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Big Tech’s Effort to Silence Truth-tellers: Global Research Online Referral Campaign
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The Tucker Carlson interview with Mike Benz (here summarised with commentary) is probably the greatest expose of the activities of that globalist corporatism which is destroying democratic nations, provoking war abroad and a totalitarian war against their own people at home – hand in glove with the modern high tech industries and the old “legacy” media. The link to the full interview is at the bottom of this article.
Click here for the link to the entire interview.
Mike Benz had the cyber portfolio at the US State Department. He’s now executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. Benz points out that three developments were critical in the creation of the modern tyranny.
- The post war media exploitation by the West to undermine the communist Soviet union with broadcast western propaganda (like the USA funded Freedom Radio in Europe)
- the 1948 UN Declaration on Human Rights and the 1966 UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which affirmed Under Article 1 the right to self-determination and
- the Gerasimov doctrine which declared the superior power of media propaganda aimed at nations’ populations over military invasion (at a proportion of 4:1). The Russian General saw in western methods of war:
“the importance of controlling the information space and the real-time coordination of all aspects of a campaign, in addition to the use of targeted strikes deep in enemy territory and the destruction of critical civilian as well as military infrastructure.”
This is very much the NATO/EU approach to the war in Yugoslavia (the lockstep of the mainstream media, the use of US PR agencies and the bombing of the Belgrade television station) and now in Ukraine where the information war is so “effective” that when things go wrong they cannot catch up with their own military failure so that artificial support for the war goes hand in glove with devastating human and infrastructure losses.
Benz says that at the beginning free speech was the ally in the cold war and:
All of that architecture, all the NGOs, the relationships between the tech companies and the national security state had been long established for freedom.
Benz traces the change from the tool of the foreign policy freedom agenda to exploitation of the media for control and censorship at home and abroad to the US funded 2014 coup in Ukraine against the elected government and the counter move in Crimea – with the full support of that population for the return to Russia:
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.
There followed the fundamental change in domestic politics, media and law which all western so called “democracies” have experienced in spades in recent years. As Tucker Carlson summarised:
In other words, you can say something that is factually accurate and consistent with your own conscience. And in previous versions of America, you had an absolute right to say those things. But now – 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.
But did anyone at NATO or anyone at the State Department pause for a moment and say, wait a second, we’ve just identified our new enemy as democracy within our own countries?
Of course the whole State /corporate censorship and cancellation structure relies on the corporate ownership of all the major economic, media, medical, military, business and new tech areas of the modern State. These are of course in many ways trumped by their supra-national equivalents in the UN, World Health Organisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the self styled World Economic Forum etc where national electorates and even their governments have far less control.
Of course the very nature of the self perpetuating corporate (whose life span far exceeds that of the individuals who temporarily “control” them) means that their elitists are in fact functionaries wept along by the unaccountable powers they have created. No democracy brings them back down to earth by counter information, objection, public opinion or the inconvenience of election.
The decisions of the WHO for instance are apparently taken not by positive vote but by the lack of negative votes! And their new totalitarian Pandemic Treaty and international health regulations could pass on that basis. A classic tool of the authoritarian.
Google Origins in US Deep State
Mike Benz looks at one of the most powerful censorship tools at the disposal of the supranational globalist corporatists – Google. (Democracy is a perpetual search for information and truth. Ii is corporatists like Google who now control the search). He describes its initial agency for free speech:
Google began as a DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) 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 “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 use free speech on the internet as a way to circumvent state control over media over in places like Central Asia and all around the world,
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, end-to-end encrypted chats.
All of 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.
Just as vote counting systems were also developed to rig elections in countries where the regimes were targeted by the USA so they were then turned on domestic “democratic” elections.
UK in Censorship Cartel:
Benz emphasises the international nature of the media manipulation industry in which the UK government took a leading role in this “political warfare”:
An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and 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 have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda and then to censor domestic, right-wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.
One of the most frightening setbacks for these corporatist “rulers of the world” was (for them and Prime Minister Cameron who instigated the vote) the Brexit referendum of June, 2016 when Britain voted to leave the European Union. Benz:
The very next month at the Warsaw Conference, NATO formally amended its charter to expressly commit to hybrid warfare as this new NATO capacity. So they went from 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, these were now Brexit groups or groups like Mateo Salvini in Italy or in Greece or in Germany or in Spain with the Vox Party.
The association by the Establishments of any opposition to the elitists globalist plans with Russia were of course nonsense and the complete failure of the Russia-gate attack on Donald Trump was typical.
Overcoming UN Declaration of Sovereign Right
Benz makes the point (see the Gerasimov discussion above) that UN Declarations had severely restricted the military solutions of the imperialist era.
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 legitimisation process whereby there’s some ratification from the hearts and minds of people within the country.
Benz notes that, although it was always illegal for the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA to operate on US soil the fraudulent Democratic Party and Deep State claim that Donald Trump was a Russian asset benefiting from “Russian disinformation” allowed the above agencies to claim this was not just a foreign policy issue but a domestic threat to democracy.
And so they were able to launder the entire democracy promotion regime change toolkit just in time for the 2020 election
But the Russia-gate attack on Trump was a fraud as a two year investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller showed.
But the whole process had allowed the State apparatus (“spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DOD, the DOJ, and then the thousands of government funded NGO and private sector mercenary firms” as Benz says) to pivot to the disinformation/censorship “threat to democracy” in time for the 2020 election.
The Sentinel Class
Benz describes the new corporatist fascist state system of control, marginalisation and censorship:
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, the civil society organizations, and then this vast cobweb of media allies and professional fact checker groups that serve as this sort of sentinel class that surveys every word on the internet.
Benz then talks about the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which was created by a former journalist Rick Stengel who described himself as Obama’s propaganda in chief and had a track record of attacking free speech, despite having previously described himself as a free speech absolutist! (This is typical of the kind of people State corporatism attracts – absolutists, totalitarians, power crazed with their own political agenda but never accountable to the people through distasteful elections)
These people saw the Internet as a threat because unlike the established mainstream media the very atomistic nature of different actors reaching large numbers of people (even “influencers” today reach millions more than the typical newspaper) was a threat to their and governments’ control of the “narrative”.
Their solution of course was not to compete with what they see as “the truth” but to censor and ban them and turn their own “news” into overt propaganda. A good example is qualifying reports of those they see as a threat with words like “unproven” or “without evidence”.
Mass Censorship – Weapons of Mass Deletion
Benz notes that The Atlantic Council in January, 2017 pressured European governments to pass censorship laws to create a transatlantic system of censorship.
One of the ways they did this was by getting Germany to pass something called Nets DG in August, 2017, which essentially kicked off the era of automated censorship in the US. What Nets DG required was, unless social media platforms wanted to pay a $54 million fine for each instance of speech, each post left up on their platform for more than 48 hours that had been identified as hate speech, they would be fined basically into bankruptcy when you aggregate 54 million over tens of thousands of posts per day.
But to avoid that internet platforms could use artificial intelligence based censorship technologies to scan and ban speech automatically.
And this gave rise to what I call these weapons of mass deletion. These are essentially the ability to sensor tens of millions of posts with just a few lines of code
“With a few lines of code” is of course a clever technical achievement but which acts in real discussion and everyday political interaction as a simplistic and moronic intervention censoring those who attack “x” as well as those promoting “x”.
University Censors Paid
Benz asserts that there are now over 60 universities getting federal government grants to do the censorship work. Profitable work if you can get it – with State payments creating even more distortion of teaching and research at those universities. (see for instance the long established corruption analysed in Dr David Lewis’s book “Science for Sale” Skyhorse Publishing 2014). The government academic complex is equivalent to Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial version!
COVID Censorship
Doubts about the origins of COVID, the wisdom and enormous costs of lockdowns, the vaccine boost to infections and vaccine deaths and even publishing Governments’ own statistics on vaccine adverse reactions were unwelcome to the medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex. So discussion of them had to be silenced or mitigated.
Benz describes the VIRALITY PROJECT:
which mapped 66 different narratives that dissidents we’re talking about around covid, everything from COVID origins to vaccine efficacy. And then they broke down these 66 claims into all the different factual sub claims. And then they plugged these into these essentially machine learning models to be able to have a constant world heat map of what everybody was saying about covid. And whenever something started trending that was bad for what the Pentagon wanted or was bad for what Tony Fauci wanted, they were able to take down tens of millions of posts.
Ballot Rigging Censorship
Benz told Carlson that “They did this in the 2020 election with mail-in ballots. It was the same”. It became important to deny vote rigging in the 2020 election and even censor legitimate doubts about the outcome of the election (which time has proven justified with 100,000 votes from the dead in one state alone and films of ballot box stuffing).
But the fascist US regime actually made the claim that questioning the legitimacy of the mail in ballots was itself illegitimate! Benz:
So just like that, you had this cybersecurity agency 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 you were now conducting a cyber attack on US critical infrastructure articulating misinformation on Twitter …..…
Of course there was no criticism of Hillary Clinton for challenging the outcome of the 2016 election which she lost!
I am going to leave it there. There is much more and here is a taster of how the threat to the Deep State, the political class, the mainstream media, foreign policy and the military developed as mass communication via the Internet emancipated and gave power to alternative narratives which corporatist fascists call “populists”:
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 in that initial period of social media, nobody was getting subscriber ships at the level where they actually competed with legacy news media
But the German Marshall Fund held a meeting in 2019..…….when a four star general got up on the panel and posed the question, what happens to the US military? What happens to the national security state when the New York Times is reduced to a medium sized Facebook page?
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 enough 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.
Click here for the link to the entire interview.
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