Mike Benz

are all in good standing with these institutions.

They don't want to embarrass their friends.

They don't want to cause a diplomatic incident that prevents us from overthrowing a dictator in Belarus or stopping infringements on women's rights in Iran or Afghanistan.

I'm not trying to have the elephant trample the whole...

the whole wheat field here.

But this specific network has to be stopped.

This specific aspect, I mean, isn't propaganda enough?

What really changed in 2016?

Brexit happened.

Trump won the election.

What else called for such a dramatic change in our diplomatic toolkit to tack on censorship as an entire subfield of democracy promotion?

That can be taken out now without too much structural damage to our soft power work.

that's not going to dramatically undercut, for the time being, what Special Forces is doing, dramatically undercut what Voice of America is doing or Internews or any of these other giant spider webs of US propaganda.

But it is getting to that point as these censorship institutions develop the tree root of linkages with all the different university centers.

We have over 60 US university centers getting $100 million from the US government funding their disinformation studies programs.

So already this tree root is vast.

you cut off the National Science Foundation funding, 60 universities are going to have people saying, oh my God, what am I going to do about my mortgage?

Oh my God, what about my college fund for my kids?

I've hitched my career to this.

And it's tied into our computer science program and our applied physics program and our communications and our sociology programs.