It’s fascinating to read the backstory of internet censorship, to understand how it happened, from Mike Benz. Kind of satisfying to know why something happened even if I hate that it happened. It started with good intentions and morphed over time. The TLDR is that Communism made us censor Trump supporters, which reminds me how much our enemies end up shaping us rather than vice-versa.
And just how super-powerful NATO is, which probably is and always was Trump’s Achilles heel.
“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 CIA and NGO architecture as a way to support dissident groups around the world in order to help them overthrow authoritarian governments, as they were billed. Essentially internet free speech allowed a kind of instant regime change operation, to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishment's State Department agenda. Google is a great example of this. Google began as a CIA 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. Google Maps was begun by purchasing a CIA satellite software.
All these things were created initially as 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 all of the adversary governments of the Obama administration, like Egypt and Tunisia, 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.
But then, in 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected counter coup where Crimea and the Donbas broke away that NATO was highly unprepared for at the time. Our State Department 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. 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. Legacy media and industry would assist 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.
Now, when Brexit happened in 2016, it was a crisis moment where suddenly NATO 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. Brexit was June 2016 and 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. 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.
So 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.
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 starting in 1948, the national security state was really established with the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. You had this new world order that had been created with all these international institutions. You had the 1948 U.N. Declaration on Human Rights, which forbid the territorial acquisition by military force, so you could no longer run a traditional military occupation government in the way that we could in 1898, for example, when we took the Philippines. Now 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. 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 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 became full throttle when Trump was elected and what little resistance to internal censorship 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.
Folks like Time magazine’s former editor and Obama aide Rick Stengel made the argument that the Constitution was not prepared for the internet and we need to get rid of the First Amendment accordingly. He’d described himself as a free speech absolutist when he was the managing editor of Time but later established the Global Engagement Center essentially to work with the State Department to put bumper cars on the ability of social media companies to platform and censor accounts.
The two most censored events in human history, I would argue, are the 2020 election and the Covid 19 pandemic. And I'll explain how I arrived there. The 2020 election was determined by mail-in ballots. And I'm not weighing into the substance of whether mail in ballots were or were not a legitimate or safe and reliable form of a voting. That's a completely independent topic from my perspective and the censorship issue. But I would argue the censorship around mail-in ballots is really one of the most extraordinary stories in our American history. What happened was, is you had this plot within the Department of Homeland Security. Now this gets back to what we were talking about with the State Department's Global Engagement Center. 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 home of society. Counter misinformation, counter disinformation alliance. It had to be centered within the government because only the government would have the clout and the coercive threat powers and the and the perceived authority to be able to tell the social media companies what to do, to be able to summon in a government funded NGOs form, to create that media surround-sound, to be able to arm an astroturf army of of fact checkers and to be able to liaison and connect all these different censorship industry actors into a cohesive, unified whole.
CISA was created by act of Congress in 2018 because of the perceived threat that Russia had hacked the 2016 election, had physically hacked it. We needed the cyber security power to be able to deal with that. And essentially on the heels of a CIA memo on January 6th, 2017, and a same day, DHS executive order on January 6th, 2017, arguing that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and a DHS mandate, saying that elections are now critical infrastructure. You had this new power within DHS to say that cyber security attacks on elections are now our purview. And then they did two cute things. One is they said misinformation online is a form of cyber security attack — a cyber attack because misinformation is happening online. We're actually protecting democracy in elections. 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 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 because you were doing misinformation online in the cyber realm and misinformation is a cyber attack on democracy when it undermines public faith and confidence in our democratic elections and our democratic institutions. They would go further and define mainstream media as democratic institutions that you also could not undermine.
What ended up happening was in advance of the 2020 election, starting in April of 2020, the DHS working with essentially NATO on the national security side and and essentially the DNC, to use DHS as the launching point for a government coordinated mass censorship campaign spanning every single social media platform on Earth in order to pre-censor the ability to dispute the legitimacy of mail in ballots….So they set up this basically constellation of State Department, Pentagon, and I.C. networks to run this pre-censorship campaign, which by their own math, had 22 million tweets on Twitter alone. This is hundreds of millions of posts which were all scanned and banned or throttled so that they could not be amplified. 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 was would 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 if Trump looked like he won by seven states and then three days later it comes out, actually, the election switched. That would put the election crisis of the Bush-Gore election, on a level of steroids that the national security state said, well, the public will not be prepared for it. So what was needed in advance was to pre-censor the ability to even question the legitimacy this took out.
The DHS at the time had actually federalized much of, of the national election, administration through this January 6th, 2017, executive order from outgoing Obama DHS head Jeh Johnson, which essentially wrapped all 50 states up into a formal DHS partnership. 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. What I'm essentially describing is military rule.
What's happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. You know, the democracy sort of draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is, rule by consent of the people being rule. That is, 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 and after a couple of other, you know, social media run elections that went the wrong way from. What the State Department wanted, like the 2016 Philippines election, 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, who it is, the NGOs. And of course, these NGOs are largely State Department funded or IC 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 democracy is just the consensus-building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves. And from their perspective, that takes a lot of work. I mean, 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 for the finance and the JPMorgan's in 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, 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 the, you know, carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass. Well, then, from their perspective, you know, that is now an attack on democracy. And this is what this whole branding effort was. And of course, democracy again, has that magic regime change predicate, where democracy is, is our magic watchword to be able to overthrow governments from the ground up in a sort of color revolution style, whole of society effort to toppling a democratically elected government from the inside. For example, as we did in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych was democratically elected by the Ukrainian people, like him or hate him. I'm not even issuing an opinion there. But the fact is, is we color revolutioned him out of office, we January 6th'd him out of office. You had $5 billion worth of civil society money pumped into this to overthrow a democratically elected government in the name of democracy.”
