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Healthcare Agency Roundtable 2022: Positioning for resiliency: Back to the (virtual) office, building and retaining talent

Part I: Leaders in healthcare marketing and communications reflect on the push to attract and retain industry talent.

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Healthcare Agency Roundtable 2022: Positioning for resiliency: Back to the (virtual) office, building and retaining talent

By Maria Fontanazza • maria.fontanazza@medadnews.com

How has the remote/hybrid working environment affected your business? Has it changed the way you bring creativity to the table when working with clients?

Jesse Kates, Neon

Jesse Kates, Managing Director, Neon, An IPG Health Company: The hybrid/remote environment has had profound effects on how we do business and most of them have been extremely positive. The best thing is that we now have a much larger pool of talent to draw from and are able to accommodate our talents’ individual needs and working styles in ways we never thought possible before. At Neon and throughout IPG Health, we have a truly flexible model that empowers individuals and their teams to make their own decisions about how and where they work. Our offices are open and – on many days – thriving with working sessions, client meetings, and social events. IPG Health has continued to invest and upgrade office technology and infrastructure to accommodate hybrid working well into the future, helping to seamlessly integrate remote attendees into the action, which is obviously critical, as nine out of 10 live meetings have at least a few remote participants as well. 

The remote environment, of course, has also hugely impacted how we bring creativity to the table. We try to structure a lot more interactivity into creative-focused meetings and use software designed to help with that. We also need to be really adept at monitoring and engaging in the chat features on the conferencing platforms, as some of our client team members often prefer collaborating that way. Having all these options is really wonderful in the sense that it allows for meaningful engagement in the ways that people feel most comfortable engaging. All that being said, for big creative presentations or working sessions, there’s still nothing quite like being in the room together. Whenever that’s an option, it’s the one I prefer. 

Renée Wills, Co-founder, Client Lead, Brick City Greenhouse: We were remote before COVID. We’ve always seen the remote model as a way to attract and retain some of the best talent in the industry, and this positioned us well for resiliency through COVID and after. 

Renee Green, Brick City Greenhouse

Renée Green, Brick City Greenhouse

Renée Green, SVP, Client Lead, Brick City Greenhouse: The remote/hybrid model has certainly had an impact on the way we approach new business. In years past, we relied so heavily on the two-hour live pitch meeting as our sole opportunity to establish chemistry and instill confidence in the agency team. But with a remote model, it’s forced us to think differently, because that two-hour pitch is rarely delivered in person. We now look for opportunities between receiving the RFP and delivering the actual presentation to build connections and allow potential clients to get to know our entire team on a deeper level.

Amy Hansen, Brick City Greenhouse

Amy Hansen, Brick City Greenhouse

Amy Hansen, SVP, Creative Lead, Copy, Brick City Greenhouse: From a creative perspective, when I worked at other agencies that presented live, we would spend so much time, effort, and energy on the presentation and the meeting itself — on the pomp and circumstance of the presentation — which would detract from the quality and quantity of the creative ideas that we brought forward. A live presentation created unintended influences. Being remote has allowed us to stay focused on developing ideas that really move people and are most effective at achieving marketing goals.

Brian Wagner, CMI

Brian Wagner, CMI Media Group

Brian Wagner, VP, Product Strategy, CMI Media Group: Our team has turned this into a positive working experience with both our internal clients, external clients, and our suppliers (publishers and data providers). One way has been by not necessarily doing business as usual, for example, by bringing empathy into the equation; we open calls asking about people on the line and their families, and we’ve developed stronger relationships that way. 

Courtney Kasey, CMI Media Group

Courtney Kasey, CMI Media Group

Courtney Kasey, VP Media Director, CMI Media Group: CMI Media Group was creatively staffed, hiring talent wherever they lived, before the pandemic started. Client teams weren’t structured by office, so we weren’t necessarily in the same office to begin with. This made the transition to fully remote easier than in most agencies. As for impact to our business, our talent roster has basically doubled in size since March 2020, meaning nearly half of our team members have never stepped foot inside a CMI Media Group office. We learned how to pitch business, and win, as well as hire and train new employees, all remotely. Our culture favors those with a growth mindset, so while building relationships and showcasing our creativity for our clients’ business, was at times more challenging virtually, there was a sincere team effort from the top down to share tips, ideas, and support, to have this fully virtual setting go from novel to normal. 

Katya Petrova, JUICE Pharma

Katya Petrova, JUICE Pharma

Katya Petrova, Chief Business Officer, JUICE Pharma: In many ways, the hybrid ways of working only reinforced the importance of the old “staples” in our business: open and frequent communication, the primacy of the strategy built on strong insight and the processes supporting and facilitating collaboration. The tools change, the philosophy of success in developing the creative product doesn’t. That’s why a culture promoting intellectual rigor and shared connected experiences is so important to have in place when part of your team is hybrid or remote. 

Brian Ward, Peregrine Market Access

Brian Ward, Peregrine Market Access

Brian Ward, Partner, Director of Organizational Development, Peregrine Market Access: The vast majority of our workforce is in-person at our Saratoga Springs, New York and Santa Monica, California offices. We have some full-time remote employees from around the country who integrate very well into our work processes. At Peregrine Market Access, we have built our workflow to accommodate the hybrid nature of the post-pandemic workforce and tap into virtual video capabilities and shared software systems to maximize collaboration. Plus, communication is the foundation of every aspect of our business and therefore is fundamental to our success. The pandemic forced us to be nimble in how we work and that has served us well. There will always be situations where an in-person environment can’t be beat, but we have the versatility to perform well in-person, remotely, or in a hybrid capacity.

Beth Bogacz, AbelsonTaylor

Beth Bogacz, AbelsonTaylor

Beth Bogacz, SVP, Human Resources, AbelsonTaylor: I believe it has affected us in a positive way. We used to only hire/relocate people to Chicago, and now we are able to hire and retain the best talent anywhere – geography is no longer a barrier. This enables us to fill open roles and support our teams much faster. Allowing our employees to work remotely or in a hybrid situation has also contributed to them being happier. Many like spending more time with their loved ones instead of commuting into the office every day. A few have even moved to other states while continuing their successful careers at AT. Proving that we could work effectively during the pandemic and deliver for our clients in a variety of different work environments was a game changer. 

Jay Carter, EVP, Director of Business Development, AbelsonTaylor: Everybody changed the way creativity was brought to the table during the pandemic. I think the question now is how do we optimize creativity post-pandemic? AbelsonTaylor is approaching this issue by encouraging in-person engagement on a regular, team-by-team basis. Wednesdays are our prime gathering days, with free lunches and interesting activities added to enrich the experience. But the highlight is always working elbow-to-elbow with one another, using everything at our disposal to solve client marketing problems.

Jay Carter, AbelsonTaylor

Jay Carter, AbelsonTaylor

I recently had two experiences that made me hopeful about this approach. Last week, as a group of us met in person to discuss a presentation of multiple different creative executions, we migrated to a Mural website, which had become our de facto collaboration tool during the pandemic. The fact that the full team was together in a meeting room and interacting with an electronic whiteboard brought two strengths together – the creative energy of our in-person collaboration and the established value of a well-tested tech tool. Rather than diluting either of these two ways of collaborating, they actually enhanced each other, making us more efficient in bringing creativity to the table.

The second experience was prompted by an Instagram post by my long-time colleague Brad Graetz. He’s joined in the photo by Christy Agee, Jeanine Clarke, and Kaelin Teegarden, all long-time veterans of AbelsonTaylor. They’re seated in the cocktail lounge of Chicago’s Old Post Office (our home) against the amazing backdrop of that space. It made me smile and wish I had been in the office that day. Our business is about people, and it’s impossible to forget that. People will come back to the office, whether regularly or from time to time, because they need each other and benefit by spending time together.

Shannon Walsh, Ogilvy Health

Shannon Walsh, Ogilvy Health

Shannon Walsh, President of PR, NA, Ogilvy Health: Learning to operate in this post-COVID-19 world has helped so many of us to be more mindful and deliberate in making purposeful connections. Work-life balance has always been encouraged and supported by Ogilvy Health and our return-to-office policy was created with this spirit of flexibility. With hybrid/remote working, people have more options to be their most productive selves, which has been important for working parents and others, and has provided us an opportunity to expand our talent footprint. It also has opened us up to new clients who are taking a similar hybrid approach and are no longer bound by geography when choosing their agency partner. That said, in-office time still remains valuable, especially with new hires and junior talent, allowing our employees to develop deeper bonds with colleagues and managers, while helping to maintain morale and foster a hands-on learning environment. 

Striking the right balance has been critical when it comes to delivering the kind of impeccable creative thinking that is core to our success and that of our clients.  And while we still very much rely on in-person collaboration, we have also introduced new ideation and collaboration tools that allow an integrated team from across practices, offices, and time zones to work together seamlessly. 

Rich Levy, Klick Health

Rich Levy, Klick Health

Rich Levy, Chief Creative Officer, Klick Health: Creative people find a way to be creative no matter what obstacles they face. Clearly, the pandemic – and remote work – were some of those obstacles, but they also came with silver linings. Zoom has allowed for more people to participate in meetings and presentations. Clients have had opportunities to meet more people who are intimately connected to the work. These are passionate people who can speak to how an idea was created, why specific choices were made and how they envision bringing it to life. Having more people at the table (virtual or not) has multiple benefits, from helping foster stronger client relationships while also creating a learning environment for future leaders. These presentations allow for more people to be involved in the process, giving them a glimpse behind the curtain, ultimately allowing them to see how ideas are made and brought to life. At the end of the day — it has made for amazing creative ideas. 

As we embrace our flexible, hybrid environment, we’re seeing more people collaborating, working in fewer silos, and having a great time creating incredible work. It’s been a really fun (and challenging) time to be a creative leader over the past few years. I’m so proud of how our teams have pulled together to create memorable work. 

JD Cassidy, DSW/Syneos Health

JD Cassidy, GSW/Syneos Health

JD Cassidy, President, Advertising, GSW/Syneos Health: In our current hybrid environment, we’re more connected than ever to the global resources we have at hand through the Syneos Health network. This constant communication to our global teams has allowed us to think bigger in our new business pitches, and work better for our current clients. Today, we’re focused on meeting our clients where they want to meet us – whether that be via Microsoft Teams or in a conference room. 

 The past few years have reminded many of us why we entered healthcare communications and the sense of purpose and fulfillment it provides. We continue to stick together, emphasizing our employees’ and clients’ total health and wellness while remaining confident in the way we show up for the communities we all serve. 

Mondy Telmer, Greater Than One

Mindy Telmer, Greater Than One

Mindy Telmer, EVP, Executive Creative Director, Greater Than One: The remote/hybrid model has pushed us as a company to be more “creative” when it comes to working for and with clients daily. The remote environment has advanced each team member’s ability to work with less-used software pre-pandemic For example, when ideating for tactical planning and beyond, we:

  • Consistently take advantage of the Teams break out groups feature to go from a large “kick off” group to smaller break out groups ¾ seamlessly, at the touch of a button
  • Use the Miro’s electronic walls to put up “stickies”
  • Record (via Zoom or Teams) more of our meetings then before to accommodate for the new flexibility people’s work schedules demand in this post-Covid era

We also think differently when presenting creative. Pre-COVID, big conceptual ideas and pitches were often “live”. A live presentation, when good, inherently allows for more energy and drama as you show the work. Now, we must think about how to add energy to a creative presentation when we are not “in the room”. Some ways we approach this is by:

  • Adding more movement to reveal creative ideas, unveiling “elements” to an idea that build to a bigger picture
  • Using music to evoke an emotional response and sonic branding to make an important point more memorable 

Lastly, we have learned to become more “creative” when it comes to getting to know our clients. Setting aside the first 5-10 minutes of meetings on Mondays and Fridays to “talk” about what plans are for the weekend or what we did after a weekend, has made a big difference. Learning about fur babies, marathon victories, horror fandom, and what’s in people’s Netflix queues helps us connect and relate to each other in a way that adds joy to our work lives. 

Pilar Belhumeur, Greater Than One

Pilar Belhumeur, Greater Than One

Pilar Belhumeur, Executive Creative Director, Greater Than One: Working remotely has changed the way we connect with our clients. Knowing how to connect virtually is a skill that we have all needed to develop to sustain those close client relationships. It has changed how we bring creativity to the table. We have developed new ways of collaborating, brainstorming, and interacting with clients. We have also brought new solutions to the table to execute work virtually. For example, we developed new ways of doing photo and video shoots virtually to keep all client staff safe during the pandemic. We also used virtual whiteboards to bring disparate groups together for development of UX deliverables such as journey maps, personas, and we also used them for group brainstorming to bring people together. Chat has become more prevalent than email as far as quick communication to get things done and Microsoft teams became an integral and efficient way to manage projects and communicate. 

Mike Myers, CrowdPharm

Mike Myers, CrowdPharm

Mike Myers, Managing Director and Partner, CrowdPharm: From our beginnings, CrowdPharm was designed with remote work in mind. Having an open approach to work and engagement enables us to tap into the abundance of creativity and talent around the world. With respect to client interactions, the changing environment has provided us with many new tools that foster interaction. We use these tools to enable our clients to experience the broad level of global creativity that we bring to every assignment. 

Steve Bernstein, Partner, CrowdPharm: CrowdPharm was designed to be around the world and around the clock since the beginning – many years before COVID. What has changed is the industry’s acceptance of this model. For many years, clients have always asked for a new agency working model but they really weren’t ready to accept it. Today, the remote/hybrid model is not only accepted by clients, but also preferred.

Susan Perlbachs, EVERSANA INTOUCH

Susan Perlbachs, EVERSANA INTOUCH

Susan Perlbachs, Chief Creative Officer, EVERSANA INTOUCH: It seems we’ve been answering this question for years. I guess that’s because it has been years now! I see more similarities than differences in how we bring creativity to our clients. We still structure ourselves in cross-functional teams with synergistic relationships; we are still looking for that actionable insight that allows us to connect with our customers; we still hold the art director/copywriter relationship sacred, using this time-proven partnership to push creative boundaries and ensure our communications change behaviors. Sure, we’ve all added a few software names to our repertoire like Mural, Stormz, or Miro. But at the end of the day, creativity happens everywhere – whether in offices, remote or hybrid. Good ideas always have a way of finding their way into the world. We are an agency that values creative and creative ideas. When you hire true creative thinkers, it’s hard to keep a good idea down. 

Matt Schneider, Calcium

Matt Schneider, Calcium

Matt Schneider, SVP, Account Director, Calcium: Calcium is a people-first organization, and the healthcare communication industry is one that is built on the power of human connection. The intimacy and value of a face-to-face meeting with a new customer or internal team members is hard to replicate. And above all else, we believe that the most meaningful connections happen in person.

However, when the pandemic hit, and when we knew our business would be moving almost 100 percent virtual, we challenged our teams to put an even more focused lens on staying proactive, engaged, and curious, both internally and externally. We found that despite not being able to be physically together, an extra push in these three key areas allowed us to maintain the meaningful human connection needed to keep our business successful. As restrictions started to lift, we kept the best interest of our people at the core of our go forward plan. We know that each individual works best in their own ways, so we gave our teams the flexibility to make the right choice based on where they felt most productive. The response to this approach was met with positivity and productivity and helped strengthened our culture during an unprecedented time.

The past two years have caused a dramatic shift in the overall market landscape of the healthcare industry. The power of personal selling has taken a back seat to non-personal, primarily digital communications, and we’ve seen our customers become bombarded and often overwhelmed with content coming at them from all angles. 

Now more than ever, it is imperative that we stop and think about the true needs of our customers and how they like to be communicated to. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with a core group of client partners that have embraced this mentality. We feel that regardless of whether a creative solution is shared virtually or face-to-face, if it’s rooted in meaning and connects with our customers on a personal and customized level, then it has an opportunity to help successfully contribute to our client’s business.

Liz Landon, Fishawack Health

Liz Landon, Fishawack Health

Liz Landon, Chief People Officer, Fishawack Health: Virtual and hybrid working are an essential part of our daily lives at Fishawack Health (FH). Due to the global nature of our work and our cross-functional ways of working, our team members are constantly collaborating across our 22 offices and 19 city hubs in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and across our core disciplines (Medical; Marketing; Policy; Value, Evidence and Access; and Consulting). 

We have a mobile working philosophy based on the principle that employees, with the support of the organization and their managers, should feel empowered to make the right decisions for themselves, their teams, and their clients in relation to how and where they work. This fosters a greater sense of trust, ownership, and engagement, which enables individuals to do their best work. 

While we’re considerate of what’s happening in the market, we base our decisions on what our people want and need, not what our competitors are doing. We have no official days in the office. Instead, we are creating what we call “connection days” in our locations to encourage people to come together, as we know this can energize teams. 

Our foundational belief is “Better Health Happens When We Connect,” and connection is the key to any great creative. As we have honed our hybrid working approach, we have uncovered new opportunities to innovate. For example, great ideas often hit at different times, and now we are not restricted to a fixed meeting to share our thinking. Brainstorming as a team has become more democratic, as it is less likely to have one or two voices dominating a virtual call. We have a “camera on” culture, so we can get to know colleagues around the world while closely collaborating. 

Our philosophy has also changed the way we now use our offices. Since our employees are working in a hybrid and mobile fashion, we have changed the setup of our physical office spaces to be more purposeful and collaborative for meetings, workshops, training, and socials, which ultimately enhance creativity, productivity, and fun.  

Employees value time in the office when there is a reason for being there, and they value heads-down time working remotely when there is a reason for being offsite. Being nimble with our policies and our workspaces helps our colleagues to shift gears from ideation with colleagues in person to focused work, heads down, at home and all the work modes in between.

Practically, our business is powered by cloud technologies and platforms that enable our teams to work efficiently and collaborate globally to innovate and meet our clients’ needs. For example, we use Egnyte, a shared and protected file-sharing platform, and Miro and Trello for running virtual brainstorming workshops. 

Robin Shapiro, TBWA/WorldHealth

Robin Shapiro, TBWA/WorldHealth

Robin Shapiro, CEO, TBWAWorldHealth: Our new hybrid work approach is ultimately a good thing for business. We’ve long embraced a geographically boundless approach to talent recruitment, which has been great for business because it opens the aperture and encourages greater diversity. In recent years, this approach has been embraced by every agency, which is a good thing for everyone. 

There is also a concern, though, considering the impact of less human connection. Relationships are at risk of becoming transactional. That could have a direct impact on client and employee retention. To prevent this, we’re working harder at facilitating trusting and durable relationships from the start – both within our agency and with our clients. We’re enhancing our onboarding approach, encouraging smaller live team gatherings versus relying on larger events, and stressing learning programs that increase empathy and understanding. It’s still early days, and we have a lot to learn, but we’re excited for what’s possible. Watch this space!

Jenny Love, SVP, People & Culture, PRECISIONeffect: We had already started to reach far afield for the best talent – so with COVID, we doubled down, identifying extraordinary contributors, wherever they sit! We now have team members in 27 states and more than a few have chosen to travel internationally. Many of our team members are working hybrid, but others fully embrace the flexibility to manage their work and family lives from the same spot. We’ve learned to be evermore intentional in how we communicate and connect. We have overhauled our onboarding efforts and support for emerging managers. When we bring teams together for critical meetings or collaborations, the joy is palpable. We have weathered, grown, and continue to adapt and change!

From day 1, we sought out technology solutions that would allow us to continue to collaborate with clients. Simon Wilson, our director of innovation, introduced Miro, a virtual infinite whiteboard with mind-blowing capabilities for real-time, online work. It’s now our standard for workshops – and as we move to hybrid, it equalizes the impact of those in the room and online. Simon also developed WildCards, an inspiration app (found on Apple and Android stores) to encourage divergent thinking internally and with clients.

What is your organization doing to attract new talent and retain existing employees?

Courtney Murphy, Ogilvy Health

Courtney Murphy, Ogilvy Health

Courtney Murphy, Global People Director, Ogilvy Health: Many companies describe recruiting as the “war for talent.” We’ve seen it posted on social channels, in publications, and heard it discussed on prestigious panels. I’ve always thought that was the wrong way to describe it because, although we are competing for talent, it’s up to the talent to determine what it is they want out of an agency – reasons that could vary drastically from person to person. There’s never a one-size-fits-all approach and at Ogilvy Health we are striving to create deeper partnerships and relationships with prospective talent to ensure the best match possible for both the agency and the individual. We are working to create deeper partnerships at the outset by tapping into our current employees’ networks and building relationships with different groups and organizations to get to know the talent on a more personal level. We are also working with our current leaders on the importance of their role when it comes to attracting talent. Hiring cannot be seen as simply transactional. Too often, recruiters and hiring managers can lose sight of the candidate’s experience in the drive to make the quick hire without taking the time to assess if it’s a fit on both sides – this results in what I call a transactional hire. They can lose focus on the importance of the unique needs and desires of the individual candidates. It’s no secret that all levels of talent want to be part of a winning and cohesive team. By building off of our current momentum and sharing our awards, our new business wins, and by inviting talent to come meet with us and get to know our people and culture, we give them the opportunity to see for themselves that this could be a place for them to do the best work of their lives! It’s imperative that talent teams stop making recruiting so transactional, celebrating quick hires for the sake of time and start making it deeply personal again. 

With attrition at an all-time high in our industry, talent leads need to begin taking a forensic look at the “why” of it all. The reality is, there are multiple reasons, but the truth is, transactional hiring is a major contributor to high attrition. If an agency is making a transactional hire, they are taking a gamble and making a lot of assumptions that the new hire will be a long-term fit for agency. So far, statistics show that hasn’t worked out to be the case. But if an agency is committed to making a deeper connection and truly working to match with the right candidate, there is a better chance that individual will stick around a lot longer. We’re all doing our best to retain talent. But it’s certainly no longer about which agencies have bagels on Fridays, or foosball, or the beer cart. Recruiters must start by recognizing that the talent they’re looking to retain or bring in is motivated by their own specific needs and desires. By factoring in and addressing each individuals’ motivations, the people not only feel seen, heard and valued, the agency inevitably benefits because their employees are more engaged, invested and committed. To create this formula for better retention and attraction, agencies need to invest in their managers and train them how to thrive in both hybrid and high-touch environments. 

Courtney Mullen, CMI Media Group

Courtney Mullen, CMI Media Group

Courtney Mullen, SVP, SEM Dept Lead, CMI Media Group: CMI Media Group listened to what employees wanted in terms of flexibility and remote working to not only retain existing employees but attract new ones. Additionally, we have opened up recruiting to new locations in order to attract new and diverse talent in the industry. Our extensive training program has allowed us to bring in talent with experience that may be outside of pharma and get them up to speed on the nuances of a very unique industry.

Priscilla Segnini, CMI Media Group

Priscilla Segnini, CMI Media Group

Priscilla Segnini, Supervisor, Paid Social, CMI Media Group: Being open to feedback and listening. CMI Media Group has been proactive about making a conscious effort to listen and open spaces for employees to share their input in future business decisions. When employees feel heard and the organization implements changes to improve the current policies and procedures, morale increases and there is a trusting relationship leading to people enjoying being part of the company. In addition, the open-door policy has led to great results during the remote environment contributing to employees advocating for new people to join.

Minnie Damle, SVP, Human Resources, Brick City Greenhouse: Our remote and flexible working model is a big attraction to talent who value work-life harmony. We lean into operating and leading with trust, respect, and transparency in all we do. This allows our employees to do their jobs with comfort, ease, and enjoyment. We’ve created an organization and culture that puts our employees first. This is lived through any initiative, brand assignments, and employee development opportunities we implement. 

In the next 12 months we will focus on establishing clear career paths, providing training/learning opportunities, and furthering employee development to allow for optimal career growth. We are also placing an importance on ensuring that we provide cross-departmental opportunities to stretch beyond the current role/assignment. Our goal is to ensure our employees always have a pulse point on their performance and a focus for growth in supporting their personal and professional goals.

Renée Wills, Brick City Greenhouse

Renée Wills, Brick City Greenhouse

Renée Wills: While we’ve always thought of our remote model as a feature that helps in attracting and retaining top talent, it’s become even more so since COVID. In the past, with new employees, we generally had to take a chance on whether they would thrive working from home in our remote model because that employee had never experienced it before. Now, prospective employees know whether remote working suits them, so that risk is gone. And, as other companies call people back to the office, there is a large group of prospective employees who will jump at the chance to remain working remotely.

Steve Bernstein: Everyone who works with us is a member of our family. We share our successes and give our incredible talent the experiences they need to grow personally and professionally. We set out to build an agency with an amazing culture that inspires talent to choose to work with us. This culture enables us to recruit and retain talent more easily than some of the traditional agencies we inevitably compete against. 

Mariela Orochena, IPG Health

Mariela Orochena, IPG Health

Mariela Orochena, Director of Talent Acquisition, IPG Health: IPG Health leads with curiosity and equity in mind when attracting and hiring the right talent for us. We proactively engage talent in and outside of the industry, recognizing new skills and backgrounds are necessary for the success of our business. Our talent acquisition strategy is anchored in three core areas to help us identify and retain new talent: The work, the people, and the culture. 

  • The work: We continue to lead the way as an employer of choice for talent looking to grow their careers with award-wining, meaningful and innovative work in health. 
  • The people: We maintain deep relationships with external industry partners and internal stakeholders to identify a diverse pool of talent who we can offer immersion programs to that can upskill and reskill them to ensure they succeed here long term. Once they are here, we empower their growth through our talent philosophy proactive career management, which equips all employees with the power and opportunity to grow their career within our global network. 
  • The culture: We lead with curiosity and equity in mind. We are relentless in securing a pipeline of talent for the future that focuses on key skills and experiences necessary to help us shape the future of health. To achieve this, we work with our managers to ensure we constantly explore new backgrounds and that we are all equipped to provide an equitable hiring and development process. 
Glenn Zujew, Klick Health

Glenn Zujew, Klick Health

Glenn Zujew, Chief People Officer, and Deanna Pathak, Global Head of Talent Attraction, Klick Health: Our talent strategy revolves around the candidate experience – from the moment someone applies to their first day on the job – to ensure we attract and hire the best people, and their first impressions are positive. We have invested in early careers, in diversifying our talent pools, and in tools that allow us access to more passive candidates.

We rely on our Klick Difference behaviors, like being people-first, embracing entrepreneurial spirit, playing the long game, leaning into our hacker roots, and prioritizing outcomes over optics to guide how we interact, hire, and find people who will add to our culture. We embed diversity into each and every process, role, and interview. We launched hiring-manager diversity training that trains interviewers to understand their biases and develop the tools needed to combat them. We know diversity makes us stronger and better, and we live that. 

We have an e-Scout program on our proprietary operating system, Genome, that helps identify the best candidates for Klick. When our recruiting team vets candidates, they can use the tool to pull from potential Klicksters with similar previous work experience, ask whether they know the recruit(s), and ask if they’d recommend them. We credit this program with helping us make better hiring decisions and finding people who will live the Klick Difference.

Deanna Pathak, Klick Health

Deanna Pathak, Klick Health

Our goal is to give Klicksters the support they need to grow as individuals and support our organizational growth. We believe Klicksters want to keep learning, growing, and evolving. In support of nurturing our high-performance culture, we launched Klick Cultivate, our growth and development ecosystem. Cultivate centers around four difference-making career moments: onboarding, performance, leadership, and growth to curate and deliver the tools, technology, processes, and learning that matters most to our Klicksters. We also added LinkedIn Learning to our Klick University portfolio of courses. We developed manager toolkits, DE&I training, added more courses to our Healthcare Talent Accelerator, and updated our peer buddy and diverse mentorship programs just to name a few. We also had some fun with our offices being open again. We had a massive 25th anniversary party – featuring Tiësto to help us dance the night away. We brought back our Halloween party, costume contest, and Pizza Wednesdays. We opened a brand new state-of-the-art office in Philadelphia, and we’re in the midst of launching no less than eight global offices.

Robin Shapiro: People are attracted to join us for many reasons, but I hope more than anything that it’s about the culture we’ve created. We’re values-based (Be Authentic, Do Good, Raise Hell) and ingrain our values into every aspect of work, from the questions we ask during interviews to how we recognize and reward excellence. As part of our values, we focus on DEI efforts in a holistic way. We are willing to do the hard work, ask the tough questions, and most importantly, make purposeful change. Our focus on DEI has been there from the start because it’s important to me as an ally. It’s also important to me as a working mom and a female creative director. I faced a lot of false assumptions and biases early in my career. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have strong agency leadership pushing for change. Our agency’s focus on DEI has only amplified over time, with employees raising their hands to take on a role in building and scaling our efforts. 

Beth Bogacz: We have updated some of our policies to be more responsive to employee needs. These include moving to a flexible time-off policy to let employees take time off when they need it, enriching our parental leave to give parents four weeks off to spend time bonding with their new child, and providing 100 percent full pay for short-term disability. We also hired a DEI director to build and manage agency-wide diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Additionally, we have a robust learning and development program that provides opportunities for employees to progress in their careers, whether they are just starting out or are industry veterans. We offer an intensive onboarding program, career development and role-specific training, a mentoring program, and additional outside training so AT employees can increase their knowledge while learning from new voices. 

Lisa Brigham, AbelsonTaylor

Lisa Brigham, AbelsonTaylor

Lisa Brigham, Director of Talent Acquisition, AbelsonTaylor: A key strategy we’re employing to attract new entry-level talent is partnering with colleges and universities to educate students about AT and promote our internship program. We strive to give our interns real-world healthcare advertising experience that broadens their knowledge, sharpens their skills, and adds significantly to their credentials and professional contacts. 

Something we do differently from many other agencies is treat interns as full-fledged employees. Each works alongside a full-time staff member on actual client accounts and ad hoc business assignments in addition to collaborating on a mock ad campaign presented at the end of the internship period. We also give our interns full exposure to the agency’s leadership and operations to provide a strong sense of AT’s history, organization, capabilities, and culture. Cross-department networking is encouraged both formally and through social activities. 

Our approach is paying off. Of the 10 students in our 2022 summer internship program, three were hired as full-time AT staff and two others are participating in part-time internships through the end of 2022.  We’re also successfully differentiating ourselves as an agency through the quality and value of the program, as shown through sample comments from last summer’s interns:

  • “I wasn’t getting coffee for people – I was doing planning work on five accounts and assisting with a new business pitch. I felt like my opinion mattered, my skills were valued, and that I was part of the team.”
  • “I learned you don’t have to be an advertising major to succeed at AbelsonTaylor. It’s a place where people with diverse backgrounds can thrive.
  • I felt seen and heard, got involved with work that mattered, met a broad range of people I could learn from, and really enjoyed myself. It was a great experience.”

Liz Landon: In a rapidly evolving and growing sector, we need to ensure we remain competitive to attract and retain top talent at all career levels. Our commitment to our people is what keeps employees here and attracts new ones. We strive to enable our employees to do, be, and feel their best by creating the teams, community, and culture where they can find purpose and thrive. This includes:

  • Providing personalized capability development and career path navigation, enabling our employees to progress their careers with purpose
  • Working every day to build an inclusive, psychologically safe, collaborative culture where all can thrive
  • Striving to offer unparalleled flexibility, benefits, and wellbeing support to team members balancing life and work 

We work every day to be responsive to our employees and their suggestions for making FH a great place to work. For example, they tell us that they value flexibility, so we have embraced mobile ways of working and flexible work arrangements. We continue to reinforce our commitment to employee wellbeing and provide the support and flexibility our staff members need to manage the challenges of life and work. 

We have a team of dedicated people and HR professionals who support every employee, making sure each feels known and supported. We have also built a dedicated Career Experience Team that provides the tools and support to ensure every employee — from new hire to long-standing colleague — enjoys a purpose-driven career where they have the tools to progress. This includes opportunities for learning, internal mobility, and cross-functional collaboration.

To support us in this mission, we have recently implemented four new training and development platforms:

  1. Fuel50: An AI-driven career development platform that allows employees to map out their own career journeys.
  2. Coursera: A world-class online learning platform with more than 8,000 courses from top universities and companies around the world.
  3. High5: A platform to express appreciation and recognition for FH’s global workforce.
  4. Connect: Our internal communications hub, where every employee receives personalized messages and content based on their team, capability, and location to help them work more effectively and feel connected to the rest of the global organization.

We place a strong emphasis on nurturing early careers with activities such as our global annual summer internship program, global graduate program, Supporting Training and Enhancing Professional Skills (STEPS) program for medical writers, and continuous coaching and mentorship. These programs offer individuals the opportunity to play a crucial part in bringing treatments and therapies to market, while solving complex challenges in healthcare and allowing them to kick-start their careers along the way!

When we look for proof that these elements of our employee value proposition are compelling, all we have to do is count the number of “Boomerang” employees who return to the company, proving that even when employees do leave us, they often come back.

Lew Campanaro, Fusion

Lew Campanaro, Fusion

Lew Campanaro, General Manager, Business Unit Lead, Fusion: We are consistent when talking with both existing employees and prospective applicants that Fusion is a destination for individuals to develop and cultivate new, bold ideas. Each employee adds a unique perspective and makes our agency better as a whole. We believe that consistent message helps create an agency culture from the top that we strive for an inclusive workplace that values and celebrates staff diversity and the ability to promote new and fresh thinking. 

We have reshaped two key areas of our employee experience. The first is a more intentional interviewing, hiring, and onboarding process. We are now a fully remote company, so we do not have the same opportunities to interview employees and onboard the “old way.” We need to leverage the interviewing process differently and more strategically. 

Second, we provide more robust employee development opportunities. I believe that now more than ever in our remote environment, employees want a clear path toward future development and opportunities. We are now offering more training courses, both professionally and personally, mentoring opportunities, and stretch assignments outside of normal job descriptions to provide expanded skills and elements of new roles. 

Jen Cully, Greater Than One

Jen Cully, Greater Than One

Jen Cully, HR Director, Greater Than One: Greater Than One has multiple initiatives underway to both attract new talent and retain the talented employees we have today. Our People & Development team is working to enhance the processes involved in recruiting and retention to better align with our people-first culture. Some initiatives include: a newly structured job architecture to help employees understand their career path and options within the agency, a refreshed compensation strategy, new medical plan offerings giving employees affordable options with increased service coverage, improved onboarding experience, and an enhanced learning and development plan to further sharpen employee’s skills and gain understanding of what the agency does. All of these initiatives help increase job satisfaction and provide a stronger sense of belonging. GTO also provides unlimited paid time off (PTO) and is a fully remote agency, which allows us to recruit talent anywhere in the U.S. Both of these benefits give employees the flexibility to better balance work and life.

Katya Petrova: Our company is opening a new chapter in its rich history of firsts and is gearing up for another phase of growth in 2023. Being part of this team requires taking on a lot of work and responsibility, but, most importantly, it takes a certain mindset to feel accomplished and fulfilled in the fast-paced, rapidly evolving environment. With our on-board talent, as well as the folks aspiring to join the agency, we are extremely open and detailed about our vision, our plan to get there and the effort it will require. Nothing reflects it stronger than our mantra Energy is Everything. And it attracts and engages the talent which thrives on the challenge of bringing high-voltage kinetic ideas to clients – ideas that are in sync and evolve with the times. Sharing the aspiration to grow together, by leapfrogging established dynamics in the industry and rewriting old playbooks, is critical for being successful here. And from the shared goals comes shared purpose which cements talent’s relationship with the team and the agency.

Jenny Love, PRECISIONeffect

Jenny Love, PRECISIONeffect

Jenny Love: Our mission of helping innovative companies change the standard of care combined with our culture of Wecentricity continues to be a strong magnet. We’ve offered our teammates extreme flexibility in defining the where and when of how they work. As a result, we’re attracting both fresh talent and senior leaders and thinkers who jive with our approach and appreciate the comprehensive, convergent offerings we can bring to our clients via our broader organization of PRECISIONValue & Health. 

We have created many programs to attract talent and engage our current Effectors, including overhauling our onboarding process and developing tool kits and training for emerging managers. We’re continually assessing market data to ensure our pay bands are competitive and supporting growth within departments as well as intercompany transfers. We’re bringing our teams together in real time and online with virtual engagement and peer-to-peer rewards programs that give everyone a voice in how it feels to be a part of PRECISIONeffect.

Scott Neverett, Partner, Director of Human Resources and Corporate Culture, Peregrine Market Access: John Guarino started Peregrine Market Access to be a company that truly takes care of its employees, knowing they are our greatest resource. In fact, our first company value is “We value each other”, and there are many ways we demonstrate that. We are now in our second year of offering no-cost healthcare for employees and their families. One hundred percent of healthcare costs are covered, including the premiums, deductibles, copays, and out-of-pocket expenses. As a company that specializes in market access, we never want cost to be a deterrent to our employees or their families receiving the care they need. 

Peregrine Market Access also has a very generous paid-time-off (PTO) policy. Employees receive more than six weeks off, including vacations, holidays, PTO, and two paid shutdown weeks each year (in July and December) aimed at giving our employees well-deserved time to rest and recharge. Another new benefit that’s in the works is a stock program that we plan to roll out in 2023. We want to give employees the opportunity to own part of the company. Additionally, we started a Peregrine University program to train and educate our employees on the complexities of our business and to support them in their professional development. 

Collectively, these efforts have translated into distinctions that we take pride in. For 2 years running, our employees’ feedback has allowed us to be certified as a national Great Place to Work. Beyond the positive workplace culture, our quality work has helped us earn recognition as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America, according to Inc.

Healthcare Agency Roundtable 2022: Uncertainties of 2023: Looming recession, inflation, and reduced investment (Part II)

Healthcare Agency Roundtable 2022: Tech trends, opportunities, and woes (Part III)

Healthcare Agency Roundtable 2022: Diversity, equity, and inclusion: Putting words into action (Part IV)

Healthcare Agency Roundtable 2022: Moving into 2023 (Part V)

 

Maria Fontanazza

Maria Fontanazza is the director of content, Med Ad News and PharmaLive.com.

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International

Beloved mall retailer files Chapter 7 bankruptcy, will liquidate

The struggling chain has given up the fight and will close hundreds of stores around the world.

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It has been a brutal period for several popular retailers. The fallout from the covid pandemic and a challenging economic environment have pushed numerous chains into bankruptcy with Tuesday Morning, Christmas Tree Shops, and Bed Bath & Beyond all moving from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation.

In all three of those cases, the companies faced clear financial pressures that led to inventory problems and vendors demanding faster, or even upfront payment. That creates a sort of inevitability.

Related: Beloved retailer finds life after bankruptcy, new famous owner

When a retailer faces financial pressure it sets off a cycle where vendors become wary of selling them items. That leads to barren shelves and no ability for the chain to sell its way out of its financial problems. 

Once that happens bankruptcy generally becomes the only option. Sometimes that means a Chapter 11 filing which gives the company a chance to negotiate with its creditors. In some cases, deals can be worked out where vendors extend longer terms or even forgive some debts, and banks offer an extension of loan terms.

In other cases, new funding can be secured which assuages vendor concerns or the company might be taken over by its vendors. Sometimes, as was the case with David's Bridal, a new owner steps in, adds new money, and makes deals with creditors in order to give the company a new lease on life.

It's rare that a retailer moves directly into Chapter 7 bankruptcy and decides to liquidate without trying to find a new source of funding.

Mall traffic has varied depending upon the type of mall.

Image source: Getty Images

The Body Shop has bad news for customers  

The Body Shop has been in a very public fight for survival. Fears began when the company closed half of its locations in the United Kingdom. That was followed by a bankruptcy-style filing in Canada and an abrupt closure of its U.S. stores on March 4.

"The Canadian subsidiary of the global beauty and cosmetics brand announced it has started restructuring proceedings by filing a Notice of Intention (NOI) to Make a Proposal pursuant to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (Canada). In the same release, the company said that, as of March 1, 2024, The Body Shop US Limited has ceased operations," Chain Store Age reported.

A message on the company's U.S. website shared a simple message that does not appear to be the entire story.

"We're currently undergoing planned maintenance, but don't worry we're due to be back online soon."

That same message is still on the company's website, but a new filing makes it clear that the site is not down for maintenance, it's down for good.

The Body Shop files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy

While the future appeared bleak for The Body Shop, fans of the brand held out hope that a savior would step in. That's not going to be the case. 

The Body Shop filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the United States.

"The US arm of the ethical cosmetics group has ceased trading at its 50 outlets. On Saturday (March 9), it filed for Chapter 7 insolvency, under which assets are sold off to clear debts, putting about 400 jobs at risk including those in a distribution center that still holds millions of dollars worth of stock," The Guardian reported.

After its closure in the United States, the survival of the brand remains very much in doubt. About half of the chain's stores in the United Kingdom remain open along with its Australian stores. 

The future of those stores remains very much in doubt and the chain has shared that it needs new funding in order for them to continue operating.

The Body Shop did not respond to a request for comment from TheStreet.   

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Government

When Military Rule Supplants Democracy

When Military Rule Supplants Democracy

Authored by Robert Malone via The Brownstone Institute,

If you wish to understand how democracy ended…

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When Military Rule Supplants Democracy

Authored by Robert Malone via The Brownstone Institute,

If you wish to understand how democracy ended in the United States and the European Union, please watch this interview with Tucker Carlson and Mike Benz. It is full of the most stunning revelations that I have heard in a very long time.

The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States.

“What I’m describing is military rule,” says Mike Benz.

“It’s the inversion of democracy.”

Please watch below...

I have also included a transcript of the above interview. In the interests of time – this is AI generated. So, there still could be little glitches – I will continue to clean up the text over the next day or two.

Note: Tucker (who I consider a friend) has given me permission to directly upload the video above and transcript below – he wrote this morning in response to my request:

Oh gosh, I hope you will. It’s important.

Honestly, it is critical that this video be seen by as many people as possible. So, please share this video interview and transcript.

Five points to consider that you might overlook;

First– the Aspen Institute planning which is described herein reminds me of the Event 201 planning for COVID.

Second– reading the comments to Tucker’s original post on “X” with this interview, I am struck by the parallels between the efforts to delegitimize me and the new efforts to delegitimize Mike Benz. People should be aware that this type of delegitimization tactic is a common response by those behind the propaganda to anyone who reveals their tactics and strategies. The core of this tactic is to cast doubt about whether the person in question is unreliable or a sort of double agent (controlled opposition).

Third– Mike Benz mostly focuses on the censorship aspect of all of this, and does not really dive deeply into the active propaganda promotion (PsyWar) aspect.

Fourth– Mike speaks of the influence mapping and natural language processing tools being deployed, but does not describe the “Behavior Matrix” tool kit involving extraction and mapping of emotion. If you want to dive in a bit further into this, I covered this latter part October 2022 in a substack essay titled “Twitter is a weapon, not a business”.

Fifth– what Mike Benz is describing is functionally a silent coup by the US Military and the Deep State. And yes, Barack Obama’s fingerprints are all over this.

Yet another “conspiracy theory” is now being validated.

Transcript of the video:

Tucker Carlson:

The defining fact of the United States is freedom of speech. To the extent this country is actually exceptional, it’s because we have the first amendment in the Bill of Rights. We have freedom of conscience. We can say what we really think.

There’s no hate speech exception to that just because you hate what somebody else thinks. You cannot force that person to be quiet because we’re citizens, not slaves. But that right, that foundational right that makes this country what it is, that right from which all of the rights flow is going away at high speed in the face of censorship. Now, modern censorship, there’s no resemblance to previous censorship regimes in previous countries and previous eras. Our censorship is affected on the basis of fights against disinformation and malformation. And the key thing to know about this is that they’re everywhere. And of course, this censorship has no reference at all to whether what you’re saying is true or not.

In other words, you can say something that is factually accurate and consistent with your own conscience. And in previous versions of America, you had an absolute right to say those things. but now – because someone doesn’t like them or because they’re inconvenient to whatever plan the people in power have, they can be denounced as disinformation and you could be stripped of your right to express them either in person or online. In fact, expressing these things can become a criminal act and is it’s important to know, by the way, that this is not just the private sector doing this.

These efforts are being directed by the US government, which you pay for and at least theoretically owned. It’s your government, but they’re stripping your rights at very high speed. Most people understand this intuitively, but they don’t know how it happens. How does censorship happen? What are the mechanics of it?

Mike Benz is, we can say with some confidence, the expert in the world on how this happens. Mike Benz had the cyber portfolio at the State Department. He’s now executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, and we’re going to have a conversation with him about a very specific kind of censorship. By the way, we can’t recommend strongly enough, if you want to know how this happens, Mike Benz is the man to read.

But today we just want to talk about a specific kind of censorship and that censorship that emanates from the fabled military industrial complex, from our defense industry and the foreign policy establishment in Washington. That’s significant now because we’re on the cusp of a global war, and so you can expect censorship to increase dramatically. And so with that, here is Mike Benz, executive director of Foundation for Freedom online. Mike, thanks so much for joining us and I just can’t overstate to our audience how exhaustive and comprehensive your knowledge is on this topic. It’s almost unbelievable. And so if you could just walk us through how the foreign policy establishment and defense contractors and DOD and just the whole cluster, the constellation of defense related publicly funded institutions, stripped from us,

Mike Benz:      

Our freedom of speech. Sure. One of the easiest ways to actually start the story is really with the story of internet freedom and it switched from internet freedom to internet censorship because free speech on the internet was an instrument of statecraft almost from the outset of the privatization of the internet in 1991. We quickly discovered through the efforts of the Defense Department, the State Department and our intelligence services, that people were using the internet to congregate on blogs and forums. And at this point, free speech was championed more than anybody by the Pentagon, the State Department, and our sort of CIA cutout NGO blob architecture as a way to support dissident groups around the world in order to help them overthrow authoritarian governments as they were sort of build essentially the internet free speech allowed kind of insta regime change operations to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishments State Department agenda.     

Google is a great example of this. Google began as a DARPA grant by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford PhDs, and they got their funding as part of a joint CIA NSA program to chart how “birds of a feather flock together online” through search engine aggregation. And then one year later they launched Google and then became a military contractor. Quickly thereafter, they got Google Maps by purchasing a CIA satellite software essentially, and the ability to use free speech on the internet as a way to circumvent state control over media over in places like Central Asia and all around the world, was seen as a way to be able to do what used to be done out of CIA station houses or out of embassies or consulates in a way that was totally turbocharged. And all of the internet free speech technology was initially created by our national security state – VPNs, virtual private networks to hide your IP address, tour the dark web, to be able to buy and sell goods anonymously, end-to-end encrypted chats.    

All of these things were created initially as DARPA projects or as joint CIA NSA projects to be able to help intelligence backed groups, to overthrow governments that were causing a problem to the Clinton administration or the Bush administration or the Obama administration. And this plan worked magically from about 1991 until about 2014 when there began to be an about face on internet freedom and its utility.

Now, the high watermark of the sort of internet free speech moment was the Arab Spring in 2011, 2012 when you had this one by one – all of the adversary governments of the Obama Administration: Egypt, Tunisia, all began to be toppled in Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions. And you had the State Department working very closely with the social media companies to be able to keep social media online during those periods. There was a famous phone call from Google’s Jared Cohen to Twitter to not do their scheduled maintenance so that the preferred opposition group in Iran would be able to use Twitter to win that election.            

So free speech was an instrument of statecraft from the national security state to begin with. All of that architecture, all the NGOs, the relationships between the tech companies and the national security state had been long established for freedom. In 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected counter coup where Crimea and the Donbas broke away and they broke away with essentially a military backstop that NATO was highly unprepared for at the time. They had one last Hail Mary chance, which was the Crimea annexation vote in 2014. And when the hearts and minds of the people of Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO – as they saw it. The fundamental nature of war changed at that moment. And NATO at that point declared something that they first called the Gerasimov doctrine, which was named after this Russian military, a general who they claimed made a speech that the fundamental nature of war has changed.

(Gerasimov doctrine is the idea that) you don’t need to win military skirmishes to take over central and eastern Europe. All you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem because that’s what controls elections. And if you simply get the right administration into power, they control the military. So it’s infinitely cheaper than conducting a military war to simply conduct an organized political influence operation over social media and legacy mediaAn industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into a organized political warfare outfit, essentially infrastructure that was created initially stationed in Germany and in Central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones, basically to create the ability to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda and then to censor domestic, right-wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.

So you had the systematic targeting by our state department, by our intelligence community, by the Pentagon of groups like Germany’s AFD, the alternative for Deutsche Land there and for groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Now, when Brexit happened in 2016, that was this crisis moment where suddenly they didn’t have to worry just about central and eastern Europe anymore. It was coming westward, this idea of Russian control over hearts and minds. And so Brexit was June, 2016. The very next month at the Warsaw Conference, NATO formally amended its charter to expressly commit to hybrid warfare as this new NATO capacity. So they went from basically 70 years of tanks to this explicit capacity building for censoring tweets if they were deemed to be Russian proxies. And again, it’s not just Russian propaganda this, these were now Brexit groups or groups like Mateo Salvini in Italy or in Greece or in Germany or in Spain with the Vox Party.

And now at the time NATO was publishing white papers saying that the biggest threat NATO faces is not actually a military invasion from Russia. It’s losing domestic elections across Europe to all these right-wing populace groups who, because they were mostly working class movements, were campaigning on cheap Russian energy at a time when the US was pressuring this energy diversification policy. And so they made the argument after Brexit, now the entire rules-based international order would collapse unless the military took control over media because Brexit would give rise to Frexit in France with marine Lapin just Brexit in Spain with a Vox party to Italy exit in Italy, to Grexit in Germany, to Grexit in Greece, the EU would come apart, so NATO would be killed without a single bullet being fired. And then not only that, now that NATO’s gone, now there’s no enforcement arm for the International Monetary fund, the IMF or the World Bank. So now the financial stakeholders who depend on the battering ram of the national security state would basically be helpless against governments around the world. So from their perspective, if the military did not begin to censor the internet, all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after World War II would collapse. So you can imagine the reaction,

Tucker Carlson:

Wait, ask

Mike Benz:      

Later. Donald Trump won the 2016 election. So

Tucker Carlson:

Well, you just told a remarkable story that I’ve never heard anybody explain as lucidly and crisply as you just did. But did anyone at NATO or anyone at the State Department pause for a moment and say, wait a second, we’ve just identified our new enemy as democracy within our own countries. I think that’s what you’re saying. They feared that the people, the citizens of their own countries would get their way, and they went to war against that.

Mike Benz:      

Yes. Now there’s a rich history of this dating back to the Cold War. The Cold War in Europe was essentially a similar struggle for hearts and minds of people, especially in central and Eastern Europe in these sort of Soviet buffer zones. And starting in 1948, the national security state was really established. Then you had the 1947 Act, which established the Central Intelligence Agency. You had this world order that had been created with all these international institutions, and you had the 1948 UN Declaration on human rights, which forbid the territorial acquisition by military force. So you can no longer run a traditional military occupation government in the way that we could in 1898, for example, when we took the Philippines, everything had to be done through a sort of political legitimization process whereby there’s some ratification from the hearts and minds of people within the country.  

Now, often that involves simply puppet politicians who are groomed as emerging leaders by our State Department. But the battle for hearts and minds had been something that we had been giving ourselves a long moral license leash, if you will, since 1948. One of the godfathers of the CIA was George Kennan. So, 12 days after we rigged the Italian election in 1948 by stuffing ballot boxes and working with the mob, we published a memo called the Inauguration of organized political warfare where Kennan said, “listen, it’s a mean old world out there. We at the CIA just rigged the Italian election. We had to do it because if the Communist won, maybe there’d never be another election in Italy again, but it’s really effective, guys. We need a department of dirty tricks to be able to do this around the world. And this is essentially a new social contract we’re constructing with the American people because this is not the way we’ve conducted diplomacy before, but we are now forbidden from using the war department in 1948.”

They also renamed the war department to the Defense Department. So again, as part of this diplomatic onslaught for political control, rather than it looking like it’s overt military control, but essentially what ended up happening there is we created this foreign domestic firewall. We said that we have a department of dirty tricks to be able to rig elections, to be able to control media, to be able to meddle in the internal affairs of every other plot of dirt in the country.

But this sort of sacred dirt in which the American homeland sits, they are not allowed to operate there. The State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA are all expressly forbidden from operating on US soil. Of course, this is so far from the case, it’s not even funny, but that’s because of a number of laundering tricks that they’ve developed over 70 years of doing this.

But essentially there was no moral quandary at first with respect to the creation of the censorship industry. When it started out in Germany and in Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and in Sweden and Finland, there began to be a more diplomatic debate about it after Brexit, and then it became full throttle when Trump was elected. And what little resistance there was was washed over by the rise in saturation of Russiagate, which basically allowed them to not have to deal with the moral ambiguities of censoring your own people.

Because if Trump was a Russian asset, you no longer really had a traditional free speech issue. It was a national security issue. It was only after Russiagate died in July, 2019 when Robert Mueller basically choked on the stand for three hours and revealed he had absolutely nothing. After two and a half years of investigation that the foreign to domestic switcheroo took place where they took all of this censorship architecture, spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DOD, the DOJ, and then the thousands of government funded NGO and private sector mercenary firms were all basically transited from a foreign predicate, a Russian disinformation predicate to a democracy predicate by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes from the Russians, it’s actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself.

And so by that, they were able to launder the entire democracy promotion regime change toolkit just in time for the 2020 election.

Tucker Carlson:

I mean, it’s almost beyond belief that this has happened. I mean, my own father worked for the US government in this business in the information war against the Soviet Union and was a big part of that. And the idea that any of those tools would be turned against American citizens by the US government, I think I want to think was absolutely unthinkable in say 1988. And you’re saying that there really hasn’t been anyone who’s raised objections and it’s absolutely turned inward to manipulate and rig our own elections as we would in say Latvia.

Mike Benz:      

Yeah. Well, as soon as the democracy predicate was established, you had this professional class of professional regime change artists and operatives that is the same people who argued that we need to bring democracy to Yugoslavia, and that’s the predicate for getting rid of Milošević or any other country around the world where we basically overthrow governments in order to preserve democracy. Well, if the democracy threat is homegrown now, then that becomes, then suddenly these people all have new jobs moving on the US side, and I can go through a million examples of that. But one thing on what you just mentioned, which is that from their perspective, they just weren’t ready for the internet. 2016 was really the first time that social media had reached such maturity that it began to eclipse legacy media. I mean, this was a long time coming. I think folks saw this building from 2006 through 2016.

Internet 1.0 didn’t even have social media from 1991 to 2004, there was no social media at all. 2004, Facebook came out 2005, Twitter, 2006, YouTube 2007, the smartphone. And in that initial period of social media, nobody was getting subscriber ships at the level where they actually competed with legacy news media. But over the course of being so initially even these dissonant voices within the us, even though they may have been loud in moments, they never reached 30 million followers. They never reached a billion impressions a year type thing. As a uncensored mature ecosystem allowed citizen journalists and independent voices to be able to outcompete legacy news media. This induced a massive crisis both in our military and in our state department in intelligence services. I’ll give you a great example of this in 2019 at meeting of the German Marshall Fund, which is an institution that goes back to the US basically, I don’t want to say bribe, but essentially the soft power economic soft power projection in Europe as part of the reconstruction of European governments after World War ii, to be able to essentially pay them with Marshall Fund dollars and then in return, they basically were under our thumb in terms of how they reconstructed.

But the German Marshall Fund held a meeting in 2019. They held a million of these, frankly, but this was when a four star general got up on the panel and posed the question, what happens to the US military? What happens to the national security state when the New York Times is reduced to a medium sized Facebook page? And he posed this thought experiment as an example of we’ve had these gatekeepers, we’ve had these bumper cars on democracy in the form a century old relationship with legacy media institutions. I mean, our mainstream media is not in any shape or form even from its outset, independent from the national security state, from the state Department, from the war department, you had the initial, all of the initial broadcast news companies, NBC, ABC and CBS were all created by Office of War Information Veterans from the War department’s effort in World War ii.

You had these Operation Mockingbird relationships from the 1950s through the 1970s. Those continued through the use of the National Endowment for Democracy and the privatization of intelligence capacities in the 1980s under Reagan. There’s all sorts of CIA reading room memos you can read even on cia.gov about those continued media relations throughout the 1990s. And so you always had this backdoor relationship between the Washington Post, the New York Times, and all of the major broadcast media corporations. By the way, Rupert Murdoch and Fox are part of this as well. Rupert Murdoch was actually part of the National Endowment for Democracy Coalition in 1983 when it was as a way to do CIA operations in an aboveboard way after the Democrats were so ticked off at the CIA for manipulating student movements in the 1970s. But essentially there was no CIA intermediary to random citizen journalist accounts. There was no Pentagon backstop.

You couldn’t get a story killed. You couldn’t have this favors for favors relationship. You couldn’t promise access to some random person with 700,000 followers who’s got an opinion on Syrian gas. And so this induced, and this was not a problem for the initial period of social media from 2006 to 2014 because there were never dissident groups that were big enough to be able to have a mature enough ecosystem on their own. And all of the victories on social media had gone in the way of where the money was, which was from the State Department and the Defense Department and the intelligence services. But then as that maturity happened, you now had this situation after the 2016 election where they said, okay, now the entire international order might come undone. 70 years of unified foreign policy from Truman until Trump are now about to be broken.

And we need the same analog control systems. We had to be able to put bumper cars on bad stories or bad political movements through legacy media relationships and contacts we now need to establish and consolidate within the social media companies. And the initial predicate for that was Russiagate. But then after Russiagate died and they used a simple democracy promotion predicate, then it gave rise to this multi-billion dollar censorship industry that joins together the military industrial complex, the government, the private sector, the civil society organizations, and then this vast cobweb of media allies and professional fact checker groups that serve as this sort of sentinel class that surveys every word on the internet.

Tucker Carlson:

Thank you again for this almost unbelievable explanation of why this is happening. Can you give us an example of how it happens and just pick one among, I know countless examples of how the national security state lies to the population, censors the truth in real life.

Mike Benz:      

Yeah, so we have this state department outfit called the Global Engagement Center, which was created by a guy named Rick Stengel who described himself as Obama’s propaganda in chief. He was the undersecretary for public affairs essentially, which is the liaison office role between the state department and the mainstream media. So this is basically the exact nexus where government talking points about war or about diplomacy or statecraft get synchronized with mainstream media.

Tucker Carlson:

May I add something to that as someone I know – Rick Stengel. He was at one point a journalist and Rick Stengel has made public arguments against the First Amendment and against Free Speech.

Mike Benz:      

Yeah, he wrote a whole book on it and he published an op-Ed in 2019. He wrote a whole book on it and he made the argument that we just went over here that essentially the Constitution was not prepared for the internet and we need to get rid of the First Amendment accordingly. And he described himself as a free speech absolutist when he was the managing editor of Time Magazine. And even when he was in the State Department under Obama, he started something called the Global Engagement Center, which was the first government censorship operation within the federal government, but it was foreign facing, so it was okay. Now, at the time, they used the homegrown ISIS predicate threat for this. And so it was very hard to argue against the idea of the State Department having this formal coordination partnership with every major tech platform in the US because at the time there were these ISIS attacks that were, and we were told that ISIS was recruiting on Twitter and Facebook.

And so the Global Engagement Center was established essentially to be a state department entanglement with the social media companies to basically put bumper cars on their ability to platform accounts. And one of the things they did is they created a new technology, which it’s called Natural Language processing. It is a artificial intelligence machine learning ability to create meaning out of words in order to map everything that everyone says on the internet and create this vast topography of how communities are organized online, who the major influences are, what they’re talking about, what narratives are emerging or trending, and to be able to create this sort of network graph in order to know who to target and how information moves through an ecosystem. And so they began plotting the language, the prefixes, the suffixes, the popular terms, the slogans that ISIS folks were talking about on Twitter.

When Trump won the election in 2016, everyone who worked at the State Department was expecting these promotions to the White House National Security Council under Hillary Clinton, who I should remind viewers was also Secretary of State under Obama, actually ran the State Department. But these folks were all expecting promotions on November 8th, 2016 and were unceremoniously put out of jobs by a guy who was a 20 to one underdog according to the New York Times the day of the election. And when that happened, these State Department folks took their special set of skills, coercing governments for sanctions. The State Department led the effort to sanction Russia over the Crimea annexation. In 2014, these State Department diplomats did an international roadshow to pressure European governments to pass censorship laws to censor the right-wing populous groups in Europe and as a boomerang impact to censor populace groups who were affiliated in the us.

So you had folks who went from the state department directly, for example, to the Atlanta Council, which was this major facilitator between government to government censorship. The Atlanta Council is a group that is one of Biden’s biggest political backers. They bill themselves as NATO’s Think Tank. So they represent the political census of NATO. And in many respects, when NATO has civil society actions that they want to be coordinated to synchronize with military action or region, the Atlantic Council essentially is deployed to consensus build and make that political action happen within a region of interest to nato.

Now, the Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its board. A lot of people don’t even know that seven CIA directors are still alive, let alone all concentrated on the board of a single organization that’s kind of the heavyweight in the censorship industry. They get annual funding from the Department of Defense, the State Department, and CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy.

The Atlantic Council in January, 2017 moved immediately to pressure European governments to pass censorship laws to create a transatlantic flank tank on free speech in exactly the way that Rick Stengel essentially called for to have us mimic European censorship laws. One of the ways they did this was by getting Germany to pass something called Nets DG in August, 2017, which was essentially kicked off the era of automated censorship in the us. What Nets DG required was, unless social media platforms wanted to pay a $54 million fine for each instance of speech, each post left up on their platform for more than 48 hours that had been identified as hate speech, they would be fined basically into bankruptcy when you aggregate 54 million over tens of thousands of posts per day. And the safe haven around that was if they deployed artificial intelligence based censorship technologies, which had been again created by DARPA to take on ISIS to be able to scan and ban speech automatically.

And this gave rise to what I call these weapons of mass deletion. These are essentially the ability to sensor tens of millions of posts with just a few lines of code. And the way this is done is by aggregating basically the field of censorship science fuses together two disparate groups of study, if you will. There’s the sort of political and social scientists who are the sort of thought leaders of what should be censored, and then there are the sort of quants, if you will. These are the programmers, the computational data scientists, computational Linguistics University.

There’s over 60 universities now who get federal government grants to do the censorship work and the censorship preparation work where what they do is they create these code books of the language that people use the same way they did for isis. They did this, for example, with COVID. They created these COVID lexicons of what dissident groups were saying about mandates, about masks, about vaccines, about high profile individuals like Tony Fauci or Peter Daszak or any of these protected VIPs and individuals whose reputations had to be protected online.

And they created these code books, they broke things down into narratives. The Atlanta Council, for example, was a part of this government funded consortium, something called the Virality Project, which mapped 66 different narratives that dissidents we’re talking about around covid, everything from COVID origins to vaccine efficacy. And then they broke down these 66 claims into all the different factual sub claims. And then they plugged these into these essentially machine learning models to be able to have a constant world heat map of what everybody was saying about covid. And whenever something started trend that was bad for what the Pentagon wanted or was bad for what Tony Fauci wanted, they were able to take down tens of millions of posts. They did this in the 2020 election with mail-in ballots. It was the same. Wait,

Tucker Carlson:

There’s so much here and it’s so shocking. So you’re saying the Pentagon, our Pentagon, the US Department of Defense censored Americans during the 2020 election cycle?

Mike Benz:      

Yes, they did this through the, so the two most censored events in human history, I would argue to date are the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’ll explain how I arrived there.

So the 2020 election was determined by mail-in ballots, and I’m not weighing into the substance of whether mail-in ballots were or were not a legitimate or safe and reliable form of voting. That’s a completely independent topic from my perspective.

Then the censorship issue one, but the censorship of mail-in ballots is really one of the most extraordinary stories in our American history. I would argue what happened was is you had this plot within the Department of Homeland Security. Now this gets back to what we were talking about with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. You had this group within the Atlanta Council and the Foreign Policy Establishment, which began arguing in 2017 for the need for a permanent domestic censorship government office to serve as a quarterback for what they called a whole of society counter misinformation, counter disinformation alliance.

That just means censorship. To counter “miss-dis-info”. But their whole society model explicitly proposed that we need every single asset within society to be mobilized in a whole of society effort to stop misinformation online. It was that much of an existential threat to democracy, but they fixated in 2017 that it had to be centered within the government because only the government would have the clout and the coercive threat powers and the perceived authority to be able to tell the social media companies what to do to be able to summon a government funded NGO Swarm to create that media surround sound to be able to arm an AstroTurf army of fact checkers and to be able to liaise and connect all these different censorship industry actors into a cohesive unified hole. And the Atlantic Council initially proposed with this blueprint called Forward defense. “It’s not offense, it’s Forward Defense” guys.

They initially proposed that running this out of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center because they had so many assets there who were so effective at censorship under Rick Stengel, under the Obama administration. But they said, oh, we are not going to be able to get away with that. We don’t really have a national security predicate and it’s supposed to be foreign facing. We can’t really use that hook unless we have a sort of national security one. Then they contemplated parking it, the CIA, and they said, well, actually there’s two reasons we can’t do that. The is a foreign facing organization and we can’t really establish a counterintelligence threat to bring it home domestically. Also, we’re going to need essentially tens of thousands of people involved in this operation spanning this whole society model, and you can’t really run a clandestine operation that way. So they said, okay, well what about the FBI?

They said, well, the FBI would be great, it’s domestic, but the problem is is the FBI is supposed to be the intelligence arm of the Justice Department. And what we’re dealing with here are not acts of law breaking, it’s basically support for Trump. Or if a left winging popularist had risen to power like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbin, I have no doubt they would’ve done in the UK. They would’ve done the same thing to him there. They targeted Jeremy Corbin and other left-wing populist NATO skeptical groups in Europe, but in the US it was all Trump.

And so essentially what they said is, well, the only other domestic intelligence equity we have in the US besides the FBI is the DHS. So we are going to essentially take the CIA’s power to rig and bribe foreign media organizations, which is the power they’ve had since the day they were born in 1947. And we’re going to combine that with the power with the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI by putting it at DHS. So DHS was basically deputized. It was empowered through this obscure little cybersecurity agency to have the combined powers that the CIA has abroad with the jurisdiction of the FBI at home. And the way they did this, how did a cyber, an obscure little cybersecurity agency get this power was they did a funny little series of switcheroos. So this little thing called CISA, they didn’t call it the Disinformation Governance Board. They didn’t call it the Censorship Agency. They gave it an obscure little name that no one would notice called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) who his founder said, we care about security so much, it’s in our name twice. Everybody sort of closed their eyes and pretended that’s what it was. CISA was created by Active Congress in 2018 because of the perceived threat that Russia had hacked the 2016 election.

And so we needed the cybersecurity power to be able to deal with that. And essentially on the heels of a CIA memo on January 6th, 2017 and a same day DHS executive order on January 6th, 2017, arguing that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and a DHS mandate saying that elections are now critical infrastructure, you had this new power within DHS to say that cybersecurity attacks on elections are now our purview. And then they did two cute things. One they said said, miss dis and Malformation online are a form of cybersecurity attack. They are a cyber attack because they are happening online. And they said, well, actually Russian disinformation is we’re actually protecting democracy and elections. We don’t need a Russian predicate after Russiagate died. So just like that, you had this cybersecurity agency be able to legally make the argument that your tweets about mail-in ballots if you undermine public faith and confidence in them as a legitimate form of voting was now you were now conducting a cyber attack on US critical infrastructure articulating misinformation on Twitter and just like that.

Tucker Carlson:

Wait- in other words, complaining about election fraud is the same as taking down our power grid.

Mike Benz:      

Yes, you could literally be on your toilet seat at nine 30 on a Thursday night and tweet, I think that mail-in ballots are illegitimate. And you were essentially then caught up in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security classifying you as conducting a cyber attack on US critical infrastructure because you were doing misinformation online in the cyber realm. And misinformation is a cyber attack on democracy when it undermines public faith and confidence in our democratic elections and our democratic institutions, they would end up going far beyond that. They would actually define democratic institutions as being another thing that was a cybersecurity attack to undermine and lo and behold, the mainstream media is considered a democratic institution that would come later. What ended up happening was in the advance of the 2020 election, starting in April of 2020, although this goes back before you had this essentially never Trump NeoCon Republican DHS working with essentially NATO on the national security side and essentially the DNC, if you will, to use DHS as the launching point for a government coordinated mass censorship campaign spanning every single social media platform on earth in order to preens the ability to dispute the legitimacy of mail-in ballots.

And here’s how they did this. They aggregated four different institutions. Stanford University, the University of Washington, a company called Graphica and the Atlantic Council. Now all four of these institutions, the centers within them were essentially Pentagon cutouts you had at the Stanford Air Observatory. It was actually run by Michael McFaul, if you know Michael McFaul. He was the US ambassador to Russia under the Obama administration, and he personally authored a seven step playbook for how to successfully orchestrate a color revolution. And part of that involved maintaining total control over media and social media juicing up the civil society outfits, calling elections illegitimate in order to. Now, mind you, all of these people were professional Russia, Gators and professional election delegitimizes in 2016, and then I’ll get that in a sec. So Stanford, the Stanford Observatory under Michael McFaul was run by Alex Stamos, who was formerly a Facebook executive who coordinated with ODNI and with respect to Russiagate taking down Russian propaganda at Facebook.

So this is another liaison essentially to the national security state. And under Alex Stamos at Sanford Observatory was Renee Diresta, who started her career in the CIA and wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian disinformation, and there’s a lot more there that I’ll get to another time. But the next institution was the University of Washington, which is essentially the Bill Gates University in Seattle who is headed by Kate Starboard, who is basically three generations of military brass who got our PhD in crisis informatics, essentially doing social media surveillance for the Pentagon and getting DARPA funding and working essentially with the national security state, then repurposed to take on mail-in ballots. The third firm Graphica got $7 million in Pentagon grants and got their start as part of the Pentagon’s Minerva initiative. The Minerva Initiative is the Psychological Warfare Research Center of the Pentagon. This group was doing social media spying and narrative mapping for the Pentagon until the 2016 election happened, and then were repurposed into a partnership with the Department of Homeland Security to censor 22 million Trump tweets, pro-Trump tweets about mail-in ballots.

And then the fourth institution, as I mentioned, was the Atlantic Council who’s got seven CIA directors on the board, so one after another. It is exactly what Ben Rhodes described during the Obama era as the blob, the Foreign Policy Establishment, it’s the Defense Department, the State Department or the CIA every single time. And of course this was because they were threatened by Trump’s foreign policy, and so while much of the censorship looks like it’s coming domestically, it’s actually by our foreign facing department of Dirty tricks, color revolution blob, who were professional government toppers who were then basically descended on the 2020 election.

Now they did this, they explicitly said the head of this election integrity partnership on tape and my foundation clipped them, and it’s been played before Congress and it’s a part of the Missouri Biden lawsuit now, but they explicitly said on tape that they were set up to do what the government was banned from doing itself, and then they articulated a multi-step framework in order to coerce all the tech companies to take censorship actions.

They said on tape that the tech companies would not have done it but for the pressure, which involved using threats of government force because they were the deputized arm of the government. They had a formal partnership with the DHS. They were able to use DHS’ proprietary domestic disinformation switchboard to immediately talk to top brass at all the tech companies for takedowns, and they bragged on tape about how they got the tech companies to all systematically adopt a new terms of service speech violation ban called delegitimization, which meant any tweet, any YouTube video, any Facebook post, any TikTok video, any discord posts, any Twitch video, anything on the internet that undermine public faith and confidence in the use of mail-in ballots or early voting drop boxes or ballot tabulation issues on election day was a prima fascia terms of service violation policy under this new delegitimization policy that they only adopted because of pass through government pressure from the election integrity partnership, which they bragged about on tape, including the grid that they used to do this, and simultaneously invoking threats of government breaking them up or government stopping doing favors for the tech companies unless they did this as well as inducing crisis PR by working with their media allies.

And they said DHS could not do that themselves. And so they set up this basically constellation of State Department, Pentagon and IC networks to run this censorship campaign, which by their own math had 22 million tweets on Twitter alone, and mind you, they just on 15 platforms, this is hundreds of millions of posts which were all scanned and banned or throttled so that they could not be amplified or they exist in a sort of limited state purgatory or had these frictions affixed to them in the form of fact-checking labels where you couldn’t actually click through the thing or you had to, it was an inconvenience to be able to share it. Now, they did this seven months before the election because at the time they were worried about the perceived legitimacy of a Biden victory in the case of a so-called Red Mirage Blue Shift event.

They knew the only way that Biden would win mathematically was through the disproportionate Democrat use of mail-in ballots. They knew there would be a crisis because it was going to look extremely weird if Trump looked like he won by seven states and then three days later it comes out actually the election switch, I mean that would put the election crisis of the Bush Gore election on a level of steroids that the National Security state said, well, the public will not be prepared for. So what we need to do is we need to in advance, we need to preens the ability to even question legitimacy.

Tucker Carlson:

Out, wait, wait, may I ask you to pause right there? Key influences by, so what you’re saying is what you’re suggesting is they knew the outcome of the election seven months before it was held.

Mike Benz:      

It looks very bad.

Tucker Carlson:

Yes, Mike. It does look very bad

Mike Benz:      

And especially when you combine this with the fact that this is right on the heels of the impeachment. The Pentagon led and the CIA led impeachment. It was Eric ? from the CIA, and it was Vindman from the Pentagon who led the impeachment of Trump in late 2019 over an alleged phone call around withholding Ukraine aid. This same network, which came straight out of the Pentagon hybrid warfare military censorship network, created after the first Ukraine crisis in 2014 were the lead architects of the Ukraine impeachment in 2019, and then essentially came back on steroids as part of the 2020 election censorship operation. But from their perspective, I mean it certainly looks like the perfect crime. These were the people. DHS at the time had actually federalized much of the National Election Administration through this January 6th, 2017 executive order from outgoing Obama. DHS had Jed Johnson, which essentially wrapped all 50 states up into a formal DHS partnership. So DHS was simultaneously in charge of the administration of the election in many respects, and the censorship of anyone who challenged the administration of the election. This is like putting essentially the defendant of a trial as the judge and jury of the trial. It was

Tucker Carlson:

Very, but you’re not describing democracy. I mean, you’re describing a country in which democracy is impossible.

Mike Benz:      

What I’m essentially describing is military rule. I mean, what’s happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. Democracy sort draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is ruled by consent of the people being ruled. That is, it’s not really being ruled by an overlord because the government is actually just our will expressed by our consent with who we vote for. The whole push after the 2016 election and after Brexit and after a couple of other social media run elections that went the wrong way from what the State Department wanted, like the 2016 Philippines election, was to completely invert everything that we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said is, we need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions and who are the democratic institutions?

Oh, it’s the military, it’s NATO, it’s the IMF and the World Bank. It’s the mainstream media, it is the NGOs, and of course these NGOs are largely state department funded or IC funded. It’s essentially all of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. Because if you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially democracy is just the consensus building architecture within the Democrat institutions themselves. And from their perspective, that takes a lot of work. I mean, the amount of work these people do. I mean, for example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is one of these big coordinating mechanisms for the oil and gas industry in a region for the finance and the JP Morgans and the BlackRocks in a region for the NGOs in the region, for the media, in the region, all of these need to reach a consensus, and that process takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of work and a lot of negotiation from their perspective.

That’s democracy. Democracy is getting the NGOs to agree with BlackRock, to agree with the Wall Street Journal, to agree with the community and activist groups who are onboarded with respect to a particular initiative that is the difficult vote building process from their perspective.

At the end of the day, a bunch of populous groups decide that they like a truck driver who’s popular on TikTok more than the carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass. Well then from their perspective, that is now an attack on democracy, and this is what this whole branding effort was. And of course, democracy again has that magic regime change predicate where democracy is our magic watchword to be able to overthrow governments from the ground up in a sort of color revolution style whole of society effort to topple a democratically elected government from the inside, for example, as we did in Ukraine, Victor Jankovich was democratically elected by the Ukrainian people like him or hate him.

I’m not even issuing an opinion, but the fact is we color revolution him out of office. We January 6th out of office, actually, to be frank, I mean with respect to the, you had a state department funded right sector thugs and 5 billion worth of civil society money pumped into this to overthrow democratically elected government in the name of democracy, and they took that special set of skills home and now it’s here, perhaps potentially to stay. And this has fundamentally changed the nature of American governance because of the threat of one small voice becoming popular on social media.

Tucker Carlson:

May I ask you a question? So into that group of institutions that you say now define democracy, the NGOs foreign policy establishment, et cetera, you included the mainstream media. Now in 2021, the NSA broke into my private text apps and read them and then leaked them to the New York Times against me. That just happened again to me last week, and I’m wondering how common that is for the Intel agencies to work with so-called mainstream media like the New York Times to hurt their opponents.

Mike Benz:      

Well, that is the function of these interstitial government funded non-governmental organizations and think tanks like for example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is NATO’s think tank, but other groups like the Aspen Institute, which draws the lion’s share of its funding from the State department and other government agencies. The Aspen Institute was busted doing the same thing with the Hunter Biden laptop censorship. You had this strange situation where the FBI had advanced knowledge of the pending publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and then magically the Aspen Institute, which is run by essentially former CIA, former NSA, former FBI, and then a bunch of civil society organizations all hold a mass stakeholder censorship simulation, a three day conference, this came out and yo Roth was there. This is a big part of the Twitter file leaks, and it’s been mentioned in multiple congressional investigations.

But somehow the Aspen Institute, which is basically an addendum of the National Security state, got the exact same information that the National Security State spied on journalists and political figures to obtain, and not only leaked it, but then basically did a joint coordinated censorship simulator in September, two months before the election in order just like with the censorship of mail-in ballots to be in ready position to screens anyone online amplifying, wait a second, a news story that had not even broken yet.

Tucker Carlson:

The Aspen Institute, which is by the way, I’ve spent my life in Washington. It’s kind a, I mean Walter Isaacson formerly of Time Magazine ran it, former president of CNNI had no idea it was part of the national security state. I had no idea its funding came from the US government. This is the first time I’ve ever heard that. But given, assuming what you’re saying is true, it’s a little weird or starnge that Walter Isaacson left Aspens to write a biography of Elon Musk?

Mike Benz:      

No? Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t read that book. From what I’ve heard from people, it’s a relatively fair treatment. I just total speculation. But I suspect that Walter Isaacson has struggled with this issue and may not even firmly fall in one particular place in the sense that Walter Isaacson did a series of interviews of Rick Gel actually with the Atlantic Council and in other settings where he interviewed Rick Gel specifically on the issue of the need to get rid of the First Amendment and the threat that free speech on social media poses to democracy. Now, at the time, I was very concerned, this was between 2017 and 2019 when he did these Rick Stangle interviews. I was very concerned because Isaacson expressed what seemed to me to be a highly sympathetic view about the Rick Stengel perspective on killing the First Amendment. Now, he didn’t formally endorse that position, but it left me very skittish about Isaacson.

But what I should say is at the time, I don’t think very many people, in fact, I know virtually nobody in the country had any idea how deep the rabbit hole went when it came to the construction of the censorship industry and how deep the tentacles had grown within the military and the national security state in order to buoy and consolidate it. Much of that frankly did not even come to public light until even last year. Frankly, some of that was galvanized by Elon Musk’s acquisition and the Twitter files and the Republican turnover in the house that allowed these multiple investigations, the lawsuits like Missouri v Biden and the discovery process there and multiple other things like the Disinformation governance board, who, by the way, the interim head of that, the head of that Nina Janowitz got her start in the censorship industry from this exact same clandestine intelligence community censorship network created after the 2014 Crimea situation.

Nina Janowitz, when her name came up in 2022 as part of the disinformation governance board, I almost fell out of my chair because I had been tracking Nina’s network for almost five years at that point when her name came up as part of the UK inner cluster cell of a busted clandestine operation to censor of the internet called the Integrity Initiative, which was created by the UK Foreign Office and was backed by NATO’s Political Affairs Unit in order to carry out this thing that we talked about at the beginning of this dialogue, the NATO sort of psychological inoculation and the ability to kill, so-called Russian propaganda or rising political groups who wanted to maintain energy relations with Russia at a time when the US was trying to kill the Nord Stream and other pipeline relations. Well,

Well, Nina Janowitz was a part of this outfit, and then who was the head of it after Nina Janowitz went down, it was Michael Chertoff and Michael Chertoff was running the Aspen Institute Cyber Group. And then the Aspen Institute then goes on to be the censorship simulator for the Hunter Biden laptop story. And then two years later, Chertoff is then the head of the disinformation governance board after Nina is forced to step down.

Tucker Carlson:

Tucker Carlson: Of course, Michael Chertoff was the chairman of the largest military contractor in Europe, BAE military. So it’s all connected. You’ve blown my mind so many times in this conversation that I’m going to need a nap directly after it’s done. So I’ve just got two more questions for you, one short one, a little longer short. One is for people who’ve made it this far an hour in and want to know more about this topic. And by the way, I hope you’ll come back whenever you have the time to explore different threads of this story. But for people who want to do research on their own, how can your research on this be found on the internet?

Mike Benz:      

Sure. So our foundation is foundation for freedom online.com. We publish all manner of reports on every aspect of the censorship industry from what we talked about with the role of the military industrial complex and the national security state to what the universities are doing to, I sometimes refer to as digital MK Ultra. There’s just the field of basically the science of censorship and the funding of these psychological manipulation methods in order to nudge people into different belief systems as they did with covid, as they did with energy. And every sensitive policy issue is what they essentially had an ambition for. But so my foundationforfreedomonline.com website is one way. The other way is just on X. My handle is at @MikeBenzCyber. I’m very active there and publish a lot of long form video and written content on all this. I think it’s one of the most important issues in the world today.

Tucker Carlson:

So it certainly is. And so that leads directly and seamlessly to my final question, which is about X. And I’m not just saying this because I post content there, but I think objectively it’s the last big platform that’s free or sort of free or more free. You post there too, but we’re at the very beginning of an election year with a couple of different wars unfolding simultaneously in 2024. So do you expect that that platform can stay free for the duration of this year?

Mike Benz:      

It’s under an extraordinary amount of pressure, and that pressure is going to continue to mount as the election approaches. Elon Musk is a very unique individual, and he has a unique buffer, perhaps when it comes to the national security state because the national security state is actually quite reliant on Elon Musk properties, whether that’s for the electrical, the Green Revolution when it comes to Tesla and the battery technology there. When it comes to SpaceX, the State Department is hugely dependent on SpaceX because of its unbelievable sort of pioneering and saturating presence in the field of low earth orbit satellites that are basically how our telecom system runs to things like starlink. There are dependencies that the National Security state has on Elon Musk. I’m not sure he’d have as much room to negotiate if he had become the world’s richest man selling at a lemonade stand, and if the national security state goes too hard on him by invoking something like CFIUS to sort of nationalize some of these properties.

I think the shock wave that it would send to the international investor community would be irrecoverable at a time when we’re engaged in great power competition. So they’re trying to sort of induce, I think a sort of corporate regime change through a series of things involving a sort of death by a thousand paper cuts. I think there’s seven or eight different Justice Department or SEC or FTC investigations into Elon Musk properties that all started after his acquisition of X. But then what they’re trying to do right now is what I call the Transatlantic Flank Attack 2.0. We talked in this dialogue about how the censorship industry really got its start when a bunch of State Department exiles who were expecting promotions took their special set of skills in coercing European countries to pass sanctions on themselves, to cut off their own leg off to spite themselves in order to pass sanctions on Russia.   

They ran back that same playbook with doing a roadshow for censorship instead for sanctions. We are now witnessing Transatlantic Flank attack 2.0, if you will, which is because they have lost a lot of their federal government powers to do this same censorship operation they had been doing from 2018 to 2022. In part because the house has totally turned on them, in part because of the media, in part because Missouri v Biden, which won a slam dunk case, actually banning government censorship at the trial court and appellate court levels. It is now before the Supreme Court, they’ve now moved into two strategies.

One of them is state level censorship laws. California just passed a new law, which the censorship industry totally drove from start to finish around, they call it platform accountability and transparency, which is basically forcing Elon Musk to give over the kind of narrative mapping data that these CIA conduits and Pentagon cutouts were using to create these weapons of mass deletion, these abilities to just censor everything at scale because they had all the internal platform data. Elon Musk took that away.

They’re using state laws like this new California law to crack that open. But the major threat right now is the threat from Europe with something called the EU Digital Services Act, which was cooked up in tandem with folks like NewsGuard, which has a board of Michael Hayden, head of the CIA NSA and a Fourstar General. Rick Stengel is on that board from the state department’s propaganda office. Tom Ridge is on that board from the Department of Homeland Security. Oh, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen – he was the general secretary of NATO under the Obama administration. So you have NATO, the CIA, the NSA four star General DHS, and the State Department working with the EU to craft the censorship laws that now are the largest existential threat to X other than potentially advertiser boycotts. Because there is now disinformation is now banned as a matter of law in the EU.  

The EU is a bigger market for X than the us. There’s only 300 million in the USA. But there is 450 million people in Europe. X is now forced to comply with this brand new law that just got ratified this year where they either need to forfeit 6% of their global annual revenue to the EU to maintain operations there, or put in place essentially the kind of CIA bumper cars, if you will, that I’ve been describing over the course of this in order to have a internal mechanism to sensor anything that the eu, which is just a proxy for NATO deems to be disinformation. And you can bet with 65 elections around the globe this year, you can predict every single time what they’re going to define disinformation as. So that’s the main fight right now is dealing with the transatlantic flank attack from Europe.

Tucker Carlson:

This is just one of the most remarkable stories I’ve ever heard, and I’m grateful to you for bringing it to us. Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, and I hope we see you again in

Mike Benz:      

Thanks, Tucker.

Tucker Carlson:

Free speech is bigger than any one person or any one organization. Societies are defined by what they will not permit. What we’re watching is the total inversion of virtue.

*  *  *

Republished from the author’s Substack

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/08/2024 - 23:00

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Angry Shouting Aside, Here’s What Biden Is Running On

Angry Shouting Aside, Here’s What Biden Is Running On

Last night, Joe Biden gave an extremely dark, threatening, angry State of the Union…

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Angry Shouting Aside, Here's What Biden Is Running On

Last night, Joe Biden gave an extremely dark, threatening, angry State of the Union address - in which he insisted that the American economy is doing better than ever, blamed inflation on 'corporate greed,' and warned that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to the republic.

But in between the angry rhetoric, he also laid out his 2024 election platform - for which additional details will be released on March 11, when the White House sends its proposed budget to Congress.

To that end, Goldman Sachs' Alec Phillips and Tim Krupa have summarized the key points:

Taxes

While railing against billionaires (nothing new there), Biden repeated the claim that anyone making under $400,000 per year won't see an increase in their taxes.  He also proposed a 21% corporate minimum tax, up from 15% on book income outlined in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), as well as raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% (which would promptly be passed along to consumers in the form of more inflation). Goldman notes that "Congress is unlikely to consider any of these proposals this year, they would only come into play in a second Biden term, if Democrats also won House and Senate majorities."

Biden also called on Congress to restore the pandemic-era child tax credit.

Immigration

Instead of simply passing a slew of border security Executive Orders like the Trump ones he shredded on day one, Biden repeated the lie that Congress 'needs to act' before he can (translation: send money to Ukraine or the US border will continue to be a sieve).

As immigration comes into even greater focus heading into the election, we continue to expect the Administration to tighten policy (e.g., immigration has surged 20pp the last 7 months to first place with 28% in Gallup’s “most important problem” survey). As such, we estimate the foreign-born contribution to monthly labor force growth will moderate from 110k/month in 2023 to around 70-90k/month in 2024. -GS

Ukraine

Biden, with House Speaker Mike Johnson doing his best impression of a bobble-head, urged Congress to pass additional assistance for Ukraine based entirely on the premise that Russia 'won't stop' there (and would what, trigger article 5 and WW3 no matter what?), despite the fact that Putin explicitly told Tucker Carlson he has no further ambitions, and in fact seeks a settlement.

As Goldman estimates, "While there is still a clear chance that such a deal could come together, for now there is no clear path forward for Ukraine aid in Congress."

China

Biden, forgetting about all the aggressive tariffs, suggested that Trump had been soft on China, and that he will stand up "against China's unfair economic practices" and "for peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait."

Healthcare

Lastly, Biden proposed to expand drug price negotiations to 50 additional drugs each year (an increase from 20 outlined in the IRA), which Goldman said would likely require bipartisan support "even if Democrats controlled Congress and the White House," as such policies would likely be ineligible for the budget "reconciliation" process which has been used in previous years to pass the IRA and other major fiscal party when Congressional margins are just too thin.

So there you have it. With no actual accomplishments to speak of, Biden can only attack Trump, lie, and make empty promises.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/08/2024 - 18:00

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