Our Government, our Censor: The Silent War on Free Speech.

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

Tucker [00:00:00] 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 to 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 other rights flow is going away at high speed in the face of censorship.

Now, modern censorship bears no resemblance to previous censorship regimes in previous countries in previous eras. Our censorship is affected on the basis of fights against disinformation and malinformation. And the key thing to know about these is they’re everywhere. And of course, they have 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, what an absolute right to say those things. But 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.

And 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 own. 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 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 your audience how exhaustive and comprehensive your knowledge is on this topic. It’s almost 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 strip from us our freedom of speech?

Mike Benz [00:02:59] Sure. You know, one of the easiest ways to actually start the story is really with the story of internet freedom and its switch 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 in our intelligence services, that people were using the internet to congregate on blogs and forums, and free speech was championed more than anybody by the Pentagon, the State Department, and our sort of CIA cut out 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 billed. Essentially the, internet free speech allowed kind of instant regime change operations, to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishment’s 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, quote, 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 track to use free speech on the internet as a way to circumvent state control over media, over in places like Central Asia, or 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 and 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. 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 it was, 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 on, 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 is named after this Russian military, a 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 organized political, influence operation over social media. And legacy media and industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the the British Ministry of Defense in 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 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. So you had the systematic targeting by our State Department, by our ISI, by the Pentagon, of groups like Germany’s AfD, the alternative for Deutschland there, and for groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Now, when Brexit happened in 2016, it was that was 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 that was Brexit was June 2016. The very next month at the Warsaw Conference, NATO formally amended its charter to expressly commit to hybrid warfare as there as this new NATO capacity. 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. 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 in two.

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 U. S. 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 Le Pen to “Spexit” in 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, 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. So you can imagine that we.

Tucker [00:10:56] May I ask.

Mike Benz [00:10:57] Later. Donald Trump won the 2016 election.

Tucker [00:11:00] So you 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 room 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 [00:11:24] Yes. Now, you know, there’s a rich history of this dating back to the Cold War. You know, the Cold War in Europe was essentially a similar, a similar struggle for hearts and minds of people, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. You know, in these sort of, you know, Soviet buffer zones.

And, you know, starting in 1948, the national security state was really established. Then, you know, you had the 1947 act, which established the Central Intelligence Agency. You had, you know, this new world order that had been created with all these international institutions. And you had the 1948 U. N. 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, George Kennan, at, 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 he 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 communists won, maybe there’ll never be another election in Italy again.

So. But it’s really effective, guys, we need a department of dirty tricks to be able to do this around the world. And it’s 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, this diplomatic onslaught for political control, rather than looking like it’s overt military control, but essentially what ends 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 plant of dirt in the country.

But this sort of sacred dirt on which the American homeland sits will, 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, 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 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, 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 transmitted from a foreign folk, 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 [00:15:50] It I mean, it’s almost beyond belief this has happened.

I mean, my own father worked for the U. S. government in this business in the information war against the Soviet Union. And, you know, was a big part of that. And the idea that any of those tools would be turned against American citizens by the U. S. government was, I think I want to think was absolutely unthinkable and say, 1988.

And you’re saying that it’s there really hasn’t been anyone who’s raised objections. And it’s just it’s absolutely turned inward to manipulate and rig our own elections, as we would in say, Latvia.

Mike Benz [00:16:25] 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, you know, we need to bring democracy to Yugoslavia. You. 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 that becomes, you know, then suddenly these people all have new jobs moving on the US side, and they can go through a million examples of that. But one thing on what you just mentioned, which is that, you know 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. You know, 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 so. And in that initial period of social media, nobody was getting subscriber shifts at the level where they actually competed with legacy news media. But over the course of being, you know, so initially, even these dissident voices within the US, even though they, they may have been loud, in moments, they never reached 30 million followers, they never reached, you know, 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 and intelligence services. And I give you a great example of this. In 2019, at a meeting of the German Marshall Fund, which is, you know, an institution that goes back to the US, basically, and I’m don’t want to say bribe, but the essentially the soft power economic soft power projection in Europe as part of the reconstruction of European governments after World War 2, 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 the meeting in 2019. They held a million of these, frankly, but where they, where a four star general, got up on the panel and said that that the what happens, he posed the question, what happens to the 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 of 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 know, 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 from the War Department’s effort in World War II.

You had these operation mockingbird relationships from the 1950s through the 1970s. Those continued it 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, you know, Rupert Murdoch and Fox are part of this as well. You know, Rupert Murdoch was actually part of the National Endowment for democracy coalition in 1983 when it was formed as a way to do CIA operations in an above board 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 journalists, 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 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 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 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, 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.

Tucker [00:22:46] So, can you give us a, and thank you again for this almost unbelievable explanation of why this is happening.

Can you give us an example of how it happens?

How just 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.

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