Mike Benz

Big tech surpassed big oil a decade ago in terms of the most moneyed lobbying interests in Washington.

Google is the largest lobbying firm.

The wealthiest companies in the world are all what Trump called MAGA, something I had to fight against when I was in the Trump White House.

I was saying these...

They're censoring the people who voted for this government.

How can this government continue to support these private sector companies with all these contracts and, you know, just no accountability?

Well, at the time, Trump was calling, and I'm not knocking this, this could have just been not knowing what's going on, but MAGA was Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon.

because that was driving the stock market.

That was a lot of what Trump, I think, was reelecting on.

I don't know.

I'm just sort of saying this from the outside that I suspect maybe that was one of the reasons there was less pressure on them.

But the fact is, is you get fast-tracked right to the heart of this.

right at the heart of the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the Washington, D.C., Beltway Insider, and Google, and Facebook, which is number five or seven by market cap, and YouTube, second most trafficked website on the entire internet, and Twitter, and Amazon, and Twitter,

Twitch, you get fast-tracked right at the heart of it.

So this is now something that is a career track, and you invest your career in it, which means you want it to be an expanding pie.

You want more and more power to counter disinformation work, more and more funding, because, hey, how are you going to afford a mortgage?

that you want to advocate for more funding.

You want to advocate for more delegated functions of these outside civil society institutions.

You want to advocate for more of these CIA cutouts and State Department grantees and Pentagon contractors doing counter disinformation work to do it.

You hitch your star to the future of the field.