On Friday, Tucker Carlson invited Mike Benz, the Director of The Foundation for Freedom Online, to discuss how the Western defense and foreign policy establishment created, used, and then turned against the concept of free speech on the internet. Mike Benz told Tucker about the point in time when the Western powers decided that concept of free speech on the internet was a danger to the future of the world order. Mike Benz: In 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected counter coup where Crimea and the Donbass 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 Durasimov doctrine, which was 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. 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 organised political influence operation over social media and legacy media. An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defence, and Brussels into an organised political warfare outfit. Essentially, infrastructure 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 or to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis. Brexit changed things. It “forced” NATO to push forward with their online censorship plans. Mike Benz: 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. 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 populist 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. NATO defined a new enemy – democracy within their own borders! The censorship industry ramped up after Donald Trump shocked the establishment and became president. Mike Benz: 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 washed over by the rise and 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 3 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… … 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 organisations, 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. The US Pentagon censored Americans during the 2020 election cycle. Tucker Carlson: So you’re saying the Pentagon, our Pentagon, the US Department of Defence, censored Americans during the 2020 election cycle? Mike Benz: Yes. They did this through 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, than 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 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 Atlantic 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. The counter Mis-dis-info. But their whole of society model explicitly proposed that we need every single asset within society to be mobilised in a whole of society effort to stop misinformation online. The formation of CISA to lead the censorship complex against American citizens. Mike Benz: 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 a 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 an obscure little cybersecurity agency get this power? Was they did a funny little series of switcheroo’s. 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, who, its 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. But it was created by active Congress in 2018 because of the perceived threat that Russia had hacked the 2016 election, had physically hacked it. 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 6, 2017, and a same day, DHS executive order on January 6, 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 misdis and mal information 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, you were now conducting a attack on us critical infrastructure by articulating misinformation on Twitter. The players behind the censorship industrial complex. Mike Benz: 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 Internet 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 colour revolution, that is. 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 delegitimizers in 2016. And then. I’ll get that in a sec. So, Stanford University, nominally the Stanford Air Observatory under Michael McMcFaul, was run by Alex Damos, who was formerly a Facebook executive who coordinated with Odni 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 Stanford Observatory was Renee DiResta, who started her career in the CIA and wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian disinformation… …The next institution was the University of Washington, which is essentially the Bill Gates University in Seattle, who is headed by Kate Starbert, who is basically three generations of military brass, who got her 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… It’s the defence Department, the State Department or the CIA every single time. This was an incredible in depth lecture on the Censorship Industrial Complex in America today. The Gateway Pundit is very familiar with this powerful machine that has been targeting this website for several years now – since President Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Currently, The Gateway Pundit is involved in at least two lawsuits against the Biden regime and the top players described above. Mr. Benz mentioned the “Missouri case” a few times in this interview. The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will hear arguments on March 18 in Murthy v. Missouri, a major case involving free speech, government agencies, and social media that could have monumental implications for content moderation. The case deals with whether or not federal agencies indirectly encouraged social media platforms such as Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, to take down posts on the basis that they contained false information about COVID-19. The case could set a significant precedent around social media and how much communication is allowed between federal agencies and tech companies before the speech becomes coercive. This was so informative. Enjoy! Ep. 75 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.” pic.twitter.com/hDTEjAf89T — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 16, 2024
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