Mike Benz

Oftentimes, the State Department will be working with those particular identity faction groups, or it will be

funding USAID-funded media or U.S.

Agency for Global Development-funded media to influence that.

So we make sure there are press protections, there are civil society protections.

Again, all of this is to protect our own control over that country.

But they began to say that as part of this political process strengthening, you have to have robust counter-disinformation, counter-misinformation measures in your country in order to be in line with best practices for democracy.

And so CEPS has this sprawling Brazil program

which coordinates with the National Endowment for Democracy, this NDI, where Hunter Biden was the Chairman's Advisory Committee, this Design for Democracy Coalition that I was just talking about, all these different university centers, all these different government-funded media ecosystem players,

all these different fact checkers, all these different AI scan and banners, all these different disinformation flaggers, all these different legal scholars are all in this umbrella network under CEPs.

And this is playing out as the House Foreign Affairs Committee has done absolutely nothing.

They just took out a U.S.

national champion, X. The State Department's job is to protect the welfare of U.S.

citizen interests, U.S.

corporate interests, and U.S.

national interests in the region.

They just seized Starlink's assets.

That's a major component of our military, frankly, in terms of its interface with telecom.

They just banned our soft power projection of X into the country, but that is because X is caught in a proxy war between the State Department and Bolsonaro.

You can bet if Bolsonaro had banned Twitter 1.0,

because too many Lula supporters were using Twitter and were outflanking Bolsonaro on Twitter 1.0 in 2021, if he had banned X, how fast Brazil would have been kicked off the dollar, how fast international sanctions, blockades to their trade supplies,