(LONG READ) A PRIMER ON THE GLOBAL MASS CENSORING INDUSTRY

Mike Benz, is the Executive Director of the free speech watchdog, Foundation for Freedom Online (website). He has made it his business to dive deep into the US Security State's machinations that threaten our God given Rights in cyber space. Benz is a walking encyclopedia on the subject. Benz explains in a shocking interview with Tucker Carlson, that the freedom of speech as laid down in Article 1 of the US Constitution, has been the subject of state craft to help dissident groups around the world subverting authoritarian state control over media, from day one of privatization of the Internet in 1991. This  turbo charged the work of the CIA, the State Department, embassies abroad and the National Endowment for Democracy. 

Feb. 16, 2024 TCN: Episode 75: Everything You Need to Know about the Government’s Mass Censorship Campaign. TweeX. 

Enter the instant Color Revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine  and the Arab Springs in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria in the Obama/Clinton era in 2011/2.

We in the West have innate rights, we live in "rights states", in democracies with Constitutions in which those rights are set in stone. Or so we are led to believe. We rely totally on those laws, but in this piece we shall see how easily laws can be subverted by a powerful administrative, national security state, hereafter called 'the blob', or the (national) security state. 

[Paraphrasing Benz from hereon] The reversal started in 2014 during the second Color Revolution in Ukraine when efforts were hampered by a Russian counter coup in the Donbass and Crimea on which the coup leaders had not counted.

Russia's President Putin pulled a fast one on them, repeating what Clinton had done years earlier by separating Kosovo from Serbia through a referendum. That's all it took to reverse free speech to the censoring imperative. We shall see later on how these referenda and elections have become vehicles for irredentist actions.

NATO changed its war doctrine accordingly. Benz explains: there is no need for classical, kinetic warfare when all you got to do is control the media and the social media eco system, because that is what controls elections. That gets the blob's Government of choice into power.

[Benz does not draw that conclusion, but we do because it is our business. Note that this whole process is based, not on reality, but on the manipulation of the perception of reality. It does not appeal to reason and free will; it labors from the idea that people are cattle that must be nudged into behaving what they deem to be politically correct.] Red.

Initially the censoring industry that had been created, spanned the US and British Ministries of Defense and the European Union cooperating from bases in Germany and Eastern Europe, enabling the military to work with social media companies to censor 'Russian propaganda' and domestic Rightwing Populist groups.

It consisted of the systematic targeting by the US security state of Germany's AfD National Populist party and, we have to suppose, in other countries as well, like LePen's party in France, Vlaams Belang in Belgium and Wilders' PVV party in The Netherlands. Benz mentions the Baltic states particularly. 

The crisis came in 2016, the year when the front moved westward with Brexit and the election of President Trump. In June NATO included hybrid warfare in its Charter to fight against what they deemed 'Russian proxies'. Note what they essentially did was declaring war on European voters.

NATO started publishing white papers stating that the biggest threat we are facing is not a military invasion by Russia (the domino doctrine 2.0 has only been revived again just recently). The greatest danger is losing elections across Europe from blue collar populists campaigning for cheap Russian energy. 

The premise was that after Brexit the entire post World War II, liberal rules based order and its institutions, including NATO, the IMF and the European Union, would collapse if they did not take over control of the media. 

Apparently it had not occurred to anyone in the blob that they had just declared war on their own people. Benz explains there is a rich history of this dating back to the Cold War which was similar, but directed against the political Left. 

Back to Benz. The paradigm of warfare had changed in 1948 with the UN Declaration of Human Rights which prohibited conquering territory by military force. Any intervention had to be done through some political legitimization process that carried weight with a majority of the people on the territory. It's now referred to as 'the battle for hearts and minds'. 

When the CIA had rigged the elections in Italy, they justified it based on the fear that if communists had won the elections, that would be the last election ever held in the country. The plot had worked and that convinced them that some 'department of dirty tricks' was required in order to continue the work. 

Essentially a new social contract with the public was required. They created a firewall between foreign and domestically orientated operations. The department of dirty tricks was charged with rigging elections and controlling the media abroad, so as to be able to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries. But they are not allowed to operate domestically within the US against Americans.

The new social contract was silently accepted by the public. But after the Brexit scare  and the election of Trump as President a new situation existed that required the breach of this foreign-domestic firewall. What little resistance there was, was washed over with the construction of Russia Gate hoax against President Trump.

Instead of a tool for the spread of democracy around the world, the free speech issue had become a national security threat. When it became apparent that the Russia Gate narrative against Trump was a hoax, the entire foreign censorship architecture turned on its heels to the domestic orientation when the predicate changed from foreign to domestic.

And so they were able to justify the switch from 'disinformation as a security threat' to, 'it's a threat to democracy itself', resulting in the re-orientation of the foreign regime change toolkit, to one directed at Trump during the 2020 elections. 

Until 2016 online media were never able to eclipse the legacy media. But when that happened, it caused a crisis in the ranks of the military, the State Department and Intelligence Services because this meant they could no longer control the narrative.

Benz mentions as an example the 2019 meeting of the Marshall Fund when a four star general posed the question what would happen to the Security State if the New York Times would be reduced to a medium sized Facebook page.

It was meant as a thought experiment to bring home that from the outset a hundred years or so ago, the legacy media were never wholly independent from the security state. ABC, NBC and CBS were all created by security state veterans. There was always a backdoor relationship. Murdoch is part if this as well as a member of the National Endowment for Democracy coalition.

[Udo Ulfkotte (20 January 1960 – 13 January 2017) was a German journalist who maintained that leading newspapers published material that had been fed to them by the CIA and other Western intelligence. Ulfkotte was called a conspiracy theorist and his claims were unceremoniously dismissed. Ulfkotte died from a heart attack on 13 January 2017 at the age of 56 (Wiki).] Red.

This long standing control of the media came to a screeching halt with the maturing of the social media. Clearly something had to be done or the new world order might collapse. A similar control system was necessary for the new media.

After the Russia Gate hoax died, a multi million dollar censorship industry was created, spanning the military-industrial complex, the Government, the private sector, civil society organizations and the vast cob web of media allies and professional fact checker groups that serve as the sentinel class for surveying every word on the Internet.

Asked by a clearly shocked Tucker Carlson for an example how this complex interferes with online messaging, Benz mentions a State Dept. outfit called the Global Engagement Center created by Obama's  Propaganda Chief, Rick Stengel. He is now the Undersecretary for Public Affairs, liaising between the State Dept. and the mainstream media. 

Initially in the Obama era, the Global Engagement Center was oriented abroad, predicated on the homegrown threat of ISIS. That morally justified the State Dept. to pry into social media outlets for ISIS recruitment in the US at a time when the US was at war with ISIS.

A new technology was created called Natural Language Processing. It is an artificial machine learning ability to create meaning out of words, in order to map what people are saying on the Internet. [Everyone who has spent any time trying to get a message across on social media, knows exactly what Benz is getting at here.] Red.

And so they knew exactly who to target, how groups were organized, who the major influencers were and what narratives were emerging. They plotted frequent words, slogans and catch phrases, distilling meaning out of the narrative.

When President Trump was elected in 2016 this cohort in the State Dept. was expecting to be promoted when Hillary Clinton was elected president. But instead they were put out of a job by a guy they detested. So they took their special skills set and put them to work by coercing the EU to pass laws to censor Right-wing National Populist groups in Europe and their affiliates in the US. 

Feb. 19, 2024 War Room: Mike Benz: How Globalism And The Administrative State Broke Down America's Middle Class.

Former  employees of the State Dept. went straight to the Atlantic Council, a major facilitator between the Government and censorship. The Atlantic Council as NATO's political thinktank, was one of Biden's biggest political backers. When NATO has civil society actions that they want to be coordinated to synchronize with military action, the Atlantic Council is deployed to build consensus and make that political action happen.

On the board of the Atlantic Council sit seven former CIA directors! It gets its funding from the State Dept., the Dept. of Defense and CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy. On Jan. 17 they moved immediately to pressure European countries to pass censorship laws to create 'a transatlantic flank attack' on free speech, as Rick Stengel had called for. 

For example they pressed Germany to pass a law that kicked off the era of automatic censorship in the US. It required that social media pay a 54 million dollar fine for each instance a post considered hate speech is left on their platform for more than 48 hours. 

The only way to escape bankruptcy was for them to install AI based censorship technology on their platforms created by DARPA to take on ISIS. Benz calls these weapons of mass deletion. It censors millions of social media posts with a few lines of code.

Two fields of science were aggregated together: political and social science to determine what should be censored; and computer programming. computational data science and linguistics to do the censoring. There are over 60 universities now that get federal Government grants to do censorship preparation work. 

They create code books of language that people use the same way they did for ISIS. They created Covid lexicons about what dissidents were saying about mandates, masks and vaccines and things about high profile, protected persons like Anthony Fauci. 

The Virality Project of the Atlantic Council identified 66 different narratives about Covid alone. In this way they could keep a heat map about everything people were saying at any time. And whenever a narrative they did not like had started to trend, they were able to take down tens of millions of posts that were disseminating that narrative.

The Pentagon did the same thing in the 2020 Presidential election about mail-in ballots. The two most censored events in human history in Benz' estimation, are the 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The 2020 election was determined by mail-in ballots. The Global Engagement Center (State Dept.), a group called the Virality Project in the Atlantic Council and the foreign policy establishment began to argue for a permanent Governmental, domestic censorship office to counter disinformation by coercing tech companies. Every aspect of society needed to be mobilized. This effort needed to be coordinated. 

The Atlantic Council proposed in a blueprint called Forward Defense to have this integrated effort run by the State Dept.'s Global Engagement Center, because Rick Stengel had many assets they could use. That didn't work because that had no national security predicate. Then they thought of the CIA. That didn't work because of its foreign orientation.

Also they needed tens of thousands of people to work this operation. You can't run a clandestine operation that way. What about the FBI? But the FBI is like the intelligence arm of the Justice Dept. which is about criminality and that is not what the operation was about. The only real alternative was the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS). 

They took the CIA's power and combined that with the power of the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI and put that in DHS. So DHS now had the combined power of the CIA abroad with the FBI at home. They called it CISA, the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency [sic].

CISA was created by an Act of Congress in 2018 on the basis that Russia was supposed to have hacked the 2016 elections. A CIA memo on Jan. 6, 2017 and a DHS Executive Order of even date argued that Russia had interfered in the 2016 elections and that elections are now considered critical infrastructure. 

Mal, mis and dis information online was now viewed as a type of cyber security attack. And the aim was protecting democracy itself, therefore the Russian predicate was not any longer required.

And so this agency was now able to make the argument that your tweets about mail-in ballots undermine public faith and confidence in a legitimate form of voting, therefore you are now conducting a cyber attack on critical infrastructure by articulating misinformation on Twitter. 

So, if you tweeted that mail-in voting was not a legitimate way of voting, you were literally conducting a cyber security attack because it undermines public faith and confidence in democratic institutions, which includes the media. 

In April of 2020 this Never-Trump Republican DHS was working with NATO on the national security side and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to use DHS as the launching point for a Government coordinated mass censorship campaign, that spanned every social media platform on earth.

The aim was to pre-censor the ability to dispute the legitimacy of mail-in ballots by aggregating four different institutions: Pentagon cut-outs within the University of Washington, a company called Grafica, the Atlantic Council and the Stanford University Observatory run by the former Ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, who authored a seven step playbook to successfully orchestrate a Color Revolution. This involves taking control of the media and social media, juicing up civil society outfits based on calling elections illegitimate.

Stanford itself was run by Alex Demos who was formerly a Facebook executive who  coordinated with ODNI (Office of Strategic Communications in the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence) taking down 'Russia propaganda' at Facebook. 

Renée DiResta worked under Alex Demos. She started her career in the CIA, and wrote an intelligence report on Russian disinformation. 

The University of Washington is headed by Kate Starbird, third generation military brass who got her PhD in Crisis Informatics essentially doing social media surveillance for the Pentagon on DARPA funding and working with the national security state, repurposed to take on the censoring posts on mail-in ballots. 

Grafica got seven million dollars in Pentagon grants as part of Minerva Initiative. That is the psychological warfare research center of the Pentagon. This group was doing social media spying and narrative mapping until the 2016 election and then was repurposed with DHS to censor 22 million pro Trump tweets about mail-in ballots.

The fourth institution, the Atlantic Council had seven former CIA directors on the board.

Ben Rhodes in the Obama era described it as 'the blob'. They felt threatened by Trump's foreign policies. While much of the censorship is going on domestically, it is actually an outward facing department-of-dirty-tricks, color-revolution blob who descended on the 2020 domestic election.

They explicitly said on tape that "we are set up to do what the Government is banned from doing itself" and then they articulated a multi step framework to coerce all the tech companies to take censorship actions that these companies would not have done but for the pressure that involved threats of Government force.

They were the deputized arm of the Government, that was in a formal partnership with DHS and they used DHS as a proprietary disinformation switchboard to immediately talk to top brass for takedowns.

They bragged on tape how they got all the tech companies to systematically adopt a new Terms of Service speech violation ban to legitimize any social media posting that undermined public faith and confidence in the use of mail-in ballots, or early voting drop boxes. Which was a prima facie terms of service violation under this new delegitimization policy that they only adopted because of pressure from the election integrity partnership.

They bragged about it on tape, simultaneously invoking threats of Government breaking them up, or to stop favors to tech companies unless they complied. They were also doing crisis PR by working with their media allies that the Govt could not do themselves.

That set up this constellation of State Dept., Pentagon and Intelligence networks to run the pre-censorship campaign which by their own math removed 22 million posts on Twitter alone. That's hundreds of millions of posts all scanned, banned or throttled.

They did this seven months before the 2020 elections because they were worried about the perceived legitimacy of a Biden victory in case of the so-called red mirage/blue shift event. They knew that the only way when Biden could 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 had won by seven states and then three days later it comes out that the election switched. That would put the election crisis of Bush-Gore on a level of steroids. The public would not be prepared for that. So what they needed to do, was to pre-censor  in advance the ability to even question the legitimacy. 

[Since a lot of state laws were changed well in advance, sometimes illegitimately, the Democrats must have been in on the plot.] Red. 

It looks very bad, especially right on the heels of the CIA and Pentagon led impeachment against Trump. It was Eric Caramella of the CIA and the Vindmans of the Pentagon who led the impeachment of Trump in late 2019 over an alleged phone call about withholding Ukraine aid. 

That same network came straight out of the Pentagon hybrid warfare military censorship, created after the first Ukraine crisis in 2014. The lead architects of the impeachment of 2019 essentially came back on steroids as part of the 2020 censorship operation. From their perspective it certainly looks like the perfect crime. 

These were the people DHS had actually federalized at the time of the election administration through this Jan. 6, 2017 Executive Order from outgoing Obama HDS head Jeh Johnson, which essentially wrapped up all fifty states into a form of DHS partnership. DHS was simultaneously in charge of the administration of the election in many respects and the censorship of anyone who challenged the administration.

Asked what is democratic about all this, Benz replies that "what I'm describing here essentially is military rule. It is a total inversion of the idea of democracy." What they said was, we need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters, to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions.

Who are that? Well, it's us, the military, NATO, it's the IMF and the World Bank, it's the mainstream media, it's the NGOs, all of the elite establishment under threat from the rise of domestic populism that declared their own consensus the new definition of democracy.

Because if you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than the will of the voters, what you are left with is essentially, democracy as just the consensus building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves. 

That takes a lot of work! For example the Atlantic Council is one of those coordinating mechanisms for oil and gas in the region, for the finance of the JP Morgans and the Blackrocks in the region, the NGOs in the region, for the media in the region, all these need to reach a consensus and that process takes a lot of time and effort. From their perspective that is what democracy is! 

Now if a bunch of populists suddenly decide they like a truck driver who is popular on TikTok more than the carefully constructed consensus of the military brass, that from their perspective, is an attack on democracy. 

And democracy has that magic regime change predicate where democracy is our magic wand that enables us to overthrow Governments from the ground up in color-revolution-style, whole-of society-effort, to topple a democratically elected Government from the inside, as for example we did in Ukraine. 

We color-revolutioned, January-6-ed Yanukovych out of office by  funding a Color Revolution with 5 million dollars in the name of democracy. Afterwards they took that special set of skills home and now it's here potentially to stay. It has fundamentally changed the nature of American governance.

Tucker asks Benz a personal question. In 2021 the NSA broke into his private text apps and leaked them to the New York Times. That happened again last week. How common is that for the intel agencies to work with the mainstream media to hurt their opponents? 

Well, that is the function of these Government funded non Governmental organizations, like the Atlantic Council which is NATO's thinktank and the Aspen Institute, which draws most of its funding from the State Dept. and was doing the same thing with censoring the Hunter Biden laptop.

You have this strange situation where the FBI had advance knowledge of the publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story and then magically the Aspen Institute, run by former CIA, NSA, FBI agents and a bunch of civil society organizations, held a stakeholder simulation, a three day conference. This came out in the Twitter File leaks and in multiple Congressional investigations.

Somehow Aspen, which is basically an addendum of the national security state, got the exact same information, that the security state spied off on journalists and political figures so as to obtain information and then leaked it. 

They did a joint coordinated censorship simulation in September, two months before the election, in order to be in a position to pre-censor anyone online who amplified a news story that had not even broken yet. 

The Aspen Institute was run by Walter Isaacson. He left to write the biography of Elon Musk. Isaacson did a series of interviews with Rick Stengel between 2017 and 2019, and with the Atlantic Council on the need to get rid of the First Amendment (free speech), and the threat that free speech in social media poses to democracy.

Feb. 20, 2024 Redacted: Tucker Carlson just EXPOSED something incredibly terrifying inside the U.S.

Isaacson pictured a highly sympathetic view on killing the First Amendment. At the time virtually nobody 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.

Much of that did not even come light until even last year. Some of that was galvanized by Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the Twitter Files and the Republican take over of the House that allowed its investigations, the law suits by Missouri's AG and its discovery processes, and more.

Like the outrage over the Disinformation Governance Board (DHS) that is headed by Nina Jankowicz, who got her star in the censorship industry from this exact same, clandestine intelligence community censorship network, created after the 2014 Crimea situation.

When her name came up as part of the Disinformation Governance Board (DHS) I almost fell out of my chair, because I had been tracking her network for nearly five years by that time, as part of the UK inter cluster cell of a busted censorship operation created by the UK Foreign Office, backed by NATO's political affairs unit, to censor the Internet, called The Integrity Initiative.

Its aim was to carry out NATO's psychological inoculation and the ability to kill Russian propaganda or rising political groups, that wanted to maintain energy relations with Russia at a time when the US was trying to kill the Nord Stream Gas Pipeline.

And when Nina Jankowicz went down, they hired Michael Chertoff, who was running the Aspen Institute cyber group. Prior to that he was the chairman of BAE Systems, a large military contractor in Europe. 

Carlson closes the interview with a question about X, the last free platform. We are at the beginning of an election year with a couple of different wars unfolding simultaneously. Do you expect X to stay free this year?

X is under an extraordinary amount of pressure and it's going to mount as the election is approaching. Elon Musk is a very unique individual and he has a unique buffer perhaps when it comes to the national security state. Because they are really quite reliant on Musk's properties, whether it's Tesla and the green transition and the battery technology there, or when it comes to SpaceX.

The State Dept. is hugely dependent on Starlink and SpaceX, because of its unbelievable pioneering presence in the field of low earth orbit satellites. That is basically how our telecom system runs. There are dependencies the national security state has, but I'm not sure if there is much room to negotiate.

If they go too hard on him, like nationalizing some of his properties, the shockwave that would send  to the international investor community would be irrecoverable at a time when we are facing great power competition...so they're trying to induce a sort of corporate regime change through a series of things involving death by a thousand paper cuts.

I think there are seven or eight Justice Dept. or FCC 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 earlier about how the censorship industry got its start when a bunch of State Dept. exiles who were expecting promotions, took their special set of skills to use in coercing European countries to pass sanctions on themselves in order to pass sanctions on Russia.

They ran that same playbook doing a road show for censorship instead of sanctions -- we are now facing transatlantic flank attack 2.0. They have lost a lot of their federal Government powers to do the same censorship operation, partly because of the media, and partly because the House turned on them. And then there is the Missouri v. Biden slam dunk case, banning Government censorship that is now before the Supreme Court.

Therefore they have now moved into two strategies. One of them is state level censorship laws. California just passed a law that the censorship industry drove from start to finish, called Platform Accountability and Transparency which is basically forcing Elon Musk to give over the kind of narrative mapping data that CIA conduits and cutouts were using to create these weapons of mass deletion, to censor everything at scale because they had the internal platform data. Elon Musk took that away, but they are using state law now to reinstate it.

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 News Guard, which has on its board people like Michael Hayden, four star general and former head of the CIA and the NSA, Rick Stengel, someone from the State Dept. propaganda office, Tom Rich from DHS and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Secretary General of NATO.

They're all working with the EU in order to craft the censorship laws that are now an existential threat to X, because 'disinformation' is now banned as a matter of law in the EU. And the EU is a bigger market for X and the US.

X is now forced to comply with this law, where they either have to forfeit six percent of their global annual revenue to EU to maintain operations there, or put essentially in place a CIA internal mechanism to censor anything that the EU, which is just a proxy for NATO, deems to be disinformation.

And with 66 elections around the globe this year you can predict every time what they will deem disinformation. The main thing now is dealing with this transatlantic flank attack 2.0 from Europe. 

More on the Foundation for Freedom Online website or on Benz' personal account onX, @MikeBenzCyber

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