by PAUL COLLITS – TUCKER Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin took the media world by storm. It ruffled feathers. Even Hillary Clinton chimed in, and, in doing so, gave it yet more oxygen, with some strategically timed remarks.
Others called Carlson Putin’s useful idiot. Still others called him worse things.
- This is yet another case of the bad guys calling the good guys bad guys.
- It sums up, in a nutshell, the whole Leftist censorship agenda.
- Australia has its own deep State, of course, and it is only now, on the clueless watch of Airbus Albo, sharpening its claws.
Yet a more recent interview conducted by Tucker Carlson is far, far more important than Putin’s. I don’t expect the same level of feigned outrage this time. This is because the deep State establishment will want as few viewers as possible to see it. [see below]
Until this week, I hadn’t heard of Mike Benz. Or of his Foundation for Freedom Online.
DISTURBING
Or Rick Stengel. Or Barb McQuade. Both characters in Benz’s compelling and disturbing narrative, Stengel in the Carlson interview and McQuade at his X (formerly Twitter) feed.
I had heard of DARPA (America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) but had no idea of its reach or its strategic connections with Big Tech or its role in developing the current incarnation of the military-industrial complex.
I probably learned more in an hour of Benz than in anything I have read or seen or heard since before COVID.
Benz talks very fast, uses military industrial complex jargon at the speed of light, mentions people and organisations and acronyms of which few people would ever have heard, and joins more dots than a kid with a colouring book.
Take out message one – watch it twice. Better still, get a transcript of the interview.
Her is a useful short summary of the interview, and of some of the more memorable quotes.
In various places (not in the interview), Benz has mentioned a forthcoming book titled Weapons of Mass Deletion. It seems not to have yet been published. I wonder why.
Others have written about the deep State before. The political scientist John Marini is one exemplar, terming it the more benign sounding “administrative State”.
Whistleblowers like Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden have blown the lid on all sorts of deep State chicanery. Researchers like Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have written about “cancel culture” with perception and verve. The scholar Shoshana Zuboff wrote about the evils of surveillance capitalism two decades back.
Studies of propaganda, of behavioural psychology and of nudging began nearly a century ago, and have taken on new meaning and significance in recent times.
A whole literature sprang up in the 1960s and has continued, unabated, detailing how the Central Intelligence Agency killed JFK.
DETER
The CIA actually coined (or re-coined) the term conspiracy theory to help deter people from looking too closely at November 1963. We know how Donald Trump talked about “draining the swamp”. Trump simply had no idea what he was up against.
Way, way earlier than any of this, the so-called “elite theorists of democracy”, Pareto, Michels and Mosca, had spoken of the coming of a new form of democracy run by those in charge, and not by we-the-people.
These thinkers were described in a book by James Burnham as “the Machiavellians”. Oddly, given what we now know of the Machiavellians of our own time, Burnham calls his chosen Machiavellians “defenders of freedom”.
When one thinks of Machiavelli, the father of modern political science, one often thinks of manipulation. Not without reason.
So, we know all about the deep State, in all its elements – surveillance, elitism, the swamp, cover-ups, propaganda and censorship.
And we know of its new and exotic partnership with globalists and corporates. And of the origins of the COVID State in the mid-2000s with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other associated, post-9/11 elements of US domestic security architecture.
Mike Benz brings all of this, and more, together, and gives it a fresh coat of paint and a massive update.
Specifically, he throws technology into the mix. He focuses on the deep State in the age of the internet 2.0, or since the creation of social media in 2004-2007.
In 2004 we got Facebook. In 2005 we got Twitter as it then was. In 2006 YouTube. And in 2007, the smart phone. On January 9, via the late Steve Jobs, to be exact.
The world changed.
Benz regards social media as critical to the development of the internet and to the evolution from deep State to surveillance State.
Social media were first seen by the US deep State as weapons to be harnessed to defeat enemies overseas and to drive regime change (by empowering dissidents).
As Benz notes: “Free speech on the Internet was an instrument of Statecraft almost from the outset of the privatisation of the Internet.
ESTABLISHMENT
“However, later social media were seen as a threat to America’s own establishment, when used by America’s home-grown dissidents. In the first case, the preferred model of internet censorship was a free internet. In the second, it was a tightly censored internet. We are now confronting the latter.”
Everyone knows that these technological advances changed everything. But in 2014, Benz argues, they also changed international security, and since that time, have created what the journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and colleagues have termed the censorship industrial complex.
For in 2014 there was a US inspired coup in Ukraine, and America’s military/foreign policy establishment decided that its earlier support, even direction of, social media had to change. From one of willing acquiescence to ruthless crackdown.
At the same time, we had the emergence of populist resistance movements across Europe.
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 to “all these Right-wing populist groups”.
These new threats to the establishment’s interests had to be neutralised. And so came the top-down attacks, from 2016, on the freedom of the internet. They have only intensified in direct proportion to the perceived growth of the threats to the elites.
Traditional methods of controlling old media wouldn’t work anymore. What happens to the US military when The New York Times is reduced to a medium-sized Facebook page?
And the censorship tsars do mean business. We now face a lethal and very sinister combination of mission-creep, power accretion and hi-tech censorship tools.
Benz, in effect, provides a potted history of the coming of the technology-driven censorship State and of the pivot moments.
HATE
Tucker Carlson states at the outset: “The defining fact of the United States is freedom of speech. To the extent this country is actually exceptional, it’s because we have the first amendment to the Bill of Rights. We have freedom of conscience. We can say what we really think. There’s no hate speech exception to that. Just because you hate what somebody else thinks, you cannot force that person to be quiet, because we’re citizens, not slaves.
“But that right, that foundational right that makes this country what it is, that right from which all other rights flow, is going away at high speed in the face of censorship. Now, modern censorship bears no resemblance to previous censorship regimes in previous countries, in previous eras.
“Our censorship is affected on the basis of fights against disinformation and misinformation. And the key thing to know about these is they’re everywhere. And of course, they have no reference at all to whether what you’re saying is true or not.
“In other words, you can say something that is factually accurate and consistent with your own conscience. And in previous versions of America, you would have an absolute right to say those things. But 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.”
This is itself a powerful statement of our coming predicament.
We all know about the arrival of the fact checkers. The cases of Alex Berenson, the Twitter files and Missouri v Biden tell us that the US Government is directly involved in censorship of dissident views on key issues.
But Benz’s detailing of the mechanics and dynamics of what he terms “narrative mapping” and the emerging use of AI in tracking down dissident posts online, then disappearing them, portends a startling new phase of the campaign to crush citizen freedom.
I had never heard of the Atlantic Council, NATO’s “thinktank”. It is up to its malodorous armpits in helping to control US domestic dissidence.
Russiagate? It was critical in the development of the censorship industry.
What about the 2020 election? I have written about the utility of mail-in (postal) ballots in effecting favourable regime change.
Benz brackets the use of censorship during COVID and against dissidents attacking mail-in ballots as the two greatest instances of censorship in US history.
What ended up happening was in advance of the 2020 election, starting in April of 2020. Although this goes back before, you had this essentially never Trump neocon Republican DHS, working with essentially NATO on the national security side, and essentially the DNC, if you will, 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.
Note the use of the term “pre-censor”. These guys are very, very pro-active.
COMPLEX
What, then, of COVID and the censorship industrial complex? We know that nudging was used to strike fear into the hearts of citizens. And how the COVID State weaponised censorship as part of the narrative protection strategy to silence dissidents.
Benz detailed how the government-funded Virality Project identified 66 dissident narratives related to COVID-19, breaking them down into sub-claims for monitoring and censorship through machine learning models, aiming to control the spread of information harmful to official narratives or individuals like Tony Fauci.
Is the United States ground zero for the censorship industrial complex? Not necessarily, according to Benz. Europe is critical.
There is a whole cast of characters exposed among Benz’s dramatis personae. Take Kate Starbird, who runs something ominously called the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington in Seattle (aka Gates University).
The obvious question – informed by whom? And for what purpose? We all remember how Jacinda Ardern viewed these things.
Like so many who are paid to promote or defend State propaganda, Starbird and her ilk are essentially engaged in enemy identification, much in the vein of Big Brother in 1984.
The new enemy is misinformation and its siblings dis and mal, sometimes known to insiders simply as MDM. Like most enemies, they are created out of nothing. It is the cleverest ruse since, well, climate change. And pandemics.
Then we have Nina Jankowicz. She was (very briefly) to be Biden’s disinformation tsar. Even Beijing Biden came to realise that was a bad idea.
Jankowicz, 33 [in 2023], is a researcher and author of two books whose stint heading the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board lasted a few weeks last spring before the board itself was dissolved by the administration following an outcry by GOP lawmakers that it was going to censor the free speech of conservatives.
IRONIC
She was involved in a court case against a stalker. This is ironic since the whole purpose of her erstwhile venture (and Biden’s) was to stalk dissidents and anyone questioning state narratives. She wrote a book. They all do, as we shall see. Hers was called How to Lose the Information War. She now works for something called the Center for Information Resilience.
As you can begin to see, the cancellation industrial complex is truly an industry. With career pathways and career off and on ramps. Growing fast. Insidious. A cabal.
Next, Renee DiResta, another irrepressible, everywhere actor. She is of Stanford University, though no scholar. They seldom are.
They are power players who happen to be employed by universities. Generally, they bill themselves – as she does – as “cross disciplinary”.
A little like cross dressers, they are neither one thing nor the other. They ain’t polymaths, that is for sure. Like many others in this game, she is obsessive about Russia.
Russia has been an absolute boon in the USA. Its alleged malfeasance at every level has created this industry.
Who, then, is the aforementioned Barbara McQuade? A friend of Rick Stengel’s. An obvious question – who is Stengel?
He has argued for the abolition of the First Amendment. He once edited Time magazine. He is an MSNBC political analyst.
He was also former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the Obama administration.
In other words, he was Obama’s head of propaganda. It helps to know your euphemisms.
WARS
His 2019 book was called Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It.
In other words, he is, like McQuade, a key practitioner of disinformation and misinformation who writes books about the fight against disinformation and misinformation. It takes gall to be such an obvious hypocrite.
Stengel knows what he is doing. He is no stooge. He knows all about authoritarianism, but doesn’t get irony. He doesn’t see authoritarianism in his own country, caused by him.
He criticises Russia’s record on free speech while at the same time he is helping to drive its crushing in America. That, too, takes gall.
McQuade is a legal academic – let us, again, not say scholar – from the University of Michigan. She has recently written a book (published last month) called Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America.
Amazon describes it as follows: “An urgent, comprehensive explanation of the ways disinformation is impacting democracy, and practical solutions that can be pursued to strengthen the public, media and truth-based politics.
“MSNBC’s legal expert breaks down the ways disinformation has become a tool to drive voters to extremes, disempower our legal structures, and consolidate power in the hands of the few.”
Not much of a sense of irony there.
This is an example of the use of the argument (described by Benz) that populism and dissent are “threats to democracy”, where “democracy” is re-defined to mean the interests of the ruling class. They have all read their Pareto, Michels and Mosca.
Benz describes her thus: “Barb McQuade is a perfect example of university centres being turned into a ‘censorship mercenary army’. While McQuade writes books pushing Internet censorship from UMichigan, the NSF [National Science Foundation] gave UMichigan grants to create WiseDex …”
BAD GUYS
McQuade is one of the bad guys. Remember how much the Australian COVID State and useful idiots – like Greg Hunt – used grant-sniffing academics and university research centres to enforce government narratives. Hunt is now a tame academic himself.
So much for the cast of characters. What of the institutions and their projects?
There is DARPA, referred to above. There is the Atlantic Council and its DFR (Digital Forensic Research) Lab. There is Stanford’s Internet Observatory. There is Graphika, a private spy firm.
Together, all these groups have worked on something called the Election Integrity Partnership. This was the 2020 anti-Trump brigade trying desperately to pretend that January 6 was evil and important.
This is yet another case of the bad guys calling the good guys bad guys. This sums up, in a nutshell, the whole enterprise.
Note the key presence of universities – once bastions of truth-seeking and truth-telling – now they are propaganda arms of the deep State, utterly compromised while being on the make and on the take.
Not-for-profits and so-called thinktanks are two other key players in the network of control. Soft power projection institutions, Benz calls them. They are fed by, indeed, they gorge on, taxpayer funded grants.
Another player is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), an agency of the State designed (ostensibly) to ward off cyber-attacks. On and on it goes.
In other words, Graphika and friends spy on troublemakers and silence them. There are even government grants programs to train up “trusted messengers” to weed out MDM at community level.
Civic listening, they call it. All this is very spooky, as is Graphika.
Benz’s Foundation for Freedom Online sums up the program:
- The popularity of private messaging channels such as WhatsApp to share news and political opinions is a major obstacle for the censorship industry, which cannot easily monitor such channels.
- These private networks are particularly popular in non-English speaking demographics, a growing cause of concern for online censors.
- In response, top censorship organisations have turned to old-fashioned networks of citizen informants, training them to spy on and report messages in private encrypted chats through online tip-lines.
- One of the nonprofits building these tip-lines, Meedan, is backed by US$5.7m in taxpayer funds via the National Science Foundation (NSF).
- Mass censorship of private messaging platforms has occurred before, most notably when Facebook banned hundreds of thousands of pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp accounts in Brazil.
Last but not least is the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, run by a guy called Cameron Hickey, and the respectable Aspen Institute, funded by the CIA.
So much for the dramatis personae.
The tools they use are beyond impressive. There are social scientists who decide what is dangerous, and the “quants” who create the tools to shut us all up. Benz referred to WiseDex, which is an AI “censorship superweapon” developed by the University of Michigan.
It describes itself as: “WiseDex harnesses the wisdom of crowds and AI techniques to help flag more posts. The result is more comprehensive, equitable, and consistent enforcement, significantly reducing the spread of misinformation.”
Ah, the wisdom of crowds. All sounds benign. It is evil. And it is here, now. Of course, getting to define “the problem” and, where possible, to give it a scary name, is half the battle won. Machiavellian, you might say.
The redoubtable Mike Shellenberger also names names, and is an invaluable resource for dissidents and the merely curious wanting to know more.
His detailed testimony to Congress in 2022 on the censorship industrial complex makes compelling reading, and endorses much of what Benz is on about.
NAIVE
Shellenberger also unpacks the ideology of modern censorship, which he describes as “naïve, grandiose and hubristic”. Benz merely scratches the surface in the Tucker Carlson interview.
President Eisenhower, who termed what we now have “the military industrial complex” in 1961, would be spinning in his grave at the developments since he spoke those words. And the US military is at the heart of it all.
For example, they led Operation Warp Speed, Trump’s biggest mistake by a fair distance. Create enemies – bioweapons, pandemics, cyber-attacks, Russia (rinse, repeat), domestic agents of mis-information – and boldly state the need for a “military solution”.
And make yourself the centre of the “solution”. Grow resources. Demand and obtain outsized funding. Build power. Crush created enemies. Broaden your reach.
It is power politics 101. Make anything a “national security” issue, and you are home dry. DiResta calls the challenge of the censor class “an information war”. It is always a war. Like the “war on terror”. Machiavelli would be proud of them.
Australia has its own deep state, of course, and it is only now, on the clueless and malevolent watch of post-COVID, Airbus Albo, sharpening its claws. The deep state is getting deeper, right under our noses.
Albo’s eSafety Commissar, Julia Inman Grant, a darling of the Davos set, is going after Elon Musk and X.
We will soon have new laws to force social media companies into cancelling what the apparatus of the State deems to be mis-, dis- or mal-information.
Governments can bankrupt social media companies who don’t play ball and censor those of their users who challenge State narratives and government policies.
And we have our very own fact checker class, centred on “our” Australian Broadcasting Corporation” – yes, we pay for it – and its partners at RMIT University – again, we pay their salaries – to spy on what citizens who disagree with government policies like COVID lockdowns and mandates for the killer jab.
This is the RMIT FactLab and they silence those identified as troublemakers.
DISSIDENCE
If the coming censorship legislation is passed, it will be the end of online dissidence in this country.
And, of course, Australia doesn’t have a First Amendment or the rights for citizens which that brings.
The war has started. Our enemies are well ahead of the game. They continue to use every trick in the book, like the traditional strategies of lying, distractions, murder, regime change, media manipulation, blackmail and old-world censorship, skillfully augmented by the new weapons of mass deletion so wonderfully, if chillingly, outlined by Mike Benz.
They know they are in a war. Democracy has been transformed to what Benz identifies as military rule.
Using “hybrid warfare”. And, as we know truth is war’s first casualty.
So, we face military rule, and democracy is now reduced to back room deals among unelected entities who both deal the cards and then play them.
We are mere bystanders, increasingly silenced and irrelevant.PC
