Mike Benz

U.S.-funded media or U.S.-supportive media could flourish there.

But Michael Chertoff was also the chairman of BAE Systems, the largest military contractor in NATO.

This is a major, major, major node of the military-industrial complex.

Teamed up with the soft power arm of the CIA, and they bring into the room with them the heads of public policy, so those are the censorship policies,

for Central and Eastern Europe from Google and Facebook.

And they basically threatened them in this, in so many words, in sort of veiled cloak terms, that,

that US, effectively, you know, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, and DHS and the military complex, and this is the pedigree they're bringing to this, that these companies better start censoring unfiltered alternative news.

That was the literal descriptor they used, because it was giving rise to populism, both in the US with Donald Trump, in the UK with Brexit, and with the rise of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe, and most especially at the time in Eastern Europe, where NATO feared that everything from

Ukraine to Georgia to Moldova to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia were all falling under Russian influence and Russia was secretly or not secretly supporting or it redounded to their interest to have these populist parties rise to power who didn't want to give the money to NATO or who wanted to have cheap energy from Russian gas instead of expensive LNG from North America.

And so you have this U.S.

government plot right out the gate

explicitly to contort the economics of the American news ecosystem, to make it inhospitable, to make it bankrupting to the bottom line for Facebook not to play ball, for Twitter 1.0 not to play ball, for YouTube not to play ball, lest the full force of the US government, either directly or through these cloak and dagger back channels that they represented, would make it economically impossible for them to avoid falling under the government boot heel.

And lo and behold, in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg tried to reverse a lot of this.

Facebook did a lot of censorship in 2018 and 2019.

2017, 2018.

In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg starts giving public speeches that he thought censorship on Facebook was going too far.

But then he got hit with a $60 billion advertiser boycott.

That is, Facebook lost $60 billion in market cap in 48 hours from this boycott.

So then he folded like a lawn chair and gave them everything they wanted.

That was five years before his letter just weeks ago to Chairman Jordan that he regretted folding to government pressure.