Mike Benz Defines and Describes “The Blob”

Mike Benz often speaks of "the Blob." To what is he referring? I created the following transcript Dr. Drew's interview of Mike Benz:

"The Blob" is actually a term from President Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, who was opining on the difficulty within the White House of getting things done because they seem to be up against an impenetrable force, an a amorphous alien monster that was more powerful than even even the Obama White House. And so he sort of coined this phrase, out of exasperation, in a certain sense, but it's been adopted in Washington. It refers to the foreign policy establishment and I'll sketch out what that is, and it's not just the foreign policy establishment within the government. It is the external stakeholders in the corporate and financial worlds who are the donor draftor class off of the government activity.

So I'll sketch that out a little bit here. The foreign policy establishment is the side of our government that faces outward rather than inward to manage the American empire, rather than the American homeland. We have government agencies that manage the American homeland, like Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor. They all face inward. They don't do international business, so to speak with, you know, Ukraine or Moldova, or Sub Saharan Africa.

We have three sides of our government--three departments or constellations of entities that face outward and those are the Pentagon, the State Department and our intelligence services, such as the CIA. Now, together, they basically form this defense diplomacy intelligence apparatus. And because they face outward and their mandate is to protect and maximize US national interests on the world stage, they have a license to do dirty tricks that domestic facing institutions are not empowered to do. So for example, they can wiretap foreign citizens. They don't need to get a warrant for it. They can bribe foreign media institutions to promote or kill stories. They can set up their own media vehicles to be able to swing hearts and minds so that another country's own parliament votes for or against a different bill there in order to get the people of a foreign country to support a US military base in the region, or a UN Security Council vote in a region. And they're they're deployed with this dirty tricks power, which involves a license to lie.

So for example, the Central Intelligence Agency under National Security Council 10-2 back in the 1940s, was given basically a license to do all sorts of criminal or illegal illegal activity as long as they maintain plausible deniability, meaning as long as the US government could plausibly deny that the Central Intelligence Agency or that the US government was behind it, they could engage in criminal activity. Now, that was all set up the foreign policy establishment, the blob, who again on the inside is State Department, Pentagon and, and CIA--we'll just say for shorthand--for the intelligence community. The social contract when that was set up in 1947 1948, was that it was for managing the American empire for the benefit of the citizens of the homeland. And it would have these dirty tricks powers. It would be able to spy. It would be able to lie. It would be able to rig elections, be able to rig media, because at the end of the day, the citizens here would benefit from it, but it would never be turned on our own citizens. That's what our constitution is for. And, and all the other you know, protections that go into being a US citizen.

That's the inside of the blob. The outside of it is the corporate and financial stakeholder class. These are the corporations and the banks, and the financial investors who are the sort of donor draftor class off of the activities of the government. When I refer to drafting you can think of it like a bike race. The strategy in a bike race is not to be out in front where the full blast of the wind is hitting you. The most efficient strategy in a bike race is to be second in line, to draft off of the person who goes first, so that they cut the wind for you so you save all your energy and are able to just overtake them on the last lap, so to speak.

So US multinational corporations, since the age of globalization, have relied on the blob, have relied on the State Department, the Pentagon to the CIA, in order to protect and secure foreign markets for their products, to protect and secure cheap manufacturing in those regions. To protect and secure against issues around tariffs or taxes or labor or regulations. And it's the job of the State Department to go in and pressure that foreign country's government. It is the job of our Central Intelligence Agency to go in and rig those elections or to go in and set up a constellation of surround-sound NGO media in order to get that country's population to support that initiative. And it's the job of the Pentagon to do both the sort of dangling threat of military intervention in the name of democracy or the civil affairs of hearts-and-minds works around psychological warfare in order to make that that happened.

Now, that is not that redounds to the benefit of US multinational corporations who operate in that region. So famous example: in the oil and gas space, for example, is Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, these companies, most of their most of their profits come from all the different shale or hydrocarbon reserves around the whole rest of the world. Other countries don't want to voluntarily just give up their oil or give up their gas or give up these these loose business partnerships where they get mostly railed in negotiations there. The government has to cut the wind for Chevron and for ExxonMobil, the government has to go in and basically coerce these foreign governments or or offer carrots and sticks. And so so those companies draft off of the activities of the blob. Now because they are also major financial donors to the political class, they are essentially donors into the decision making within the government, while their own corporate and financial interests draft off the activities of the government who does that work?

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The Anxiety-Complacency Connection

Fear is a market. To instill fear in people also has advantages. Not only in terms of drug use. Anxiety-driven people are easier to rule.

-Gerd Gogerenzer, Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research (Torsten Engelbrecht, Virus Mania, 2021)

I've been struggling to understand why it is that "The Blob" (or, as Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi have termed it, the "censorship-industrial complex") tolerates and even seems to embrace so many flavors of woke dogma. Many of these woke position are outright oxymorons. Here are a few examples:

Men = Woman

Carefully- gathered statistics (e.g., regarding police/race) are racist. And see here for many statistics that are inconvenient to the "abolish the police" insanity.

The Rule of Law is unfair, even racist/colonial/white supremacist etc.

Enlightenment Principles, including free speech, have become barriers to progress. See here for my articles on free speech.

Intelligence Tests (modern versions, which are highly predictive, as much as any other aspect of psychology, as well as very carefully designed to be race-neutral) are "racist."

Allowing high schoolers to take advanced math courses is racist. To preserve "equity" we must not allow such classes in high school.

I have written about all of these pronouncements at DI. I have also written repeatedly about immense pressures to conform to particular unwarranted, nonsensical and incurious narratives (see more than 250 of my articles that I have tagged as "narratives in media"), especially by corporate media outlets (which I am increasingly thinking of as government propaganda (often CIA) outlets--See Dick Russel's "Belly of the Beast" two-part article here and here. It is guaranteed to ruin your week--it can be painful when scales fall from your eyes).

My understanding from the sordid marriage between multinational corporations, U.S. foreign policy, government censorship and CIA dirty tricks is those with great economic and political power want more and more. They are never satisfied. But why allow woke ideology or even push it on us?  What does that have to do with money or power? For that, consider the quote at the beginning of this article. When those around us utter palpable bullshit, it makes us anxious, even when we know that it is bullshit (see here). It makes us stay indoors. It causes us to avoid going to school board meetings. It keeps us from speaking up at the workplace or even at family dinners. We know woke ideology makes no sense, but most of us are willing to do a LOT of work to keep others from disliking us, even if they are saying things that we know, for sure, make no sense. Even if we know that they are saying and believing these things due to a vast censorship effort funded and operated by our own government. Even if we are certain that the corporate media consensus is a false consensus enabled by a highly sophisticated government apparatus.

Hearing nonsensical things being uttered around us by family, friends and co-workers who rely on corporate media makes us anxious. In the long run, this anxiety makes us more obedient.

This leaves us with two paths in life.

#1: Run out to get yet another COVID booster, then go home to watch Disney and eat ice cream;

#2: Keep speaking up. When you hear nonsense, call it nonsense. You might be worried that if you say what you believe out loud, people will yell at you and call you names. That will, indeed, happen. But remember, for every ignorant loud mouth in the room, you have become a hero to 9 anxious and silent people who are sitting on their hands. Your job is to inspire those people to be heroes next time.

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The Number One Rule When Dealing with Any Organization

We have schools that don’t teach, public health organizations that don’t protect our health, news reporters who are not curious and a Department of “Defense,” an aggressive perpetrator of violence around the world, the world’s biggest bully and propaganda machine. What do each of these institutions have in common? They often fail to do the work they claim to do. Economist Thomas Sowell's advice:

When examining institutions, it is critically important “to distinguish between:

(1) examining issues and institutions in terms of their process characteristics versus

(2) examining them in terms of their proclaimed goals or ideals….

Knowledge and Decisions, Preface to 1996 Edition.

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Corporate Media Lies About NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s Ideology

It was totally predictable that the corporate media (mainstream media or MSM) is trying to pretend that there is nothing to see about recent revelations about Katherine Maher, CEO of NPR. They are pretending her illiberal woke-drenched ideology has no relevance to the illiberal woke-drenched ideology of the modern version of NPR. Andrew Sullivan also noticed this cover-up in his recent link-rich article*:

I used to be quite fond of NPR. Each time I’d tune in, I’d be treated to calm, reassuring voices, occasional folk music and high-minded liberalism. Yes, it was biased — but in a tolerable, occasionally hilarious way, still relaying facts about the world, occasionally even letting an always-qualified “conservative” voice on its airwaves. Yes, we used to refer to “All Things Considered” as “All Things Distorted,” but it was a tease, not an indictment.

And so when I read the NYT story about the new NPR CEO, Katherine Maher, being criticized for past tweets that were “embracing liberal causes,” it felt like a blast of ‘90s nostalgia. Who running the MSM doesn’t “embrace liberal causes”? Ditto the WSJ’s description: that the tweets “indicate liberal leanings.” Or the Washington Post, which wrote that Maher’s tweets included calling Tump a “deranged racist” and a photo of her “wearing a Biden hat, or wistfully daydreaming about hanging out with Kamala D. Harris.”

Nothing to see here. Nothing new. Just a liberal CEO getting blasted by a far-right activist (in this case, Chris Rufo), after an NPR stalwart, Uri Berliner, wrote a public critique of NPR. A tale as old as the MSM.

But of course, the MSM is lying — by obfuscating Maher’s politics and her tweets to make her views seem far milder than they are. She is not, in fact, a liberal of any kind. She is — as the tweets and the record prove — a near-parody of an illiberal leftist, dedicated to replacing open and free debate with benign censorship, and to constructing a journalistic regime rooted not in the pursuit of truth but in the urgent task of dismantling “white supremacy.”

Sullivan also noticed that substantial drop-off in NPR audience since 2017, from 11M to about 8M. I'm not in a mood to hear about correlation and causation on these numbers . . .

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More on NPR and Wikipedia

I even have less respect for NPR and Wikipedia today than I did yesterday.

For more on Wikipedia corruption.

For more about NPR's CEO.

Matt Taibbi's take on NPR:

Last week, NPR senior editor Uri Berliner rattled the media world with a tell-all piece in The Free Press, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” He detailed a series of problems, including what he described as a transition from a “liberal bent” to a more “knee-jerk, activist, [and] scolding” posture, representing the “distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.” He also described serious coverage failures surrounding Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and Covid-19.

The ghoul pools in the media world started immediately. It’s one thing for a former employee to out so many serious newsroom problems (including a devastating account of one of NPR’s “best” journalists admitting to being glad to not cover the laptop story, because it “could help Trump”), but it’s rare for a still-working senior employee to drop that kind of bomb. Berliner in fact was hit with a five-day unpaid suspension last Friday, but this wasn’t announced until Tuesday, when I wrote, “The Vegas over/under line on Berliner’s days left has not been released.”

Whatever that line might have been, betting the under would have been smart. Berliner resigned today, taking a direct shot at new CEO Katherine Maher in the process, writing in an email:

I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new C.E.O. whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay
.

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