How Western Censorship and Our New System of Government Came About. By Mike Benz, who had the cyber portfolio at the State Department. He’s now executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. Mike Benz is active on Twitter (X).
An insider spills the beans. This is a very important interview by Tucker Carlson, and one of the most important posts ever on the WR. This is an awful lot here. It fills quite a few holes in the last decade.
We’ve noted the highlights below, but the entire 29 page transcript (download here) is well worth reading.
It began as a free-speech operation to undermine regimes that the US wanted to overthrow:
The internet free speech allowed kind of ‘instant regime change operations’, to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishment’s State Department agenda. …
All of the internet free speech technology was initially created by our national security state: VPNs (virtual private networks to hide your IP address), TOR, The Dark Web (to be able to buy and sell goods anonymously), end-to-end encrypted chats. All 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.
In 2014, with Crimea, NATO realized meme warfare was much cheaper and could be more effective than tanks and planes. This was about power, raw power:
In 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected counter-coup where Crimea and the Donbas broke away … 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. …
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 media. …
In 2016, NATO interpreted Brexit as a Russian threat to their power:
Brexit was June 2016. The very next month, at the Warsaw Conference, NATO formally amended its charter to expressly commit to hybrid warfare … So they went from, you know, 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 was these were now Brexit groups, or groups like Matteo Salvini in Italy, or in Greece, or in Germany, or in Spain with the Vox party. … 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, into all these right-wing populist groups …
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 Le Pen, to “Spexit” in Spain with a Vox party, to “Italexit” 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 is 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, (every) all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the World after World War Two would collapse. …
There was no moral quandary in the ruling class, because they initially justified it as a national security issue rather than a free speech issue (and, of course, it threatened their power and money):
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 was it became full throttle when Trump was elected.
And what little resistance there was, 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 three hours and revealed he had absolutely nothing after two and a half years of investigation, that the foreign to domestic switcheroo took place [in the US] …
[They segued seamlessly 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. …
The spooks who specialized in overthrowing foreign governments were called upon to work their magic on the US:
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, you know, “we need to bring democracy to Yugoslavia” and that’s the predicate for getting rid of, you know, Milosevic, 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 suddenly these people all have new jobs moving on the US side …
By 2016 the Internet was surpassing the legacy media, so they were losing their control over what we knew and thought:
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. …
As 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 and intelligence services. …
A four-star genera … 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 {amusement park car ride where in an enclosed spaces people ride small cars, pretending as if they ride the real thing, but in fact are riding cars which are restricted by speed and which are equipped with bumpers which prevents any accidents from occurring} on democracy in the form of a century-old relationship with legacy media institutions.
The national security community have always controlled the media. Press freedom was always a charade:
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 know, all of the initial broadcast news companies: NBC, ABC and CBS, were all created by Office of War Information veterans from the from the War Department’s effort in World War II. You had these operation mockingbird relationships from the 1950s through the 1970s {Operation Mockingbird was the CIA program to manipulate or direct the content of news outlets and journalists to advance its own agenda and shape public opinion}. …
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, you know, Rupert Murdoch and Fox are part of this as well. …
They were losing control of the conversation:
There was no CIA intermediary to random citizen journalists accounts. There was no Pentagon backstop. You couldn’t get a story killed. You couldn’t have this favors-for-favors relationships. You couldn’t promise access to some random person with 700,000 followers who’s got an opinion on Syrian gas {meaning — who was behind the the use of chemical weapon against Syrian civilians during the Syrian civil war}.
And so 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. …
They felt justified in censoring to reassert information control, to continue “protecting” us like they thought they had been for the last 70 years:
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 a 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.
An initial predicate for that was Russiagate. But then, after Russiagate died, they used a simple democracy promotion predicate.
It gave rise to this multi-billion-dollar censorship industry that joins together the military industrial complex, the government, the private sector, civil society organizations, and then this vast cobweb of media allies and professional ‘fact checker’ groups that that serve as this sort of sentinel class that surveys every word on the internet.
Unemployed spooks are dangerous:
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 {she} was also Secretary of State under Obama (actually ran the State Department).
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-1 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 of 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 populist groups in Europe, and as a boomerang impact, to censor populist groups who were affiliated in the U.S.
2020:
The two most censored events in human history, I would argue to date, are the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic …
The blob, the narrative, it’s real:
You had this group within the Atlantic Council in 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” {counter disinformation and/or misinformation}. But their whole society model explicitly proposed that 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.
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 {amplify the narrative you want to push}, to be able to arm in a, you know, an astroturf {a practice that simulates grassroots support or activity but is, in fact, artificially created or orchestrated} army of ‘fact checkers’ and to be able to liaise and connect all these different censorship industry actors into a cohesive, unified whole.
An obscure cyber security body within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) became the lead censor to control society:
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 domestic jurisdiction of the FBI by putting it at DHS.
So, DHS was basically deputized. It was empowered through this obscure little cyber security agency to have the combined powers that the CIA has abroad with the jurisdiction of the FBI at home. …
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 just care about security so much it’s in our name twice” and everybody sort of closed their eyes and pretended, you know, that’s what it was. But it was created by Act of Congress {law} in 2018 because of the perceived threat that Russia had hacked the 2016 election, had physically hacked it and so we needed the cyber security power to be able to deal with that.
And essentially on the heels of a CIA memo on January …
This is why the US Government thinks you are a domestic terrorist:
So they said: mis, dis and mal {misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation} online are a form of cyber security attack, they are a cyber-attack because they are happening online. … Russian disinformation … we’re actually protecting democracy in elections. We don’t need a Russian predicate after Russiagate died.
So just like that, you had the Cyber Security 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 by articulating misinformation on Twitter. …
You could literally be on your toilet seat at 9:30 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 U.S. critical infrastructure …
Censorship blossomed, democracy died:
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 to thing, it was is 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 be able to 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, you know, and then three days later it comes out, actually, the election switched. …
So what we need to do is we need to in advance we need to pre-censor the ability to even question the legitimacy this took out.
Tucker Carlson: Wait, wait, wait. May I ask you to pause right there? 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. …
In 2020, military rule replaced domestic rule:
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. It’s just like, you know, putting essentially the defendant of a trial as the judge and jury of the trial.
Tucker Carlson: 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. You know, democracy draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is rule by consent of the people being rule. That is {this means} 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, … 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 us, you know: it’s
- the military,
- it’s NATO,
- it’s the IMF and the World Bank,
- it’s the mainstream media,
- it is the NGOs (of course these NGOs are largely State Department or IC {intelligence community} 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 that democracy is just the consensus building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves. …
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 JPMorgan’s and the BlackRock’s 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, you know, 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, you know, populist groups decide that they like a truck driver who’s popular on TikTok more than, you know, carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass. Well, then, from their perspective, you know, that is now an attack on democracy. …
Welcome to 21st century government:
Tucker Carlson: So you’ve blown my mind so many times in this conversation that I’m going to need a nap directly after it’s done.
That explains an awful lot.
hat-tip Chris
