The US Deep State Censorship Complex - Part One

A Paradigm Shifting Interview With Mike Benz On The Joe Rogan Podcast. Unmistakable Proof That They Do Censor Us And How They Are Doing It.

This Podcast blew my mind. It has the potential to change public perceptions of censorship, just as the Malone Podcast on Rogan changed public perceptions ofthe mass formation hypnosis.

You can find the podcast on The Joe Rogan Experience on Spotify and on YouTube. I was lucky to find a transcript here from which I will quote. It isn’t perfect, so please excuse the errors. I will clear up word fragments that don’t make sense without making notes every time and will edit and structure the podcast as I see fit.

It is three hours long and packed with fascinating information. I will break it up into several parts.

I will start with Part One , wait for your response and feedback, and if there is enough interest, I will continue.

Who is Mike Benz?

Mike Benz’s intellectual muscles must be witnessed in order to be believed. The man knows deep, hidden secrets; his cognitive abilities and memory are astounding. I have never seen anyone output so much precise and accurate data from memory.

The other thing that stood out was his deep passion, bordering on obsession with the topic. This man feels deeply offended by what is going on. It feels very personal. I wonder what happened to him that put him on this 9-year-long journey.

[02:07:59]

Joe: How do you sleep? You know, like, knowing all this…..

Mike:

What it was, it was really, really hard the first three or four years because the whole thing was totally depressing and there were no wins at all. You know, ….. it was bad.

My health deteriorated….I didn't look good, I didn't feel good. I mean, I tell everyone, you have to go through your five stages of grief on this. You're going to have your denial and then your anger and then your depression and then your bargaining and then your acceptance. And you'll go through many iterations of those five stages of grief.

But you get to a certain point, I think, where you accept that this is our inheritance and this is in a way, as evil as so many……components of it are.

The larger picture is kind of a fascinating archeological dive into the ancient dinosaur bones of the world that we live in. The American empire would not exist without this apparatus. It took a twisted turn in 2016.

It appears that his illusion that the USA is the good guy has been severely shattered by what he discovered.

He seems slightly biased toward the right and Trump and Musk, which must be considered. However, despite my bias against Trump and Musk, this didn’t matter to me. Rather than ideological, he is very information-oriented.

Joe: So just as a background, please tell people what you do and what positions you held.

Mike:

I do all things Internet censorship. That's really my mission in life. My North Star. I started off as a corporate lawyer and then worked for the Trump White House. I was a speechwriter. I sort of advised on technology issues and then I ran the cyber division for the State Department. Basically the big tech portfolio that interfaces between sort of big government, international diplomacy issues on technology, and then the sort of private sector US national champions in the tech space like Google and Facebook. So I was the guy that Google lobbyists would call when they wanted favors from big government. But, you know, my life took a huge sort of U turn, you might say, when the 2016 election came around. And I became obsessed with the early development of the censorship industry, this giant behemoth of government, private sector, civil society organizations, and media all collabing to censor the Internet. And it was kind of a weird path from there.

When did the censorship start?

[00:02:08]

It started in 2014 with the Ukraine fiasco, the coup and then the counter coup. The coup was great for Internet free speech. I mean, you really do need to start the story of Internet censorship with the story of Internet freedom.

Promotion of censorship is sort of the flip side of promotion of free speech. And we've had this free speech government diplomatic role for 80 years now. When World War II ended, we embarked…….in international rules based order that was created in 1948. We had the UN, we had NATO, we had the IMF, the World Bank. We had this big global system.

Now there was a prohibition in 1948 under the UN Declaration of Human Rights that you can't acquire territory by military force anymore and have it be respected by international law.

So everything had to move to soft power influence. And so the US government took a very active role beginning in 1948 to promote free speech around the world. And this was done through all these initially CIA proprietaries like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, then the whole Wisners, Wurlitzer, State Department, CIA apparatus, all the early partnerships with the media and the war machine around.

Propaganda for World War II continued through the Cold War. And then that hit the gas with promotion of free speech on the Internet. When the Internet was privatized, it was initially a military project. So it was a government operation from jump street.

And then in 1991, the World Wide Web came out, civilian use. And right away, the State Department, the military, our intelligence sphere, was promoting free speech so that we could have basically government pressure on foreign countries to open up their Internet to allow basically groups that the US Government was supporting to be able to combat state control over media in those other countries.

So we already had this sort of deep interplay between government, tech companies, universities, NGOs that dates back 80 years.

You look at the evolution of NGOs like Freedom House or the Atlanta Council or Wilson center in promoting these free speech things. But what happened was, in 2014, we had had about 25 years of successful free speech diplomacy.

And then there was….you know….we tried to overthrow the government of Ukraine. We successfully did. And I'm not even arguing whether that's a good or a bad thing. But the fact is, the US did effectively January 6th, the Yanukovych government out of power in 2014.

I mean, we literally had our Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, handing out cookies and water bottles to violent street protesters as they surrounded the parliament building and ran the democratically elected government out of office.

But then what happened is the eastern side of the state completely broke away.

So they don't respect this new US installed government. Crimea voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation and that kicked off. That sort of set in motion the events that would end the concept of free speech diplomacy.

We pumped $5 billion worth of US government money into media institutions in Ukraine. That's the figure that's cited by Victoria Nuland in December 2013, right before the coup. $5 billion. Setting up independent media companies, basically sponsoring Mockingbird style, our media assets in the region.

And they still didn't penetrate Eastern Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine was primarily ethnic Russian. Didn't penetrate Crimea. So they said, we need something to stop them from being able to combat our media influence. And they initially called this the Gerasimov Doctrine, named after Valery Gerasimov, who is this Russian general. They took a quote from him saying, the new nature of war is no longer about military to military conflict.

All we need to do is take over the media in these NATO countries, and that's primarily social media. Get one of our pawns elected as the president, and that president will control the military.

So it's much cheaper and more efficient to win a military war by simply winning civilian elections. So that was called the Gerasimov Doctrine. That's what set up the early censorship infrastructure in 2014.

Three years later, the guy who coined that, Mark Galeotti, would write a sort of mea culpa saying, oops, I'm sorry.

Gerasimov was actually citing what the US does. But by that point, they'd already renamed it hybrid warfare. NATO formally declared its “tanks to tweets doctrine”, saying that the new role of NATO is no longer just about tanks, it's about controlling tweets.

And then Brexit happened in June 2016. In July 2016, the very next month in Warsaw, NATO added hybrid warfare to its formal charter, basically authorizing the military, the diplomatic sphere, and the intelligence world to take control over social media. And then five months later, Trump won the election, being called a Russian asset. So all that infrastructure was redirected home to the U.S.

It was looking pretty bleak, I would say, in terms of the direction Internet censorship was headed. It seemed like the censorship machine was winning up until around the time that Elon purchased X. That seems to me to be our fork in the road. That's the alternative timeline. You know, Marc Andreessen talked about that yesterday, that we've had a couple of alternative timelines where things have shifted. I think that was one of the big ones.

How Did They Pull It Off And Structure It?

Who/what agencies were involved?

There were events in the run up. Well, it all sort of happened simultaneously, really, because the month that Elon announced his acquisition was the same month that the Disinformation Governance Board was announced at DHS (Department of Home Affairs), which was the first thing that really roused Republicans and frankly anyone with institutional power in D.C. to finally stare into the sun and recognize or at least begin to glimpse the size of what they were up against.

The Disinformation Governance Board set off a flurry of congressional activity from Chuck Grassley and other luminaries in Congress. There were a lot of whistleblower documents came out, and for years the entire Republican Party and most of the Democrat Party had denied the existence of government censorship.

And frankly, the Mystery of Truth was not the Disinformation Governance Board. The Mystery of Truth had already existed three years earlier at DHS.

They just called it a name that masked what it did. It was called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is a name that puts you half to sleep by the time you're finished saying it.

Joe:

Ministry of Truth scared the shit out of people just because of the Orwellian context of the term. You know, it just seemed like, what are you? What?

Mike:

Well, the funny thing is they were right.

The Disinformation Governance Board was not the Ministry of Truth.

It was a dull, boring, mundane bureaucratic layer to manage the Ministry of Truth that was already created three years earlier. But the fact is, nobody called them out on it because of the thick language of censorspeak that hides this whole thing from general public awareness.

In my own path, I've tried to self reflect about how I ended up here spending my life on this. And I used to think it was primarily about chess and my early encounters with AI and then seeing the censorship AI that really sparked my pursuit into this.

But the more I've thought about it, the more it's based, I think, it's just kind of coming from a corporate law background where your job is to plant dirty tricks in the fine print of 150 page legal documents and to catch dirty tricks in that linguistic framing that's done by opposing lawyers.

And that's really how they pulled this off. Nobody thought in 2019 that the cybersecurity agency in DHS would be the Ministry of Truth. They didn't appreciate the layers of censor speak that were constructed on top of that to say that, well, DHS governs critical infrastructure and elections are critical infrastructure. Public health is critical infrastructure.

Misinformation online is a cyber component. So it's a cyber attack on critical infrastructure. And so normally policymakers or people in the public think, oh, cybersecurity that's hacking, that's phishing. You know, that's some, that's for CIA, NSA people to stop Russians from hacking us.

And they think critical infrastructure, they think things like dams or subsea cables or low earth satellites, they don't think it means you sitting on the toilet at 9:30pm on a Thursday saying, I don't love mail-in-ballots. And then suddenly you're being flagged by DHS as a cyber threat for attacking the US Critical infrastructure of confidence in our elections.

But that's how they scaled these definitions into this giant mission creep. And now it's metastasized into the entire U.S. federal government, the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, DHS, FBI, DOJ, HHS. And the task in front of this administration is just unbelievably enormous in deconstructing that.

Is it possible they're going to run into a lot of headwinds?

Because once this power was discovered and funded to the tune of billions as it has been, we have this foreign policy establishment that manages the American empire that saw Internet censorship as kind of an El Dorado key to permanently winning the soft power influence game around the world.

And what I mean by that is, okay, so you know how a lot of people talk about the early CIA activity in the media with things like Operation Mockingbird and whatnot, and the ability to sort of propagandize things in the media?

Well, you never had this capacity in the 1950s while that was going on.

If you and I were at dinner, Thanksgiving or something, and there's 12 people at the table and I start talking to you about, I don't know, the COVID vaccines may have adverse side effects.

How Did It Affect Trump And The Elections In The USA And Around The World

[00:13:26]

There was never an ability to simply reach under the table as an intelligence agency or as the Department of Homeland Security or as the Pentagon or the State Department. Just turn off the volume when we talk to each other, peer to peer.

But since the lion's share of all communication is digital, especially the politically impactful ones, that capacity now allows our blob, our foreign policy establishment, to effectively control every election, or at least tilt every election around the world.

And they've sprawled this into 140 countries. And Trump is going to run into every single regional desk at the State Department, every single equity at the Pentagon, arguing that if you do not allow us to continue this censorship work, it will undermine national security because it will allow Russian favored narratives to win the day in the Ivory coast, in Chad, in Niger and Brazil and Venezuela and Central and Eastern Europe. You're going to have the State Department argue that if we don't have this counter misinformation capacity, then extremists will win.

Populists will win the election around the world and that will undermine the power of our democratic institutions, essentially our programming, our assets in the region.

And they've built this enormous capacity. We use it because it works, because it wins.

And the fact is, Trump probably only won this election because for the same reason, he probably only won the 2016 election, which was, in both cases, there was largely a free Internet.

It was when Trump got censored into oblivion in 2020 by the US government under his nose, working with webs of outside NGOs and Pentagon front groups to mass censor virtually every narrative that he was putting out that he lost. So it does work to win elections.

[00:15:30]

There's a regional desk at the State Department covering every country on Earth. Victoria Nuland, you know, at a desk that cover about 20 countries.

So every country, the State Department has a preferred winner of that election. We work with all political parties, and that's a hugely powerful tool to lose.

It's just twisted and evil….. and it needs to be….and we need to win I don't want to say fair fights, but dipping into this sort of dark sorcery power has…..not only does it crush the First Amendment entirely, but the diplomatic blowback, it's just absolutely normal, enormous. I can go through examples of that if you're interested.

This concludes Part I.

I wonder what all my readers from around the world think, learning that the USA actively interferes and decides who wins the elections in their countries. I wonder what my American readers think about that and how Trump supporters feel about all this.

Because, after all, if Mike Benz is correct (and we have to remember he is pro-Trump), Donald Trump was right when he claimed that the 2020 elections were stolen from him.

To support this work, please become a paid subscriber - only $30 per year - less than 30 cents per article - Thank you.