WE BEGAN publishing edited sections of Joe Rogan’s epic two-and-a-half hour interview with Mike Benz, the former US State Department Cyber Division head, before Christmas – the best analysis and explanation of the US ‘deep state’ I had come across. The first four edited transcript sections can be found here, here, here and here.
Part 4, as though anticipating Donald Trump’s then unfulfilled promise to ‘drain the swamp’, focused on USAID, the covert intelligence operation and CIA front which the President is abolishing, starting by placing nearly all of USAID’s global workforce on administrative leave yesterday.
In this final section, Benz moves on to the National Science Foundation (the civilian arm of DARPA) and government-funded civil society capacity-building for hate crime that was used for covid disinformation (censorship), focusing on Graphika, the contractor that did social media monitoring, surveillance and analytics work for the US military and intelligence.
The full interview is here. The final edited extracts follow below it.
MIKE BENZ: When these CIA cutouts and State Department emissaries . . . had this apparition moment in 2016, where the rules-based international order would collapse, and [thought] we have to stop populism; we have to stop Trump from, you know, ending our [unclear] Eurasia foreign policy. When that happened, they had a lot of self-reflection: ‘China doesn’t have this problem. Russia doesn’t have this problem. Authoritarian countries don’t have to deal with the threat of insurgent populist groups radically altering that country’s foreign policy, that country’s national security state. But they do it all top down. And we have . . . our entire diplomatic apparatus is arrayed as a sort of dichotomy between democracy and autocracy, because that’s what lets us go over, go and take over, or overthrow, or regime-change foreign countries, is they’re autocracies and we’re bringing democracy to them. So we can’t be seen to look like the autocracies we’re trying to overthrow. We want the autocratic outcome with a . . . but we can’t be seen to use the autocratic process.’
So they came up with a really cute trick to prevent the top-down perception. And they called this The Whole of Society Counter Misinformation Framework. And the reason I thought it would be funny to just play this clip before delving into it a little bit more is because it actually starts with a clip from CISA, the cybersecurity-turned-cyber censorship DHS internal meeting, where the CISA censorship official leading the meeting apologises for using the phrase ‘Whole of Society’ because by that point everyone is so sick of hearing it . . . an incantation . . . that has to be recited, almost like a religious ritual, because this is how you get this government-private sector-civil society-media alliance.
This thing was completely orchestrated top-down to avoid the appearance of top-down in 2017. They borrowed this concept from their military counterinsurgency work and they simply grafted it on to censorship . . .
If you just look for the phrase ‘Whole of Society’ at MikeBenzCyber. If you go to my highlights tab and scroll down, I think you’ll see it there. It’s a supercut.
But Whole Society is this concept that the government will fund allies to astroturf the appearance of a spontaneous democratic surround-sound around the need to do the censorship work.
There are four quadrants in their Whole Society framework:
- Government – which is everything from the State Department, the DHS, HSS for Covid censorship work, you know, FBI, DOJ, National Science Foundation, all that.
- The private sector are the private sector companies, the social media tech platforms where the censorship actually takes place.
- The civil society quadrant means university censorship centres; ‘disinformation studies’ is what they call it – misnomer of the century. Every major US university has a censorship centre . . . it’ll be called disinformation studies. Sometimes it’ll be tucked under their sociology department or their communications – even their applied physics when they do AI censorship. [Also] the NGOs, the activist groups, the . . . you know, independent non-profit foundations.
- The fourth quadrant is media, which is the government working with media to promote censorship of US citizens. And so by effectively wielding all these assets so that there’s government funding and government coordination.
The US government needs to capacity-build these counter misinformation institutions in civil society because the government has the money and the resources, but not the credibility. Civil society organisations – the universities, the NGOs – they’ve got the credibility, but not the money . . . the government can’t be seen as telling everyone to do all this censorship because that’s authoritarian. That would look not credible. That would look authoritarian for the government to do. So we’ve got the muscle and the money, but not the credibility. Our cut-out organisations have the credibility, but not the money and the muscle. So we’re going to give them the money and the muscle.
I can show you some great videos that show this. So if you just look up WiseDex, it’s in my highlights, it’s also if you just do @MikeBenzCyber WiseDex.
Trump did something really ambitious when he was president at the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation is the main funder of higher education in the United States. It’s a $10billion pool of money that goes to fund university centres. And it is sort of the civilian arm of DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. Technically, a sort of civilian foundation for science. But if you look at its history, it basically has a . . . it’s when military technology becomes dual use for commercial and civilian purposes.
So, for example, the internet itself started off as DARPA in the 60s. Then it was transferred to the National Science Foundation for civilian management. [Then?] it made its way to the World Wide Web. That’s why the National Science Foundation has a 15 per cent quota on national security-related projects. And all the technical implementers of the censorship programmes at the National Science Foundation come from DARPA.
Trump created this thing, in his first term, at the National Science Foundation, called the Convergence Accelerator Program. And the idea was is that we were going to converge scientists from different fields to solve these home-run swing challenges, like, you know, cold fusion and, you know, all the quantum mechanics challenges that required physicists to talk to data scientists and network modellers, and bringing them all together so that they all converge on a [unclear].
He set up about five of these tracks in 2019. Biden gets into office. His first year in office, his National Science Foundation creates a new track. It’s called Track F. And the whole thing is for countering misinformation, to converge scientists on developing censorship technology to censor the internet at scale. So they have spent tens of millions of dollars. This one that we’re about to watch was eligible for $5.7million from the National Science Foundation. It received $750,000 from the National Science Foundation to create this. This is the promo video that they put up on YouTube in connection with their grant.
JOE ROGAN: So Covid-19 was essentially like a proof of concept of all this, right? Like this is something they could utilise and see how everything works, because you have this sort of consensus among most people, because of the media narrative that ‘This is dangerous, we’re all going to die. The thing that’s f*cking us up is these people are vaccine deniers and these people who are believing things that are ridiculous, like natural immunity.’ And so you have, like, a public support of this thing to go full scale where they can try it out with Covid-19, where there were no real specific narratives that we thought of wholly as problematic as a society before Covid-19. Covid-19 became one that at least a large swathe of society believed the narrative that’s being given to you by corporate news. And this was the thing that they could combat on social media and have support for this type of censorship.
BENZ: They had already begun doing it for hate speech before Covid-19. It didn’t hit the scale, though. But they were already using hate speech as a proxy for populism, both in the US and across Nato . . . conflating everything with hate speech, basically. You know, if you opposed open borders in the US or in Italy or in Germany or in the UK. In fact, that’s why the US Justice Department funded Hate Lab. You want to see another crazy video from all this? Look up the Hate Lab, their video on their AI scan and ban dashboard for . . .
ROGAN: All of this is just a large-scale implementation of censorship?
BENZ: Yes.
ROGAN: Just using all these different things to get people accustomed to it and to try to start using this full scale?
BENZ: Yes, actually, before we go to the Hate Lab, I do want to dwell on this covid thing for a second. Because that’s exactly right. On what we just watched with WiseDex, just coming back to this Whole Society concept. So, this is the National Science Foundation. The administrators for this are both DARPA guys. It is funding the University of Michigan to create an AI censorship claims database so that the censorship policies that the Biden administration strong-armed on to these social media companies, as we know from Mark Zuckerberg and others, to adopt in the first place, so that there’s no escape.
Every claim that a covid vaccine sceptic says will be mapped out in a sort of, you know, a lexicon codebook of terms and claims that will then be automatically flagged. And the National Science Foundation does not want to be seen as having the government tell the private sector companies to do it. So it is capacity-building a civil society non-profit, the University of Michigan Disinformation Lab, to create this AI censorship technology to then sell to the social media platforms to make sure there’s no escape in terms of the ability to criticise government policy on covid without getting censored.
But just to drive home that point on covid censorship. This is something that I think is really terrifying, that people should be aware of. There’s a company called Graphika which figures very heavily in all of the censorship industry. If you pull up Graphika’s April 2020 report on covid and covid conspiracy theories . . .
Graphika is a long-time military contractor that did social media monitoring, surveillance and analytics work for the US military and intelligence, in order to see what narratives various political movements or insurgent groups are saying on social media. They were formerly a part of the Pentagon’s Minerva Initiative, the Psychological Operations Research Centre of the Pentagon . . .
Graphika has gotten over $7million in Pentagon grants. It was formerly a part of the Pentagon’s Psychological Operations Research Centre. And Graphika was one of the very first entities to begin the censorship around the world of Covid-19.
Given the strange unresolved role of the Pentagon in potentially giving rise to Covid-19 or, you know, the strangeness of the DARPA grants around there and the military networks around the biosecurity state, Graphika began their work . . . before Covid-19 even got its name. Their own source documents say they started December 16th [2019]. The pneumonia-like symptoms . . . were December 12th, 2019. So just four days after. Now, they’ve said later that ‘Actually we started in January 2020, but we backdated our data – our AI injection of all the tweets and Facebook posts in January 2020.’
So, even if you accept that, that is still just one month after covid broke out. Their report is here, it’s called The Covid-19 Infodemic.
. . . They published this in April 2020 after covid got its name. But they started this before it did.
If you scroll down to page 5 you’ll see . . . an AI-generated network map of all people expressing scepticism about the origins of Covid and . . . different conspiracy theories. It says, ‘A key analytical [unclear] of these maps.’ So, you’ll see that . . . so, seemingly large mega-clusters of US right-wing accounts were diminishing the mainstreaming of the coronavirus conversation. If you scroll down to the next one, you’ll see (this): ‘Dedicated coronavirus disinformation map seeded on disinformation-specific hashtags reveals that conservative groups had a larger total presence of covid heterodox opinions.’
This is right at the outbreak. One month into it. A Pentagon-funded PsyOps firm is doing political mapping, in the US, in the UK, in Italy. So they found that, disproportionately, it’s conservatives who need to be censored more. And if you just scroll down through this, I’ll show you some highlights.
ROGAN: Was this disinformation in regard to the origin at this point?
BENZ: Yes. Yes.
ROGAN: Which is wild that they were already countering when the origin was not really disclosed yet, and still being debated.
BENZ: Right. So, again, this is the Pentagon creating network maps – we’re paying for this, effectively, to protect the . . . the online reputation of Bill Gates and George Soros . . . if you just run a ctrl+F for Gates or Soros, you’ll see this as well.
You’ll see that they mapped these different conspiracy theories. How much would Bill Gates or George Soros need to pay a cloak-and-dagger public relations shop to scour the entire and create targetable, censorable demographic communities that social media should censor in order to protect their reputation?
This is us paying the Pentagon to pay a PsyOps firm to protect the reputation of Bill Gates and George Soros from conspiracy theories online. And they did the same thing with covid origins. They did the same thing with vaccines. The same group graphic. It was a part of something called the Virality Project, which mapped out 66 different claims of, if you questioned covid vaccine efficacy; if you questioned masks and their efficacy; if you questioned policies around lockdowns. All of that was systematically mapped.
All four of the entities involved in the Virality Project, by the way, were US government-funded, in terms of at the organisational level. The University of Stanford and the University of Washington, who are two of those four, received a joint $3million grant from the National Science Foundation, which again, is this, basically, civilian side of DARPA.
Graphika has received $7million in Pentagon funds. And then, the nastiest one of them all is this group, the Atlantic Council, gets annual funding of over $1million a year from the Pentagon, over $1million a year from the State Department. It also gets annual funding from the CIA cut-out National Endowment for Democracy, it gets annual funding from USAID. Basically, every web of US cloak-and-dagger intelligence and diplomatic funding funds the Atlantic Council every year.
The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its board of directors. A lot of people don’t know seven former number one heads of the CIA are still alive, let alone all locally clustered on the exact organisation which is the premier heavyweight in internet censorship around the world.
I can show you some wild clips of that, by the way, including them training journalists on what to censor – a 45-minute video that goes through it but there’s like a two-minute, a two- to four-minute video. It’s called, ‘I Call Bullshit’. This was in June 2019, right on the heels of the Bob Mueller investigation. The Atlantic Council . . . does this 360 meeting, where they bring in journalists and fact-checkers from all over the world to come to this, you know, I mean, it looks like something straight out of Dr Strangelove . . . So, I found this video in 2019. You know, like, my whole life has been 24/7, morning, noon, night, tracking, watching – I know these people closer than my own friends and family.
I [also] found this nine-hour video in June 2019, where this was, basically, the month before the Bob Mueller investigation. And they wanted to pre-censor and throttle Trump’s ability to be able to fight off charges that he was a Russian asset – because at the time the Pentagon and the intelligence community wanted him out. If you remember . . . Trump had a big beef with the existing brass of the Pentagon and the intelligence community over Russia policy, over Eurasia policy, which is a whole thing that we can maybe talk about it, if you’re interested . . .
The Atlantic Council was one of the very, very, very first movers in the censorship industry space . . . [it] effectively bills itself as Nato’s think tank. That’s what it’s known as in Washington. You know, there’s . . . places like the Council on Foreign Relations are sort of more known for Chamber of Commerce and big business, sort of working on government policy. The Atlantic Council is one of these that’s for Nato. And . . . it’s basically Nato’s clandestine civilian . . . military arm. When there’s a Nato military agenda that needs massaging at the political level, they need laws passed, they need sanctions put in place, they need capacity building on the civilian side to help a military thing, that’s what the Atlantic Council primarily does.
They set up something called the Digital Forensics Research Lab . . . basically right on the heels of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine counter-coup. And it was one of the earliest Nato/US military-liaised internet censorship shops that targeted populist governments – Trump, you know, the whole UK, Italy, Germany, Spain network. They talked about Bolsonaro right out the gate.
And so this video was, again, right before Russiagate ended and . . . they thought they could put Trump in prison with this. [‘I Call Bullshit’] was a training session that they did for journalists and fact-checkers in June 2019. You know, see, this session is called . . . it’s an interactive session. It’s called ‘I Call Bullshit’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bVyXFU-WIc]
How can you censor the sitting President, arguing that what he said is disinformation? How can you tell the tech platforms that that tweet is disinformation? Get creative. [second slide] Pro-Brexit. This is a Brexit ad saying, ‘We should be spending the money on our own national health system instead of funding the EU.’
. . . what you’ll see is, this is the exact political adversary group that the intelligence, diplomatic and military structure is trying to stop Donald Trump, Brexit in the UK . . . if you ever wondered why is it that everyone got all on board and suddenly started doing this all together? They were literally having years of this consensus-building. If you want to get your career made, if you’re at the Poynter Institute or the International Fact Checking Union, or if you’re on the disinformation beat for the Washington Post or NPR [National Public Radio] or Le Monde in France or the Frankfurt Allgemeine in Germany, you get your bona fides by going to these and you get effectively accredited by the Blob. They were literally training people to find creative ways to mass flag . . . you can’t even run a Brexit ad saying, ‘Hey, we should be spending £350million on ourselves rather than the EU’? That’s disinformation? Not false . . .
There’s any number of ways to put pressure on the tech platforms to call this disinformation, you’re hosting disinformation, simply because it’s not the agenda item that we want here. And again, there’s seven CIA directors currently on the board of that organisation. Those placards reading ‘I Call Bullshit’ were paid for by us.
