LAST February Tucker Carlson conducted a groundbreaking interview with a man no one at the time had heard of, a certain Michael Benz, who had worked at the US State Department in the Cyber Division.
It was one of the most disturbing and eye-opening interviews I had ever seen about the West’s ‘oppositionless’ transformation from liberal democracies into autocracies – the silent revolution that happened under our very eyes without a shot being fired. Benz explained how Obama’s military censorship network led to the 2019 impeachment of Trump in a final stage of this transformation process. But he went back much further to the origins of Google in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). One such fact dropped after another – information we all ought to be aware of, underlining how ill-informed we are. I was so taken by this interview that we published the transcript in five parts. In them Benz provides the clearest evidence yet that Americans (and the rest of the West) are being censored and manipulated at the highest levels of government.
Now Benz has given another interview. This time with that other great American interviewer Joe Rogan. A friend who alerted me described it as the best explanation of the ‘Deep State’ that he had ever heard. I decided to transcribe as much as I could. For though Benz speaks lucidly, he speaks at speed. I for one need to read to digest.
Here is the full long interview.
Benz’s specialist knowledge, he explains at the start, comes from his time running the cyber division for the State Department, the big tech portfolio that interfaces between big government, international diplomacy issues on technology, and in the private sector in the tech space like Google and Facebook. The following edited extracts form the first part of the interview centre on his historical account of the internet. How first it was seen and used as a free speech asset in the post war ‘soft power’ tradition but later – for not dissimilar power and control objectives – this became inverted and began to be seen as a threat to be managed. The start of this censorship of the internet, Benz argues, was triggered by the 2014 Ukraine war.
He starts with a necessary explanation of the soft power international rules-based order that was created in 1948 but takes is through to 2016 when he says Nato added ‘Hybrid Warfare’ to its formal charter, basically authorising the military, the diplomatic sphere and the intelligence world to take control over social media.
‘We had the UN, we had Nato, we had the IMF, the World Bank. We had this big global system now. There was a prohibition in 1948 under the UN Declaration of Human Rights that you can’t acquire territory by military force any more and have it be respected by international law. So everything had to move to soft power influence. And so the US government took a very active role, beginning in 1948, to promote free speech around the world. And this was done through all these, you know, initially CIA proprietaries like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. And then the Wisner/Wurlitzer, State Department, CIA apparatus, all of the early partnerships with the media, and the war machine around propaganda for World War II continued through the Cold War. Then that hit the gas with the promotion of free speech on the internet. When the internet was privatised – it was initially a military project – . . . in 1991, the World Wide Web came out, civilian use. And right away with the State Department, the military, our intelligence sphere was promoting free speech, so that we could have . . . government pressure on foreign countries to open up their internet, to allow, basically, groups that the US government was supporting to be able to combat state control over media in those other countries.
‘We already had this sort of deep interplay between government, tech companies, universities, NGOs that dates back 80 years. You know, look at the evolution of NGOs like Freedom House or the Atlantic Council or Wilson Centre in promoting these free speech things. But what happened was in 2014 (up till which point) we had had about 25 years of successful free speech diplomacy. And then . . . we [the US] tried to overthrow the government of Ukraine. We successfully did. I’m not even arguing whether that’s a good or a bad thing. But the fact is, the US did effectively on January 6th, 2014 throw the Yanukovych government out of power.
‘We literally had our Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, handing out cookies and water bottles to violent street protesters as they surrounded the parliament building and ran the democratically elected government out of office. What happened then is that the eastern side of the state completely broke away, saying, “We don’t respect this new US-installed government.” Crimea voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation. And that . . . set in motion the events that would end the concept of free speech diplomacy [as] a US government unfettered good . . . They [had] pumped $5billion worth of US government money into media institutions in Ukraine. That’s the figure that’s cited by Victoria Nuland in December 2013, right before the coup. Five billion dollars setting up independent media companies, basically sponsoring, Mockingbird-style, our media assets in the region. And they still didn’t penetrate eastern Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine was primarily ethnic Russian. It didn’t penetrate Crimea.
‘So they said, “We need something to stop them from being able to combat our media influence.” And they initially called this the Gerasimov Doctrine, named after Valery Gerasimov, who is this Russian general. They took a quote from him saying, the new nature of war is no longer about military-to-military conflict. All we need to do is take over the media in these Nato countries – and that’s primarily social media – get one of our pawns elected as the president, and that president will control the military. So it’s much cheaper and more efficient to win a military war by simply winning civilian elections.
‘That’s what set up the early censorship infrastructure in 2014 . . . Nato formally declared its Tanks to Tweets doctrine, saying that the new role of Nato is no longer just about tanks, it’s about controlling tweets.
‘And then Brexit happened in June 2016. In July 2016, the very next month, in Warsaw, Nato added Hybrid Warfare to its formal charter, basically authorising the military, the diplomatic sphere and the intelligence world to take control over social media. And then five months later, Trump won the election being called “the Russian asset”. So all that infrastructure was redirected home to the US.’
Rogan opines that the censorship machine was winning until around the time that Elon purchased Twitter and renamed it X. That seems to me to be our fork in the road.
Benz describes events in the run-up to this:
‘The month that Elon announced his acquisition was the same month that the Disinformation Governance Board [an advisory board of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), from April 27, 2022 to August 24, 2022 whose stated function was to protect national security by disseminating guidance to DHS agencies on combating misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation that threatens the security of the homeland] was announced, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Board which was the first thing that really roused Republicans – and frankly, anyone with institutional power in DC – to finally stare into the sun and recognise, or at least begin to glimpse, the size of what they were up against. The Disinformation Governance Board set off a flurry of congressional activity from Chuck Grassley and other, you know, luminaries in Congress.
‘Whistleblower documents came out. And for years, the entire Republican Party and most of the Democrat Party had denied the existence of government censorship. And frankly, the Ministry of Truth was not the Disinformation Governance Board. The Ministry of Truth had already existed three years earlier at DHS – they just made . . . they just called it a name that masked what it did. It was called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is a name that puts you half to sleep by the time you’re finished saying it.
‘The Disinformation Governance Board was . . . a dull, boring, mundane bureaucratic layer to manage the Ministry of Truth that was already created three years earlier. But the fact is, nobody called them out on it because of the thick language of censor-speak that hides this whole thing from general public awareness.
‘Nobody thought in 2019 that the cybersecurity agency in DHS would be the Ministry of Truth. They didn’t appreciate the layers of censor-speak that were constructed on top of that to say that, well, DHS governs critical infrastructure, and elections are critical infrastructure. Public health is critical infrastructure. Misinformation online is a cyber component. So it’s a cyber-attack on critical infrastructure.
‘Normally, policymakers or people in the public think, “Oh, cybersecurity – that’s hacking. That’s phishing. That’s . . . you know, that’s for CIA, NSA people to stop Russians from hacking us.” And they think “critical infrastructure”, they think things like dams or subsea cables or low-Earth satellites. They don’t think it means you sitting on the toilet at 9:30pm saying, “Oh, I don’t know that I love mail-in ballots” and then suddenly you’re being flagged by DHS as a cyber threat actor, for attacking the US critical infrastructure of confidence in our elections.
‘But that’s how they scaled these definitions into this giant mission creep. And now it’s metastasised into the entire US Federal government – the Pentagon, the State Department, US Aid, the National Endowment for Democracy, DHS, FBI, DOJ, HHS. And the task in front of this administration is just unbelievably enormous in deconstructing that.’
Further edited extracts will follow in the New Year.
