Robert Malone: Is Mercenary Censorship the New Face of Warfare? | FALLOUT

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Censorship has evolved radically and, in recent years, a new industry of mercenary censorship armies has emerged, according to Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. These armies are available for hire and compete for multi-million-dollar government contracts.

Can democracies survive the rise of this censorship industrial complex?

How have governments deployed hybrid warfare tactics developed for overseas combat on their own citizens?

Where is the West headed?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the hosts, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Hello everyone and welcome to Fallout. We are here at CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] to sit down with you all for another episode. We will be giving a talk here on Saturday called The Good Doctors with Dr. Brooke Miller.

Robert Malone:
I really look forward to that and we’ve got a lot to talk about. It’s great to be here. Information warfare or cognitive warfare has been one of our central themes at Fallout. It is also a central theme of the book that I’m working on right now with Dr. Jill Glasspool-Malone, which is focused on psychological warfare and what’s really been going on over the last four years.

We’ve learned a lot from Mike Benz in a great set of interviews, first with you on American Thought Leaders, and then the interview with Tucker Carlson that has got so much attention. Mike really lays out the whole timeline of the censorship industrial complex and traces it back to the birth of the CIA and its creation from the OSS [Office of Strategic Services] after the Second World War. In particular, he focuses on the initial events around a key election in Italy right after the war.

Mr. Jekielek:
In that Tucker Carlson interview, he’s bringing back a lot of content that he has already put on Twitter and elsewhere saying, “Hey guys, I have all the receipts. I’m going to show you.” It’s remarkable that he found this playbook from 1948 when the Italian election was in danger of being won by a Soviet-influenced candidate. They wanted Western-influenced candidates of course. They deployed what he now calls the Department of Dirty Tricks, an influence operation to make sure that the Western-backed candidate would win.

This is something that actually was a really good idea. It would have been terrible back in 1948 to have a Soviet-backed candidate take over. We know what happens when those Soviet-backed candidates win elections.

Mr. Malone:
There’s not another election.

Mr. Jekielek:
Exactly. How do you read this, Robert?

Mr. Malone:
What we both find fascinating about this is the tension between an absolutist position on censorship and propaganda and a realistic position. The problem is that if we take an absolutist position that the U.S. Government should not be engaging in any of this activity, then we basically leave the door open to our adversaries like the CCP, the former Soviet Union, and other international actors that are on the main stage these days.

That tension was resolved with the initial tacit agreements between both political parties giving rise to the uniparty concept. It was an agreement that both American political parties and the foreign policy and intelligence establishment will allow psychological warfare, cognitive warfare, and censorship, all these propaganda techniques, to be deployed by the State Department and by the intelligence community offshore. But we had an agreement that out of respect for the First Amendment, which is something that’s unique to the United States as compared to other western democracies, we will allow free speech.

There was a curtain placed between allowing this technology offshore in service of U.S. interests and a restriction on deploying it onshore. Mike Benz’s documents cover the history that has led to taking that censorship industrial complex, appropriately labeled by Schellenberger and his colleagues, and focusing it instead on the U.S. domestic front.

Mr. Jekielek:
Mike calls this the foreign-domestic switcheroo, and this is something that we have covered extensively at The Epoch Times. Russiagate originally started as a smear operation created by the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 election.

Mr. Malone:
And their allies within the government

Mr. Jekielek:
It got taken up by the security state. There are years of this issue being debunked by huge investigations. You can go through the Epoch Times reporting on this issue to understand how terribly false and destructive this idea was. They used a FISA warrant. They used the most invasive foreign surveillance methods that exist in the U.S. government tool kit to spy on the Trump campaign and then on the Trump presidency, using Russia as an excuse.

Mr. Malone:
Or a stalking horse.

Mr. Jekielek:
Or a stalking horse. Now, this is the crazy part. We have this stalking horse coming back now. You can see all these different congressional members, saying, “Look, this was Russia all along, all the way back from 2016 that has been supporting Trump and these other candidates.” This myth never dies.

Robert, you’ve done some interesting research as well. You have connections to some of these Intel community contractors that confirm the work that Mike Benz has done. I want to make sure our audience knows about this.

Mr. Malone:
A few years before the West African Ebola outbreak, I was contacted by a new client called BehaviorMatrix that asked for my assistance in proposal development. They had a suite of technologies that they had developed for other purposes, much of which was classified, and much of which I was not even aware of. They were hoping to repurpose those technologies to support the identification of infectious disease and a more efficient response to infectious disease outbreaks. They were using an amazingly powerful tool kit that involved natural language processing, which is a computer algorithmic assessment of language as communicated in any information stream. This could be text messages, Twitter, Facebook, or any source of information.

With this particular tool kit, and this has all been statistically validated, virtually any modern language can be processed to extract the emotional content behind that message, and then send that message to a person’s social media connections, and then determine how that person is influencing their social media connections. Then that can be used to basically turn up the dial or you can think of an equalizer to slide up the scale for particular topics and particular types of emotion.

This technology was definitely deployed during the Arab Spring uprising. It allows a dirty tricks organization, such as a non-state actor or a government actor, to actively manipulate the dialogue, discussion and feelings occurring on any kind of an information exchange space, to selectively amplify one voice over another voice, and to push the consensus of the group one way or another.

For instance, if you want to attack a particular palace, you can select out the person that is saying, “Hey, I think we should all go attack this palace,” and amplify that among their social media contacts. Then you can de-amplify anybody that might say, “No, we shouldn’t go attack the palace. We should go attack the bridge.”

In that way, you can control the movement of crowds and the emergence of social consensus, not just based on the words that are being spoken, but also based on the emotions underlying those words. They were contacting me because they wanted to use this to detect information about emerging infectious disease and to potentially modify how populations would respond to an emerging infectious disease, such as the Ebola outbreak.

But the technology was being repurposed, because it had really been built for this intelligence operative function, such as was deployed in the Arab Spring, which led me to my essay that Twitter was being used as a weapon. It’s not a business. As originally developed, Twitter absolutely was a weapon. Now, it has become hybrid under Musk, but that was the original intent.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is highly relevant to our current times and the information warfare space that we discovered around Brexit and the Trump election. Mike identifies the machine algorithms used to crush any questioning of the validity of the ballots that are mailed in.

Mr. Malone:
Election integrity was one of their first big pushes.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is a whole new category called delegitimizing that he mentions, where almost everything basically gets thrown in the trash can from the perspective of the user. You just never knew that this existed. On the other hand, we have this switch from what was originally the election integrity project election of 2020 turning into The Virality Project, which focused on Covid narratives. Then we keep hearing, “If you don’t do a,b, and c, you’re going to kill grandma,” because it was discovered that was a very effective method.

Mr. Malone:
Yes. Remember, there are thousands of peer-reviewed studies that have been published, including a major forward-looking, placebo-controlled, multi-arm clinical trial performed at Yale. By the way, Yale doesn’t disclose who funded this. It was designed to test messaging to obtain vaccine acceptance. The government has funded thousands of academic studies designed to overcome vaccine hesitancy and promote vaccine acceptance.

Through that, it has gained a series of cognitive warfare toolkit items, such as the logic and the messaging. It says that if you don’t comply you will kill your grandmother. If you don’t comply, you are socially derelict. These were field-tested in controlled clinical trials by academics in order to feed the government the best strategies for their propaganda and cognitive warfare campaigns.

Mr. Jekielek:
Here’s the kicker. The assumption in all of these tools being deployed is that the people controlling the machine know what the answer is. However, the last 5 to 7 years will attest to the fact that they really don’t. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We can see how important the open space for discourse and truth-seeking really is, and we can see the horrible results of that being taken away.

Mr. Malone:
Along these lines, one of the things that I found most fascinating about Mike Benz’s thesis is that this has spawned a mercenary industry. This military-industrial complex has matured, as Mike points out, to the point that there is significant competition in this space. There are multiple mercenary armies that are now available to perform censorship and cognitive warfare or hybrid warfare, as you were discussing using the NATO language.
There are multiple mercenary armies that are able to do this, and they’re competing with each other for money from governments, particularly from the U.S. government. They’re in an arms race with each other to show who has the best tools to do what the government wants. They will employ those tools for whatever purpose the government wants.

I am not even sure that there’s a belief that the government needs to be correct. It’s almost irrelevant as to whether or not the message is true or false, because they’re all competing for the money to perform the censorship. In that sense, they are agnostic about the message. They will do whatever the government wants. They are mercenaries. These are major institutions like Stanford. These are academics as well as industrials that are engaged in this mercenary activity where basically they are guns for hire to do whatever the government wants.

Mr. Jekielek:
Mike has been meticulous at sourcing all of the direct evidence of this. Most of this is open source. This whole mercenary scenario is the reason they talk about this publicly.

Speaker 3:
Wisedex enables fast, comprehensive and consistent enforcement around the world so that harmful misinformation stops reaching big audiences.

Speaker 1:
They want to market themselves as the ones who can do it. There are multiple examples that Mike has documented where they get these fat, multi-million dollar contracts after demonstrating something or explaining their capabilities.

Mr. Malone:
Yes, it’s akin to the whole inside the Beltway ecosystem. Here in DC the common slang for these organizations is the Beltway Bandits. These government contractors compete with each other to do the government’s bidding. This is the new model.

The government can outsource these activities and keep them at arm’s length. Then the government can take the position, “We weren’t censoring. They were the ones that censored, and we haven’t broken the First Amendment. We haven’t transgressed.” Those industrials and other third parties are how mercenary armies have always been used through history to create plausible deniability.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s a brave new world. Mike Benz’s interview with Tucker Carlson brings together many things that you and I have certainly been seeing. The picture is coming more into focus.

Mr. Malone:
Yet all the little pieces have already been out there. For instance, there’s a peer reviewed 2015 study from Robert Epstein in which he documents that Google, through its selective amplification or suppression of information that is shared with Google searches, is able to potentially swing elections. This was known in 2015, but we all kind of ignored it.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ll direct people to a few American Thought Leaders episodes on this topic with Dr. Epstein. It’s as simple as reordering the place at which different kinds of results and different candidates appear. He has demonstrated empirically, both through experiments and observation, that these formulations were actually happening in real time, favoring certain candidates.

Based on his experimental research, he has shown that this is not conjecture. This is actually actively happening. In one instance, when he publicized it very loudly, they actually turned it off for a time and he was able to document that as well.

Mr. Malone:
Yes, he outed them. I’ve had this vague sense that all this was going on. I’ve written about it and speculated about it. But Benz and Epstein have brought the receipts and the actual data to demonstrate that this is ongoing. That’s what is amazing about what has transpired over the last couple of months in this whole space.

Mr. Jekielek:
With Dr. Robert Epstein’s work, we know that Google has close ties with all these different outfits in the information-disinformation space, so it’s not surprising. At one point you may have thought that these were not coordinated efforts, and that they were just simply ideologically-aligned efforts. But it appears they are more coordinated than we had realized.

Mr. Malone:
Absolutely. You were talking about the transition from Russian disinformation and the development of this whole censorship industrial complex justified by the need to resist intrusion of Russians and Russian bot farms into western elections in the UK, United States, and throughout the west, and then the abrupt retooling of that to support government official Covid narratives.

What I find fascinating about Benz’s timeline here is that precisely mirrors when the BBC set up their Trusted News Initiative, which ties together all major media globally; American media, Canadian media, European media, British media, French media, and Australian media, all tied together under this BBC Trusted News Initiative [TNI] to resist the so-called Russian disinformation.

There was a decision by the BBC to reformulate the Trusted News Initiative to support the resistance against anti-vaxxers. Anti-vaxxers were perceived as a threat. Then Covid came along, and that got further weaponized.

Mr. Jekielek:
It started with this antipathy towards the Great Barrington Declaration and the throttling of Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter, then it evolved back to a focus on vaccine hesitancy.

Mr. Malone:
This ties together all major newspapers. The New York Times, Washington Post, AFP, Reuters, and Associated Press are all part of this cabal organized by the British Broadcasting Corporation. In the UK, censorship is intense. It’s far worse than it is here in the United States, and this is shown by Great Britain News. They have basically lost their mojo, because one of their broadcasters was forced to be fired by the censorship committee that’s operating in the UK.

This is the organization tying together all these new approved corporate news sources. By the way, the Epoch Times is excluded and you were not invited to the party, which is fascinating in and of itself. But it’s all the old school major media tied together, and they have fixed rules. For instance, under the Trusted News Initiative, all of these news outlets must comply with the consensus narrative. This is how the approved narrative gets pushed out in so many different ways in a harmonized fashion.

They actually allow a member of the Trusted News Initiative to print something that is different from the approved narrative. But the rules are that no other outlet can pick that up and amplify it. It used to be that if the New York Times published something, there would be a bunch of other follow-ons that would republish that article. But if the article that comes out is counter to the approved narrative, then it is not allowed to be republished within the network of the Trusted News Initiative.

Bobby Kennedy and Children’s Health Defense have set up a lawsuit against the TNI under the thesis that it functions as a monopoly. Its true purpose is to resist the intrusion of alternative media, which Epoch Times would be a part of in this business space of mainstream corporate media. The Trusted News Initiative and the weaponization of censorship and propaganda is being used in part to support the business agenda of the entire mainstream media complex.

Mr. Jekielek:
I love your image of the sliders on an audio equalizer. When it’s an approved narrative, everybody blasts it up. That’s how vertically integrated it is. Wesley Yang has this great term for it—the megaphone. You can really amplify a message like, “You’re going to kill grandma if you don’t follow the rules.”

Mr. Malone:
Yes, sure. You could amplify that the vaccines are safe and effective, or the masks work, or six foot distancing works.

Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely. There are 20 different repurposed drugs that actually work for treating Covid now. But that is dialed down to this very low level where you might be allowed to publish it, but how many actually get to see it?

Mr. Malone:
But you’re allowed to promote remdesivir, which is a toxic compound, and responsible for many iatrogenic deaths during this period. We are increasingly in this globalized, utilitarian environment that is very much driven by corporatist interests, which is really embodied by the World Economic Forum.

These are financial and political interests that are integrated so that their public-private partnerships are able to market their technology and their solutions. For instance, one example is green energy. They’re allowed to use this censorship industrial complex to promote their own economic objectives and to suppress alternative technologies or solutions that could be better able to solve the world’s problems.

This gets to this key issue of, “Should we really be that concerned?” In the case of the Italian elections after World War II, most of us would agree on the outcome of that election through the intervention of the U.S. State Department and U.S. Intelligence community. By the way, there was collusion with the mafia that resulted in an Italy that remained within the West, as opposed to joining the USSR sphere of influence. We saw that as a good thing. Most of us would agree that was a good thing in terms of the arc of history.

We now have the rise of globalism and a centralized command economy with socialist-based logic that’s being implemented globally, and the weaponization of this censorship industrial complex to support that. We can all agree that is not good, and yet the other one was good. Where do we draw the line? Why is censorship intrinsically wrong? Why shouldn’t we have censorship?

Mr. Jekielek:
When it comes to the importance of speech and the value of speech, on the one hand, we could talk about Copernicus or Galileo voicing their new understandings and being suppressed by the authorities. That is the suppression of truth-seeking, really. That’s what we’re really talking about.

On the other hand, we have actual bad actors like the Chinese Communist Party using TikTok and flooding the zone with botnets with certain types of information. After October 7th, we heard about Bin Laden’s letter to America. Through selective amplification on TikTok, people thought that he had some good points there. All this is possible.

Mr. Malone:
Yes, this is really complicated.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is what we have to untangle. I’ve become a First Amendment absolutist. I’ve understood how dangerous it is when you have a Department of Dirty Tricks available. For example, it has been taught in universities for decades that communism, this totalizing worldview, is a good way of approaching the world. That’s where we are today .

Mr. Malone:
It leads to the slippery slope when this kind of policy is normalized. The key issue is when censorship, which can absolutely control elections and social consensus, becomes a boundary or a fence to innovation. The core problem with censorship and all of these psychological warfare technologies is they constrain the ability of a culture or a nation state to evolve and adapt to changing conditions.

It forces us into the way things are right now, which is all really good for whoever is on top of the stack, the fraction of 1 percent that are controlling things. We call them the oligarchs. It’s very much in the interest of the oligarchs, but it’s not very much in the interest of society. It prevents society from evolving to respond effectively to new conditions. That eventually leads to major social disruption, which we call revolutions.

All of us can agree we don’t want to have major social disruptions. Often what happens is that a society will get so fed up with the chaos that they will just take any ideology off the shelf that purports to offer a better solution and they will latch onto it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Especially this Marxist ideology, which is always so seductive. Every time it fails completely, someone comes back and says, “We can do it again.” Robert, I’m thinking back to the truckers and the freedom movement in Canada. Given this censorship and propaganda system that’s in place, it is amazing that this grassroots movement happened and then it grew.

Mr. Malone:
It was out of the blue.

Mr. Jekielek:
It changed the world.

Mr. Malone:
Now we have the farmers’ movement in Europe. Both of these are basically working-class people that are not integrated into the social media ecosystem in the same way. They’re not commonly accessing mainstream corporate media. The truckers and the farmers are not reading Le Monde, or the Telegraph, or listening to CNN. Historically, they have been listening to Rush Limbaugh. They’re outside the loop.

Mr. Jekielek:
The people with their hands on the levers are thinking, “This is very wrong. This needs to be corrected.”

Mr. Malone:
We cannot have populism.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s right. Robert, we’re at the end of another episode of Fallout.

Mr. Malone:
It’s always a great pleasure. This is going to be a really exciting CPAC. We will also be following that testimony in the Senate from Ron Johnson, focused not just on the Covid crisis, but also on these new initiatives involving the World Health Organization, the new pandemic treaty, and the International Health Regulations. Last night, International CPAC came out with a clear, unequivocal statement that absolutely rejects the new International Health Regulations and the new pandemic treaty.

Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely. Robert, speaking of Canada, next week we will cover medically assisted suicide. This has come onto the scene and was made legal just a few years ago. It’s competing for 5th or 6th cause of death in Canada right now.

Mr. Malone:
It’s not just medically assisted suicide. It’s state-sponsored medically assisted suicide. Now, British Columbia considers itself the capital of the world for medically-assisted suicide. This is an amazing thing that parallels the growth of state-funded abortion. It is a perversion of medical ethics and a perversion of medical caregivers to do something that’s exactly opposite to the Hippocratic Oath, which prohibits physicians from administering lethal or toxic compounds. This is now being normalized in Canada, Germany, much of Europe, and increasingly in the United States.

Mr. Jekielek:
We will focus on this topic next time. See you all next week on Fallout.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.