Tucker Carlson broadcast on Feb. 16 an interview with Michael Benz on the “Big Brother” manipulation of social discourse by control of the internet, including efforts to censor what is labeled as “disinformation” and, even more insidious, efforts for “pre-bunking"—preventing disallowed thoughts from ever being considered.
Benz had worked to get Donald Trump elected in 2016, and then served the next four years as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Communications and Information Policy in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. His Foundation for Freedom Online, for which he serves as executive director, appears to have begun its activities in October 2022, as evidenced by the reports that it posts.
In the interview, Benz says that it was good in the 1990s for the U.S., with the team of the State Department, Defense Department, CIA, NSA and the Silicon Valley crowd, to proliferate “internet free speech,” as it would promote dissident groups and color revolutions in closed societies. “Now, the high watermark of the sort of Internet free speech moment was the Arab Spring in 2011-2012, when you had this one by one, all of the adversary governments of the Obama administration, Egypt, Tunisia, all began to be toppled in Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions.” However, in 2014, “after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected counter-coup where Crimea and the Donbass broke away…. 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,” said Benz.
The new focus became to “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.… An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into an organized political warfare outfit. Essentially infrastructure that was created, initially stationed in Germany and in central and eastern Europe … to create the ability to have the military work with the social media companies, to censor Russian propaganda” and then “domestic right wing populist groups in Europe.…”
The June 2016 Brexit, along with general worker discontent with immigration, made it so that the military-financial groupings could no longer control elections. “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.… Now the entire rules-based international order would collapse unless the military took control over media.… The EU would come apart, so NATO would be killed without a single bullet 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, all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after World War II would collapse.”
