Dismantling the Censorship Industrial Complex (04-17-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:29] Thanks to everybody for coming out to the News & Brews, the WBT News & Brews last night at Heist Brewery in Barrel Arts. I had a lot of fun. I hope you did too. Good food, great people out there. Got to talk with a lot of folks. If you haven't been to one, you should come because they're fun. And it's good fellowship and you get to hang out and talk with fellow listeners and fans of the station and the show and us as well.

[00:00:56] I mean, we're just kind of, you know, value add on that thing. So thanks again. It was great to talk with everybody last night. Too many people to name. And frankly, nobody had name tags, so I probably would get a bunch wrong too. So anyway, thanks again for coming out. I had a lot of fun and I hope you did too.

[00:01:13] One of the people I spoke to last night mentioned, we got to talk a little bit during the event about the censorship, the censorship industrial complex, basically.

[00:01:30] And I'm not sure if you are aware of this or not, but we have some developments in what Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, refers to as a dark chapter in America's constitutional history.

[00:01:45] He wrote an op-ed over at thefederalist.com and he announced that the State Department is taking a, quote, crucial step towards keeping the president's promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center or the GEC, or as I call it, the GEC.

[00:02:16] The GEC was supposed to be dead already. But as many have learned the hard way in Washington, D.C., few things ever truly die. When Republicans in Congress sunset GEC's funding at the end of last year, the Biden State Department renamed it.

[00:02:39] The GEC became the Counter-FORIN, I'm writing these acronyms down, the letters, Counter-FORIN Information Manipulation and Interference Office. Or the RFIMI. Or the RFIMI. And the same people. They just moved, they just renamed the GEC to the RFIMI.

[00:03:07] With the new name, they were hoping to survive the transition to the new administration. That did not work out. Because the State Department under Marco Rubio put that to an end as well. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return, he said. Over the past half decade, bodies like the GEC, crafted by our own governing ruling class, nearly destroyed America's long free speech history.

[00:03:35] The enemies of speech had new lingo to justify their authoritarian impulse. It was disinformation, allegedly pushed by nefarious foreign governments. That was the number one threat to our democracy. And to protect our democracy, this disinformation had to be identified and stamped out.

[00:03:57] See, this is one of the things that, and Rubio alludes to it, which is George Washington's warning about government. It is a useful servant, but a fearful master. And fire easily becomes uncontrollable.

[00:04:21] And so, it is imperative that we constantly be on guard for the excesses of government. Because government has a natural tendency, because it is comprised of human beings. It has a natural tendency to grow and to take liberty from its citizens.

[00:04:45] And the citizens have a natural tendency to yield their liberty to their governments. That is the natural order of government-citizen relations. That's usually what happens. Governments rarely ever devolve power. Right? They're always taking more. And that leads to tyranny.

[00:05:10] And that's what the founders tried to guard against in constructing the system that we have. They recognized that natural tendency. And the GEC is a perfect example of it. GEC's history, Rubio writes,

[00:05:39] GEC began life in 2011. It was then called the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, or the CSCC. Right? And its purpose was to monitor the narratives of Al-Qaeda and ISIS and other foreign terrorist organizations that were trying to recruit and to propagandize to Americans.

[00:06:10] 2011. Right? Remember this? Obama's in office. The rise of ISIS. All of that. They're recruiting all these British girls to go over and be, you know, slave wives to the ISIS fighters. Remember all of that? That's how it started. Then, in early 2016, the Obama administration renames it the Global Engagement Center.

[00:06:34] And it strips away the explicit focus on international terrorism. Then, Donald Trump wins in 2016. But before he takes office, GEC's mission then gets expanded to cover any and all, quote, foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.

[00:07:02] And at that point, game on. That's why we saw what we saw during the Trump administration and through COVID, right? Through the Biden administration. That's why people were getting blacklisted, banned, deplatformed, their accounts throttled, just regular people. That's why that all occurred. The pivot was not an accident.

[00:07:32] Keep this name in mind. Rick Stengel. That was Obama's guy who was in charge at the GEC. And he touted his efforts to protect democracy while redefining it so that democracy came to mean silencing the part of the electorate that he didn't like. In 2019, he directly equated President Trump's campaign with foreign and terrorist propaganda.

[00:07:59] He wrote, quote, Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians. That sounds familiar. And much the same scare tactics as ISIS. That same year, he wrote an entire article about why America needs a hate speech law. He said, quote, I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their own population. And I don't necessarily think it's that awful.

[00:08:28] This was the guy in charge of deciding who should get censored and who should not. The guy who's not against propaganda. He doesn't think it's that awful. What could go wrong? Right? Like fire. Useful servant. Fearful master. All right. So spring is here. A time of renewal and celebrations.

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[00:09:50] Get all the details at createavideo.com. All righty, so Marco Rubio gave an interview to Mike Benz, no relation to Mercedes. Mike Benz is a former State Department official, and he is also the founder of Foundation for Freedom Online, or the FFO. And Rubio sat down to talk with Benz,

[00:10:17] because Benz has been hammering this issue of the censorship industrial complex, basically, the State Department's abuse of American citizens. He's been hammering away at this for years. So Rubio gave him like a 15-minute interview. I pulled a couple of sound bites. Here's the first. Well, we ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department. And let me explain how we get there. This started out, you know, 15, 10 years ago with this effort of,

[00:10:45] let's go after the messaging that Al-Qaeda and ISIS and others are putting to radicalize people. Oh, no, who's going to be against that? That sounds normal. And then it was like in 2016, oh, you know, we had this foreign interference in our election. We need to start targeting some of that stuff. By 2020, it had grown into this movement of like actually going after individual American voices. And one of the ways that was being done wasn't just directly, because the guy that was running this thing, Stengel, was actually a guy that was out there saying, you know, Donald Trump talks just like a Russian spy. He talks just like a terrorist.

[00:11:15] And so do the people around him. But they were also taking money from this program and using it to fund these NGOs, these third party groups who were supposed to be like impartial. Those groups were then tagging. They were literally tagging and labeling voices in American politics. Ben Shapiro, the Federalists, others tagging them as foreign agents. So you look at it and say, American taxpayers through the State Department were paying groups to attack Americans and to try to silence the voice of Americans. And they were consequent.

[00:11:44] This wasn't just a label they put on people. Some of these people got deplatformed. They got taken down. They couldn't communicate. So it was outrageous. So before President Trump took over, they disbanded this unit. They just renamed it and moved it somewhere else. But now over the last few months, we've worked on it and just taken it down. And to the extent we're spending money now, we are going to spend money on messaging. It's going to be pro-American messaging. And it's going to be incentivizing and protecting free speech, which is threatened in all over the world, including countries that are allies of ours.

[00:12:13] The best way to counter disinformation, if that's what people are thinking is out there, the best way to counter disinformation is free speech, is to make sure that what's true has as equal or greater opportunity to communicate as what's not true. We've learned that the hard way. But when you turn disinformation into a weapon, a political weapon, a label that you can use to go after people you don't like and say, oh, anything that person's saying is disinformation. Well, listen, I read mainstream newspapers every day or I watched mainstream broadcasts every

[00:12:43] day that I know are disinformation. We have an issue right now. They keep calling it Maryland man deported to El Salvador. No, not Maryland man, El Salvador citizen deported to El Salvador. That's disinformation every day. A U.S. senator yesterday said that this guy was a kidnapped American citizen. And they published it in the article without any fact check. He's not an American citizen. So the important thing is that we have free speech so we can counter that. So we can say this is not true. That's the way you handle that.

[00:13:10] And, you know, but we have instances now in Western countries where people are being arrested. You've seen this. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Absolutely. People are out there. They put a post and the cop comes knocking on their door. You're going to go to jail for 60 days for posting something online. You know, this is crazy stuff that's happening. The vice president addressed this in his speech at the Munich conference back in February. So we've got a lot of work to do. But the most important thing is we're going to make sure that as we communicate to the

[00:13:38] world, it's going to be pro-American, you know, things that build up what this country is working on and explaining what we're doing, not attacking Americans who are exercising their First Amendment rights. Yeah. Americans exercising their First American rights like during the COVID pandemic. GEC, the GEC, popped up with a report warning that a Russian disinformation apparatus was behind all of this public speculation that the virus was an engineered bioweapon or that

[00:14:06] it existed due to research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That was Russian disinformation, according to the GEC, which then tarred not only specific claims as foreign propaganda, but also specific users. It created blacklists of thousands of accounts that were accused of being foreign propaganda vectors simply for sharing articles or even if they just followed some accounts that the GEC didn't like.

[00:14:35] These lists were then sent to social media companies for quote unquote review. But nobody was fooled. He says the purpose of this was to pressure private companies in the direction of more censorship and less free speech. And we know this now. We have gotten the information from the Freedom of Information request. We've got the emails and text messages and group chats and such. So we know what they were doing now.

[00:15:03] And finally, the GEC has been dismantled inside of the State Department. It's a good first step. This is a good day. This is good news. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do too. And you probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place so

[00:15:31] you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using Ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The Blind Spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check.ground.news slash Pete.

[00:16:01] Subscribe through that link and you'll get 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. As you've probably heard me and others say, take the win. So I am taking the win. I'm going to celebrate this win. Thank you, Marco Rubio.

[00:16:27] And thank you, Donald Trump for dismantling the GEC, the GEC, global engagement, blah, blah, blah, whatever and whatever name they adopted to try to hide inside the State Department so they can continue censoring Americans and American publications like The Federalist. And that's why Marco Rubio published his op-ed at thefederalist.com because The Federalist was a website that was targeted by the GEC.

[00:16:56] The GEC put them on a blacklist, sent that blacklist to social media companies so they wouldn't be allowed to share their content. And they put it on an advertiser block list so advertisers wouldn't spend any money at thefederalist.com. That's how they did it. That's fascism, by the way, folks. That's what that is. All the people on the left that are like, this is, this is in that, fascism this. That's what fascism is.

[00:17:26] When the government doesn't directly do it themselves, but they use a cutout, basically, to use a spy term, you're using a cutout to do the thing that you are not legally allowed to do, which is to directly censor free speech or blogs and websites and social media.

[00:17:50] So the government can't censor you, but we can use the social media platforms. We can use the advertising boycotts, essentially, which the left has been doing for 20 years. They started targeting Rush Limbaugh. When was that? Not Air America. Center for American Progress, right? Isn't that what the David Brock won? And they launched advertiser boycotts of Rush Limbaugh's show.

[00:18:19] So this has been their common tactic because they can't beat you in the debate on the ideas and the policies. And so their tactic is shut up. Andrew Klavan did the seminal work on shut uppery like 25 years ago. It's a great YouTube video. Go watch it. Just type in Andrew Klavan. Shut up. It'll come up. It's a fantastic rundown.

[00:18:48] I mean, the events he's talking about are dated because he did it, you know, in like 2003 or something like that. But this is the this was the system that they had erected and they used initially. Right. The law was to combat disinformation from actual terrorist organizations. And then they loosened the the parameters so they could target American citizens because democracy.

[00:19:19] And this is why Marco Rubio said accountability is vital in the tearing down of this infrastructure. Because it doesn't just provide justice and but it also prevents it from happening in the future. You have something you can point to at the same time and say these are the kinds of things we want to stay away from. And, you know, it's also a very important lesson here.

[00:19:42] If I take you back 15 years and I ask somebody, do you think we should be doing more to make sure ISIS and Al Qaeda are not radicalizing people online 15 years ago? We'd have said, yeah, of course. But look what that turned into. And I'm not saying I'm, you know, obviously we don't want ISIS radicalizing everybody. But you have to understand that sometimes some idea that starts out as innocuous or maybe even good intention, whatever, can metastasize, becomes a weapon that can be turned into something else by someone else. That's a valuable lesson here.

[00:20:09] And everything we do, you have to understand that when you create something, what you create it and what it turns into are not necessarily the same thing, especially when the people in charge change. Yeah. Unintended consequences. It is part of every single government action and policy. Every one of them. There is no way that you can know every single impact your policy, once it becomes law, is going to have. It's just impossible.

[00:20:40] When it wasn't directly nagging social media companies to censor more, the GEC paid private actors to do it for them. With its multimillion dollar budget paid for by American taxpayers, GEC funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting disinformation. Right. There was one called the Global Disinformation Index or the GDI.

[00:21:09] There was one called the Election Integrity Partnership. There was another called News Guard. And by the way, the Board of Advisors of News Guard, one of those advisors, Rick Stengel. The same. Yep. The one. The one in the same Rick Stengel from the GEC.

[00:21:30] See, some of the third party implementers of the GEC paid to fight so-called disinformation were downright laughable. One such implementer, which continued to receive funding even after Congress sunset the GEC. This one organization flagged the Doge dog. You know the dog I'm talking about? It's on all the memes. I don't know what kind of breed it is. I think it's a corgi or something.

[00:21:58] And it's a corgi. I would say corgi. Corgi. And it's kind of looking at you like side eye or something like with a surprise look on its face. That that meme of the dog, they said that that was a symbol associated with Nazi SS officers. These are the same people that were like, that's not an OK symbol. That's white power. Not realizing that the 4chan trolls created that to make you say that to make you look stupid. But you're so stupid that not only did you adopt the 4chan troll as true,

[00:22:28] but you don't even realize it when the secret, the troll is exposed. Like, haha, joke's on you. You're like, no, it's not. That's a really white power thing. What? We made it up. No, you didn't. No, that's white power. Like, that's the kind of... These are the people that are like, you can't use the different skin tone emojis. Right? Like, if you use the yellow emoji, that's somehow inappropriate.

[00:22:56] Like, this is the kind of restrictive mindset these people have. The problem wasn't that the government picked the wrong people and the wrong NGOs to police disinformation. The problem is they were picking anybody to do it at all. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina, just a quick drive up the mountain? And Cabins of Asheville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon,

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[00:24:22] and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Marco Rubio with the op-ed at thefederalist.com pointing out that the problem wasn't that the government picked the wrong people or the wrong NGOs to police disinformation. The problem was that they were picking anybody at all. The entire disinformation industry from its very beginnings has existed to protect the American establishment from the voices of forgotten Americans. Everything it does is the fruit of the poison tree.

[00:24:51] The hoax that Russian interference, misinformation, and meddling is what caused Trump's victory in 2016 rather than a winning political message that only he was offering, right? Rubio said this travesty has gone on long enough. And he says the American people don't need an obscure agency to protect them from lies by pressuring Twitter to ban users or trying to put the Federalist out of business.

[00:25:19] At her birth, America was a lone beacon of freedom to the world. If necessary, we will happily be that lone beacon once again. He said in that interview with Mike Benz, he said that they are now going to be creating a process to determine who was targeted and for what specifically. We already know some of the higher profile ones, but there are more than a higher profile ones, right?

[00:25:45] There are a lot of other, including everyday individual American citizens who suddenly were labeled. And I think this is going to require some cross-jurisdictional work because some of it's going to require us to go back and prove, okay, somebody got deplatformed in 2021, right? And like in the middle of COVID, 2020, someone got deplatformed. And tracking, we can prove that. People can show, hey, I got deplatformed by the old Facebook or by the old Twitter or whatever. But then linking that. So why were they deplatformed?

[00:26:14] Who told them to deplatform? And if we could somehow, with internal review, create a linkage between some information that came from something the State Department paid for and an actual aggrieved party, that's what's important. Because I think that one thing is to point to the high profile cases, which we're aware of. But I think when people see that there were actually just individual everyday Americans that were deplatformed and for whatever, silenced, because somebody associated with this program identified them, I think that's what's really going to be eye-opening to a lot of people.

[00:26:44] But we didn't want to wait for that to take action. We know enough to already act. But we obviously want to know the depth and the scope of this. That's going to happen. It's already happening. So Eric Schmidt, he is the former Attorney General of Missouri. I believe he's now a U.S. Senator. He celebrated this announcement. He said, it's hard to overstate how big this is. For years, the State Department ran a global censorship operation, not just in America, but across the entire Western world.

[00:27:12] As Attorney General of Missouri, he says, I sued the Biden administration for working with big tech to censor conservatives. We took them all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. That case, Missouri v. Biden, led to the release of thousands of pages of documents detailing a vast censorship enterprise. Piece by piece, we uncovered exactly how the system worked. Under Biden, government agencies funded an army of third-party censors

[00:27:40] and disinformation groups to do what they could not do legally themselves, which was to censor American speech. One of the nerve centers of this censorship machine was the GEC, the Global Engagement Center. Founded under Obama, the GEC was originally billed as a way to combat foreign propaganda, but it began to target Americans under the guise of fighting disinformation. And it wasn't just Americans.

[00:28:07] The GEC funded and worked with powerful NGOs, non-governmental organizations, which, by the way, I would submit, if you cannot survive, if your operation cannot survive without government funds, then I don't think you're actually a non-government organization. But I digress. The GEC funded and worked with powerful NGOs, pushing speech restrictions and creating advertiser blacklists, designed to crush conservative media across the West.

[00:28:35] Your tax dollars were funding a global war against conservatives. For example, of the London-based Global Disinformation Index, funded by GEC. It compiled blacklists of media outlets to feed to advertisers. Essentially, a form of financial warfare against disfavored outlets. The top 10 outlets on its disinformation list, you may want to sit down for this development,

[00:29:05] they were all from the right. Last year, he said, I led a fight in Congress to shutter the GEC for good. The agency was supposed to sunset at the end of 2024. But the Biden State Department simply renamed it, kept all the same employees, and tried to smuggle it into the next administration. That's how the administrative state works. It morphs and adapts to protect itself.

[00:29:33] But he said this is a huge step in dismantling the left's censorship enterprise. Free speech, and in particular, free speech online, is one of the major battlefields of our time. It's one of the fights that will define whether we win or lose on everything else. Also related, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has declassified a Biden administration plan to counter domestic terrorism

[00:30:02] established in the months following the January 6th Capitol riots. Gabbard declassified Joe Biden's strategic implementation plan for countering domestic terrorism, or the SIPCDT, which I'm not even going to try to make that into an acronym. So it was declassified at the urging of conservative groups, including America First Legal. The Washington Examiner

[00:30:32] reports that the 15-page declassified plan from June of 2021 established four pillars that it hoped to achieve. One, understand and share domestic terrorism-related information, prevent domestic terrorism recruitment and mobilization to violence, disrupt and deter domestic terrorism activity, and confront long-term contributors to domestic terrorism. See, the plan called to

[00:31:00] drive other executive and legislative action. That's the point of the plan. And when you call, you know, parents going down to a school board meeting, domestic terrorists, now all of a sudden, you know, the net that you're casting gets really, really big. And you can catch way more people with it. Among the action items in the plan to drive

[00:31:30] legislative action, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Huh, that's interesting. So weird how leftist goals just sort of map on to this, you know, non-partisan effort to root out domestic terrorists. Look, I was saying this when people were running around saying, punch a Nazi, punch a Nazi. The problem is, first off, you don't know they're actually Nazis. Secondly,

[00:32:00] they're not actually Nazis. Third, if you're the only one who gets to determine who is and who isn't a Nazi, and then you get to commit violence on them, that is a slippery slope that's going to lead to a lot of innocent people who are not Nazis getting punched. And then that leads to them punching you back. That's how that works. It's like they never understand that the other team gets a turn at bat. The Biden administration also called for sharing

[00:32:29] with relevant technology and other private industry companies information concerning domestic terrorism. The outline garnered criticism from even the American Civil Liberties Union. Even the ACLU called it a reflection of the ever-expanding authority to surveil and monitor American communities. When you've lost the ACLU, as a Democrat, when you've lost the ACLU,

[00:32:59] yeah, you're on the wrong path. And this was all done by President Autopen. Like, I don't even know who to blame for this. I don't think Joe Biden even was aware that the Internet existed at this point. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page

[00:33:28] or go to thepetecalendorshow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.