Mike Benz on the Domestic Censorship State
to save democracy from populist nationalism
Tucker Carlson’s Putin interview on 2/8 was one for the ages, and you know it was important because all the right people say it was a clown show.
Now Tucker has interviewed Mike Benz on the current censorship regime, and the Benz interview makes the Putin interview seem like a walk in the park. You can get a text version here.
I think we all understood from the Twitter Files that the Intelligence Community was all over social media during the late COVID Unpleasantness, but Mike Benz is telling us that it is much worse than we thought.
Mike Benz is a former State Department official with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters.
That is to say, Benz was in the spy business.
But now he has created Foundation for Freedom Online and is campaigning against the domestic censorship regime of the national security state.
Here is his Narrative, taken from the transcript of the Tucker interview.
It all begins with the privatization of the Internet in 1991.
[W]e 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.
Hey, why not use that to back dissident groups abroad?
The national security state [Pentagon, State Department, CIA, government-funded NGOs] saw the internet as a way to support dissident groups around the world in order to help them overthrow authoritarian governments.
Hey here’s a nugget:
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, quote, birds of a feather flock together online through search engine aggregation.
Oh, and Google Maps got started with CIA software.
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.
Then came a shocker. In 2014 the people of the Crimea voted in an election to rejoin the Russian federation: the bad guys won. That was the end of free speech on the internet, as far as our national security state was concerned.
And NATO at that point declared something that they first called the Durasimov doctrine, which is named after this Russian military general who they claimed made a speech that the fundamental nature of war has changed. 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.
By 2016 the idea was to have “the military work with the social media companies, to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.”
After the British Brexit election the alarm bells started ringing.
Now the entire rules based international order would collapse unless the military took control over media, because Brexit would give rise to Brexit in France with Marine Le Pen, to spexit in Spain with the Vox party, to Italy. Exit in Italy to Gregson in Germany to Grexit in Greece.
Actually the fixing of elections went back to Italy in 1948 where the CIA stuffed the ballot boxes to make sure the Communists didn’t win.
Now, as we all know, the CIA & Co. aren’t allowed to spy on Americans. But what if Trump were a Russian asset? Then spying on Trump was a foreign policy issue until the Mueller investigation failed to find collusion between Trump and Russia. So now we have to have a legal domestic spying and election fixing mandate. Democracy!
[So] 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.
See, nothing new here. In the good old days, the mainstream media was in bed with the government.
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. 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… And so you always had this backdoor relationship between the Washington Post, the New York Times and all of the major broadcast media corporations.
Problem was, the mainstream media was dying and the national security state had no way of controlling the burgeoning social media universe. Until it did. Used to be that the national security state could kill wrongthink “through legacy media relationships and contacts.” So the national security state had to adapt so it could control the new social media.
[And so by 2020 the national security state created] 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.
And you may say, if you like, that the late COVID Unpleasantness was the test drive of this new censorship regime. The point is that our national security state learned how to fix elections in its overseas American empire, and now it wants to use the same tools back here at home. To save Democracy.
As you know, the big threat to Democracy is the rising threat of populist nationalism all over the western world. There’s an article in the London Economist just this week about “The Growing Peril of National Conservatism.”
IN THE 1980s Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher built a new conservatism around markets and freedom. Today Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and a motley crew of Western politicians have demolished that orthodoxy, constructing in its place a statist, “anti-woke” conservatism that puts national sovereignty before the individual.
Well, we’ve to to put a stop to that. Right, senator?