"Americans are subsidizing their silence."
The man who uttered those words is Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department boss who now strenuously advocates for digital freedom before The Blob, as he calls the deep state, completely controls every aspect of American life with its Censorship Industrial Complex. That complex doesn't exist as an entity but does in reality.
The censorship mechanisms we now see on a daily basis in our Google searches, wildly one-sided "news" coverage, and the consolidation of speech codes into full-fledged and sometimes violent censorship on campuses across the nation are the outgrowth of U.S. State Department censorship programs enacted in 2016 after a new bubble of worldwide populism erupted. It marked the point when all of the mechanisms the U.S. employed against our enemies were turned on the American people.
Benz told podcaster Shawn Ryan (see video below) that the domestic censorship campaign was constructed when the government censorship crowd decided that free people had chosen poorly with their votes.
The advent of populism really started in 2016 with the events of the Philippines election, the events of Brexit, the events of Donald Trump's election, followed in short succession by [Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil, [Matteo] Salvini in Italy, Marine Le Pen's rise in France, Vox Party's rise in Spain, AFDs rise in Germany.
Suddenly the people had to be stopped and wrong-think had to be corrected -- and the U.S. State Department, CIA, and other alphabet agencies specializing in disinformation were put into the service of changing the minds of the American and other western people.
Benz has been boldly telling the story about this censorship campaign at his Foundation for Freedom. He's been featured on many right-leaning programs, mainly because the right is currently the victim of the these far-reaching speech attacks. It's similar to the efforts the FBI made with its COINTELPRO spying and worse on America's far left in the 1970s.
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Before 2016 you could not get a full-time job getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to censor what other people say on the internet. The content moderation jobs were about getting rid of spam and child porn and a little bit of compliance for other countries that had like hate speech laws but it has become an industry. It has become a career track and it is supplanting other career tracks that used to be soft power influence jobs.
The Censorship Industrial Complex is now beginning to get baked into the university system for those who want to be diplomats and spooks.
If you wanted to work you know at the the heart of the action a generation ago you'd go to Georgetown and you would study political science or international relations.
[...] Well with this new advent of disinformation studies and it's folded under so many different programs it'll make your head spin the communications departments have this the Applied Physics departments have this for the AI censorship soft software component. The sociology departments have this, the psychology departments have this, the computer science partner programs at universities have this, the Linguistics programs have this.
This broad field of disinformation studies is now an advanced track golden ticket to be at the heart of the action in terms of high level high impact foreign policy blob positions because it doesn't just put you at the heart of Washington and in its own secular interest it puts you right at the heart of a big government, big business, and big Tech.
And the people began to understand what was going on. We saw all the chicanery of the 2020 election: no signature matches were required in some states, universal mail-out ballots became a key feature, and bipartisan election laws were thrown out due to COVID fears. There were broken-down machines; blackouts of state vote counting happened in front of our eyes. No reasonable person would consider these anomalies and not wonder if something nefarious was going on.
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It's why when the leader from CISA, a newish agency that took a leadership role in this censorious information operation against the American people, sounded downright Orwellian when he proclaimed that the 2020 "election was the most secure in American history."
That was nonsense and the American people knew it.
Now the censorship folks are "predicting" (or promising?) a cyber attack on Election Day in America, yet another reason to bank your vote.
We're surrounded by captured corporations whose interest, because of government influence, is to censor the truth.
The Washington Post owner has a huge deal with the CIA. Jeff Bezos's Amazon is beholden to government agencies because of its cloud service contracts; Google faces U.S. and EU pressure to censor searches.
Twitter 1.0 was crawling with former spooks and feds and was on weekly calls with censorious FBI agents like Elvis Chan, Benz says Facebook was threatened by the U.S. government with a $60 billion ad loss if Mark Zuckerberg didn't play ball with government censors, and Elon Musk is being actively targeted by the U.S. government, which is leaning on the government of Brazil because Musk isn't doing the bidding of the censorship comrades.
Benz's endgame:
I want free speech on the internet and I want Americans to be able to determine our own elections and our own social and cultural and political discourse and I don't want to be caught in a proxy war any longer between this foreign facing Department of dirty tricks and our domestic speech at home.
[W]hat what I'm getting at here is I think what needs to be offered to to people who who are who mean well on both sides of the political aisle I'm not just talking about Republicans although they happen to be predominantly the ones who have taken this issue up is you have to be able to articulate a firewall between the capacity to do this in other countries and it's blowback on American citizens here.
The good news is that the very entities the Censorship Industrial Complex targeted and tried to destroy — such as alternative news sources like PJ Media— began to tell the story and call out the information operation for what it was: the silencing of the American people for wrong-think. We've seen it as a political operation because that's been the result, but Benz believes it's more about conformance. He opines that if Donald Trump embraced censorship and endless wars The Blob would love him. It's why the Cheney family actively supports Kamala Harris, to give you a real-world example.
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House Republicans have begun to strip away the programs' facades, but it will take a lot more action by the American people to stop it. Benz says Elon Musk's take over of Twitter/X has provided a huge wedge against The Blob. It's why that same blob is going after Musk's SpaceX and Starlink businesses. Musk's businesses have many government contracts and he's angering his "customers."
There's more to say about this interview and I will in the coming days.
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