Mike Benz

And so they have a whole bag of tricks that are the new frontier for fighting this.

But if they hadn't escalated that, we would be winning quite dramatically right now.

The main thing for people to understand is that free speech is caught in this proxy war between...

what I call the blob, and I didn't coin this term, I'll go over it, the blob versus populism.

So it's not Democrats versus Republicans.

It's not right versus left or liberals versus conservatives.

It is the blob.

And what I mean by that is the foreign policy establishment of the US, the UK, and NATO, this was a term that was coined by

President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, when the Obama administration, in its final years, was frustrated with this entrenched, immutable, alien-like, all-powerful form within Washington that appeared to be more powerful than the White House itself.

So this term, the blob, again, came from the Obama White House to describe forces that the White House felt it couldn't take on.

And I find it to be a more useful term than something like deep state because it really encompasses this whole society concept that what the government does stretches its tentacles into the private sector and into civil society and into media organizations.

So the blob really has its sort of central locus within the diplomacy, defense, and intelligence worlds.

So it's the State Department, it's the Pentagon, it's the CIA and the IC, and then sort of spandrels out from there into all of the different political actors on both sides of the aisle, into all the different universities and NGOs and allied media institutions.

And it's transatlantic.

It's the sort of conjoined foreign policy of the U.S.,

the UK and NATO.

And we have empowered this blob apparatus to be able to do dirty tricks on the world stage to protect national interests, right?

So since World War II ended and we set up this rules-based international order,

We have needed a capacity to influence the course of events in foreign countries to make them more suitable to US interests, right?

In 1948, we had the UN Declaration on Human Rights, made every country a sovereign territory.