Michael Shellenberger offers an excellent summary of the nefarious conduct of the censorship industrial complex and lays out ties to some of its government funding sources. The people on FB who most need to understand this won't be able to. Their minds have been taken over and they fear information that challenges this propaganda.
Stunning information from Mike Benz, being interviewed by Joe Rogan. It was a long detailed interview that is extremely important for everyone to read. This is shocking, but we all knew that there was coordination in all of the "news outlets that have been marching in lockstep for the past five years to stamp out dissent, including stamping out true information that the government found to be inconvenient. I transcribed the portion of the interview provided in the following Tweet by KanekoaTheGreat. See below.
Mike BenzOn Internews, I've been talking about it for a long time, but now the stage is set to really show the extent of this. What we do is we create these pretty little predicates, these pretty little lie words, weasel words, to hide from the American people, and especially from foreign governments what we're really doing in the area. So we have a catchphrase at State and in state craft. It's called "independent media." You can think of that as the State Department's word for a good guy. Okay, doesn't mean independent. They are funded by us. They are not independent from the government. They literally submit their work and approval plans for their work plans, for what their cover, for review and approval to the US State Department. They are dog walked the whole way. But we call them independent because they are said to be independent from foreign governments who influence.
So basically, they're independent from the Chinese government, or they're independent from the Russian government. So there's just like with the word USAID itself that we talked about last time, it's your mind playing tricks on you. You're seeing "aid," but it's Agency for International Development. They do the same thing with independent media, which is that, internally to them, it means it's a good guy for us, because it's independent from our enemies, but when Americans see that, they think, well, "independent" that means it's a free actor who's not being sponsored by any government. But under the banner of USAID's independent media and media sustainability branches, we fund half a billion dollars a year to this network of, again, over 4000 media outlets. It reaches 778 million people, 9000 journalists "trained." Remember last time we went over the training? The Atlantic Council with seven CIA directors and annual funding from USAID as well as the State Department and pentagon, how they were holding up "I call BS" placards and putting Trump tweets on screen to flag for disinformation? If you remember, we went over that. Well, this is what training journalists looks like. Not only do they have the direct spawn of media octopus under their direct sub-grantee group, but they then go out and train the journalists who work at all the other ones who aren't directly sponsored. So they reach everywhere. And you'll see here, for example, it makes reference to to Jean Bourgault, who is making a half million dollars a year there. . . This has been going viral on X. I've been talking about USAID's role in the censorship industry forever. And if you look up, if you just look up "Internews," and you just plug in the name, you know, if you just copy paste that, you know, "Jean Bourgault" phrase, you'll see this in the video section, because it's everywhere now. She made speeches for a long time.
[More ...]
Somehow, Mike Benz has survived this long, even though he has done great damage to the CIA by revealing their tactics and corruption. You couldn't blame him for being concerned that someone hired by the CIA might try to kill him, however. In this post at X, he reads the CIA's Assassination Guide, declassified in 1995.
George Carlin unwittingly gave a master class about USAID:
But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It's a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club."> in his American Dream performance.
Walter Kirn:
"In a way, censorship is just for the prisoners who've escaped the info dome. You know, censorship is just shooting the escapees but keeping people inside the dome and playing that 24 hour news act like music as maybe the main imperative. That is the part that I think will truly blow our minds."
Walter has perfectly expressed something that distresses me every hour of the waking day. There are vast numbers of people in the US who ingest only the high-calorie low nutrition version of information. I've referred to this type of "news" hundreds of times as "corporate news" or "legacy news," to distinguish it from the work of journalists who rely primarily upon the contributions of individuals who value the quality of the work. The legacy news includes five major players who I have often featured in my posts about the legacy media walking in lockstep to withhold information or to propagandize us. Once upon a time these outlets practiced something more akin to journalism, but we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears (I have posted hundreds of examples) that these outlets are no even trying to tell us what is going on around us, no longer offering conflicting perspectives, no longer putting their stories into historical perspectives and no longer pointing out the hypocrisy of public figures who make claims that conflict with their prior statements each day. Rather, in coordination with the U.S. government (and its many agencies, such as DHS, DOD, CIA as well as CIA's cutout USAID) our major news outlets work hard to convince consumers of pre-determined narratives--they write these plot first, then they go out to construct the facts. They do it like lawyers representing their clients in court--their is no attempt to be even-handed. In short, they engage in Censorship and Propaganda: The modern day versions of Scylla and Charybdis.
People who continue trust legacy news outlets have been convinced by these big corporate-monied narrative-purveyors that alternate opinions and dissident voices are radioactive. As they did throughout COVID, they argue that dissidents are far more nefarious than people, way worse than people you merely find disagreeable. Dissidents must be avoided at all costs because the dangers they pose with their facts and opinions are existentially dangerous. This way of promulgating news is a great danger. For example, by pounding a simplistic narrative about Ukraine-Russia, as many as one million people have died and the US Treasury funds have been diverted from helping Americans to going into a big black hole. As a result of stifling COVID dissidents, they got almost everything wrong (I found this on X recently:
Dozens of people with whom I once experienced mutual warm feelings have cooled. If we bump into each other, they look at me with suspicion. Some of them have accused me of being a Republican, even though my views are largely consistent with what I've always believed, including this: for the 40 years during which I voted almost entirely for Democrats. That said, I have spent my entire life declaring my independence from tribes, political, religious and otherwise. I'm proud of that and I have a lot of criticism for Republicans too, for instance the elimination of the CFPB. My acquaintances on the new Left tend to show intense unwillingness to consider alternative facts and opinions. They are locked down and in fetal position. This is not happenstance--this behavior is the result of one the tectonic plates underlying their media ecosystem. In earlier times, their information diet might have been more varied, but they are now victims of Stockholm Syndrome:
[More . . . ]