In the first part of this interview, which we published before Christmas, former US State Department Cyber Division head Mike Benz explained the evolution of the post-war soft power international rules-based order that ended up authorising the military, the diplomatic sphere and the intelligence world to take control over social media.
In this second part, he explains why Donald Trump’s task of deconstructing the deep state and its censorship ‘mercenaries’ is an enormous one, especially given their transformation of democracy into institutional consensus building.
The full interview is here and edited extracts of the second part follow below.
MIKE BENZ: They’re going to run into a lot of headwinds. Because once this power was discovered and funded to the tune of billions as it has been, we have this foreign policy establishment that manages the American empire that saw internet censorship as kind of an Eldorado key to permanently winning the soft power influence game around the world.
And what I mean by that is [that] you never had this capacity in the 1950s . . . But since the lion’s share of all communication is digital – especially the politically impactful ones – that capacity now allows our blob, our foreign policy establishment, to effectively control every election, or at least tilt every election around the world. And they’ve sprawled this into 140 countries.
Trump is going to run into every single regional desk at the State Department, every single equity at the Pentagon, arguing that if you do not allow us to continue this censorship work, it will undermine national security, because it will allow Russian-favoured narratives to win the day in the Ivory Coast, in Chad, in Niger, and Brazil, and Venezuela, and Central and Eastern Europe. You’re going to have the State Department argue that if we don’t have this counter-misinformation capacity, then extremists will win elections around the world, where populists will win the elections around the world, and that will undermine the power of our democratic institutions, essentially our programming, our assets in the region. And they’ve built this enormous capacity . . . we use it because it works. Because it wins.
The fact is, is Trump probably only won this election – for the same reason he probably only won the 2016 election – which was, in both cases, there is largely a free internet. It was when Trump got censored into oblivion in 2020 by the US government under his nose, working with webs of outside NGOs and Pentagon-fronted groups, to mass-censor virtually every narrative that he was putting out, that he lost.
So it does work to win elections. There’s a regional desk at the State Department covering every country on earth. Victoria Nuland had a desk that covered about 20 countries. So [for] every country, the State Department has a preferred winner of that election [working] with all political parties. That’s a hugely powerful tool to lose. It’s just twisted and evil, and it needs to . . . but dipping into this sort of dark sorcery power . . . not only does it crush the First Amendment [which guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition] entirely, but the diplomatic blowback is just absolutely enormous.
[For example] we have this thing called the Global Engagement Centre at the State Department. It was set up initially to fight ISIS because in 2014, 2015, when the Obama administration was trying to put military boots on the ground in Syria, there was this sort of giant threat that was publicly talked about all over, about ISIS recruiting on Facebook and Twitter. ‘Home-grown ISIS threats’, for example, the Garland, Texas fiasco where there was a shooting by an ISIS terrorist, and the web of online intrigues around that. Three years later, it would come out that he had been effectively groomed by the FBI. The FBI had paid someone over $100,000 to become his best friend and text him to tear up Texas before that. But never mind, the horse was out of the barn.
So this idea that ISIS was recruiting on Facebook and Twitter gave a licence to the State Department to create this thing called the Global Engagement Centre, which was really the first official censorship capacity in the US government. It predated the DHS stuff that would come along in the Trump era.
And this gave the State Department the direct back channel, the direct co-ordinating capacity with all the social media companies to tell them about ISIS, ISIS accounts, ISIS narratives that were trending. The Pentagon poured hundreds of millions of dollars into developing a technique called natural language processing. Which is a way to use AI to scan the internet for keywords.
And you would have these academic researchers, effectively, constructing code books of language. ‘What do ISIS advocates or supporters talk like? What words do they use? What prefixes and suffixes?’ This whole lexicon is then conjoined with the ingested sum of all of their tweets and transcribed YouTube videos and Facebook posts. And then suddenly the State Department has a real-time heatmap of everyone who is likely to be, or hits a certain confidence level being suspected to support ISIS.
That was 2014 to 2016, set up by this guy, Rick Stengel, who described himself as Obama’s propagandist in chief. He’s now on the advisory board of Newsguard, one of the largest censorship mercenary firms in the world. But he described himself as ‘a free speech maximalist’ because before he started this, he was the Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. He started this censorship centre. He was the former managing editor of Time magazine. He’s talked about how he used to be a free speech maximalist, back when he was in the media, and media companies benefited from that. But when Trump won the election in 2016, he [Stengel] became convinced that actually, the First Amendment was a mistake. He actually openly advocated in the Washington Post, in an op-ed, that we effectively end the First Amendment, that we copycat Europe’s laws. And then he wrote a whole book on it. This is the guy who started, effectively, the country’s first censorship centre.
But then they did a really cute trick. They went from counter-terrorism to counter-populism. Now, we’ve always had this ability since the 1940s to interfere in the domestic affairs of foreign governments or foreign countries, to topple communist countries. This was the whole Cold War counter-communism work of the CIA and the State Department. But that was primarily targeting left-wing communists or left-wing socialists or left-wing populist-run countries. When Trump won the election in 2016, this was one of the reasons I think Republicans were so slow to move on all this. They never experienced the brunt of the intelligence state against the mainline GOP, or at least the ‘empower Trump’ faction of the GOP, in the way the Democrats did in the 1960s and 70s when the CIA was actively interfering in Democrat Party politics to try to tilt them away from the anti-Vietnam movement and more into the sort of limousine liberal international interventionalist neo-liberal camp.
And so in 2016, the Global Engagement Centre pivoted from being counter-terrorism to counter-populism, arguing that right-wing populist governments – it wasn’t just right-wing, they were also against left-wing populists, but they simply never rose to power in the way that Trump did in the US, Bolsonaro did in Brazil, Matteo Salvini did in Italy, Marine Le Pen almost did in France, Nigel Farage was on his way to in the UK and the Brexit referendum, the AfD party in Germany, the Vox party in Spain. In 2016, they were afraid that social media raising all these right-wing populist parties to power would effectively collapse the entire rules-based international order unless there was international censorship. Because Brexit would give rise to Frexit if Marine Le Pen won – and she was massively overpowered on social media versus Macron. If, you know, as I mentioned, Italy . . . there was going to be not just Brexit, there was going to be Frexit, Spexit, Italexit, Grexit, Gerexit. So the entire EU would come undone, which means all of Nato would come undone, which would mean there’s no enforcement arm for the IMF or the World Bank or international creditors.
This would mean like it would be like the ending scene of Fight Club, where the credit card company buildings all collapse, just because you’re allowed to ‘shit post’ on the internet. And they talked about that quite openly in 2017 as they were creating this whole censorship infrastructure.
Brexit was a major event in that, basically it was said to come to Western Europe at that point. But when Trump won, that was, I guess, both the final straw and then the massive anvil that collapsed any residual resistance that existed within the national security state that we didn’t need to do this. And Russiagate really was the useful tool to drive that all through.
The fact that Trump came into office under the barrel of a gun of a special prosecutor openly alleging that he may be a Russian asset – effectively a Manchurian Candidate of Russia, who only rose to power because of social media operations being run by Russia – allowed that national security predicate to carry forward this infrastructure and be massively funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, the IC [US intelligence community], the NGO sphere, in order to set this infrastructure.
But then, in July 2019, Russiagate died on the vine immediately, as soon as Bob Mueller completely goofed his three-hour testimony. And a lot of people were thinking before he took the stand that Trump was going to be in jail as a Russian asset because it was kept under such close hold for two and a half years. What was Bob Mueller doing? You know, there was the SNL [Saturday Night Live] sort of fanfare around that. But then when it was revealed he had nothing . . . There was a moment in time between July 2019 and September 2019 when all of this could have been shut down. And we could have just called all that censorship work, counter-intelligence, you know, a national security state thing.
But they did something really, really nasty at that point, which we now live in, the permanent aftermath of which is they switched from a sort of counter-intelligence national security threat from Russian interference predicate, which is useful, because that gives a blank cheque to use the Pentagon and the State Department, the IC on this, to a domestic democracy predicate.
No, this is really, really nasty because it basically transitions censorship from being a strictly military thing that we’re doing to stop Russia, to being a total, permeating apparatus over all civilian domestic affairs, regardless of whether there’s a foreign threat. And when that was allowed to go unchallenged for, effectively, three years up until Elon announced the acquisition of X, and that same month, the Disinformation Governance board spilled over, and then Republicans won the House in November 2022, which then allowed congressional hearings on all of this, and the elevation of the Twitter files and the public awareness from that.
But for three years, you had this handoff from Russiagate. I call this the ‘foreign to domestic switcheroo’ . . .
I did a compilation of all these DHS officials, State Department officials, Pentagon officials, completely changing their justification for why we need internet censorship. Before Russiagate and after Russiagate. And they switched from saying, ‘Russian disinformation is the threat. So that’s why the Pentagon is involved; that’s why the state and CIA and FBI is involved,’ to saying, ‘Well, actually, domestic disinformation is a threat to democracy. So regardless of whether it’s the Russians or not, we need to censor Americans to preserve democracy.’
They pulled off a cute trick where they doctrinally redefined democracy to mean a consensus of institutions rather than individuals. They had, when Trump won in 2016 and Brexit passed in 2016, they took this anti-authoritarian toolkit, which has, for 80 years, been the CIA’s predicate for overthrowing governments – really since the 1910s, when Woodrow Wilson announced that America’s role is to make the world safe for democracy – we’ve long had a habit of intervening in foreign countries in order to liberate people from authoritarian control and bring them the gift of democracy. And that has always meant, primarily, that the government would represent the mass of institutional . . . the mass of individuals, in the form of voting.
When Trump won in 2016, at the same time that all these right-wing populist parties who were just like Trump also won between 2016 and 2018 – primarily using free speech on social media and their popularity there – they argued that right-wing populism was the same authoritarian threat that left-wing socialism and left-wing communism was. And so they said, ‘Well, populism is the people’s ground-up revolt against institutions, against government, science, media. Against the NGOs, the experts, the academics.’
So what they did is they argued that democracy has to be defended from demagoguery. Democracy needs guardrails . . . Because people voted for Hitler, people voted for Trump . . . they were arguing that we need these institutional guardrails against people voting for the wrong person. And those institutional guardrails are so-called democratic institutions, which is another cute rhetorical trick, because that’s the CIA State Department watchword for ‘asset’. When USAID [United States Agency for International Development], for example, goes in and funds university centres, media outlets, parliamentarian groups, activist groups, legal scholars, you name it, in a region, they are building up their assets to exert soft power influence on that society, on that government, in order to influence the passage of laws . . .
So what they argued is, actually, democracy is not about the will of individuals. It’s about the consensus of institutions. So if there’s institutional consensus building between the military, the diplomatic sphere, the intelligence community, the NGOs, the media outlets, the universities – that’s really democracy. Those are the institutional guardrails, the people who know best.
