US funded its own censorship complex.
Benz And Rogan Expose How USAID Pushed 'Blacklists' Of Independent Media While Operating Global Propaganda Network
by Tyler Durden
Thursday, Feb 13, 2025 - 12:35 PM
Former State Department official-turned-truthsayer Mike Benz sat down with Joe Rogan for three hours this week, where the two went down the USAID rabbit hole.
To review - over the past several weeks, Elon Musk's team at DOGE have descended on several key levers of power within the US government - including the US Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, and of course, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) - which was quickly revealed as a rogue, unaccountable 'blob' that used its vast funds not only to spread propaganda worldwide, it paid news organizations and 'disinformation' researchers to collude against outlets such as ZeroHedge, The Federalist, and others in order to strip us of ad revenues and damage our reputation. (Fortunately your subscriptions, and generous support of our new store, are keeping the lights on).
Rogan and Benz
"It must have been very exciting to have the vault opened and to get a peek into the machine, because you've been describing this," Rogan told Benz - who's spent the last several years dispensing redpills. "The last time you were on the podcast, you went into depth about usaid, and it's very curious why they chose USAID as the first organization for DOGE to investigate."
"Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, the joke that I tell here is, it's like what they tell you to do your first day of prison is you go in, you walk up to the meanest, baddest SOB and you punch them right in the mouth. I mean, that's basically what's happened here with the White House's first target being USAID," Benz replied.
Benz then went into how USAID funded NGOs, along with the deep state's global propaganda news complex via 'Internews.'
Benz: "For example, we just played internews and the internews CEO campaigning to governments and corporations and private sector civil society organizations around the world that they need to economically Blacklist news sites that operate on social media and those are U.S. news sites. This is the basis of lawsuits here in the US like Daily Wire and the Federalist suing the State Department. Because U.S. news sites are in these advertiser blacklists. And to that end, I want to note two things. First, if you go to my X feed and you type in the word advertiser or advertisers and if you need to, you can plug in the word USAID or CEPS in this.
And I want to show you that this is not internews gone wrong. This is not a half a billion dollar year grantee of USAID going rogue and being ideological about this. This is top down US government policy from the White House."
"SEPS is a program that is basically a joint baby of USAID and the State Department and is implemented by USAID's key operational arm, the National Endowment for Democracy. But this is a USAID program on countering disinformation. Internet censorship is what they do and we went over last time, remember we played that two minute video where they were openly saying that the plan is to get foreign governments to pass legal reform, pass laws and regulations to stop the spread of misinformation on US social media websites."
13 min video https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1889763678737584459
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/benz-and-rogan-expose-how-usaid-pushed-blacklists-independent-media-while-operating