Speaker 1: What's going on.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It
is heard live every day from noon to three on
WBT Radio and Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content
like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily
show prep with all the links, become a patron, go
to thepeakclendarshow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button.
Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet.
And again, thank you so much for your support. Thanks
to everybody for coming out to the News and Bruise
the WBT News and Bruis last night at Heist Brewery
and Barrel Arts. I had a lot of fun. I
hope you did too. Good food, great people out there.
Got to talk with a lot of folks, and if
you haven't been to one, you should come because they're
fun and it's good fellowship and you know, you get
to hang out and talk with fellow listeners and fans
of the station and the show and us as well.
I mean, we're just kind of you know, value add
on that thing. So thanks again. It was great to
talk with everybody last night. Too many people to name,
and frankly nobody had name tag, so I probably would
get a bunch wrong too. So anyway, thanks again for
coming out. I had a lot of fun, and I
hope you did too. One of the people I spoke
to last night mentioned we got to talk on a
little bit during the event about the censorship, the censorship
industrial complex basically, and I'm not sure if you are
aware of this or not, but we have some developments
in what Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, refers
to as a dark chapter in America's constitutional history. He
wrote an op ed over at the Federalist dot com,
and he announced that the State Department is taking a
quote crucial step towards keeping the President's promise to liberate
American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as
the Global Engagement Center or the GEC, or as I
call it, the GEK. The GEK was supposed to be
dead already, but as many have learned the hard way
in Washington, d C, few things ever truly die. When
Republicans in Congress sunset gek's funding at the end of
last year, the Biden State Department renamed it the GEK
became the Counter Foreign I'm writing these acronyms down to
the letters counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Office or
the RFIMI or the r FIMIPA ME and the same people.
They just moved. They just renamed the GEK to the Arphamy.
With the new name, they were hoping to survive the
transition to the new administration. That did not work out
because the State Department under Marco Rubio put that to
an end as well. Whatever name it goes by, GEK
is dead. It will not return, he said. Over the
past half decade, bodies like the GEK, crafted by our
own governing ruling class, nearly destroyed America's long free speech history.
The enemies of speech had new lingo to justify their
authoritarian impulse. It was disinformation allegedly pushed by nefarious foreign
governments that was the number one threat to our democracy,
and to protect our democracy, this disinformation had to be
identified and stamped out. See this is one of the things,
and Rubia alludes to it, which is what George Washington's
warning about government right. It is a useful servant, but
a fearful master, and fire right easily becomes uncontrollable, and
so it is imperative that we constantly be on guard
for the excesses of government because government has a natural tendency,
because it is comprised of human beings, it has a
natural tendency to grow and to take liberty from its citizens,
and the citizens have a natural tendency to yield their
liberty to their governments. That is the natural order of
government citizen relations. That's usual what happens. Governments rarely ever
devolve power right. They're always taking more, and that leads
to tyranny. And that's what the founders tried to guard
against in constructing the system that we have. They recognized
that natural tendency, and the GEK is a perfect example
of it. Gek's history, Rubio writes, the history shows the
pernicious way that Washington turns laudable public goals into a
means of entrenching its own power and rolling back the
freedom of regular Americans. GEK began life in twenty eleven.
It was then called the Center for Strategic counter Terrorism
Communications or the cSCC, RIGHT, and its purpose was to
monitor the narratives of al Qaeda and ISIS and other
foreign terrorist organizations that were trying to recruit and to
propagandize to Americans. Twenty eleven, RIGHT remember this Obama's in office,
the rise of ISIS, all of that. They're recruiting all
these British girls to go over and be you know,
slave wives to the ISIS fighters member all of that.
That's how it started. Then in early twenty sixteen, the
Obama administration renames it the Global Engagement Center and it
strips away the explicit focus on international terrorism. Then Donald
Trump wins in twenty sixteen, but before he takes office,
get's mission then gets expanded to cover any and all
quote foreign state and non state propaganda and disinformation efforts,
and at that point game on. That's why we saw
what we saw during the Trump administration and through COVID
right through the Biden administration. That's why people were getting blacklisted, banned, deplatformed,
their accounts, throttled, just regular people. That's why that all occurred.
The pivot was not an accident. Keep this name in mind,
Rick Stengel. That was Obama's guy who was in charge
at the GEK, and he touted his efforts to protect
democracy while redefining it so that democracy came to means
silencing the part of the electorate that he didn't like.
In twenty nineteen, he directly equated President Trump's campaign with
foreign and terrorist propaganda. He wrote, quote Trump employed the
same techniques of disinformation as the Russians. That sounds familiar,
and much the same scare tactics as isis. That same year,
he wrote an entire article about why America needs a
hate speech law. He said, quote, I'm not against propaganda.
Every country does it, and they have to do it
to their own population, And I don't necessarily think it's
that awful. This was the guy in charge of deciding
who should get censored and who should not. The guy
who's not against propaganda. He doesn't think it's that awful.
What could go wrong? Right? Like fire? Useful servant, fearful master?
All right, So spring is here a time of renewal
and celebrations. You got graduations, weddings, anniversaries and especial days
for mom and dad, your family's and memories that are
going to last a lifetime. But let me ask you,
are all of those treasured moments from days gone by?
Are they hidden away on old VCR tapes, eight millimeter films,
photos slides? Are they preserved? Because over time, these precious
memories can fade and deteriorate losing the magic of yesterday.
At Creative Video, they help you protect what matters most.
Their expert team digitizes your cherished family moments and transfers
them onto a USB drive, freezing them in time so
they can be enjoyed for generations to come. I urge
you do not wait until it's too late this spring,
celebrate your past. Visit Creative Video today and let them
preserve your legacy with the love and care that it deserves.
Creative Video Preserving Family Memories since nineteen ninety seven. Located
in Minhill, just off four eighty five. Mail orders are
accepted to get all the details that create a video
dot com. Alrighty, So Marco Rubio gave an interview to
Mike Bens no relation to Mercedes. Mike Bens is a
former State Department official and he is also the founder
of Foundation for Freedom Online or the FFO. And Rubio
sat down to talk with Ben's because Benz has been
hammering this issue of the censorship industrial complex, basically the
State Department's abuse of American citizens. He's been hammering away
at this for years. So Rubio gave him like a
fifteen minute interview. I pulled a couple of soundbites. Here's
the first.
Speaker 3: Well, we ended government sponsored censorship in the United States
through the State Department.
Speaker 1: And I may explain how we get there.
Speaker 3: This started out, you know, fifteen ten years ago, with
this effort of let's go after the messaging that al
Qaeda and ISIS and others are putting to radicalize people,
or no, who's going to be against that?
Speaker 1: That sounds normal?
Speaker 3: And then it was like in twenty sixteen, oh, you know,
we had this foreign interference in our election. We need
to start targeting some of that stuff. By twenty twenty,
it had grown into this movement of like actually going
after individual American voices. And one of the ways that
was being done wasn't just directly, because the guy that
was running this thing, Stingle, was actually a guy that
was out there saying, you know, Donald Trump talks just
like a Russian spy.
Speaker 1: He talks just like a terrorist, and so do the
people around them.
Speaker 3: But they were also taking money from this program and
using it to fund these NGOs, these third.
Speaker 1: Party groups who were supposed to be like impartial.
Speaker 3: Those groups were then tagging, they were literally taggling and
labeling voices in American politics, Ben Shapiro, the Federalists, others.
Speaker 1: Tagging them as foreign agents.
Speaker 3: So you look at it and say, American taxpayers through
the State Department, were paying groups to attack Americans and
to try to silence the voice of Americans. And they
were consequent these were just a label they put on people.
Some of these people got deplatformed, they got taken down,
they couldn't communicate, So it was outrageous. So before President
Trump took over, they disbanded this unit. They just renamed
it and moved it somewhere else. But now over the
last few months, we've worked on it, just taking it
down and to the extent we're spending money.
Speaker 1: Now, we are going to spend money on messaging.
Speaker 3: It's going to be pro American messaging, and it's going
to be incentivizing and protecting free speech, which is threatened
in all over the world, including countries that are allies
of ours. The best way to counter disinformation, and that's
what people are thinking is out there, the best way
to counter disinformation is free speech. Is to make sure
that what's true has as equal or greater opportunity to
communicate as what's not true.
Speaker 1: We've learned that the hard way.
Speaker 3: But when you turn disinformation into a weapon, a political weapon,
a label that you can use to go after people
you don't like and say, oh, anything that person's saying
is disinformation. Well, listen, I read mainstream newspapers every day,
or I watched mainstream broadcast, mainstream broadcast every day that
I know are disinformation.
Speaker 1: We have an issue right now.
Speaker 3: They keep calling it Maryland manor to tell Salvador, No,
not Maryland man El Salvador citizen deported, Tell Salvador, that's disinformation.
Speaker 1: Every day.
Speaker 3: A US senator yesterday said that this guy was a
kidnapp American citizen and they published it in the article
without any fact check.
Speaker 1: Not an American citizen.
Speaker 3: So the important thing is that we have free speech
so we can counter that, so we can say this
is not true.
Speaker 1: That's the way you handle that.
Speaker 3: And you know, but we have instances now in Western
countries where people are being arrested.
Speaker 1: You've seen this. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: People are out there, they put a post and the
cop comes knocking on their door. You're going to go
to jail for sixty days for posting something online. You know,
this is crazy stuff that's happening or all, and their
vice president addressed this in his speech at the Munich
conference back in February.
Speaker 1: So we got a lot of work to do.
Speaker 3: But the most important thing is we're going to make
sure that as we communicate to the world, it's going
to be pro American.
Speaker 1: You know, things that build up with this country is.
Speaker 3: Working on and explaining what we're doing, not attacking Americans
who are exercising their First Amendment rights.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Americans exercising their First American rights. Like during the
COVID pandemic GEK, the GEC popped up with a report
warning that a Russian disinformation apparatus was behind and all
of this public speculation that the virus was an engineered
bioweapon or that it existed due to research conducted at
the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That was Russian disinformation, according
to the GEK, which then tarred not only specific claims
as foreign propaganda, but also specific users. It created blacklists
of thousands of accounts that were accused of being foreign
propaganda vectors simply for sharing articles or even if they
just followed some accounts that the GEK didn't like. These
lists were then sent to social media companies for quote
unquote review, but nobody was fooled. He says. The purpose
of this was to pressure private companies in the direction
of more censorship and less free speech. And we know
this now. We have gotten the information from the fo
the Freedom of Information requests. We've got the emails and
text messages and group chain and such, so we know
what they were doing now. And finally the GEK has
been dismantled inside of the State Department. It's a good
first step. This is a good day. This is a
good news, all right. If you're listening to this show,
you know I try to keep up with all sorts
of current events, and I know you do too, And
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources.
Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which
is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's
an app and it's a website, and it combines news
from around the world in one place, so you can
compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out
at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put
the link in the podcast description too. I started using
ground news a few months ago and more recently, chose
to work with them as an affiliate because it lets
me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom.
The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored
by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check
dot Ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link
and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use
the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature.
Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. As you've probably heard me and others say,
take the win, So I am taking the win. I'm
going to celebrate this win. Thank you Marco Rubio, and
thank you Donald Trump for dismantling the GEK, the GEC
Global Engagement blah blah blah whatever and whatever name they
adopted to try to hide inside the State Department so
they can continue censoring Americans and American publications like The Federalist.
And that's why Marco Rubio published his op ed at
the Federalist dot com. Because the Federalist was a website
that was targeted by the GEK. The GEK put them
on a blacklist, sent that blacklist to social media companies,
so they wouldn't be allowed to share their content, and
they put it on a you know, an advertiser block list,
so advertisers wouldn't spend any money at the Federalist dot com.
That's how they did it. That's fascism, by the way, folks,
that's what that is. All the people on the left
that are like fishism, that fascism is. That's what fascism is.
When the government doesn't directly do it themselves, but they
use a cutout basically to use you know, a spy term.
You're you're using a cutout to do the thing that
you are not legally allowed to do, which is to
directly censor free speech or uh, you know, blogs and
websites and social media. So the government can't censor you,
but we can use the social media platforms. We can
use the advertising boycot essentially, which the left has been
doing for twenty years. Right, they they started targeting Rush Limbaugh.
When was that air not Air America Center for American Progress, Right,
isn't that what the and that the David Brock won
and they they launched advertiser boycotts of Rush Limbaugh's show.
So this has been their common tactic because they can't
beat you in the debate on the ideas and the policies,
and so their tactic is shut up. Andrew Claven did
the seminal work on shut up or Eat like twenty
five years ago. It's a great YouTube video. Go watch it.
Just type in Andrew Claven, shut up, it'll come up.
It's a fantastic rundown. It's a I mean, the events
he's talking about are dated because he did it, you know,
in like two thousand and three or something like that.
But this is the This was the system that they
had erected and they used initially right the law was
to combat disinformation from actual terrorist organizations, and then they
loosened the parameters so they could target American citizens because
democracy and this is why Marco Rubio said, accountability is
vital in the tearing down of this infrastructure.
Speaker 3: Because it doesn't just provide justice, but it also prevents
it from happening in the future. You have something you
can point to at the same time and say these
are the kinds of things we want to stay away from.
And you know, it's also a very important lesson here.
If I take you back fifteen years and I asked somebody,
do you think we should be doing more to make
sure ISIS and al Qaeda are not radicalizing people online
fifteen years ago to say, yeah, of course, but look
what that turned into. And I'm not saying I'm you know,
obviously we don't want ISIS radicalizing everybody. But you have
to understand that sometimes some idea that starts out as
innocuous or maybe even good intention whatever can metastasize becomes
a weapon that can be turned into something else by
someone else. That's a valuable lesson here and everything we do,
you have to understand that when you create something, what
you created and what it turns into are not necessarily
the same thing, especially when the people in charge.
Speaker 2: Change yeah, unintended consequences. It is part of every single
government action and policy, every one of them. There is
no way that you can know every single impact your policy,
once it becomes law, is going to have. It's just impossible.
When it wasn't directly nagging social media companies to censor more,
the GEK paid private actors to do it for them.
With its multimillion dollar budget paid for by American taxpayers,
GEK funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to
pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting disinformation. Right
there was one called the Global Disinformation Index or the GDI.
There was one called the Election Integrity Partnership. There was
another called NewsGuard, and by the way, the board of
advisors of NewsGuard, one of those advisors Rick Stengel. The
same yep, the one and the same Rick Stengel from
the GEC. Some of the third party implementers of the
GEK paid to fight so called disinformation were downright laughable.
One such implementer, which continued to receive funding even after
Congress sunset the GEK, this one organization flagged the doge dog.
Do you know the dog I'm talking about. It's on
all the memes. I don't know what kind of breed
it is. I think it's a quirky or something. And
it's a corki, I would say, corky corgi, and it's
kind of looking at you like side eye or something like,
with a surprise look on its face. That meme of
the dog, they said that that was a symbol associated
with Nazi SS officers. These are the same people that
were like, that's not an okay, symbol, that's white power,
not realizing that the four chan trolls created that to
make you say that, to make you look stupid. But
you're so stupid that not only did you adopt the
four chan troll as true, but you don't even realize
it when the secret the troll is exposed, like, haha,
joke's on you. You're like, no, it's not. That's really
white power thing, what we made it up? No, you
did it? Duh, there's white power? Like that's the kind
of These are the people that are like, you can't
use the different skin tone emojis right, Like if you
use the yellow emoji, that's somehow inappropriate. Like this is
the kind of of districtive mindset these people have. The
problem wasn't that the government picked the wrong people and
the wrong NGOs to police disinformation. The problem is they
were picking anybody to do it at all. Here's a
great idea. How about making an escape to a really
special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina? Just a
quick drive up the mountain and cabins of Ashville is
your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe
you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family
and friends together for a big old reunion. Cabins of
Asheville has the ideal spot for you where you can
reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter.
Nestled within the breath taking fourteen thousand acres of the
Pisga National Forest, their cabins offer a serene escape in
the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Centrally located between
Ashville and the entrance of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.
It's the perfect balance of seclusion and proximity to all
the local attractions with hot tubs, fireplaces, air conditioning, smart TVs,
Wi Fi grills, outdoor tables, and you're on private covered porch.
Choose from thirteen cabins, six cottages, two villas, and a
great lodge with eleven king sized bedrooms. Cabins of Ashville
has the ideal spot for you for any occasion, and
they have pet friendly accommodations. Call or text eight two eight,
three six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all
there is to offer at Cabins of Ashville dot com
and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Marco Rubio with
the op ed at the Federalist dot Com, pointing out
that the problem wasn't that the government picked the wrong
people or the wrong NGOs to police disinformation. The problem
was that they were picking anybody at all. The entire
disinformation industry, from its very beginnings, has existed to protect
the American establishment from the voices of forgotten Americans. Everything
it does is the fruit of the poison tree, the
hoax that Russian interference, misinformation, and meddling is what caused
Trump's victory in twenty sixteen than a winning political message
that only he was offering right. Rubio said that this
travesty has gone on long enough, and he says the
American people don't need an obscure agency to protect them
from lies by pressuring Twitter to ban users or trying
to put the Federalist out of business. At her birth,
America was a loan beacon of freedom to the world.
If necessary, we will happily be that loan beacon once again,
he said. In that interview with Mike Ben's, he said
that they are they're now going to be creating a
process to determine who was targeted and for what specifically.
Speaker 3: We already know some of the higher profile ones, but
they're more than a higher profile ones, right, there are
a lot of other including everyday individual American citizens who
suddenly were labeled. And I think this is going to
require some cross jurisdictional work because some of it's going
to require us to go back and prove, Okay, somebody
got deep platformed and one and like in the middle
of COVID twenty twenty, someone got deplatformed, and tracking we
can prove that people can show, hey, I got deep
platformed by the old Facebook or by the old Twitter
or whatever, but then linking that, so, why were they
deep platform who told them the deep platform?
Speaker 1: And if we could.
Speaker 3: Somehow with internal review create a linkage between some information
that came from something the State Department paid for and
an actual a grief party, that's what's important because I
think that one thing is to point to the high
profile cases, which we're aware of, but I think when
people see that there were actually just individual everyday Americans
that were deplatformed and for whatever was silenced because somebody
associated with this program identified them, I think that's what's
really going to be eye opening to a lot of people.
But we didn't want to wait for that to take action.
We know enough to already act, but we obviously want
to know the depth and the scope of this that's
going to happen.
Speaker 1: It's already happening.
Speaker 2: So Eric Schmidt, he is the former Attorney General of Missouri.
I believe he's now a US Senator. He celebrated this announcement.
He said, it's hard to overstate how big this is.
For years, the State Department ran a global censorship operation,
not just in America but across the entire Western world.
As Attorney General of Missouri, he says, I sued the
Biden administration for working with big tech to censor conservatives.
We took them all the way to the US Supreme Court.
In that case, Missouri v. Biden, led to the release
of thousands of pages of documents detailing a vast censorship enterprise.
Piece by piece, we uncovered exactly how the system worked.
Under Biden, government agencies funded an army of third party
censors and disinformation groups to do what they could not
do legally themselves, which was to censor American speech. One
of the nerve centers of this censorship machine was the GEK,
the Global Engagement Center founded under Obama. The GEK was
originally billed as a way to combat foreign propaganda, but
it began to target Americans under the guise of fighting disinformation.
And it wasn't just Americans. The GEK funded and worked
with powerful NGOs, non governmental organizations, which, by the way,
I would submit, if you cannot survive, if your operation
cannot survive without government funds, then I don't think you're
actually a non government organization. But I digress. The GEC
funded and worked with powerful NGOs, pushing speech restrictions and
creating advertiser blacklists designed to crush conservative media across the West.
Your tax dollars were funding a global war against conservatives.
For example, of the London based Global Disinformation Index, funded
by GEK, it compiled blacklists of media outlets to feed
to advertisers, essentially a form of financial warfare against disfavored outlets.
The top ten outlets on its disinformation list You may
want to sit down for this development. They were all
from the right. Last year, he said, I let a
fight in Congress to shutter the GEC for good. The
agency was supposed to sunset at the end of twenty
twenty four, but the Biden State Department simply renamed it,
kept all the same employees, and tried to smuggle it
into the next administration. That's how the administrative state works.
It morphs and adapts to protect itself. But he said
this is a huge step in dismantling the left's censorship enterprise.
Free speech and in particular free speech online is one
of the major battlefields of our time. It's one of
the fights that will define whether we win or lose
on everything else. Also related, the Director of National Intelligence
Tulcy Gabbert, has declassified a Biden administration plan to counter
domestic terrorism established in the months following the January sixth
Capital riots. Gabber declassified Joe Biden's Strategic Implementation Plan for
Countering Domestic Terrorism or the SIPCDT, which I'm not even
going to try to make that into an acronym. So
it was declassified at the urging of conservative groups, including
America First Legal. The Washington Examiner reports that the fifteen
page declassified plan from June of twenty twenty one established
four pillars that it hoped to achieve. One Understand and
share domestic terrorism related information, prevent domestic terrorism, recruitment and mobilization,
to violence, disrupt and deter domestic terrorism activity, and confront
long term contributors to domestic terrorism. See the plan and
called to drive other executive and legislative action. That's the
point of the plan. And when you call, you know,
parents going down to a school board meeting domestic terrorists.
Now all of a sudden, you know, the net that
you're casting gets really, really big and you can catch
way more people with it. Among the the action items
in the plan to drive legislative action banning assault weapons
and high capacity magazines. Huh, that's interesting, so weird how
leftist goals just sort of map on to this, you know,
non partisan effort to root out domestic terrorists. Look, I
was saying this when people were running around saying, punch
a Nazi, Punch a Nazi. The problem is, first off,
you don't know they're actually Nazis. Secondly, they're not actually Nazis.
Third if you're the only one who gets to determine
who is and who isn't a Nazi and then you
get to commit violence on that is a slippery slope.
That's going to lead to a lot of innocent people
who are not Nazis getting punched and then that leads
to them punching you back. That's how that works. It's
like they never understand that the other team gets a
turn at back. The Biden administration also called for sharing
with relevant technology and other private industry companies information concerning
domestic terrorism. The outline garnered criticism from even the American
Civil Liberties Union. Even the ACLU called it a reflection
of the ever expanding authority to surveil and monitor American communities.
When you've lost the ACLU as a Democrat, when you've
lost the ACLU on the wrong path, and this was
all done by President Auto pen Like, I don't even
know who to blame for this. I don't think Joe
Biden even was aware that the internet existed at this point.
All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. I could not do the show
without your support and the support of the businesses that
advertise on the podcast, So if you'd like, please support
them too and tell them you heard it here. You
can also become a patron at my Patreon page or
go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much
for listening, and don't break anything while i'm gone,