WE HAVE been running sequential segments of Tucker Carlson’s eye-opening interview with former US State cyber security expert Mike Benz who provides the clearest evidence yet that Americans (and the rest of the West) are being censored and manipulated at the highest levels of government, specifically by the defence establishment’s exploitation of the internet and social media. If you have not done so already, you can watch the full interview here:.You can also read Part 1 of the transcript here , Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
In the previous segments Benz explains how the US government was blindsided by the power of social media, seen as a good thing to prop up democracy and free speech abroad until the US-backed coup in Ukraine (which ethnic Russians did not want at all) which changed everything, and the US no longer saw social media as a freedom trigger to topple governments abroad but as a domestic threat to their own (liberal, progressive) interests and control. He details the post-war historic roots of the national security state, the CIA and the ‘long moral licence’ given it, and how when Trump won the 2016 election and the UK voted for Brexit, censorship went ‘full throttle’.
Benz then tracks the development of the government censorship operation, its roots in the Global Engagement Centre under Obama and the new technology they created – initially on the predicate of the threat from ISIS – who after Trump’s election believed in the need for permanent domestic censorship; how they targeted a range of Nato and government-associated think tanks to effect this, and had Germany introduce Removals under the Network Enforcement Law in 2017 which kicked off the era of automated censorship. In this penultimate part, he explains the threat of mail-in ballots and the creation of a censorship ‘aggregate’ and how it was able to harness and control the social media giants.
The Transcript, Part 4
Mike Benz: [00:37:21] You could literally be on your toilet seat at 9:30 on a Thursday night and tweet, ‘I think that mail-in ballots are illegitimate’ and you were essentially then caught up in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security classifying you as conducting a cyber attack on US critical infrastructure, because you were doing misinformation online in the cyber realm and misinformation is a cyber attack on democracy when it undermines public faith and confidence in our democratic elections and our democratic institutions.
They would end up going far beyond that. They would actually define democratic institutions as being another thing that (it) was a cyber security attack to undermine. And lo and behold, the mainstream media is considered a democratic institution. That would come later. 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 Department of Home Security (DHS) working with essentially Nato on the national security side and and essentially the Democratic National Committee (DNC) if you will, to use DHS as the launching point for a government co-ordinated 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.
And here’s how they did this. They aggregated four different institutions: Stanford University, the University of Washington, a company called Graphika, and the Atlantic Council. Now all four of these institutions, the centers within them, were essentially Pentagon cutouts. You had at the Stanford Internet Observatory – it was actually run by Michael McFaul. You know Michael McFaul, he was the US ambassador to Russia under the Obama administration and he personally authored a seven-step playbook for how to successfully orchestrate a color revolution. Part of that involved maintaining total control over media and social media, juicing up the civil society outfits, calling elections illegitimate . . .
All of these people were professional Russiagaters, professional election de-legitimizers in 2016. So Stanford University, the Stanford Observatory under Michael McFaul was run by Alex Stamos, who was formerly a Facebook executive who coordinated with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) with respect to Russiagate, you know, taking down Russian propaganda at Facebook. So this is another liaison essentially to the national security state and under Alex Stamos at Stanford Observatory was Rene DiResta, who started her career in the CIA and wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian disinformation. And there’s a lot more there that I’ll get to at another time.
The next institution was the University of Washington, which is essentially the Bill Gates University in Seattle, headed by Kate Starbird, who is basically three generations of military brass who got her PhD in crisis informatics, essentially doing, you know, social media surveillance for the Pentagon and getting, you know, DARPA funding and, and working essentially with the national security state then repurposed to take on mail-in ballots.
The third firm, Graphika, got $7million in Pentagon grants, and got their start as part of the Pentagon’s Minerva initiative. The Minerva initiative is the psychological warfare research center of the Pentagon. This group was doing social media spying and narrative mapping for the Pentagon until the 2016 election happened and then were repurposed into a partnership with the Department of Homeland Security to censor, you know, 22million Trump tweets, pro-Trump tweets about mail-in ballots. And then the fourth institution, as I mentioned, was the Atlantic Council, who’s got seven CIA directors on the board.
So one after another, it is exactly what Ben Rhodes described during the Obama era as the blob, the foreign policy establishment. It’s the Defense Department, the State Department, or the CIA every single time. And of course, this was because they were threatened by Trump’s foreign policy. And so while much of the censorship looks like it’s coming domestically, it’s actually by our foreign-facing department of dirty tricks, color revolution blob, who are professional government topless, who were then basically descended on the 2020 election. Now they did this. They explicitly said, the head of this election integrity partnership on tape and my foundation clipped them, and it’s been played before Congress. And it’s in, you know, a part of the Missouri v Biden lawsuit now, but they explicitly said on tape that they were set up to do what the government was banned from doing itself. And then they articulated a multi-step framework in order to coerce all the tech companies to take censorship actions. They said on tape, the tech companies would not have done but for their pressure, which involved using threats of government force, because they were the deputized arm of the government, they had a formal partnership with the DHS.
They were able to use DHS as a proprietary domestic disinformation switchboard to immediately talk to top brass (and) all the tech companies for takedowns, and they bragged on tape about how they got the tech companies to all systematically adopt a new terms of service speech violation band called delegitimization, which meant any tweet, any YouTube video, any Facebook post, any TikTok video, any discord posts, any Twitch video, anything on the internet that undermined public faith and confidence in the use of mail-in ballots or early voting dropboxes or ballot tabulation issues on election day was a prima facie ‘terms of service’ violation policy under this new delegitimization policy – that they only adopted because of government pressure from the Election Integrity Partnership, which they bragged about on tape, including the grid that they used to do this and simultaneously invoking threats of government, breaking them up, or government stopping doing favors for the tech companies unless they did this, as well as inducing crisis PR by working with their media allies.
And they said the government, DHS, could not do that themselves. And so they set up this basically a constellation of State Department, Pentagon, and IT networks to run this pre censorship campaign, which by their own math, had 22million tweets on Twitter alone. And I think it’s on 15 platforms. This is hundreds of millions of posts which were all scanned and banned or throttled so that they could not be amplified or they exist in a sort of limited state purgatory, or had these frictions affixed to them in the form of fact-checking labels where you couldn’t actually click through to thing or you had to. It was an inconvenience to be able to share it.
Now, they did this seven months before the election because at the time they were worried about the perceived legitimacy of a Biden victory in the case of a so-called red mirage blue shift event. They knew the only way that Biden would be able to was to win mathematically – was through the disproportionate Democrat use of mail-in ballots. They knew there would be a crisis because it was going to look extremely weird if Trump looked like he won by seven states and, you know, and then three days later it comes out, actually, the election switched. I mean, that would put the election crisis of the Bush-Gore election on a level of steroids that the national security state said, well, the public will not be prepared for it. So what we need to do is we need to in advance we need to pre-censor the ability to even question the legitimacy this took out.
Carlson: [00:45:11] Wait, wait, wait. May I ask you to pause right there. So what you’re saying is . . . What you’re suggesting is they knew the outcome of the election seven months before it was held.
Benz: It looks very bad.
Carlson: Yes, Mike, it does look very bad.
Benz: You know, and especially when you combine this with the fact that this is right on the heels of the impeachment, the Pentagon-led, CIA-led impeachment. You know, it was Eric Ciaramella from the CIA, and it was the Vindmans from the Pentagon, who led the impeachment of Trump in late 2019 over, you know, an alleged phone call around withholding Ukraine aid. This same network – which came straight out of the Pentagon’s hybrid warfare military censorship network created after the first, you know, Ukraine crisis in 2014 – were the lead architects of the Ukraine impeachment in 2019 and then essentially came back on steroids as part of the 2020 election censorship operation. But, you know, from their perspective, I mean, it certainly looks like the perfect crime. These were the people DHS at the time had actually federalized much of the national election administration through this January 6th 2017 executive order from outgoing Obama DHS head Jeh Johnson, which essentially wrapped all 50 states up into a formal DHS partnership. So DHS was simultaneously in charge of the administration of the election in many respects, and the censorship of anyone who challenged the administration of the election. It’s just like, you know, putting essentially the defendant, of a trial, as the judge and jury of the trial.
Carlson: But you’re not describing democracy. I mean, you’re describing a country in which democracy is impossible.