Mike Benz

And it was – the CIA director is who actually backchanneled the deal in 1984, just one year after it was created.

The House voted –

by about a 50-vote majority to defund Ned because they said it was too close to the CIA and already been caught doing CIA dirty work as an outside NGO, completely unauthorized and with no bookkeeping effectively.

And then the CIA director, Bill Casey, then worked out a deal with the Democrat senator, Bill Proxmire, to have the Senate kill the House defunding.

Today, Ned is probably the number one global social media censorship coordinator.

When you take the fact that it was set up by the CIA, its own founders confess that it operates for the CIA, that it has this cloak and dagger relationship where there's no transparency about it because they

signed a secret agreement to classify all grants that it gives out, and that it's the number one global coordinator of the censorship industrial complex.

That's a pretty bad combination.

We used to call that Operation Mockingbird, but that seems quite quaint and pale in comparison to what we're talking about here.

So the idea that there's now at least a bill to defund this.

Now, I think a large part of this was because the Senate Appropriations Committee under Susan Collins

Republican, you know, with friends like this who needs enemies, put in the draft bill a few, about a week ago or so, full funding for the National Down for Democracy, which the Trump OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, wanted to zero out to zero last year.

And so what you have right now is this never-Trump Republican wing of the

our colleagues can muster, against the Trump White House running into each other.

And what this vote will prove is really where we are going into the 2026 midterms in terms of how many Trump Republicans there are in Congress versus how many of the kind of deep, permanent swamp Republicans there are.

And this is about as pure a metric for determining that as anything I've ever seen.

Well, everything that since Trump first ran for office, we had a free and open Internet in this country from basically 1991 until 2016.

And then suddenly the walls all closed in and everything from every angle, you know, it started with Russian disinformation and anything that you did to, you know, challenge Trump.

any aspect of the blob, whether it's immigration, war policy, war funding, supporting Trump against Hillary Clinton.

It seemed like basically everything started to be censored all at once.