Mike Benz

And so this is our sort of special set of skills the blob has.

If we can't get them on terrorism grounds or military grounds, this is part of how we wage the Cold War.

You know, communism, even if a country was minding its own business, we said that, well, it's a communist structure that's depriving the people of their yearnings for democracy.

And so we get to

play God, we get to use our CIA and our State Department and our USAID and our paramilitary-backed channels to do a top-down military coup, as we did in Brazil in 1964, or a bottom-up color revolution, as we did in Ukraine in 2014 and dozens of other countries.

But populism is the new communism.

Populism is the new counterterrorism.

This is something I think that a lot of conservatives who may be listening really need to process because this CIA State Department USAID military apparatus had the support of the Republican Party throughout the entire 20th century as it was toppling left-wing socialist, left-wing communist governments.

It was not until Trump won in 2016 or Brexit four or five months before that and then the rise around the world of these right-wing populist governments

politicians from Abe in Japan, to Modi in India, to Bolsonaro in Brazil, to that whole European axis I laid out that stretches all the way from France into the Baltics, that there became this flip.

The CIA, the State Department, they still oppose left-wing socialism and communism, but the biggest threat that they see is right-wing populism.

Neoliberalism, the blob's sort of financial motto, can be flanked from either side, from its left-wing socialist flank or from its right-wing nationalist flank.

And so this is why they went after Bolsonaro and tried to stop him from winning in 2018.

Bolsonaro supporters were censored on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, all the major platforms between 2017 and 2018.

So they started to take to end-to-end encrypted chats in order to circumvent that censorship.

So that's WhatsApp and Telegram are the main players there.

And also, for folks who are familiar with this alternative social media platform, Gab, which was one of the sort of early pre-parlor social media alternatives, one of their first early

demographic bases other than people in the US were Brazilians because they had nowhere to go because they were censored because of all this government pressure on them in Brazil.

But they took to WhatsApp and Telegram.

And I did a report on this two and a half years ago.