And Mike, can you talk more specifically about what that looks like in practice?
Yeah, well, part of the issue is we're actually past that now. That was, as Ben said, how the initial predicate was laid down. This is something that I refer to as the foreign to domestic switcheroo.
The initial censorship structure in this country grew out of what was called the hybrid warfare doctrine that NATO came up with after the Crimea annexation. And there was essentially a pan-military decision across NATO for the military to play a more active role in the media because they perceived a loss of hearts and minds in Eastern Europe as us ceding ground to Russia politically.
And then when Brexit and the Trump election happened, the Russiagate predicate was used to basically portray any sort of right-wing populism as being favorable for Russia and then so could be censored on the basis of being Russian propaganda.
The problem was when Russiagate died in the summer of 2019 when Mueller choked on the stand in the hearing, instead of shutting down that censorship apparatus that joined together the FBI and the CIA and DOD and State Department, they simply changed the predicate from being a Russiagate predicate to a democracy predicate. And this is very nasty because democracy is the watchword of the foreign policy establishment to overthrow governments.
I'm just going to say that again: Democracy is the watchword of the foreign policy establishment to overthrow governments.
So we have had a lot of presidents, Republican presidents who have been tarred by left-wing media as being bad people, dictators. People were calling George Bush a Nazi and things like that, I remember in my lifetime. They were not calling him a threat to democracy. That triggers, when something is categorized as a threat to democracy by our government, what that does, it's like an immune system response that activates for the white blood cells of our blob to descend the NGO swarm, the university centres, which act as proxies by the government and are all funded by our federal government, for DOD counterintelligence, for the State Department to get involved, for the FBI, for DHS, they all descend on it. And they use their media organs as well.
Much of what we think about as being independent media is anything but. They depend, and we can go through this in more detail maybe in questions, This surround sound is a creation of this immune system and the fact that it no longer, even though it was created under this foreign policy national security predicate, we are now about four or five years past that.
And I'll give you just one great example to leave this off on. The number one funder right now of the censorship industry in the US and not the number one necessarily most, you know, top of the food chain, but who's providing the actual money, the civil society capacity building for domestic censorship mercenary firms is the National Science Foundation, which is basically the kissing cousin of DARPA. And National Science Foundation is the number one, it's the number one funder of all secondary research in the US. Ten billion dollars goes to our universities at the National Science Foundation. They created a program which used a democracy, they created two programs actually during the Biden administration which simply said misinformation is a threat to democracy. And so they've given over $60 million just in the past year to specially constructed censorship labs, they call them, counter misinformation labs within universities. It's now a growing profession where undergraduates and PhD students are staking their professional careers on the rise of the censorship industry.
And it's all constructed around a democracy predicate, which again simply means the control and the ability to overthrow a government who's not doing the bidding of the US foreign policy establishment.
Nothing has changed, just the decorations. The old words like “empire” and “colony” are now dirty words, so the New Aristocrats require more ambiguous terms to justify their invasions, extraction of resources, the creation of client states, and the control of global money and trade.
Which "un-democratic" country shall we invade next? Or, which "democracy" shall we save from nasty foreigner types? Or, we must do X to save the “democracy” of the West.
The Censorship-Military-Industrial Complex: 'Our authoritarianism is good because we are saving democracy'.
"Democracy is the watchword of the foreign policy establishment to overthrow foreign governments"