February 17, 2024

Perhaps you’ve seen texts or heard people talking about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Benz regarding the national security state’s vast censorship regime operating within America. You might have thought to yourself, “Well, I already know that.” No, you really don’t. Until you take the hour to listen to the interview, you have absolutely no true understanding of what’s been happening in America since the second Obama administration and with increased power, fury, and vindictiveness since the Americans dared to elect Trump.

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If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (and I’ve embedded the video at the end of this post, along with Scott Adams’s commentary), here’s the gist:

Mike Benz used to hold the cyber portfolio at the State Department and is now the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. He’s seen the system from the inside and studied it from the outside. This is the broad outline of what he told Tucker:

Since the very beginning, the internet has been a federal program with its roots in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (“DARPA”). DARPA, as you may know, is the research and development arm of the Department of Defense. Google started with a grant from DARPA to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who also got funding from CIA and NSA programs.

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The government’s original purpose in creating the internet was free speech oriented. National security agencies wanted to use free access to information to create soft coups against governments the U.S. disliked, which, in those days, were totalitarian governments.

Image: Tucker Carlson and Mike Benz. X screen grab.

By providing dissenters with a way to come together, the U.S. didn’t need military coups such as those attempted against Cuba and carried out successfully in Iran. Instead, throughout the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, the government could control their opponents’ information systems and, fairly reliably, their elections. According to Benz, the system worked wonderfully all the way through the Arab Spring, when the internet facilitated Obama’s dream of overthrowing Sunni governments to help facilitate Iran’s rise within the Muslim sphere of influence.

When ISIS rose up from the ashes of the Arab Spring, the U.S. government got the mandate to create a new technology that would track ISIS on social media. This new artificial intelligence can understand and map everything said on social media and, with a few lines of code, delete tens of millions of posts.

The NATO alliance, however, got frightened of the internet’s ability to overthrow governments when dissidents used it in Crimea to ally, not with the West’s preferred Ukrainian leaders, but with Putin and Russia. Suddenly, Europe decided that the internet needed to be censored. The push to control the internet in Europe accelerated with the Brexit movement.

Obama, of course, was on board with the push to censor the internet. After all, he was (and is) a globalist, as were (and, mostly, are) Europe’s leaders. They’d staked out a post-WWII and post-Cold War global power structure that worked perfectly well for them. The rise of a new nationalism, not one grounded in Nazi-style world domination but in smaller governments working to benefit the people within their own borders, was anathema to the globalists.

For Obama, the Deep State, and the Vichy Republicans, the crisis in America came with Trump’s election. Until then, the media universe, which rose up during WWII, was stable and was controlled by various departments within the United States government, which could dictate how to cover stories. (Fox, included.) These institutions were caught off guard when social media, only a decade old, broke free of the government stranglehold and placed Trump in office.