Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2237 - Mike Benz
Uploaded: 2024-12-03T18:00:28.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2237 - Mike Benz' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-12-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2237 - Mike Benz' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-12-03. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2237 - Mike Benz

Joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan experience trained by day Joe Rogan
podcast by
night all day nice to meet you Mike nice to meet you Joe I wish you didn't have
to exist
you're one of those guys that when you talk like god I wish what he's saying
isn't true but I know
it is but I'm happy you do I I don't remember what I where I first saw you
speak but I mean right
away I was thinking okay this makes a lot of sense when you're explaining like
the ministry of truth
or whatever it is is that what it's called ministry of truth well they tried
they tried to do that for
a while that was a I think so just as a background please tell people what you
do and what your what
positions you held I do all things internet censorship that's really my mission
in life my
North Star I started off as a corporate lawyer and then worked for the Trump
White House I was a
speechwriter I sort of advised on technology issues and then I ran the the
cyber division for the State
Department basically the big tech portfolio that interfaces between sort of big
government
government international diplomacy issues on technology and then the sort of
private sector
us national champions in the tech space like Google and Facebook so I was the
guy that Google lobbyists
would call when they wanted favors from big government um but you know my my
life took a huge
sort of u-turn you might say when I the 2016 election came around and I became
obsessed with
the early development of the censorship industry you know this this giant behemoth
of government private
sector civil society organizations and media all collabing to censor the
internet it was kind of a
weird weird path from there when did it all start rolling when did the
government realize that they had to
get actively involved in censorship and what steps did they initially take to
get involved in this it started in
2014 with the Ukraine fiasco the coup and then the counter coup the coup was
great for internet free speech I
mean you really do need to start the story of internet censorship with the
story of internet freedom because
censorship is promotion of censorship is sort of the flip side of promotion of
free speech and we've had this free speech
speech government diplomatic role for 80 years now when the when World War two
ended we embarked you know we have the
international rules based order that was created in 1948 we had the UN we had
NATO with the IMF the World Bank we
had this big global system now there was a prohibition in 1948 under the UN
Declaration of Human Rights that you can't acquire
territory by military force anymore and have it be respected by international
law so everything had
to move to soft power influence and so the US government took a very active
role beginning in 1948
to promote free speech around the world and this was done through all these you
know initially CIA
proprietaries like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty and
then the whole Wissner's
Wurlitzer State Department CIA apparatus all the early partnerships with the
media and the worst the war machine around
propaganda for World War two continued through the Cold War and then that that
hit the gas with promotion of free speech
on the internet when the internet was privatized it was initially a military
project so it was a government operation from from
Jump Street and then in 1991 the World Wide Web came out civilian use and
right away the with the State Department the military our intelligence sphere
was promoting free speech so that we could have a a
basically government pressure on foreign countries to open up their internet to
allow
basically groups of the US government was supporting to be able to combat state
control over media in those other countries
so we already had this sort of deep interplay between government tech companies
universities NGOs that dates back 80 years if you look at the evolution of NGOs
like Freedom House
or the Atlantic Council or Wilson Center and promoting these these free speech
things so but what happened was
is in night in 2014 we had had about 25 years of successful free speech
diplomacy and then there was a you know we tried to overthrow the government of
Ukraine we successfully did and I'm not even arguing whether that's a good or
bad thing but the fact is is
the US did effectively January 6th the Yanukovych government out of power in
2014 I mean we literally had our assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian
Affairs Victoria Newland handing out cookies and water bottles to violent
street protesters as they surrounded the parliament building and ran the
democratically elected government out of office but then what happened is the
eastern side of the state completely broke away so we don't respect this new US
installed government Crimea voted in a referendum join the Russian Federation
and that kicked off that that sort of set in motion the events that would end
the concept of free speech diplomacy is like a US government unfettered good
because what they argued is we pumped five billion dollars worth of US
government money into media institutions in the US.
that would end the concept of free speech diplomacy is like a US government unfettered
good because
what they argued is we pumped five billion dollars worth of US government money
into media
institutions in Ukraine that's the figure that's cited by Victoria Nuland in
December 2013 right
before the coup five billion dollars setting up independent media companies
basically sponsoring
Mockingbird style our media assets in the region and they still didn't
penetrate eastern Ukraine
the eastern Ukraine was primarily ethnic Russian didn't penetrate Crimea so
they said we need
something to stop them from being able to combat our media influence and they
initially called this
the Jarosimov doctrine named after Valerie Jarosimov who is this Russian
general they took a quote from
him saying the new nature of war is no longer about no longer about military to
military conflict all we
need to do is take over the media in these NATO countries and that's primarily
social media get
one of our pawns elected as the president and that president will control the
military so it's much
cheaper and more efficient to win a military war by simply winning civilian
elections so that was called
the Jarosimov doctrine that's what set up the early censorship infrastructure
in 2014. Three years
later the the guy who coined that Mark Gagliotti would write a sort of mea
culpa saying oops I'm sorry
Jarosimov was actually citing what the US does but by that point they'd already
renamed it hybrid warfare
NATO formally declared the tanks to tweets doctrine saying that the new role of
NATO is no longer just
about tanks it's about controlling tweets and then Brexit happened in June 2016
in July 2016 the very
next month in Warsaw NATO added hybrid warfare to its formal formal charter
basically authorizing the
military the diplomatic sphere in the intelligence world to take control over
social media and then
five months later Trump won the election being called the Russian asset so all
that infrastructure was redirected home to the US
Jesus
um it was looking pretty bleak i would say um in terms of the direction
internet censorship was
headed it was it was it seemed like the censorship machine was winning up until
around the time that elon purchased
x that seems to me to be our fork in the road that's the alternative timeline
you know mark entries and
talked about that yesterday that we've had a couple of alternative timelines
where things have shifted i think
that was one of the big ones that's exactly it i mean he's he's sort of the the
timeline where we miss the
bullet is where there's a deus ex muskina you know it's sort of like a deus ex
machina where it's this
random plot thing that happens you know someone descends onto the stage and
solves all the plots
loopholes and magically saves the the you know the the plucky heroes that were
otherwise in danger
there were events in the run-up well it all sort of happened simultaneously
really because the the
month that elon announced his acquisition was the same month that the disinformation
governance board was announced at dhs
which was the first thing that really roused republicans and frankly anyone
with institutional power in dc
to
finally stare into the sun and recognize or at least begin to glimpse the size
of what they were up against
the disinformation governance board set off a flurry of congressional activity
from chuck grassley and other
um you know luminaries in in congress uh there were a lot of there's whistleblower
documents came out
and for years
the entire republican party and most of the democrat party had denied the
existence of
government censorship uh and it frankly the the mystery the the mystery of
truth was not the
disinformation governance board the disinformation mystery of truth had already
existed three years
earlier at dhs they just made they just called it a name that masked what it
did it was called the
cyber security and infrastructure security agency which is a name that puts you
half to sleep by the
time you're finished saying it ministry of truth scared the out of people just
because of the orwellian
context of the term you know it just seemed like what what do you what well the
funny thing is they were
right the disinformation governance board was not the ministry of truth it was
a dull boring mundane
bureaucratic layer to manage the ministry of truth that was already created
three years earlier
but the fact is nobody called them out on it because of the thick language of
sensor speak that um that
that hides this whole thing from general public awareness i mean in my own path
i've i've tried to
self-reflect about how i ended up here spending my life on this and i used to
think it was primarily about
chess and you know my sort of early encounters with ai and then seeing the the
censorship ai that really
sparked my pursuit into this but the more i've thought about it the more it's
based i think it's just kind
of coming from a corporate law background where your your job is to plant dirty
tricks in the in the fine
print of 150 page legal documents and to catch dirty tricks in that linguistic
framing that's done
by by opposing lawyers and that's really how they pulled this off nobody
thought in 2019
that the cyber security agency in dhs would be the ministry of truth they didn't
appreciate the
layers of sensor speak that were constructed on top of that to say that well dhs
governs critical
infrastructure and elections are critical infrastructure public health is
critical infrastructure
misinformation online is a cyber component so it's a cyber attack on critical
infrastructure and so
normal normally normally policy makers or people in the public think of cyber
security that's
hacking that's fishing you know that's some that's that's for cia nsa people to
stop russians from
hacking us uh and they think critical infrastructure they think things like dams
or subsea cables or
low-earth satellites they don't they don't think it means you sitting on the
toilet at 9 30 pm on a thursday
saying uh i don't know that i love mail-in ballots and then suddenly you're
being flagged by dhs as a cyber threat
actor for attacking the u.s critical infrastructure of confidence in our
elections but that's how they
scaled these definitions into this giant mission creep and now it's metastasized
into the entire
u.s federal government the pentagon the state department usaid the national endowment
for democracy dhs
fbi doj hhs and the task in front of this administration is just unbelievably
enormous in deconstructing that
is it possible they're going to run into a lot of headwinds because once this
power was discovered
and funded to the tune of billions as it has been we we have this foreign
policy establishment that
manages the american empire that saw internet censorship as kind of an el dorado
key to
permanently winning t