. These people were installed at the Department of Homeland Security's CISA bureau, and they were installed at various levels of the State Department and the intelligence community, and they carried it out. One amazing example, this is the technology used to censor the Internet itself. And now this is a I just want to hit this point, because I consider it to be one of the craziest untold stories in the world, which is how the heck it is that the Internet even can be censored. Before 02/2016, the technology did not exist to censor the Internet in what they call a fast, precise, and comprehensive way.
• 47:58
  That's DOD speak for, you know, for the power of artificial intelligence and a technique called natural language processing, NLP, in order to censor the Internet. See, what happened was is in 02/2014 and 02/2015, ISIS was said to be a, you know, the the biggest home homegrown terrorist threat in the country. ISIS was said to be recruiting on Facebook and Twitter to get impressionable young Americans to turn to their content and then become little ISIS terrorists, like the attack that happened in Garland, Texas, which served as a predicate for Obama to put military boots on the ground in Syria. At the time, DARPA spent tens of millions of dollars pumping the computer sciences and universities with cash for R and D to to come up with a language processing technique, to use the words you speak, the language that you use, every word you say, every sentence you write online, then chunk it into political meaning. That is, they would take ISIS dialect, the the words they tended that ISIS supporters tended to use versus regular Muslims or or regular Arabs or or regular people, you know, who were a part a non ISIS contingent of the population in Iraq or or in or in Syria.
• 49:37
  And they would look at the prefixes that they used, the suffixes, the the words, the distinguishing words, the the the memes, the hashtags, the images that were then uploaded into matching image databases. And they would chunk that all to say, okay, our AI can now identify whether somebody talks like an ISIS supporter or someone talks like not an ISIS supporter. And then and then NLP could be used in order to detect every conversation on the Internet that sounded like it was an ISIS supportive statement or not an ISIS supportive statement. What happened was this DARPA funded CIA NSA massive digital data program coordinated technology to censor foreign terrorists after the twenty sixteen election was brought to The US Internet by Google, and specifically Google's jigsaw unit, which was started by a guy who came straight out of the CIA and State Department named Jared Cohen, which an incredible story I perhaps don't have time to get into here, who went by this digital counterinsurgency doctrine. And this was essentially a very senior, very, very influential CIA State Department Google guy, who then rolled out this mass before 2016, it was the you know, censorship insiders refer to it as the the whack a mole period.
• 51:25
  Everything was reactive. If you couldn't simultaneously censor 10,000,000 people on what they think about vaccines in the whack a mole era, the technology didn't exist to do it. Everything had to be manually flagged. With NLP, you could preemptively identify and censor before you they it even went viral. Because again, when I say censor, I don't mean it gets banned necessarily.
• 51:54
  You may post it, but they have something to remove, reduce, and form, and which is removing is banning, informing is automatically fixing a fact check label, but reduces this whole toolkit of what they call friction, which are virality circuit breakers that can that can be applied. A good example of this is the FBI. Right. Right. So, like, the FBI just came out with this list of of sort of ways to identify a right wing extremist.
• 52:18
  They'll use words like based. I don't know if you saw this or or, you know, they'll use words like, You know, they they had this whole, you know, linguistic dictionary. You know, this is from the FBI. You know, DHS has this as well, and it's this this is one of the things universities get paid to do is to chronicle what people say about vaccines, chronicle what people say about about about public health response matters, chronicle what people say about elections, chronicle what people say about immigration, energy, climate. They they think they've discovered the magic tool kit for controlling an entire populations, And this is why the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, has rolled out these digital democracy programs, utilizing this in about 85 countries since 2018, is this is the way to control policy debates.
• 53:09
  And one thing I should just say before I end this is, you know, I never talk about this, but I think it should be said, and I'm not drawing any conclusions when I say this. But we talked about biometrics and their role in population management, which is when General Petraeus, you know, had this light bulb go off evidently, because every single coin, you know, counterinsurgency framework now makes biometrics the the bedrock of its counterinsurgency paradigm, because that's what's now used to be able to destroy an insurgent group's anonymity, is this idea that okay. I'll just say this. The CIA got in a lot of trouble around the world, and you can look this up. For example, in Pakistan, the CIA got busted running a fake vaccine clinic in order to clandestinely collect the biometric data.
• 54:06
  So they had this goal where they wanted to reach this over 80% threshold of biometrics of the entire Iraq, Afghani and Syrian populations for this counterinsurgency program. They set that as a threshold goal. And they said, Okay, we're coming up short. We need to get over the hump, and we need to collect more of this biometric data on population. And so they set up these public health clinics and using essentially these vaccination clinics to collect the biometric data of the indigenous population so that they could run that up to the Pentagon and have a matching database for the entire population.
• 54:49
  So anytime they appear in life, that point afterwards, they can be identified as a friend or foe. I mean, this is but this is New York Times, Washington Post, you can Google this. So I find the fact that all of this came to an intersection at home in The US with these exact same forces aligned. You know, the Defense Department got 65% of warp speed funding. The Pentagon's role
• 55:19
  Mel K: in the
• 55:19
  Speaker 2: pandemic itself perhaps outweighs even that of the public health community. The fact that that you have so many of these shocking human rights and civil liberties abuses internationally, expressly for counterinsurgency purposes to manage our world empire abroad, and those same people are running it at home and then it happens at home, you know, at some point you say that's too much.
• 55:48
  Seth Holehouse: Man, that's a lot. It makes you think, gosh, what kind of collection was happening with the the COVID vaccine program? I mean, how many Trojan horses were hidden inside of that? That's a whole other can of worms. So, you know, one question that we can end with is, what can people do?
• 56:10
  Like someone like me, I guarantee you I'm on some list, know, that they say, yeah, this guy's some, he's a, you know, a terrorist, he talks about the vaccines and the elections and everything and, but there's also a lot of parents, they're just, know, they're now concerned with what's being taught in their children's school. I know that they're being targeted by these agencies. So, I mean, right now we're at a place where I believe that our constitution is hanging on by a thread and the people that gain control through stealing an election and illegitimately put themselves in power are now using every available resource to clamp down and make sure that they don't lose this power that they've gained over the past couple of years once they got Trump out. And so for the people that see this happening, and are wondering like, you know, what can we do? What would you tell them?
• 56:59
  How can we fight back against this?
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: Well, we I think we're actually in a in a moment of tremendous opportunity. A lot of things happened last year that broke what I call the silicon curtain. You know, during Cold War, we famously blamed the Soviets for an iron curtain descending over Europe, where on the other side of the curtain, you couldn't get any information. You know, we had the CIA had to pipe in Voice of America and radio free Europe, you know, to the population who was under totalizing Soviet media control. Well, you know, a silicon curtain descended over The United States in '20 from 2018 to 2022, where every single platform on the Internet that was that had centralized, you know, every single major platform on the Internet.
• 57:54
  And that, you know, that's Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and I guess, you know, Reddit, TikTok, every single one of these were controlled by we're all in lockstep and operating in total unison with the US national security state and with this sort of whole society, you know, foreign policy establishment priority tier. And in 2022, you had a bunch of things happen that sort of started to break that silicon curtain. You know, Elon Musk acquired Twitter, and while it hasn't been perfect, you know, this was a sort of dozek's machina out of nowhere where it so happens the world's richest man is willing to spend $44,000,000,000 so that he can essentially shitpost about you know, with with memes, pardon my language, but, you know, that's kind of what he does if you read his feed. I'm I'm always like amazed, you know, when I when I see just, you know, symbolically, it's, you know, but but, you know, whether you you know, there there's a lot of of potentialities for, you know, this thing going sideways, you know, with Linda Yaccarino being installed now from the World Economic Forum, and his plans on creating x, which in many ways is sort of an embodiment of all the concerns you expressed, because he was inspired, in his own words, by China's WeChat and and Weibo.
• 59:25
  You know, this he he said, why isn't there something like that in America, this everything app? You know, if you combine that with the sort of Dia thing that was just rolled that just broke in Ukraine, this sort of state in a smartphone, you literally have China right there, you know, just if if that were to simply be but the fact is is in the intervening period, discourse on you can talk about, you know, Pfizer, talk about vaccines and masks and pandemics and public health response. There have been tens of thousands of hugely influential million follower accounts who have who have all been reinstated, including the former president of The United States. There there that has also emboldened congress to through the Twitter files disclosures and through feeling like they now have an ally in the private sector to to do an an incredible volume of congressional investigations. The weaponization committee in in in the house has been interrogating the censorship industry over this.
• 1:00:30
  The oversight committee has been interrogating the censorship industry. The the oversight committee, the House Homeland Security Committee, the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. There is now, there's a lot they need to do, and they're having trouble getting over the hump. But we are at a critical moment in the power to roll this back. The first thing people should do is simply talk about it.
• 1:00:58
  Strange things break in the system when people don't shut up. And oftentimes it's just a persistence game. And oftentimes, it's, you know, it's darkest before the dawn. You know, right when things look like they're unstoppable is sort of, you know, the the moment right before things actually start to break. And, you know, so one thing that immediately is every you have a lot more influence over your local member of the House of Representatives than you do over your your local senator or a president or, you know, congressional districts are a small thing.
• 1:01:42
  You know, they they they are much more they have to be responsive in order to get reelected. And the fact is is the house is where you can defund all of this. The one thing the house has over the senate is it controls the purse strings, the house appropriations committee. And the house right now could attach a rider to the budget to cut a hundred million dollars in government grants and contracts to the censorship industry. Now, right now, they don't have the political will to do that apparently.
• 1:02:11
  There are certain programs that I think they may take action against actually through rioters. They need nudging, and they need pressure. And the more people talk about this issue, the more individual policymakers will feel like they will be a hero to their people if they take on this issue everyone's talking about it. So everyone talk about it.
• 1:02:39
  Seth Holehouse: Including, you know, following you on Twitter, sharing this this video, you know, just sharing this information, making more people aware of it. So before we sign off, I want to I do want to bring up your website for people to check out. So it's just foundationforfreedomonline.com. And you've got a lot of great resources here. People can follow along.
• 1:03:00
  They can support. They can contact you. This is a great place. And also just following you on Twitter. Just mikebenscyber is your handle there.
• 1:03:09
  I know you're very active going over a lot of stuff. Again, mikebenscyber. And so Mike, I just want to thank you again for coming on. It's a very important topic. And I think that more people need to be just understanding the potential threats, and understanding where this could lead if enough people don't stand up and say, No, I'm not going to partake in it.
• 1:03:30
  I thank you for the work that you've done to help, you know, give us the tools and the knowledge to fight back against this.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you for the work that you're doing as well. And you've got a very keen eye on the on the problem here and appreciate your time and of all this.
• 1:03:49
  Seth Holehouse: Absolutely. Well, thank you and take care. Alright, folks. I've got a quick message for you. I have one simple question.
• 1:03:57
  If today you could no longer go purchase more food for your family, with the food stores that you have in your home, how long would you be able to feed your family? Would it be a week, three weeks, a month, two months, a year? This is a really important question folks that we have to be very realistic about because the elites are proactively trying to put us into a state of food crisis and a state of famine. I'm sure you've seen all of the different food processing plants and farms that are blowing up. You've got cattle dying by the tens of thousands.
• 1:04:30
  They're proactively trying to collapse our food system because they know if they can control our food, they can control us. And so one of the best ways to be outside of their control is to be able to have our own stores of food and to be able to produce our own food. So there's really two things I would recommend. One is having heirloom seeds that you can grow your own food with, making sure that they're non GMO heirloom seeds that that way you can harvest your seeds this year, use them next year. You can use these seeds for generations.
• 1:04:59
  Literally, it's how it will work. The other thing though is this high quality storable food. This is food that's sitting somewhere, it's hidden in your basement, buried in your backyard, whatever it is. So that way if there is a crisis, if there is an emergency, you might have three months set aside to get through that time period. And so for this, I would highly recommend a company called Heaven's Harvest.
• 1:05:20
  This is an amazing Christian owned patriot company, and what they're doing is they're making high quality storable food. Again, lot of the food companies, they say these food buckets, they're all about maximizing calories per dollar. They're filling the buckets with a bunch of filler and junk like sweet beverages, etc. But Heaven's Harvest, they focus on very high quality food that will last up to twenty five years on the shelf. They also sell heirloom seeds.
• 1:05:47
  You can buy all of your seed, you can buy all of your restorable food. And look folks, personally, I would recommend having at least three months per person in your household, if not six months or even a year. Again, depends on your budget, but I'll definitely make sure you have some seeds because that seed, those seeds could be worth their weight in gold, if not more in the future. So to go ahead and do this right now, go put up a new tab and go to heavensharvest.com. And if you use the promo code Seth, that's s e t h, promo code Seth, you'll save 15% off of your entire order.
• 1:06:21
  So again, folks, the time is running out and you'd rather be three months or one year early than one day late. Again, heavensharvest.com and use promo code Seth to save 15% today.