Populism and the Propaganda Machine Opposing it
Segment # 106
I was reading an article a few days ago that mentioned Mike Pence was involved in an organization that was committing 20 million dollars to combating “populism” in the next ten months. This certainly appeared to be a not too veiled threat against his former boss Donald Trump. It appears that this movement is far more than a narrow vendetta. More likely it ties in with the globalist international cabal with disparate but compatible agendas. It unites the United Nations, European governments, Davos, big Tech, big Pharma, the climate change movement and many others. The bottom line is simply control and marginalizing freedom of choice and informed consent for anything. Most people are not taking this very seriously which will make the challenge of protecting our rights a formidable challenge. The full transcript is provided below for Parts 1 and 2. This s long but it is a pretty good outline how we could lose our freedoms in the future.
Mike Benz (Part 1): The West’s Burgeoning Censorship Industry and the Government Funds Pouring In–From DHS to DARPA to National Science Foundation
Views 55.9K •
Feb-02-2023
“Whoever can control the Department of Dirty Tricks is able to use it to remove all opposition,” says Mike Benz.
He is the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a former State Department diplomat under the Trump administration.
The Twitter Files were just the tip of the iceberg, says Benz, who has been tracking the rise of the West’s censorship industry for years.
“22 million tweets were categorized as misinformation for purposes of takedowns or throttling through [the Election Integrity Partnership],” Benz said.
“It wasn’t just government individual takedown requests. It was government pressure … to create whole new categories of things to censor and then arming them with the artificial intelligence to then automatically scan and ban the new thought violations.”
In this comprehensive two-part interview, Benz breaks down the major players in today’s censorship regime and how tactics once used abroad were deployed to target Americans and so-called election “delegitimization” or COVID “misinformation” online.
“Graphika was immediately working with NATO’s essentially psychological warfare branch—the Hybrid Center of Excellence—in January 2020 … They had this sophisticated typography of what right-wing media was saying, what left-wing media was saying, what was being shared, the nodes and links between nodes of all the different narrative discourses on social media.”
“They will have a revolving door at the professional level. That is, people who are in government roles, for example, in Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation at DHS, will get their next jobs at the German Marshall Fund or the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab … It is a career path. It is a path to power,” Benz says.
For your files in the vent thi is taken down.. here is the full tyrasncript of the interview..
Jan Jekielek:
Mike Benz, it’s such a pleasure to have you on “American Thought Leaders”.
Mike Benz:
Thanks for having me.
Mr. Jekielek:
Mike, in our conversations, you told me that you have a mission of fostering a free and open internet. Where are we at now? You’re basically saying that this is not the case here.
Mr. Benz:
We’re very far removed from the days of what I consider to be the golden age of the internet between 2006 and 2016, when you had this combination of a mature social media ecosystem where people could share information, basically a pure information meritocracy. After that, the political turbulence of the events of 2016, instituted a revenge of the gatekeepers, an increasingly, incrementally more regimented system of censorship that we are now in the process of negotiating our opposition to.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’re saying that something profound happened in 2016 that changed the ecosystem dramatically. You said it was political turbulence, but what actually happened? How did the system change?
Mr. Benz:
There were two enormous and unexpected political events that year. In June 2016, you had Brexit. Brexit at the time was not just a small isolated domestic issue within the United Kingdom, it was viewed as an existential threat to the integrity of the European Union. Because at the time there was a fear that France would then go through Frexit with Marine Le Pen’s movement. Italy would go through Italexit with Matteo Salvini’s movement. You would have Grexit in Greece, and Spexit in Spain. The EU would come undone, and NATO would fall apart. The entire rules-based international order would collapse if something urgent wasn’t done about it.
And then, in quick succession, you had a candidate who at the time was an almost 20 to one underdog in the New York Times. On the morning of the 2016 election, you had Trump at about 5 per cent and Hillary Clinton 90 per cent, and a little bit left for the stragglers. But basically, it was this idea that this couldn’t happen, and yet it did. And it seemed like everything was going to fall apart with the rules-based international order unless the information ecosystem was radically and permanently altered. Because both of these events were viewed as being internet elections, if you will.
Social media was the reason that Nigel Farage developed the popularity of the Brexit movement. It was through his viral YouTube speeches to the European Parliament. It was the domination of Twitter hashtags and Facebook groups that were responsible for Donald Trump’s popularity at the base level. So, you had an organized effort to contain populism by containing the means through which populists could distribute their messaging and mobilize politically.
Mr. Jekielek:
Populist seems like a catchall term. Is it actually populists that we’re talking about?
Mr. Benz:
That’s their terminology. It’s fair to use because it captures the idea that base level opposition to elite institutions can come from both the Right and the Left. It’s not necessarily a Right-wing or a Left-wing thing. Left-wing populists like Bernie Sanders in the U.S. or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK were targeted with equal ferocity. It’s just that they didn’t come as close to power as Trump and the Brexit movement did.
Mr. Jekielek:
Why don’t we just sketch out where we are today? You describe it as a whole of society effort, which just sounds massive and unbelievable. You’re saying that a lot of people are beginning to understand what this is. They might know, “Oh, the Twitter files have exposed a lot of censorship.” They might have themselves experienced something, but they can’t necessarily see the whole picture. The whole of society, what does that mean?
Mr. Benz:
That’s actually the terminology of basically every mainstream censorship industry professional.
Audio:
Addressing disinformation requires a whole of society approach.
This information is not going to be fixed by governments acting alone. I think we’ve seen that a whole of society effort is really key to the solution.
This is a whole of society challenge.
A whole of society approach. This is a whole of society problem.
Mr. Benz:
This is something that is now such a well-worn phrase within the censorship industry, that they often apologize at conferences for using the term, because it’s so well worn at this point. What it means is four categories of institutions in society all working together towards the common goal of censorship. You’ve got government, the private sector, civil society, and then news media and fact checking. So, let’s break down these four elements.
You’ve got DHS, FBI, DOD, the State Department, the National Science Foundation, the CIA, and National Endowment for Democracy. On issue-specific issues like Covid censorship, you’ve got HHS, NIH, CDC, and NIAID, all of these playing various roles at the government level.
Then, you’ve got the private sector, and you’ve got the tech platforms where the censorship actually occurs. That is where the button gets pressed, so to speak, or where the algorithms play out. You’ve also got private sector censorship technology development, which is the private companies whose job is to create machine learning and artificial intelligence to incorporate the training data to create the tools that are used for the active censorship.
And then, you’ve got corporate social responsibility, the CSR money that pours into it from the private sector. In fact, there’s a whole new impact investing angle, VCs investing in censorship companies, because there’s such a gold rush into this field. On the civil society side, you’ve got universities, NGOs, activists, nonprofits and foundations.
And then finally, at the news media and fact checking level, you’ve got the politically like-minded within the media who are propped up by the government, by the private sector, and by the civil society so that they can manage public narratives about various issues and can amplify pressure for censorship, by creating negative press on the tech companies, for example. You’ve got the fact checking conglomerates within those who flag the individual posts for the tech companies to manage. So, all four of those in concert have all been fused into basically the nucleus of a single atom.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s hard to conceive how all of this works.
Mr. Benz:
When they have disinformation conferences, there will be representatives from all four institutions there. They will negotiate what their own preferences and needs are, and they will talk with each other about doing favors for favors. They will work out common terminologies, and common problems that they’re having.
They will have a revolving door at the professional level. People who are in government roles in misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation at DHS will get their next jobs at the German Marshall Fund, at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, or at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Stanford University has a fellowship there.
It is a career path; it is a path to power. We’re now going on essentially year five or six of this industry being created, so it’s reaching a stage of maturity, as it would for a technology space or an energy space. It’s becoming much more seamless as these roles become more interchangeable.
Mr. Jekielek:
What is it that unites these people, is it ideology?
Mr. Benz:
Different people are in it for different reasons. What I find most fascinating is the young people. It’s my contention that censorship is the fastest growing major on college campuses for ambitious young people who want jobs in Washington DC, or in Silicon Valley. Often, a top career path was you would go to Georgetown, you would major in international relations, and you would aspire to get a job on the Hill, and then work your way up, and/or maybe you'd start in finance and then transition over.
What has happened with the rise of the censorship industry, basically they don’t call it that, you don’t get your degree in censorship, you'll get it in something like computational data science, advanced linguistics, the internet research lab, or the media lab. There are so many different ways to launder the concept, but essentially what they’re doing day-to-day in these majors and in these PhDs is they are fusing the social sciences with the computer sciences to help both Silicon Valley and big government control public discourse and control the political momentum of various ideas.
This puts young people right at the nexus of Google, Facebook, Washington DC, and Congress. So, you can shortcut making a tiny salary at the Hill out of Georgetown. You can take that pedigree into long term by going directly over to Google’s content moderation team or public policy team and working directly with Congress there, or essentially working directly with congressional cutouts. It is a path to power that is stunning in both the salaries these folks make and in how glitzy it is.
You really do get the cocktail party invitations, you really do get access to a beautiful life, and you get impact. You’re not a sort of desk jockey who’s correcting typos for the first five years of your career, you’re in the action. So, I think it’s very exciting for people, and I think they become very intoxicated with the power, the god-like power, if you will, that total censorship capacity gives you.
Mr. Jekielek:
As I’m listening to you speak, I’m still having trouble imagining how in 2016 this whole industry suddenly launches or is created. You’re saying it’s not out of nothing. You’re saying it’s maturing at this time, and it happened without most people being entirely aware, even though they were aware that there was more censorship, especially if they were targeted, of course. But you never imagined it would be something so grand as what you’re portraying here.
Mr. Benz:
These things were not on the front page of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. You pick it up in strange vibrations. For me, I came to it through the artificial intelligence space. I was an avid chess player as a kid, and I lived through that period when computers overtook humans in the capacity to play chess well.
I remember all the naysayers saying, “Chess computers will never be able to beat Garry Kasparov,” or “There will always be this ability to have the purity of the human spirit pierce through the dead soul of a chess computer.” And then, I remember the existential dread that came over the chess community when Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, and it was like humans would never be able to compete against computers again. It was like this existential question, “What do we do in a world where you’ve got no hope?”
I remember in late 2016, when I first came across literature around the deployment of artificial intelligence for purposes of content moderation, it gripped me. I became fixated at the cognitive level on the existential threat that this posed. Every time I would try to have conversations with folks about it, both socially and politically, nobody took the concern seriously and laughed it off, in a very similar way that people did in 1996 before the Garry Kasparov match.
And so, for me, none of what’s happened has been a surprise to me. I only wish that folks had taken the issue much more seriously before the infrastructure became consolidated. Because now, it’s like trying to stop a cancer once it has already metastasized into the brain and the lungs, it’s much harder to do. It’s still essential to do, and that’s what I consider to be my purpose.
Mr. Jekielek:
What is it that you saw exactly? What did you realize that no one else realized?
Mr. Benz:
The power of control over words was very similar to the power of control over chess pieces. The way chess computers work for algorithms is they condense everything into a number system, so that you can grade every aspect of a chess position on a number scale to spit out a clean number that tells you who’s winning by and by how much. For example, if the computer says the position is -0.5, it means that the computer assesses the person who’s playing the black pieces to be up by approximately half of a pawn.
When I started looking into what was being done with artificial intelligence and natural language processing and machine learning training models that were being developed, they were using a very similar system to map linguistically what was happening in the human language on social media. If someone was talking about a Trump policy, you could map the linguistic topography of that narrative and you could grade all the different words and slogans and memes and concepts into essentially what looked like a chess computer readout for whether you want to play knight to F3 or bishop to C5.
The power this gives you is to be able to automatically trip varying levels of interventions, as they call it, which means censoring things. If the threshold goes above 1.5, this thing just gets banned. If it’s between 1 and 1.5, we’re going to shadow ban it. If it’s between .5 and 1, we’re going to just affix a fact checking thing to it. It gives you perfect control over the ability to determine the popularity of a narrative.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let me talk about the Twitter files. Okay, we’ve known about censorship for a while. At the Epoch Times, we’ve experienced hit pieces, and the deplatforming and demonetization associated with such hit pieces. This is some of what we’ve been talking about here. But what the Twitter files revealed to me was that there is censorship happening.
The thing that really hit me at one point as we were looking at these dumps is there is the ability to shape the perceptions of a whole significant portion of society by just excluding information. This is what you’re making me think of right now as you describe this chess analogy. But you say that the Twitter files are just kind of the tip of the iceberg?
Mr. Benz:
A very tiny tip of it. The fact is, my foundation, the Foundation for Freedom Online, had already covered a lot of the things that ended up coming out in the Twitter files. A lot of this was available just by listening to these folks involved in their own public meetings. A lot of these things were done on YouTube, or were added as Facebook videos, or were on their own websites. What the Twitter files revealed was basically the presence of censorship operatives at virtually every national security-related institution in the U.S. government, as well as in the intelligence and public health spheres.
There were Twitter files for the FBI, for the DHS, for the DOD, and for the State Department. I saw that at the State Department myself, everything from funding censorship-themed video games to promoting censorship of populist groups around the world, often with a conscious view of it having a boomerang effect on limiting the popularity of populist groups in the U.S. What the Twitter files tended to focus on, even in their most explosive cases, were one-off requests for censorship takedowns.
For example, the FBI would send a message to the Twitter Trust and Safety Team saying, “Here’s a batch of six or seven tweets that we don’t like, and we want you to take down. They violate your terms of service, so you may want to take them down.” That only captures the tiniest fraction of censorship that was actually done in each of the major geopolitical events that we’ve experienced in the past few years.
Look at these six or seven takedowns in the context of something like the Election Integrity Partnership [EIP], which had a formal partnership with the Department of Homeland Security to operate as their formerly designated disinformation flagger. 22 million tweets were categorized as misinformation for purposes of takedowns or throttling through the EIP.
Compare that to the six or seven tweets highlighted in a Twitter files dump. These are six or seven orders of magnitude, it’s not even the same ballpark. This is because it wasn’t just government individual takedown requests, it was government pressure and coordination with the changing of the policies in the private sector themselves to actually coerce the tech companies to create whole new categories of things to censor, and then arming them with the artificial intelligence to then automatically scan and ban the new thought violations that they themselves had helped install. So, they did a one-two punch behind the scenes that the Twitter files still have not even come close to touching.
Mr. Jekielek:
How are you cataloging all this? Where are you discovering all this, and the evidence of this happening?
Mr. Benz:
What we just covered was stated very frankly and directly by an individual named Alex Stamos, who was the head of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the anchor entity of the Election Integrity Partnership.
Speaker One:
My suggestion is if people wanted to get the platforms to do stuff, first you got to push for written policies that are specific and that give you predictability. And so, this is something we started in the summer in August, is as Kate talked about, Carly Miller led a team from all four institutions to look at the detailed policies of the big platforms and to measure them against situations that we expected to happen. Now, we’re not going to take credit for all the changes they made, but we had to update this thing like eight or nine times, right? And so, like putting these people in a grid to say, “You’re not handling this, you’re not handling this, not handling this,” creates a lot of pressure inside of the companies and forces them to kind of grapple with these issues because you want specific policies that you can hold them accountable for. The second is when you report stuff to them, report how it’s violating those written policies, right? So, there’s two steps here, get good policies and then say, “This is how it’s violating it.” We will have our statistics, right? But I think we were pretty effective in getting them to act on things that they hadn’t act on it before.
Mr. Benz:
The November 9th, 2022 report has about 20 to 25 embedded videos of censorship professionals confessing what they did. What I just cited here is how EIP, using DHS’s clout and pressure on the backend, coerced the tech companies to create a new category of censorship called delegitimization, which was anything in the 2020 election that delegitimized public faith or confidence in mail-in ballots, early voting drop boxes, or ballot tabulation issues on election day. 100 per cent of their targets were Trump voters and Right-wing populist groups.
It was the tech companies that didn’t want to do these policies initially, but they were coerced by EIP and EIP’s friends in the legislature; Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Mark Warner, Adam Schiff, and this whole intelligence committee, foreign affairs committee faction, as well as from others in the DNC to put pressure on the tech companies to create the censorship category.
And then, he laid out in that video the two-step process, which is one; you get them to change the policies by putting them in the grid and threatening and then creating negative news media. And then two; you engage in this mass documentation and assist with the actual development of the capturing of all the violations of the new policies you just got put in. Now, the reason they do all these confessions on video is because you have to understand censorship is not just an industry, it is a mercenary business.
Everyone in the censorship industry is competing for the same pool of government grant funds and donor dollars. It is a competitive industry at this point, we’re not in 2018, 2019 anymore. It is a mature industry with many players in it. You need to stand out. You need to prove what a good mercenary you are, what a good censor you are, how effective you are at silencing the opposition to the donors and the grant organizations.
You need to brag about it on video, so that you are more qualified than your opposition and your competitors at getting more government grants. In fact, right after Alex Stamos made this confession, not just on video, but in a 292-page public report, he, and the lab that he partnered with, got a $3 million government grant from the Biden administration. They became government-funded for the first time ever right after he made that confession.
Mr. Jekielek:
So many things are coming out of what you just said. But the first one is that this is now actually a competitive market for censorship that you’re talking about.
Mr. Benz:
It is an industry. It is a business subsidized by the federal government and by large entrenched commercial and political interests who all have varying investment in neutralizing opposition to their concerns, which can be done through censorship. Because social media is the great equalizer when it comes to creating social and political momentum.
Mr. Jekielek:
What is really interesting is what you’re describing. You’re talking about it in the context of election integrity, you used that term. It also applies directly when it comes to Covid misinformation, similarly. Is it the exact same tools that are essentially being used in the same way?
Mr. Benz:
Actually, it’s funny you say that, because we just covered the Election Integrity Partnership, EIP. It’s the entity that DHS formerly partnered with as their disinformation flagger. When the 2020 election ended, they had censored their 22 million tweets. They had 120 staffers censoring the Trump supporters for the 2020 election for DHS. There was no more election cycle until 2022, when they came back and partnered with DHS again for the midterms.
But in between then, they folded up briefly and then rebranded and renamed themselves as a new entity consisting of the same censorship entities. But instead of calling themselves EIP, they called themselves VP, the Virality Project. They did the exact same system of coordinating the government, the civil society, the private sector, and the news media and fact checking organizations.
Instead of doing election censorship, they did Covid censorship, but they did it with the exact same ticketing system. They had the exact same relationships with Facebook, with Google, with YouTube, with Twitter, with TikTok, with Reddit, and with the 15 different platforms they monitored. They had the same system of chopping conceptual opposition, which was in the election context, opposition to mail-in ballots and drop boxes and ballet tabulation. It then became censoring opposition to Covid origins, to vaccine efficacy, to mask mandates, or to narratives about Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci.
In fact, in their own after-action report, they detailed how they micro-targeted 66 distinct narratives about Covid and chopped all of them up into all of the different component claims. Then, they basically helped advise on the artificial intelligence censorship, helped the reporting and flagging, and coordinated the censorship army that was trained on censoring Covid. So, it was a seamless transition from election censorship to Covid censorship.
Mr. Jekielek:
So, basically, all you need to do this is to know what the correct view is. Is this what you’re telling me? And then, you just basically engage the system, and you’re good to go?
Mr. Benz:
It’s an evolutionary process as well. One of the things that was onboarded several years ago into the censorship industry was this concept of subject matter experts on a narrative-by-narrative basis who can help do the linguistic mapping and monitoring the rise of new memes, and of new ways of talking about an issue, and then continually fold that into the censorship paradigm that you’ve established.
I do want to quickly say though, that I highlighted EIP turning into VP for Covid censorship after the 2020 election. But Covid started at the end of 2019, and actually the Covid censorship consortium began immediately, I mean really immediately.
For example, Graphika is one of the four component entities of the EIP censorship consortium that DHS partnered with. Graphika is essentially a U.S. Department of Defense-funded censorship consortium. They were initially funded to help do social media counterinsurgency work effectively in conflict zones for the U.S. military. Then, they were redeployed domestically both on Covid censorship and political censorship. Graphika was deployed to monitor social media discourse about Covid and Covid origins, Covid conspiracies, or Covid sorts of issues.
In January 2020, they began their first formal domestic campaign. COVID-19 didn’t even have the name COVID-19. In January 2020, it was still called Coronavirus at the time. And yet, Graphika was immediately working with NATO’s psychological warfare branch, the Hybrid CoE, Hybrid Center of Excellence in January 2020. Immediately, they were doing social media network graphs on Right-wing social media, and they did this along political lines.
They had this sophisticated topography of what Right-wing media was saying, what Left-wing media was saying, about what was being shared, the nodes and links between nodes of all the different narrative discourses on social media for the purpose of handing that to the government to say, “Here’s what people are saying, what should we do to stop it?” So, the censorship set in right away.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’re reminding me of something I read that I wanted to get you to comment on, which is the foreign to domestic disinformation switcheroo. It sounds like you’re touching on something about this, so what is that? I think it’s very important to this whole picture.
Mr. Benz:
This is so important for understanding the history and chronology of how we got here, and it’s something that many commentators to the Twitter files are discovering for the first time now. Matt Taibbi has spilled a lot of ink in the past several weeks talking about how shocking it is, the Russian disinformation predicate, how central that was in retrospect, as he’s been writing about the normalization of domestic censorship. This is something I’ve been screaming about for five years now.
What happened was before 2016, the idea of domestic censorship in the U.S. was not just rare, isolated, and frowned upon—it was a sacred existential attack on everything American. Censorship was the one thing that really distinguished at the governmental and at the social contract level the United States of America from every other country on the face of the planet. No other Western democracies have a First Amendment.
We look at liberal democracies like Canada or the United Kingdom as being just like America in the Western tradition of governmental democracies. But what makes America distinct is that we have total free speech in this country, at least that’s what it was billed as. Now, we are going directly from that into this system of mass domestic censorship, where if you challenge mail-in ballots in a Twitter post on a Thursday night, the Department of Homeland Security has an entire division sitting there who when they see your tweet will categorize you as conducting a cyberattack on U.S. critical infrastructure, because you’ve undermined public faith in the elections.
This is something that needed an intermediary step, and that intermediary step was the foreign predicate. Now, this is something that the U.S. foreign policy establishment has been doing since time immemorial, but essentially since the 1940s, when the national security state was established and consolidated with the 1947 National Security Act. The American foreign policy establishment basically came to a consensus opinion that if we want the 20th century to be the American century, we’re going to need a Department of Dirty Tricks. We’re going to need to play rougher on the world stage than we’ve been used to.
We will still have constitutional protections for Americans, we‘ll still have free speech in America, and we’ll still have due process in America. But we’re going to empower our foreign intelligence in our foreign influence capacities with much more ruthless and dirty capacities than we have at home. This is because it’s a tough world out there. The Bolsheviks are going to do it if we don’t do it. There is this whole new order coming out of World War II that is going to need some tough love to consolidate.
Even in the 1960s, when there were opposition movements to the bipartisan consensus on several things, including on war and foreign policy, the counterintelligence division at the FBI often deployed this Department of Dirty Tricks to neutralize anti-war protestors, or some of the more stringent elements of the civil rights protest. Martin Luther King, for example, was targeted by the FBI formally because of his connection to Stanley Levison, who had these affiliations with communism.
And so, you could wiretap Martin Luther King’s phone, you could have COINTELPRO [Counterintelligence Program] write nasty telegrams, and death threat letters, because there was a foreign predicate. If you simply conflated the domestic with the foreign, then it wasn’t really the classical type of deprivation of due process, this is just being really aggressive about countering Russian influence.
So, it’s a way of laundering, of bringing the Department of Dirty Tricks that’s supposed to stay overseas and bringing it home. If you think of it as a war between two political factions, it’s a sneak attack by bringing in powers that aren’t supposed to be there for this game. They did that in the censorship industry through the creation of a Russian boogeyman that was said to have hacked the 2016 election, that was said to have interfered on U.S. social media, that was said to have created these sophisticated bot farms and troll farms and Facebook pages and this enormous network tapestry that magically disappeared right before the 2020 election.
Somehow, in 2016, it was said to be enormous. Of course, all the digital forensics were a total hoax. They were done by the same disinformation experts as Graphika and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab that ended up becoming massively discredited in subsequent years when they completely made up results. They called real people Russian bots, and those people went on TV and read their name, rank, and serial number.
It was a hoax from the start, but it was a useful one, because it allowed the handoff of the censorship infrastructure on the foreign side to be grafted on to the domestic side. We’ve talked about the Department of Homeland Security and how it became this hub within the U.S. federal government for coordinating whole society censorship.
At the time, before the Biden administration and for the 2020 election, the only thing that existed at the time to partner with EIP to outsource all this censorship, to coordinate the domestic censorship of the U.S. election in 2020, was technically a group within DHS called the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force.
The Countering Foreign Influence Task Force was technically the coordinating wing for censorship of you, and of people in Ohio talking about how it was a little weird that early voting drop boxes were open for six weeks before an election, and you can imagine what might go wrong with that. In the very first week Biden took office, this was in January 2021 before the calendar even hit the word February, one of the first courses of action that Biden’s DHS did was they revamped the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force with the same personnel and the same staffers. They simply went from countering foreign influence to “MDM,” misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation as a general catchall, with no distinction between foreign and domestic. That way it could paper over the fact that they weren’t supposed to be operating on domestic soil.
Mr. Jekielek:
As you’re describing all this, readers of The Epoch Times and viewers of this program just keep thinking Russiagate, Russiagate, Russiagate. Underpinning Russiagate was this idea that there were Russians who had hacked the election. In fact, there’s still Americans that believe that Russians hacked the 2016 election. And then, there was the whole weaponization of the Pfizer warrants, which is what you’re alluding to and what you’re speaking about. Perhaps this is Matt Taibbi’s realization in the last few weeks—no one imagined that the whole system could be somehow engaged in all of this at the same time. Does this make sense? It’s still straining credulity that everyone, all these different institutions are working in lockstep.
Mr. Benz:
Unfortunately, real people with real names at real meetings were very cognizant of this. In fact, it’s my belief based on compelling evidence that I’ve assembled that this is actually very conscious from the very start. Take for example, in early 2017, you had the foreign policy establishment trying to reconcile the fact that an essentially uniparty apparatus that had existed from Truman until Trump on foreign policy. It had this shared left-hand, right-hand understanding that there would not be any sort of partisan disagreement on foreign policy grounds.
We may disagree on whether it should be high taxes or low taxes, we may disagree on something like pro-life or pro-choice, or civil rights, but when it comes to what are we going to do about Venezuela, what are we going to do about Southeast Asia, there’s not going to be any sort of intense existential Right or Left distinction. Because that’s what keeps Washington unified, and part of that is because of the commercial interest around that.
But when populism emerged and became powered by social media, it threatened the very bedrock of those institutions, because now domestic manufacturing concerns may actually impede the political will of these multilateral institutions that form the basis of the consensus architecture. This is what happened when they were negotiating the response to the threat of social media in the very beginning.
I'll give an example. Ambassador Daniel Fried is one example of this. Now, I don’t know Ambassador Fried, I assume he’s a very nice person in his personal life. He has a certain grace with which he conducts diplomacy, but he was part of the architecture of the censorship industry’s development on this Russiagate issue in a way that I find to be profoundly disturbing.
Ambassador Fried was a 40-year diplomat at the U.S. State Department. He’s on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. In February 2017, he left the State Department in order to take his talents for coordinating government responses to sanctions. He was the sanctions coordinator for the Obama administration after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. After the Crimea referendum, he did the roadshow in Europe to get all the different NATO countries to pass what were for themselves painful sanctions on Russia over the Crimea annexation.
A lot of European countries didn’t want to do these sanctions, because of the economic impact it would have on their own populations. But Ambassador Fried took his State Department and network clout to put pressure on Europe to do sanctions on Russia for purposes of this Crimea response. He then turned around after the 2016 election and took those same connections, those same power networks and organized all these disinformation conferences, these whole of society meetings and mobilizations. The same thing that he did on sanctions coordination, he did on censorship coordination.
He was a part of this network that helped pressure and contort the European regulatory climate to passing new censorship laws. Like, for example, Germany’s NetzDG [Network Enforcement Act] passed in August 2017. Germany is the industrial powerhouse of Europe and when they passed NetzDG, it compelled Facebook and YouTube to adopt artificial intelligence censorship techniques in order to comply with $54 million fines for leaving various kinds of content on their platforms that violated this new German law.
And so now, Facebook and YouTube had to adopt all this new AI that had an immediate impact on that AI being redirected inward in the U.S. context, and in the UK context to counteract Brexit support. Now, Ambassador Fried was talking openly about this at his own disinformation conferences with European regulators, with national security officials, and with extremely important and influential people. At the time they were saying, “Ambassador Fried, that sounds like a great idea, but it’s just not enough. The Russians are only one component of these populists. They’ve taken on a life of their own, and they seem to have their own independent interests.” Ambassador Fried is in the room telling them, “Listen, I understand, I understand. But in America, we can’t just go from zero to one, we have to boil the frog.”
Speaker Two:
As an old diplomat, the thing to do is to set up an informal mechanism, maybe formal, but start informally between the U.S., the EU key shareholders and bringing in the civil society. And then use that to have a conversation with the social media companies. Like we’ve got a lot of leverage, we can use it, and they will adjust, their culture is malleable. They will respond to the incentive structure that we set up if we do our job.
Mr. Benz:
If you do your thing in Europe, it will help the Trans-Atlantic Alliance merge towards a common set of norms and values with respect to social media speech. And in the creation of this counterintelligence infrastructure, it will naturally gravitate, as the Mueller investigation is ongoing, as pro-Trump groups are seen more and more as an arm of Russians themselves, it will be easier to simply consolidate those two concepts into one: Trump, Russia.
If you simply create a censorship infrastructure for Russia, as Trump gets merged into Trump, Russia, the two become one and the same. And then suddenly, no one is crying tears if a suspected Russian propagandist who happens to be some 17-year-old high school kid in Wisconsin who has an opinion about the border wall, when they get taken down as part of a 10,000-person roundup of suspected Russians, no one is going to cry tears, because at least you’re aggressively dealing with a national security threat. So, they were aware of this. This is February 2017; this is right at the outset. We should be far past the spotter stage at this point.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Part 2 Mike Benz (Part 2): How the ‘Department of Dirty Tricks’ Turned on Americans
Previously, in part one of my interview with Mike Benz, he explained the existence of a “whole-of-society” censorship industry in the West. Benz has been tracking the rise of censorship for years as executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a former State Department diplomat.
Now in part two, Benz explains how tools originally developed to promote regime change were deployed against Americans.
“What you are doing in a regime-change operation is you are operationalizing huge masses of an indigenous or domestic population in order to create a ground-up overthrow of a sitting government. And in order to do that, you need to control the media infrastructure, you need to control the narratives that people believe. … What was new is that in 2016, this began coming home,” Benz says.
Changes in America also corresponded with changes in the broader Western world, Benz says. “There became a whole new military doctrine—it’s not a new concept, [but] I think it was given a new name—called hybrid warfare. NATO declared a new doctrine called ‘from tanks to tweets.’”
And a whole new lexicon emerged to describe the new censorship regime, Benz says, from “digital resilience” to “media literacy” to “moderation” and “intervention.”
“Whoever can control the Department of Dirty Tricks is able to use it to remove all opposition,” Benz says.
Missed part one? You can watch it here.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
So, a couple of quick thoughts. Number one, Russia essentially became a code word for Trump. The second thing, this was all being done in the name of protecting democracy, if I recall. This is how it’s all being explained.
Mike Benz:
Right. Democracy is a fascinating word, both historically and in the context of the development of the censorship industry. Obviously, the thing that makes democracy the underpinning of the American governance system is this idea that government exists to serve the people. It’s legitimized and it’s consent by the governed. That is, the government exists because the governed people consent to it, and it is their consensus that they want the government to do what it’s doing that way. That’s how we know that the government is serving us, rather than we are serving an overlord government.
Democracy has been a rallying cry for the U.S. foreign policy establishment to use the Department of Dirty Tricks, if you will, for purposes of regime change and regime stabilization as a matter of foreign policy around the world, and as part of the management of the American world empire. By the way, I should say, as somebody who’s had a career in the foreign policy establishment, I do not have a problem with that normatively. There are reasonable opinions on both sides about the necessity of regime change or counterinsurgency in various regions. I don’t go there.
My concern is over censorship and digital freedom and when the concept of using democracy as a pretext for regime change comes home and is used as part of a pretext for the regime change of a U.S. president on democracy grounds and using the same toolkit of the regime change context where control over media is absolutely essential. Because what you are doing in a regime change operation is you are operationalizing huge masses of an indigenous or domestic population in order to create a ground up overthrow of a sitting government.
And to do that, you need to control the media infrastructure. You need to control the narratives that people believe, because you need them to believe that their government is evil or illegitimate or tyrannical, in order for them to overthrow that government. In that context, when there’s a democracy threat, it creates a predicate for controlling the media in that territory. There are various ways that the U.S. State Department and various assets can be deployed on the media side and in the foreign context.
What was new is that in 2016, this began coming home. This foreign to domestic switcheroo was done in the media context through several mechanisms, by the creation and the government funding of these professional censorship groups that were essentially cutouts of the U.S. State Department, or the U.S. Defense Department, or DHS. The so-called threat to democracy from social media fueling populism was a common slogan by which all the different stakeholders in the foreign policy establishment could ban together to say, “There’s a common threat we all face, whether we’re Democrats associated with the National Democratic Institute or Republicans associated with foreign policy links like the International Republican Institute. We’re not threatened by liberalism or conservatism, because that’s a partisan thing.”
“But if we’re commonly threatened by democracy, we can use that as our common rallying point for us all to pour those resources in together.” Though what happened was they needed to create this new definition of democracy to justify censoring in the name of democracy. Essentially how they did that was by defining democracy as not being a consensus of individuals, and reflected by how people vote, but rather by defining it as a consensus of institutions. That is, what institutions prefer.
This is a conceptual sleight of hand that is extremely dirty if you think about it at any level of depth. And by the way, you‘ll see this in strange places the moment you start looking for it. You’ll see, even early on in 2017, 2018, you had military and intelligence and foreign policy folks writing op-eds that there need to be more guardrails on even who you can make eligible to become president. There should be a 15-person panel comprised of senior military and intelligence folks who vet a person before they can even go through the process of being nominated for president.
It was this idea that democracy should not be left up to the masses of people. There should be guardrails that make sure that the national security and the foreign affairs wings of the foreign policy establishment can basically pick the pool of people that the masses can have a say on. That is, the institutions get the first cut, and then the masses get the remnants. This was the redefinition of what democracy means to the foreign policy establishment.
The moment you understand that’s how they see things, you can see how they say that social media freedom is a threat to democracy. Because to them it’s not a democracy of what 10,000 people in Wisconsin think. It’s what Harvard and MIT and the Council of Foreign Relations and the Atlanta Council and NATO and the World Economic Forum, and the Department of Homeland Security—it’s what these institutions collectively prefer. And so, threats to the institutional consensus at the individual level are a threat to democracy. This was the predicate by which you had the national security state descend on social media.
Mr. Jekielek:
I can’t help but think that this all started happening during the Trump administration, which you eventually became part of.
Mr. Benz:
It did start a little bit before that. I would argue that the infrastructure for the foreign to domestic switcheroo technically started, if you were to pick a clean start point, I would describe it as being right after the Crimean annexation vote in early 2014. That was when the Obama administration’s State Department and Defense Department and the foreign policy establishment decided that internet free speech was a serious problem in a foreign context. That is, hearts and minds in an internet free speech context could decide to vote against American interests.
Up until that point, internet freedom had always been something strongly backed by the U.S. government, because it was so instrumental in having low-cost regime change. You simply flood a zone with hashtags and Facebook groups and influencers that have a relationship with the U.S. State Department, and then you’re able to have an instant revolution like the Arab Spring. But what happened in 2014 is that backfired in some respects, and that created a whole new military doctrine.
It’s not a new concept, but it was given a new name called hybrid warfare. NATO declared a new doctrine called “From Tanks to Tweets,” saying NATO is no longer about tanks in traditional warfare. It’s about political control over the covert NATO countries. And so, our new remit, and in fact right after the Brexit vote in June 2016, the very month after, in July 2016, at the Warsaw Conference, NATO essentially created an addendum to now engage in hybrid warfare as one of their core capacities. And it was these hybrid war centers that actually became the initial censorship industry professionals.
For example, the Atlanta Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab was one of the four entities that DHS partnered with to censor your opinions about the 2020 election. They got their start in that interstitial period between 2014 and 2016, when they were doing early censorship work for NATO as part of the hybrid warfare doctrine. The problem was, in 2016, when Brexit and the Trump election happened, that infrastructure already had two or three years of prior development, and it simply moved westward to Britain and to the U.S. homeland.
Now, the Trump administration was not aware of this. And I considered that to be my sacred duty during the Trump administration when I was at the White House. I was doing my morning pilgrimage through the various offices trying to tell people. I remember going over to the budget office and telling the budget folks, “We have to stop the government grants of all these different institutions that are censoring an in-process election.
We pulled up the grant pages and everyone said, “Hey, there’s no grants for censorship here. What are you talking about?” I said, “No, look, they’re calling it media literacy and digital resilience.” You have to be able to understand censorspeak to know how they laundered all of this, because they know what they’re doing is dirty. They know that they can’t call it what it is. Part of the function of the academic underpinnings is what Stanford and MIT and Berkeley’s Data Lab does. It is to create a new dictionary of terms that can be used. It’s not censorship.
First, it was content moderation. Now, they use a new term called intervention, this idea that we’re actually not censoring what you’re saying, we’re intervening to prevent you from hurting yourself with what you might say. Media literacy is a way of saying, “We’re not censoring you. We’re simply getting you to be literate about what kinds of media you have access to.”
For example, if you read CNN” or The New York Times, you’re media literate. If you read, Breitbart or watch Fox News, you are media illiterate. They say, “As part of our media literacy programs, we’re going to help social media companies contextualize low information integrity media literacy threats,” like Tucker Carlson’s show having normal distribution access on Twitter. It’s all done through a laundering apparatus, which by the way is the bread and butter of how foreign policy operations work.
When the CIA does an operation in Nicaragua, they don’t come out and say, “Hello, we’re a foreign intelligence service.” The laundering process is when there’s the use of front companies, there’s the use of creative terminology, and when there’s a whole branding and media effort. These are professionals doing a professional job with professional PR, and professional crisis communications. They’re simply doing domestically what they have been empowered since the 1940s to do abroad, except now it’s coming to Boston instead of Baghdad.
Mr. Jekielek:
As you said during the Trump administration, there was this powerful use of AI, which just hadn’t existed before, where you could stop speech in its tracks basically.
Mr. Benz:
Right. Technically, that AI was in its early stage of development during that 2014 to 2016 period, for a slightly different reason. In the run up to the Obama administration’s military interventions in Syria, there was a dramatic concern or media escalation of the concept of homegrown ISIS threats, the idea that ISIS was growing in popularity on Twitter and Facebook, and they were recruiting there.
At the time, DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], began really pouring money into funding for the use of natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence-powered censorship capacities, and repurposing things that were done in the advertising space. If you’re doing brand analysis, if you’re a high-end luxury brand and you want to know what people are saying about Dior handbags on Twitter, there existed for some time the capacity to essentially scrape public conversations through using keywords, through using mapping networks, and through aggregating big data in order to create network maps of who’s saying what about your brand, and then using that for purposes of ad targeting and attribution.
DARPA basically took that commercial concept and said, “Hey, you know what? Let’s use this for counter-terrorism purposes and instead of amplifying or doing ad targeting, we’re going to use that to help do censorship of ISIS on Twitter and Facebook.” And so, universities started receiving a tremendous amount of military funding to have military grade censorship capacities to take out ISIS.
What happened was, in 2016, you went straight from ISIS being the target, to MAGA being the target. And it wasn’t just MAGA, I don’t consider this to be a partisan thing. I don’t have empirical evidence that this was used against Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn or Left-wing populist groups, but I would be surprised if that was not the case. But the fact is, the AI story did start before 2016, but the chickens had not yet come home to roost on it.
That is, it was still a part of the foreign policy toolkit, the things that we do abroad because it’s terrorism, and because it’s foreign policy. But we don’t do this to Americans because Americans have free speech, and Americans have constitutional protections, and Americans have due process. That social contract was irreversibly broken after the 2016 election. The task now is to create a new social contract that really begins with a reckoning of what has happened.
Mr. Jekielek:
I definitely want to talk about that, but the obvious thing to talk about is what was being done to prevent ISIS recruitment, which is presumably the purpose of what you’re describing. Basically, there are very real threats out there. We’re in this place, and this is incredibly disturbing now. You have significant disinformation operations coming out of communist China that are targeting Americans specifically, and it’s something that we track. These threats exist and they’ve existed before and there needs to be some way to counter them. And these tools were ostensibly created to deal with that in some way, so it almost feels like an intractable problem. Do we give up on all of that?
Mr. Benz:
This is why earlier in our conversation here, I said that I tried to be agnostic on that, because it is a very complicated issue. It wasn’t until 2016 that we even had to grapple with the issue of this being so intentionally directed inward. I actually don’t find it to be an ethical quandary, because I don’t consider this to be an edge case. There are edge cases at certain times when the distinction between foreign and domestic is blurred, especially in a globalized world with a totally free and open internet. If someone retweets you from Mexico, that’s not fundamentally different than someone retweeting you from Montana.
But what was done in this case was so dirty, so out in the open, and so known at the time that it was a lie. I'll give you a great example. On January 6th, 2017, the Central Intelligence Agency produced their first piece of literature on Russian interference in the 2016 election. This set the stage for this inter-agency consensus that Russia had tilted the election in favor of Trump.
Now, this was a highly touted finding at the time. It was all the clout, all the significance, all of the power of the white shoe, top of the food chain foreign intelligence service for the United States of America having an unambiguous, total agency consensus that Russia had interfered in the election with this so-called detailed 15-page memorandum, setting forth all the different ways Russia had done it.
I read that report the day it came out. It was totally stunning in its complete absence of any sort of detail. All it had to corroborate all the flowery language and filler talk was an appendix at the very end, which said, RT, Russia Today, and Sputnik, the Russian radio channel, essentially had higher than expected engagement on Twitter and Facebook, and on their YouTube channels.
When you compare their growth rates to growth rates at the BBC and other publicly funded national broadcasters of foreign governments, they had high levels of engagement. All the talk about the kinds of interference operations that 14 pages of the memo, 13 pages of the memo had referred to were completely divorced from what they actually put as their findings. It was not true. They didn’t have evidence the entire time.
None of this was an edge case. None of this said, “We’ve got evidence that Russia had spent $10 billion on social media.” Even all that was alleged. All that was alleged was a hundred thousand dollars in Facebook ads. That’s less than a single middle class person’s salary in the United States of America. A hundred thousand dollars.
Clint Watts, who is the DHS’s advisor on censorship for the 2020 election, gave keynote speeches for CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency]. One of his censorship advocacy pitches was that if we don’t censor social media, people on social media will vote for the wrong president. He said that at a CISA disinformation conference in the fall of 2020. To use that as the predicate for this foreign to domestic switcheroo—I don’t think we need to go anywhere near that ethical quandary.
Mr. Jekielek:
The implications of having these systems that traditionally would target foreign threats turned inward domestically, means that the whole system has been upended. Is that what you’re saying here?
Mr. Benz:
What it means is that the foreign policy establishment has seized long armed jurisdiction over all things domestic. What really happens here is whoever can control the Department of Dirty Tricks is able to use it to remove all opposition on the political, social, and cultural side. This is why I come back to the conflict between the foreign policy establishment and populist political forces.
Because when you really pierce through to the soul of the funding and the specific types of conferences where censorship thought leadership is done, or consensus building is manufactured, it really is in these trans-Atlantic foreign policy hubs where you’ve got representatives from the national security state, and then from the political and commercial stakeholders in the foreign policy establishment.
What populist folks threatened to do as they began to be legitimized through social media in 2016, was to actually have their own domestic concerns addressed at the expense of foreign policy stakeholders. Domestic populists don’t have access to the Department of Dirty Tricks. There’s no domestic central intelligence agency, if you will. There’s no domestic equivalent, other than DHS, you might argue, to the State Department or to various kinds of diplomatic or defense or intelligence spheres.
The domestic faction has things like interior, agriculture, labor, housing, and urban development. These are the nuts and bolts of what’s happening on your street corner. You don’t have access to tanks or to advanced logistics or to entire howitzers of media assets. Prior to 2016, the foreign policy establishment wasn’t particularly concerned with what the domestic populace thought about in their own neighborhoods.
Before the manufacturing heartland turned into the Rust Belt, there was no real beef between the heartland and the foreign policy establishment when it came to what blue chip companies were doing in China or outsourcing of jobs or manufacturing. It wasn’t really until the 1990s that there became even the beginnings of a financial, a commercial and in some sense a cultural cleavage between the domestic populace and the foreign policy establishment.
There was conflict in the 1990s politically on both the Left and the Right, with establishment versus base elements of the Republican and Democrat parties, that was effectively neutralized during the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, and the Obama administration. It came back with a vengeance on both sides of the Atlantic through Nigel Farage’s movement with Brexit and through the Trump movement; the idea of serving the forgotten person, bringing back manufacturing, closing up a border, and having national sovereignty. All of these things had a connected underside at every single level that was consolidating power back into domestic forces, and taking that power from what used to be the domain of foreign policy.
What I’m trying to say here is you have a situation where the foreign policy establishment has cracked open that Department of Dirty Tricks. Now, they do care about what domestic populists say about what’s going on in their own neighborhood. They do care about the domestic drivers of that, because if domestic populists get into power, they will vote. If they have any success on any metric whatsoever, it will undermine the political will for the foreign policy side.
We see this happening right now with the Freedom Caucus of the GOP. The crux of the speaker’s fight with Speaker McCarthy was Matt Gaetz and the Freedom Caucus folks holding out for days in heated negotiations to get this reduction in military spending, so that it could be repurposed for domestic purposes. The foreign policy establishment didn’t want that. The foreign policy wing of the Republican party didn’t want that.
They had to fight to the bone to get that concession on reduced military spending. You can understand from that perspective why certain factions within the U.S. military establishment, the U.S. State Department, and intelligence folks wouldn’t want Matt Gaetz to have any success whatsoever. Because the more he succeeds, the more clout he has, the more pressure he can put on Kevin McCarthy, the less success the foreign policy establishment has. So, that’s a clarifying example.
Mr. Jekielek:
Since we’re jumping into this, explain to me what is the significance of the subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which is a product of what you just described.
Mr. Benz:
It is long overdue. It’s something I’ve been calling for from within the White House for several years. There’s a certain poetry to this weaponization on a federal government subcommittee that’s being housed within the House Judiciary Committee, and which some people are calling Church Committee 2.0. There’s certain poetry between that and the original Church Committee 1.0 in 1975. You had the development of a powerful and consolidated intelligence capacity in the U.S. government in World War II, and then consolidated through the 1947 National Security Act in 1947. And then, you had 30 years essentially of no brakes on that train.
As it accrues more and more power, and you had this statutory grant of power get even more power through things like the NSC 10-2 [National Security Council Directive 10/2], which basically gave it all sorts of teeth. As more and more powers were given to the national security state, more and more abuses started happening to political dissidents domestically from entities that were only supposed to operate on foreign soil.
You had situations in the 1960s when the CIA was doing battle with international communism. One of the things that came out was they were actually funding student groups on U.S. college campuses, operating domestically, running student newspapers, paying the National Student Association, and infiltrating college kids. And this was something that there was no oversight for. This capacity existed for 20 years, but there had never been any congressional investigation. There had never been any opening up the box to see all the dirt inside.
In the analog sphere, the Church Committee, it’s a complicated topic. There was a lot that was left undone. There are fairly persuasive arguments that some elements of it were incomplete, or you might even argue a whitewash. But the fact is, there was essentially a two-year set of open hearings that were dramatic and powerful. They were so impactful that they actually helped bring Jimmy Carter to power.
At the time, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the IRS, which were the four targets of the original Church Committee, were being weaponized against Left wing groups, because they were the ones challenging the foreign policy establishment. They are the ones who would primarily be anti-war protestors, and the anti-imperialists. And so, you had this FBI, CIA, NSA, and even IRS convergence on those groups. It engendered a tremendous amount of political ire in the political Left at the time. They voted Jimmy Carter into power, partially on the basis that Jimmy Carter was going to reign in the intelligence services.
And in fact, Jimmy Carter did that. He laid off 33 per cent of the entire operations division of the CIA. The operations division is really the beating heart of our foreign influence capacity. Now, he ended up getting in trouble with the Iran hostage situation in 1979. And then, Ronald Reagan inherited this situation of intelligence still having this sort of dirty name from the Church Committee hearings, but he still wanted to have this powerful foreign capacity. A lot of that was privatized through cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy.
We have no Church Committee equivalent for the digital age. In 1991, the world wide web came out. The internet was privatized, and you started to have the intelligence services, the diplomatic spheres, and the foreign policy establishment getting into the internet game. The abuses were really few and far between up until 2016. But we’ve now had many years of this Department of Dirty Tricks operating with no congressional transparency, with no one using subpoena power to pry open the agencies, and with nobody holding up the equivalent of the heart attack gun like Frank Church did with James Angleton during the Church Committee hearing. There has been no equivalent of, “We’re going to show the dirty laundry, not to discredit you, but actually to restore faith in you.”
The idea behind the Church Committees was not to disband the FBI and the CIA and the NSA. It was to reckon with where the American people were. “You’re not going to get back our trust unless you come clean about what you’ve done, or at least a substantial portion of it.” This is a difficult thing, because by nature, these are clandestine service operations. And even when what they’re doing is not clandestine in terms of its operational jurisdiction, they’re still under the cloak of secrecy because of national security.
Basically, what Congress said at the time is “Because we need you, we need to know your dirty secrets. The American people need you, because otherwise we can’t trust you going forward, so we need tough love, essentially. We need to embarrass you in order to believe in you again.” And it’s my contention that is needed now for the digital age, and that’s really the only way that trust can be restored.
Mr. Jekielek:
When you were speaking earlier, it sounded like a lot of people were not really listening to you. Has that changed at all?
Mr. Benz:
I would say so. I do think that some of it just became so self-evident over time, that you really didn’t have much choice. You can believe me or not, if I tell you the oxygen is running out of the room. You get to a point where the air is so thin that you can’t breathe anymore, and that is what’s happening now. But for Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter earlier last year, there were no breaks. Things were getting so bad so fast, and there were no outlets whatsoever. There were no shared internet platforms that had all institutions of society onboard.
Even at the commercial level, you started having people who were not political, people who were just cultural commentators, sports figures, and people who didn’t do politics for a living started to lose their bank accounts. They started to not have access to apps like Airbnb or Uber because of their opinions on a public health epidemic. I think people are listening now because the political angle has merged with the social and cultural one in a way that they are now no longer distinct things, such that they are no longer their own fields, in that sense. It is part of how people go through their day, because what they say online could now jeopardize their entire livelihoods.
Mr. Jekielek:
As we finish up, is this your vision for how to fix things, to have a Church committee 2.0, and then this will solve the issues? Where do things need to go?
Mr. Benz:
It’s one component of a whole of society approach that has to be taken to internet freedom. Just as a whole of society approach was done on the censorship side, it’s a network attack and it requires a network defense. Strange bedfellows may need to bind together. I forget the quote, it may be from Ronald Reagan, who said during the heat of the Cold War that maybe the one thing that could unify humanity is a new threat from aliens or something that would get everyone together as a common humanity.
There is an aspect through which people who believe in freedom are truly going to need to merge elements of government, private sector, civil society, and news media into a common effort to restore free and open internet using any and all assets available, even strange and creative ones that are not normally fit to such purpose. The Church committee 2.0 is absolutely vital and essential, even if only for symbolic purposes, to signal to people throughout civil society, throughout the private sector, and throughout other institutions that Congress is serious and public about this, and that they have your back.
Washington is not all against you. Washington is not all on the side of censorship. You have the judiciary, the committee for rule of law who is on team freedom. That’s a very powerful signal, it emboldens people. It makes people take risks for freedom. The people who are afraid for their careers have husbands, wives, children, college funds, cocktail parties that they might lose, uncles who may not talk to them, and friends who might abandon them.
It is a hard road to fight for freedom. There is no lobby for the American people. When people take an ideological stance for freedom and for little people, you are on your own in that. Every person who goes through that journey of fighting for that, experiences the isolation of that. To know that you’ve got a chairman like Jim Jordan, you’ve got respected, influential legislators who are going to have your back is vital to that. And I do think having that run as the Church Committee did as a multi-year thing, until we get to the bottom of it, will be a cleansing process.
Mr. Jekielek:
Given everything you’re describing here, there’s still a substantial portion of the American population who doesn’t see what you’re describing, or maybe doesn’t want to see what you’re describing, and is ready to accept the legacy media narratives on reality. How do we deal with that?
Mr. Benz:
The free and open internet was a rare instance of true information democracy and meritocracy in world history. Rather than losing hope that this monstrous, tyrannical system is all powerful and has seized control over things as basic as what you can say when you open your mouth, I would say take a minute to appreciate just how incredible it was that these freedoms opened up to the world. You could be some poor kid in Bangladesh who’s got a great idea and if you’ve got access to a free and open internet, you could end up becoming a YouTube influencer with 10 million followers and have a level playing field with institutions like The New York Times in an instant.
That’s something that came out of nowhere, essentially, with the development of a free and open internet, and only recently began to be batted back on. What you start to see when you start fighting for this is, although it is a lonely road at times, you make a lot of friends along the way, and often from places that you wouldn’t expect. The process of being proud, and brave, and public in this fight is something that can actually cure the isolation and can cure the feelings of depression or helplessness that can come from simply accepting things the way they are, and feeling like you can’t change it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Michael Benz, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Benz:
Thanks so much for having me.
