The CIA’s Censorship Machine Is Fully Operational – And You’re the New Foreign Enemy

So a few frameworks to understand this. This is a story of capacity building, and that story also sort of points the way to how to. Fight this story in the first evolution of democracy promotion. It was pump, it was pumping in propaganda pro US or Pro Pro UK propaganda to countries around the world. During the Cold War, and so we built things like Voice of America and Radio for Europe. This was what these things were were piped in to do today. This will come not from the CIA directly, but from CIA intermediated, soft power fronts like US aid, the National Endowment for Democracy or things like Internews, which played a big role in the censorship story. For example in Brazil. But this first evolution in media. Soft power by this foreign policy establishment was about effective intelligence and and diplomatic control of media in order to control the political ecosystems. Because the military became downstream of that after World War 2, all of this was fought at the subversive political level.

They just fought a war. And in a war, we conduct all sorts of operations of deception, operations and sabotage all the rest of it. And I was involved in that, and the OSS was involved in that was the danger of Stalins expansion seemed to be threatening to sweep around and cover more of the world. We developed the CIA. In order to conduct the subversive level of the struggle.

And these were this is not like a giant conspiracy. This is Frank Wisner, the godfather of the CIA, as as he bragged about his own quote, Wisner’s Willitzer, A worldwide network of thousands of foreign media outlets on 6 continents, including some here in the US, which they got in trouble for in the 1970. A third of their budget went to media control. This is the Central Intelligence Agency and I just had a couple of things that they’re authorized under NSC10-2 to do, which include propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, demolition assistance, underground resistance movements, etcetera.

This concept of capacity building is is very important. Because what you see in country by country is a building up of a capacity. In order to do this censorship work, you see these university centers pop up, you know, you have a, you have a white shoe university that’s been in the country for 203 hundred years. And all of a sudden, they’ve got a new lab in their communications department or in their Advanced Physics department or in their computational data science. Department. What I’m trying to describe here with the role of the US and UK governments is the creation of a capacity very deliberately to do this understanding a little bit about the relationship between these three categories.

This why do you see the military in this? Why do you see intelligence in this? What? Why do you keep seeing the State Department in the UK? Foreign. And all this. That’s because they have this license under national interest, which is a broader mandate than national security. The the Department of Defense and the UK Ministry of Defense operate on a sort of national security. Do you threaten us or do you think we threaten you or can we create some pretext to to say that you’re threatening us? OK, now we can launch into action. But the State Department and the UK Foreign Office, you know, it’s parallel. Have a broader mandate, which is national national interest, even if no one is threatening us, we can still overthrow the government. We can still build up a political resistance group. We can still bribe the endogenous news organizations to censor stories and things like that because we are doing dirty deeds abroad. But for the benefits of mean nasty world out there. If we don’t do it, then somebody else.

But the the DoD does hearts and. Once. Work. Under the Psychological Operations Branch and NATO began to do this right after Crimea. This is what this was. So Sweden is something, for example, called the Sweden Psychological Defense Agency, and you will often see this referred to as psychological inoculation or psychological resilience. And then we’ll just call it resilience because they don’t want to sound like. They’re psyching. With you. But this is the DoD work. This is hearts and minds. This is information shaping work that DoD does. This is why you’re going to see things like the 77th Brigade in the UK and why you’re going to see things like military funding and DARPA grants to all these censorship industry participants in the US and the State Department and US aid side, you have the capacity building of a network.

The capacity means run. Money and resources into a network so so that those assets can be instrumentalized for that for a purpose. In this case, the purpose being censorship, and then the CIA’s role is really liaising and providing direction to the already capacity built networks that are getting State Department USA funding and and in coordination where necessary with the military. And again, what makes this so powerful. Is that they have a government license, department of Dirty Tricks. They’re not subject to the standard protections against information control that U.S. citizens have.

And I just wanted to just with my remaining time, I sort of wanted to demystify this. Because it’s like I said, it’s almost it’s it is the end of the world. So it’s a big deal that way, but it’s. Not a big deal. In the sense that this is actually completely ordinary course and you could be talking about this in the State Department hallway without batting an eyelash, because this is just normal stuff. OK, the the empires view, you know, empires, eye view of the world is that there is no such thing as domestic policy. Every country’s domestic policy is another country’s foreign policy. Has it impacts another country’s national interests? Each foreign country, therefore, has a foreign policy interest and influence, or ramming through changes to other countries own domestic policies.

Someone has to do that influencing or ramming job in the US, and it’s. Really a transatlantic thing with the UK, we call that the foreign policy establishment, the BLOB. Milton Friedman has this great video on how you can’t even make a pencil in the United States without going abroad, and he sort of fashioned that into a sort of libertarian political argument around the amazingness of of the, you know, the free. Market, but it actually provides a kind of interesting way to understand why it is that everyone converged on this at the military and intelligence and State Department level, which is that you can’t even make a pencil in America without going to a foreign.

Land and this? Milton Friedman video goes over how you know the wood is is cut down from a. Tree in Colombia and the graphite is mined somewhere in Argentina and the gum comes from a tree in Malaysia. And So what happens if you don’t have a BLOB? If you don’t have a soft power apparatus to influence the internal politics of another country? So, for example, say you need the compressed graphite from mines in South America. What happens if the South American government nationalizes the graphite industry there and no longer allows American companies in? If you still want pencils, you need a BLOB to go in and.

Influenced that government and influence that country’s electorate. In order to prevent that nationalization, what if the foreign government is on board, but the holdup is a specific faction within that foreign countries population, for example, both the miners and the graphite industry there are striking or protesting labor conditions, or successfully lobbying for labor laws that make pencil sales unprofitable. If you still want pencils in America, you need a BLOB. You need a foreign policy establishment. You need this cloak and dagger apparatus to have a capacity, even if they don’t use it. You need a pre built capacity in place to go in and do that.

Hearts and minds work to influence those labor unions to influence those voters and influence those court systems in order to make sure that we have pencils here in the United States. So what does this look like in a in a typical in a typical case, first, the BLOB would send a State Department delegation to tell them not to nationalize the graphite mines. If that fails, they might negotiate. If that fails, they might threaten economic sanctions. If that fails, they might seek to create leverage by destabilizing their government counterparts, then going back to the negotiating table. And and offering to end the destabilization in exchange for ending the graphite nationalization.

And if that fails, they may need to orchestrate a coup, A regime change. They may need to provide, for example, in the case of Yugoslavia 72. $1,000,000 to the political opposition party in order to effectively rig their elections and do everything we accused Russia of on steroids in 2016. So the intended purpose of the BLOB is to is to do this, and again, the BLOB is this is this diplomacy, defense, intelligence apparatus or foreign policy department. Of dirty tricks.