We The People Are The Enemy? It Couldn't Happen Here.
It did. It is. Right here, right now in our beloved America.
It is practically impossible for most Americans to admit even the first molecule of the thought that their very own government has undertaken a policy of censorship in which the basic tenet is that citizens— i.e. We The People — are now considered in many areas of our government as enemies of “democracy”, now re-defined as all agencies under the umbrella of the national security state. I recently had the remaining shreds of my deep belief in the American experiment and all it encompasses, the Rule of Law, the First Amendment right - repeat, right - to freedom of expression, just to name a couple of the treasures our Founders bedqueathed us, severely tested, this time almost to the breaking point.
What was that event which caused a person who has held deep beliefs in our system of government to seriously question whether our government has gone so far off the rails it may have passed the point of no return?
I watched, at times in sheer astonishment and/or fear for the future of our country, the one hour video of Tucker Carlson’s interview of Mike Benz, head of the Foundation for Freedom Online, who Carlson introduced as probably the leading expert on cyber-censorship and its history and tecnniques. After watching the video, it is hard to imagine how anyone could have a more encylopedic knowledge of this entire area than Mr. Benz. I often recommend a certain piece of writing or a video or a blog for their signifigance in their areas, at times very highly. This video is quite simply in a class of its own as there is simply no way to fully understand what has been put in place by what Mr. Benz refers to as a “federal censorship-industrial complex”, its history, how it works and, most chillingly for those who have the temerity to exercise their First Amendment right to criticize the government, how deep its roots run through so many areas of our system of governance. The video is linked below and I humbly and genuinely ask that you watch every single minute of it as it is one of the most alarming presentations I have ever seen.
Several recent articles have sketched out the meaning of these findings and the two I highly recommend are 2024 Is Already Being Stolen Through Mass Gov’t Censorship by the eminent analyst John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist and Tucker Carlson bombshell: Americans are controlled by a vast, invisible censorship regime by the incisive writer Andrea Widburg at The American Thinker.
Here is Widburg’s pithy introduction:
Perhaps you’ve seen texts or heard people talking about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Benz regarding the national security state’s vast censorship regime operating within America. You might have thought to yourself, “Well, I already know that.” No, you really don’t. Until you take the hour to listen to the interview, you have absolutely no true understanding of what’s been happening in America since the second Obama administration and with increased power, fury, and vindictiveness since the Americans dared to elect Trump.
The Federalist piece starts out with a brief overlook at the long history of the process which got us to this “censorship-industrial complex”:
If you didn’t see Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Benz, you need to take an hour and watch the whole thing. In a mind-bending narrative about the emergence of what Benz calls “military rule” through an online censorship industry in the U.S., he lays out in startling detail just how corrupt and tyrannical the U.S. defense and foreign policy establishment has become.
Most importantly, Benz, the executive director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, explains how a constellation of federal agencies and publicly funded institutions, under the pretext of countering “misinformation,” rigged the 2020 election and are right now smothering the First Amendment and rigging the 2024 election through massive state-sponsored censorship online. The 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic, says Benz, were the “two most censored events in human history.” And 2024 is shaping up to be the same, thanks to the emergence of a federal censorship-industrial complex.
The problem here is profound, with deep historical roots that go back to the aftermath of World War II and the creation of the CIA along with a host of U.S.-funded international institutions. But for our purposes, it suffices to understand the problem in its two most recent stages: the period from 1991 to 2014, and from 2014 to the present.
After fleshing out the background of the initial use of the internet by governmental entities and its use as a means of statecraft to foment the overthrow of “problematic” governments in Eastern Europe and the Middle East such as Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, the Federalist piece describes the tipping point at which the entire concept of “free” speech online changed:
But all of that changed in 2014 after the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine toppled the government of Viktor Yanukovych and there was an unexpected pro-Russia counter-coup in Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. Later that same year, says Benz, when the people of Crimea voted to be annexed into the Russian Federation, “that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO.”
Thereafter, NATO, the CIA, and the State Department, together with the intelligence agencies of our European allies, did an about-face on internet free speech. They began instead to engage in what amounted to hybrid or information warfare to censor what they saw as Russian propaganda online. These efforts quickly spread beyond Ukraine and Eastern Europe to include the censorship of populist groups on the right that were emerging across the EU as a response to the Syrian migrant crisis.
By the time Brexit emerged in the summer of 2016, explains Benz, NATO and the foreign policy establishment felt there was a real crisis afoot; the problem was spreading west from Central and Eastern Europe, and it had to be stopped. If it wasn’t, then Brexit might trigger the collapse of the entire EU, along with NATO and the entire constellation of supranational institutions that relied on NATO. The entire postwar architecture of institutions might come crashing down, all because the hearts and minds of the people were being swayed. So went the thinking, anyway. As far as the national security establishment was concerned, citizens were being swayed by Russian and far-right propaganda, and we can’t have that.
Under these circumstances, free speech was the last thing that could be allowed to flourish online. Censorship became the order of the day. As Carlson put it, these NATO and EU leaders identified their new enemy as democracy within their own countries — their own voters, in other words: “They feared that their people, the citizens of their own countries, would get their way. And they went to war against that.” (Emphasis mine)
“ … and we can’t have that.” Just a few words describe how truly and profoundly radical the mindset of the “Elite” became almost overnight, reflecting their revulsion at the very idea upon which this most exceptional nation ever created was founded- the idea that our nation belongs to us, We The People, and that our votes should determine the course of the nation. Later in Widburg’s piece, she quotes Carlson’s words which sum up this frightening shift in policy by those in power:
We’ve just identified our new enemy as democracy within our own countries. I think that's what you're saying. They feared that the people, the citizens of their own countries would get their way, and they went to war against that.
There is so much more that I struggled with the temptation to just set out the entirety of both these excellent analyses and agonized over what parts to just highlight in order to keep from being sued for copyright infringement. What I have selected are just a few of the very tips of this monumental iceberg in the hope that they would whet your appetite enough to watch every minute of this “amazing and horrifying” video as Widburg characterizes it.
Every voter should watch every single minute of this video. I am halfway through my second viewing which I started in an attempt to more fully understand the true enormity of what we are facing. In this day and time of such inanities as “trigger warnings”, I should probably supply one here, as this is not pleasurable viewing. That said, it should be a requirement of citizenship in the nation we love.
God Bless America!