Mike Benz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, joins Lou Dobbs to discuss censorship and why it's time to ask the question: Who's really running this country? The answer may surprise you.
00:07:48.860Oh, not just in the algorithm at the network level. I mean, what you're talking about is not,
00:07:53.200you know, is not an idea from you or me. It's an idea. It's actually the central thesis
00:08:00.160of the Biden administration's legal defense of their censorship scheme, which is that the First
00:08:05.500Amendment needs to be effectively somewhere between shelled altogether or more broadly interpreted in
00:08:13.040the age of social media because democracy did not anticipate social media. And this is the argument
00:08:20.220that they're making in the Missouri v. Biden case that the traditional interpretation of the First
00:08:24.580Amendment should no longer apply. And a great example of this is actually one of the origin points of
00:08:29.100government censorship. There's a small little nucleus tucked within the State Department called the
00:08:33.400Global Engagement Center, which was initially set up to give the government the capacity to censor
00:08:39.200ISIS. Because in 2014 and 2015, during the Obama administration, as part of the lead up to putting boots on the
00:08:45.300ground in a military sense into Syria, there were all of these, you know, hyperventilated threats, you know,
00:08:52.780surround sound media about ISIS recruiting Americans on Facebook and Twitter, and it was everywhere. And that gave this
00:08:58.620sort of political predicate to set up a group within the State Department that would be able to have a liaison office
00:09:04.660at the highest levels of YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and every major platform and forum on the Internet to be able to
00:09:12.180tell them, hey, these networks need to go down. This speech is not allowed. This person sounds like an ISIS
00:09:17.180or ISIS propaganda. And they mapped the whole language, the exact same thing they would do for critics of mail-in ballots
00:09:24.300or for COVID-19 heterodox opinions, which is this process when you're creating these censorship algorithms
00:09:33.160of mapping the specific linguistics of, you know, the slang terms, the prefixes, the suffixes, the slogans, the hashtags, you know, every, there's a unique dialect that
00:09:45.220every belief system articulates. You know, we, you know, who tend to be more on sort of the right side or conservative side of the aisle
00:09:54.160can very quickly identify this when we hear social justice or cultural Marxist type type talk. We can sort of identify that immediately just with our own sort of human capacities.
00:10:05.160You can only imagine the power of AI to be able to do that. And that is, that is what, you know, was, was basically under construction with the assistance from the Global Engagement Center at the State Department.
00:10:16.160And the guy who founded that, that censorship center within the State Department, Rich Stengel, came from being the managing editor of Time Magazine previously.
00:10:26.160And he was the Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs, which is the, you know, which is the liaison office that coordinates basically the CIA, the State Department, and mainstream media in order to amplify the State Department's foreign policy priorities.
00:10:39.260And he had, he had, you know, he had said that his mission was, firstly, he described himself as Obama's propagandist chief, but he had said that his mission as, as Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs was to, quote, export the First Amendment.
00:10:52.520But then two years later, when, when social media cost them the election, he then wrote a Washington Post op-ed in an entire book calling for an end to the First Amendment,
00:11:04.300because it allows the kind of people to be elected who might undermine democracy.
00:11:08.980So it went from exporting the First Amendment to ending the First Amendment just because they lost an election.
00:11:13.860And recently, listening to Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, being asked about FISA reauthorization and reform, suggesting,
00:11:23.640it's not suggesting, stating clearly that the administration doesn't believe that the First Amendment concerns,
00:11:30.960where it pertains to warrantless wiretaps, would be helpful to the national interests.
00:11:37.320I mean, to hear this nonsense spewing out of this administration, frankly, every American should be chilled with that kind of attitude in the White House.
00:11:46.120And because of you, we know that that attitude permeates our federal government, in point of fact,
00:11:51.640that is under the control of the, of really the, the deep state and the Marxist Dems, as I call them.
00:11:59.160Mike, we're going to take just a quick break here.
00:12:02.340We'll come right back after these quick messages.
00:12:05.260We're talking with Mike Benz and the Foundation for Freedom Online.
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00:14:24.640And I urge everyone to look at that as well and everything that Mike has in terms of media on his site.
00:14:32.660Let's go to the first instance, the pandemic.
00:14:36.480We saw the government really turn against the people.
00:14:39.300And for the first time, we in this country that I can recall, certainly, we had mandates.
00:14:45.100We had rules imposed by public health agencies, by the White House, by the Defense Department.
00:14:53.080Suddenly, everywhere in government, there was a totalitarian streak.
00:14:57.920Government, obviously, is all about power over the people.
00:15:01.500But we've been fortunate enough to live here where we have power over the government.
00:15:05.900I watched huge chunks of freedom being chewed up by these agencies and departments.
00:15:15.020And suddenly, I realized this is not the America that we had just a few months, a few years previous.
00:15:24.980What is the program, if there is one, the specific program, the specific tool that made it possible for government to strip out dissent online?
00:15:49.580And you have this, you know, at the top of my feed right now on my Twitter account, it's at Mike Ben Seiber.
00:15:56.000The top post is a video showing the Soviet military response to the Chernobyl.
00:16:01.880It's from the, it's a scene from the Netflix documentary called Chernobyl.
00:16:05.500And it basically describes how information was contained, you know, as that outbreak happened in order to stop people from perpetuating misinformation within the Soviet empire about that event.
00:16:17.960There was a very similar thing that happened here with respect to the outbreak of COVID, which is to say that you had, you had a kind of martial law from the government being applied.
00:16:27.700And particularly within our national security state, our Pentagon State Department, CIA, and all the adjacent NGOs and cutouts that they work through in order to create the surround sound and the so-called whole of society censorship apparatus that they have.
00:16:44.580Now they call it whole society counter misinformation network, but countering the misinformation does not mean counter speech.
00:16:52.440It means picking down the posts from you have removed, reduced, and form.
00:16:55.360You know, you know, you know, the, you know, the government that we're in trouble with our government when the government starts labeling everything the opposite of what it is.
00:17:04.260It becomes Orwellian to a degree we've never experienced before in this country.
00:17:08.340Well, you're kind of getting at sort of the heart of it, which is, I mean, most people have no idea how much work goes into it from their side in order to come up with those framing devices.
00:17:21.420I mean, for years I was watching these people come up with all the, you know, we can't quite say it like that.
00:17:33.900Well, we need to run this through our whole sort of stakeholder apparatus in order to, you know, to get everyone on board that this is the branding.
00:17:39.820And it's all done to deliberately mislead you so that you have no idea what's happening behind the scenes.
00:17:44.820And this is why I sometimes joke that the reason that the disinformation governance board was shelved within a week.
00:17:50.420But the actual Ministry of Truth within the Department of Homeland Security, which had this innocuous, innocuous, you know, mundane name called the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has the name security in it twice.
00:18:08.400It was our first ever federal government domestic censorship bureau.
00:18:12.300And that was what was responsible for censoring the 2020 election.
00:18:15.440This is how you got hundreds of millions of pro-Trump tweets censored.
00:18:19.480It was through this specific government agency.
00:18:21.860But they didn't call it the Disinformation Governance Board.
00:18:24.620You know, if they called it that, it probably would have been shut down within a week, like the Disinformation Governance Board, when they tried that in April 2022.
00:18:32.340So the systematic wrong naming, you know, I refer to this as censor speak.
00:18:36.980In order to parse the sort of cinematic universe of what you're up against here, you need to speak their language.
00:18:42.520Because everything is coded in order to prevent the sunlight that would instantly be legitimized.
00:18:50.280And so, you know, these are words like media literacy, you know, which is like a whole censorship branding thing to say that if you read news sources that are misinformation sites, then you are illiterate in media and you need to get your mind right or you shouldn't be able to access those sites.
00:19:06.220Most people think media literacy means, you know, helping underprivileged kids in inner cities learn how to become more literate.
00:19:12.360They have no idea it's a censorship branding term or the term intervention.
00:19:15.920You know, intervention, most people think that that means, you know, saving someone from drinking themselves to death.
00:19:21.560But what they mean is running an intervention on you so that you your mind is not clouded up by misinformation that you see on social media.
00:19:29.160And so we will censor the posts that you can see or we will throttle them in the algorithm or we'll fix these fact checking labels with interstitial playthroughs so that you we are intervening to help to see you from your own wrong thoughts and opinions that you might form.
00:19:43.700And I mean, there's a million of these on my website.
00:19:45.520I have a whole sort of lexicon of censor speak.
00:19:48.200But, you know, you need to speak that language and people are only beginning to learn that now.
00:19:52.400And don't hesitate to mention the name of your site, the Foundation for Freedom Online, because it's very important to this audience.
00:20:01.300What you're talking about is, frankly, it's so important to the American people to understand what has happened to this country.
00:20:08.940I want to go to the you mentioned the the the agency, the cyber, cyber security and infrastructure security agency.
00:20:23.440I mean, all they needed was another another security in there.
00:20:27.280We had a real title, but they also lied through their teeth in the 2020 election.
00:20:33.900Famously, Chris Krebs came out and said it was the most secure election in American history.
00:20:38.480He did that within, I believe, as I recall, six days of the election, which was impossible, no matter how advanced to the the cyber tools that were in use.
00:20:48.660You couldn't have possibly rendered that judgment because of the variety of votes that were cast and types of votes.
00:20:56.520And then a year and a half later, and most people didn't pay a bit of attention.
00:21:00.640They came out with a paper in which they recanted.
00:21:59.180Yeah, I mean, the rabbit hole on this goes so deep, I think it could be a lot of overwhelming for people to sort of digest in one bite.
00:22:06.700On my foundation's website, we have an article called The Ultimate Guide to DHS Censorship.
00:22:11.260And it's a 10,000 word report with 25 different confession videos of insiders confessing to this whole plan as they were doing it and gloating about it afterwards.
00:22:19.900150 hyperlinks is sort of the definitive story of this DHS censorship of mass mail-in ballots.
00:22:26.540It's been entered into the floor of Congress and multiple lawsuits.
00:22:30.260That's probably the best source for people who want further reading after this.
00:22:33.840But, you know, the short story is when this whole society censorship network was set up, they knew they needed the government to be the quarterback.
00:22:42.020Again, the whole society is four quadrants of institutions, government agencies, the private sector institutions such as the platforms and the private sector censorship mercenary firms and the censorship technology developers, civil society institutions, and that's universities, nonprofits, foundations, and activists and researcher groups.
00:23:01.760And then the fourth one is media and fact-checking organizations.
00:23:04.140And they knew they needed a government quarterback of the whole society network because government cutouts, like, for example, Stanford University created this censorship organization called the Stanford Internet Observatory.
00:23:45.840You know, they were partnered with three other institutions, which include Graphica, which got $7 million of Pentagon grants and got started as part of something called the Minerva Initiative, which is the Psychological Operations Research Center of the Pentagon.
00:24:00.300So this was a formal, this is a private firm, which was formerly, you know, parked within a psychological operations unit within the Pentagon, who got $7 million of Pentagon funding, who was designated the formal domestic disinformation flagger for the U.S. election in 2020.
00:24:19.080You know, their CSO was 25 years in the CIA.
00:24:22.780They'd been doing basically social media mapping for the Pentagon in conflict zones until the 2016 election.
00:24:28.980And then the Pentagon, you know, the Pentagon was at war with Donald Trump.
00:24:34.020The Ukraine policy that he articulated and the Russia policy that he articulated was a reversal of the Obama administration and the Bush administration and the Mitt Romney and the John McCain.
00:24:43.780The uniparty Pentagon priorities that had basically existed from Truman until Trump were deeply, deeply challenged.
00:24:52.500Not only that, it happened at a time when these things were very fragile in Ukraine and there was an in-process operation to try to basically bring these breakaway states back in.
00:25:01.400And so you had this, you know, what you might argue may have happened with the Kennedy situation where he was at war with his own generals.
00:25:09.180And so this, but there by far none, the Pentagon is the largest employer in the entire country, bigger than a private employer.
00:25:18.120They employ something like 2 million people, the Pentagon alone.
00:25:20.960It gets the most money of the federal dollars of any federal government agency.
00:25:26.200And the most sophisticated in being able to launder things through cutouts because so many of our own private sector institutions and universities and media companies rely on the Pentagon either for direct funding,
00:25:38.420for R&D funding, for the Pentagon to clear the way for them, to do favors for them so that they can, you know, resist resource nationalism from foreign countries and for access, you know, when it comes to media institutions.
00:25:50.240And so, you know, the Atlanta Council is also partnered with Stanford.
00:25:53.340The Atlanta Council gets funding from all four branches of the U.S. military, the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, as well as funding from the State Department and CIA cutouts like the National Dome of Democracy.
00:26:02.240They were all joined together in a formal partnership called the Election Integrity Partnership, which was handcrafted by CISA, the DHS, seven months before the election started, in order to, in the words of the head of EIP,
00:26:16.680to do what the government wanted to do in terms of censorship but could not do itself.
00:26:22.100They deliberately confessed to the DHS wanting to violate the First Amendment but knowing they couldn't and so running it and laundering it through an outside private group that were closely together with them.
00:26:36.740And there's a formal pitch to even form them.
00:26:39.660And not only that, in order to do that, they used this DHS-funded infrastructure to access the domestic disinformation switchboard to be able to make sure that everything was censored in real time.
00:26:49.040Incredible. I mean, it is just utterly incredible.
00:27:00.280And when we do, we're going to get a handle on just exactly where was the intelligence community in all of this during this period, during this period in which we live as well.
00:27:55.180He is the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
00:28:01.840And I want to just get to where we are, it seems to me, in this conversation, Mike.
00:28:06.720And that is, who is in charge of this country?
00:28:09.960Who is in charge of, I think I know the answer, but our government?
00:28:14.420And is there any place to hide in the midst of all of this?
00:28:19.680So my stock answer to that question is simply the blob.
00:28:23.660And then the magic of that is, what is the shape of the blob?
00:28:26.960The blob was a term that Obama's deputy's national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, described as being, you know,
00:28:35.580what you're up against when you're trying as a president to actually, you know, affect foreign policy in the country.
00:28:42.580And the blob refers to this foreign policy establishment, which is a really sort of cute way, a sort of boring way of describing the managers of the American empire.
00:28:52.860And so here, I think, at a sort of theoretical level, it's important to draw a distinction between the managers of the American empire and the citizens of the American homeland.
00:29:02.080Because the power structures that run Washington, there's a very sharp divide between those two things.
00:29:07.940We have, America is not just the 330-odd million people who live here.
00:29:16.140And it has been for, you know, almost a century now, in the sense that, you know, in 1898, we became this global empire when we took the Philippines and the Spanish American War.
00:29:25.220And we took Cuba and we had to defend all these foreign territories.
00:29:28.360Frankly, you can take it back farther than that into the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and the Banana Wars.
00:29:33.740And, you know, we are an industrial nation of multinational corporations in a big, bad, mean, old world where every country's government is, you know, trying to do what's best for its own corporations and its own people.
00:29:48.380And so their resource nationalism is real, market protectionism is real.
00:29:53.320And so we, in order to maintain our pull over the American empire, we needed to create this vast blob structure that is, at the government level, is localized to three different sort of legs.
00:30:10.100There's the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community.
00:30:15.840But it's important when you think of those three different categories of institutions, they are one thing.
00:30:20.580If you have a job at the Pentagon as a deputy assistant secretary there, the very next year, you could be a deputy assistant secretary of the State Department or go into the CIA or NSA or any of the other 17 agencies.
00:30:32.580And so that's the government side of it.
00:30:35.140But then you have the donors and drafters off of the battering ram, the blob.
00:30:39.200And I should say, the blob is imbued with a department of dirty tricks power to be able to overthrow governments, to be able to, you know, bribe or censor foreign media,
00:30:48.700to be able to do all manner of psychological operations, to run color revolutions, to take over unions, to run this whole society playbook where if there's a territory that we want to extract, you know, resources from or we want to put a military base in or we want that country to vote our way in a U.N.
00:31:06.420security council vote, we have this department of dirty tricks to be able to co-opt all the different private sector, civil society and media institutions in that region in order to make it more client to the empire's interests.
00:31:18.480And so this is essentially the main power structure in Washington because the empire is much, much bigger than the homeland.
00:31:28.040The issue is, while that may have been in some ways responsible for our prosperous middle class in the 20th century because all of our multinational corporations, Pepsi-Cola could export to billions of people,
00:31:40.060Microsoft, Microsoft, you know, our oil and gas companies, they would not be able to have access to these foreign markets unless the State Department pried them open or unless the Pentagon or NATO, you know,
00:31:52.920basically forced free market reforms or unless, you know, our intelligence agencies were able to pipe in, surround sound media or groom a sort of political class to emerging leader programs and whatnot.
00:32:04.820The issue is, is we had this department of dirty tricks, which was supposed to be this kind of, you know, multi-headed hydra, you know, pit bull orca whale defending our American interests.
00:32:17.620And it was never supposed to come inside the house.
00:32:19.840It's supposed to protect us and sort of, you know, acquire territory politically in order to increase U.S. national interests.
00:32:27.720But after the 2016 election, they, they broke two and a half, you know, they broke, you know, what's effectively two and a half centuries of precedent going, you know, going back to our founding,
00:32:37.740but certainly a century of precedent since the founding of this apparatus in 1948.
00:32:43.180In the same way, they broke that precedent, by the way, at the Justice Department level, you know, with indicting Trump and with these bankruptcy lawsuits.
00:32:50.660But in 2016, we took our magic department of dirty tricks, democracy blob power, and we turned it inward to do the same thing to our own homeland, what we did to other regions in the empire.
00:33:04.740And that is, of course, that Washington, domestic focused politicians in Washington have not been prepared.
00:33:12.160And frankly, it will take decades to really be prepared to confront.
00:33:14.840Decades to be prepared to confront, yet we are in conflict, and it looks like mortal conflict, frankly, to me right now.
00:33:26.020We have an election, a presidential election, that is absolutely existential.
00:33:29.920I know that sounds like hyperbole to some.
00:33:32.600I truly believe that if Donald Trump does not win this election, there are very few options open to us.
00:33:38.800And that, in effect, the Marxist Dem Party, led by Marxist Dems, will have its way.