This video is incredible. There's a lot to unpack. I wonder where the hell has this guy been?

I think that mail-in ballots are illegitimate. <-If you watched the video, you’ll get that.

Very Orwellian.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: trapper189,

Very interesting video.


Anyway to save it? Just in case it gets censored.

Simply put, it explains everything.

Extraordinary. Everything we saw happening, except with receipts and names.

quote:

Originally posted by TRIO:
Very interesting video.

Anyway to save it? Just in case it gets censored.

The video is on the Tucker Carlson Network, Rumble and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter (Thank you, Elon Musk!). I wouldn't expect any 'censorship issues' on ANY of those platforms.

Here's an article which distills the hour-long interview:

Tucker Carlson, Episode 75: The National Security State and Its Drive for Censorship in the United States with Mike Benz

Mike Benz told Tucker about the point in time when the Western powers decided that concept of free speech on the internet was a danger to the future of the world order.

Mike Benz: In 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected counter coup where Crimea and the Donbass broke away. And they broke away with essentially a military backstop that NATO was highly unprepared for at the time. They had one last Hail Mary chance, which was the Crimea annexation vote in 2014.

And when the hearts and minds of the people of Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the Internet. In the eyes of NATO as they saw it, the fundamental nature of war changed at that moment. And NATO at that point declared something that they first called the Durasimov doctrine, which was named after this Russian military general who they claimed made a speech that the fundamental nature of war has changed. You don’t need to win military skirmishes to take over central and eastern Europe. All you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem, because that’s what controls elections. And if you simply get the right administration into power, they control the military. So it’s infinitely cheaper than conducting a military war to simply conduct an organized political influence operation over social media and legacy media. An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense, and Brussels into an organized political warfare outfit. Essentially, infrastructure was created, initially stationed in Germany and in central and eastern Europe, to create psychological buffer zones. Basically to create the ability to have the military work with the social media companies, to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.


Brexit changed things. It “forced” NATO to push forward with their online censorship plans.

Mike Benz: And so Brexit was June 2016. The very next month at the Warsaw conference, NATO formally amended its charter to expressly commit to hybrid warfare as this new NATO capacity. So they went from basically 70 years of tanks to this explicit capacity building for censoring tweets if they were deemed to be Russian proxies. And again, it’s not just Russian propaganda. These were now Brexit groups, or groups like Mateo Salvini in Italy or in Greece or in Germany or in Spain with the Vox party. And now, at the time, NATO was publishing white papers saying that the biggest threat NATO faces is not actually a military invasion from Russia. It’s losing domestic elections across Europe to all these right wing populist groups who, because they were mostly working class movements, were campaigning on cheap Russian energy at a time when the US was pressuring this energy diversification policy.


NATO defined a new enemy – democracy within their own borders!

The censorship industry ramped up after Donald Trump shocked the establishment and became president.

Mike Benz: There was no moral quandary at first with respect to the creation of the censorship industry. When it started out in Germany and in Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and in Sweden and Finland, there began to be a more diplomatic debate about it after Brexit. And then it became full throttle when Trump was elected. And what little resistance there was washed over by the rise and saturation of Russiagate, which basically allowed them to not have to deal with the moral ambiguities of censoring your own people. Because if Trump was a Russian asset, you no longer really had a traditional free speech issue. It was a national security issue. It was only after Russiagate died in July 2019 when Robert Mueller basically choked on the stand for 3 hours and revealed he had absolutely nothing, after two and a half years of investigation, that the foreign to domestic switcheroo took place… Where they took all of this censorship architecture, spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DoD, the DOJ, and then the thousands of government funded NGo and private sector mercenary firms, were all basically transited from a foreign predicate, a Russian disinformation predicate to a democracy predicate, by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes from the Russians, it’s actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself. And so by that, they were able to launder the entire democracy promotion regime change toolkit just in time for the 2020 election…

… after Russiagate died and they used a simple democracy promotion predicate, then it gave rise to this multi billion dollar censorship industry that joins together the military industrial complex, the government, the private sector, the civil society organizations, and then this vast cobweb of media allies and professional fact checker groups that serve as this sort of sentinel class that surveys every word on the Internet.


The US Pentagon censored Americans during the 2020 election cycle.

Tucker Carlson: So you’re saying the Pentagon, our Pentagon, the US Department of Defense, censored Americans during the 2020 election cycle?

Mike Benz: Yes. They did this through the two most censored events in human history, I would argue to date, are the 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic. And I’ll explain how I arrived there. So the 2020 election was determined by mail in ballots. And I’m not weighing into the substance of whether mail in ballots were or were not a legitimate or safe and reliable form of voting. That’s a completely independent topic, from my perspective, than the censorship issue one. But the censorship of mail in ballots is really one of the most extraordinary stories in our American history, I would argue. What happened was you had this plot within the Department of Homeland Security. Now this gets back to what we were talking about with the State Department’s global engagement center. You had this group within the Atlantic Council and the Foreign Policy Establishment, which began arguing in 2017 for the need for a permanent domestic censorship government office to serve as a quarterback for what they called a whole of society counter misinformation, counter disinformation alliance. That just means censorship. The counter Mis-dis-info. But their whole of society model explicitly proposed that we need every single asset within society to be mobilized in a whole of society effort to stop misinformation online.


The formation of CISA to lead the censorship complex against American citizens.

Mike Benz: Essentially, what they said is, well, the only other domestic intelligence equity we have in the US besides the FBI is the DHS. So we are going to essentially take the CIA’s power to rig and bribe foreign media organizations, which is a power they’ve had since the day they were born in 1947. And we’re going to combine that with the power, with the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI by putting it at DHS. So DHS was basically deputized. It was empowered through this obscure little cybersecurity agency to have the combined powers that the CIA has abroad with the jurisdiction of the FBI at home. And the way they did this, how did an obscure little cybersecurity agency get this power? Was they did a funny little series of switcheroo’s.

So this little thing called CISA, they didn’t call it the disinformation governance board, they didn’t call it the censorship agency. They gave it an obscure little name that no one would notice, called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency, who, its founder said, we care about security so much, it’s in our name twice. Everybody sort of closed their eyes and pretended that’s what it was. But it was created by active Congress in 2018 because of the perceived threat that Russia had hacked the 2016 election, had physically hacked it. And so we needed the cybersecurity power to be able to deal with that. And essentially, on the heels of a CIA memo on January 6, 2017, and a same day, DHS executive order on January 6, 2017, arguing that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and a DHS mandate, saying that elections are now critical infrastructure…

…You had this new power within DHS to say that cybersecurity attacks on elections are now our purview. And then they did two cute things. One, they said misdis and mal information online are a form of cybersecurity attack. They are a cyber attack because they are happening online. And they said, well, actually, Russian disinformation is we’re actually protecting democracy and elections. We don’t need a Russian predicate after Russiagate died. So just like that, you had this cybersecurity agency be able to legally make the argument that your tweets about mail-in ballots, if you undermine public faith and confidence in them as a legitimate form of voting, you were now conducting a attack on us critical infrastructure by articulating misinformation on Twitter.


The players behind the censorship industrial complex.

Mike Benz: Here’s how they did this. They aggregated four different institutions. Stanford University, the University of Washington, a company called Graphica, 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. If 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, that is. And part of that involved maintaining total control over media and social media, juicing up the civil society outfits, calling elections illegitimate, in order to now, mind you, all of these people were professional Russia gators and professional election delegitimizers in 2016. And then. I’ll get that in a sec. So, Stanford University, nominally the Stanford Air Observatory under Michael McFaul, was run by Alex Damos, who was formerly a Facebook executive who coordinated with Odni with respect to Russiagate, 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 Renee DiResta, who started her career in the CIA and wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian disinformation…

…The next institution was the University of Washington, which is essentially the Bill Gates University in Seattle, who is headed by Kate Starbert, who is basically three generations of military brass, who got her PhD in crisis informatics, essentially doing social media surveillance for the Pentagon and getting DARPA funding, and working essentially with the national security state, then repurposed to take on mail in ballots. The third firm, Graphica, got $7 million in Pentagon grants and got their start as part of the Pentagon’s Minerva initiative… It’s the defense Department, the State Department or the CIA every single time.


This was an incredible in depth lecture on the Censorship Industrial Complex in America today.

The Gateway Pundit is very familiar with this powerful machine that has been targeting this website for several years now – since President Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Currently, The Gateway Pundit is involved in at least two lawsuits against the Biden regime and the top players described above by Mike Benz.

Mike Benz Gives Background Context on Internet Censorship Programs

The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. “What I’m describing is military rule,” says Mike Benz. “It’s the inversion of democracy.”

CTH readers have discussed this issue for several years. What Benz describes in the video below is the reality of what systems and tech architecture are in place right now. The big picture of who wants control over the domestic internet apparatus and how.
WATCH:



It is important to begin with the end in mind. Perhaps some people are unaware that internet services, meaning the actual experience of using the internet for communication and commerce, are not the same in every nation. In fact, it is quite a different experience depending on where on the globe you are located. The differences are driven by internal controls, the intranet of the regional internet per se.

The internet in China is not the same as the internet in Europe, which is not the same as the internet in Australia, which is not the same as the internet in North America, which is not the same -at all- as the internet that now exists within Russia. Even in some continents, the internet traffic flows are controlled at different levels within each nation. The “world wide web” is a format, but when you get down to the national level, things change.

This baseline helps to understand that internet freedom is defined by access to information and commerce.

To the extent the information or commerce is defined as against the interests of the authority structure, or potentially a threat to the national security interest of the government therein, the internet content is filtered, modified, censored, removed or just simply blocked from view. This is one layer in the information control system.

Another layer is the flow of commerce that floats atop the flow of information. This is where advertising, product sales, purchasing and general e-commerce takes place. This layer represents another option for control; therefore, this e-commerce layer should be considered running in parallel to the information, albeit perhaps indirectly attached.

https://theconservativetreehou...censorship-programs/

I truly hope Tucker has excellent security detail. He’s exposing a nasty underbelly that most of us figured was there. Some of this stuff like the FBI involvement is even worse than I thought.

He’s been knocking it out of the park with his guests.

I was going to post it here Para and I see you beat me to it. I just got done listening to it. Well worth the time guys! It pretty much spells out what’s going on. Now trying to figure out how we can counter it.

I listened to a significant portion of the Benz interview, but I found the synopsis posted by para very helpful. We’re being ground up in the gears of very powerful machinery; I pray that a solution is attainable.

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:
I think that mail-in ballots are illegitimate. <-If you watched the video, you’ll get that.

Very Orwellian.

As I understand my state went all mail in in 2011, and after years of being surprisingly pro-gun (gaining suppressors and sbrs) we met an avalanche of anti-gun bills around that time. If anyone I meet says they don’t believe me, I ask why my county (includes Seattle) allegedly voted away their right to elect a sheriff. Not one person, even the most rabid lefties, can defend that.

Excellent interview by Tucker, the more people find out who is controlling America the better off we are.. Here is more information people need to hear. Same people behind "Russian Collusion" behind Fanni Willis, Jack Smith and other prosecutions.

https://rumble.com/v4dnqhl-mel...s-com.html?mref=6zof

Government-Backed Censors Who Rigged The 2020 Election Are Now Stealing 2024
By: John Daniel Davidson

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Benz should be a wake-up call for all Americans that our government is waging war on us.

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.

At the outset of internet privatization in 1991, free speech online was seen as an instrument of statecraft. At that time, says Benz, internet free speech was championed by the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments as a way to support dissident groups around the world in their efforts to overthrow authoritarian or disfavored regimes. It allowed the U.S. to conduct what Benz calls “insta-regime change operations,” in service of the State Department’s foreign policy agenda.

The plan worked really well. Among other things, free speech on the internet allowed U.S.-backed groups to assert control over state-run media in foreign countries, making it much easier to overthrow governments. The high-water mark of this way of deploying free speech online, Benz explains, was the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012, when governments the Obama administration considered problematic — Egypt, Tunisia, Libya — all began falling in so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions. During that time, the State Department worked closely with these social media companies to keep them up and running in those countries, to be used as tools for protesters and dissident groups that were trying to circumvent state censorship.

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.”

And then Trump was elected. From that moment — and indeed, as we know from the Russia-collusion hoax, even before Trump was elected in November 2016 — the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments, which had done so much to censor and weaponize the internet overseas, turned their attention to American citizens.

Initially, their predicate for domestic surveillance was Crossfire Hurricane, the fatuous notion that Russia had infiltrated the Trump campaign and that Trump was a Russian asset. Once that collapsed, they needed another excuse to spy on and censor Americans who held disfavored opinions or who spread “misinformation,” to put it in the parlance of the censorship-industrial complex. To do that, they had to get around the prohibition against the CIA operating on American soil.

Since they couldn’t very well get away with openly spying on and censoring American citizens, they decided to house the bulk of their censorship operations inside the Department of Homeland Security, specifically in a part of DHS tasked with reducing and eliminating threats to U.S. critical physical and cyber infrastructure. Hence “domestic misinformation” — which is really just a term for opinions and information that the national security state doesn’t like or that run counter to State Department policy — was classified as an attack on “critical cognitive infrastructure,” and could therefore be censored. What it amounted to was an end-run around the First Amendment.

But even DHS couldn’t do this directly, so it outsourced online censorship operations to third parties like the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, which consisted of four separate organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and a firm called Graphika. These private-sector “partners” did the nitty-gritty work of mapping out entire online networks of people who helped spread certain disfavored opinions, or what the censors called “false narratives.” Essentially they were deputized to censor Americans on behalf of the government.

It should come as no surprise that the people behind the EIP censorship network are leftists who hate Donald Trump, despise his supporters, and love censorship. For example, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos is the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. He has compared “over half of the Republicans in Congress” to ISIS, called for Newsmax and OANN to be kicked off the air, and said, “We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences.” His views are typical among the managers of the censorship industry.

These managers and their partners inside the U.S. government went about their task with gusto, including a seven-month pre-censorship campaign ahead of the 2020 election. Any content challenging public faith in mail-in ballots, early voting, and ballot drop boxes was flagged for violating new rules about “delegitimizing elections.” The censors, along with the government, had strong-armed the social media companies into adopting these rules, as documented in great detail last year with the release of the “Twitter Files.”

Indeed, the “Twitter Files” exposed a massive effort by the federal government to deputize Twitter and other social media companies to do what it could not, at least not legally. But in some ways, the “Twitter Files” just revealed the tip of the censorship iceberg.

We at The Federalist were caught up in all this during the 2020 election. As detailed in a recent lawsuit filed in December by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas, the State Department illegally used a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” to censor Americans.

The State Department, through grants and product development assistance to private entities like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, was “actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” according to the lawsuit.

In our case, it meant the federal government was using cutouts like NewsGuard to throttle our reporting and commentary on the 2020 election and its chaotic aftermath. Both the GDI and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) developed censorship tools that included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says. The State Department then gave these tools to companies like Facebook and LinkedIn to target disfavored media outlets, including The Federalist.

Through these and other methods, during the 2020 election cycle and the Covid pandemic, the government-backed censorship-industrial complex throttled millions of online posts, suppressing traffic to news sites, and undermined revenue streams for a host of outlets and influencers with disfavored or dissident views.

But this isn’t a thing of the past. All of the censorship infrastructure described above is still intact, still functioning, and is firing on all cylinders right now ahead of the 2024 election. If anything, the censorship-industrial complex is more robust than it was four years ago. Just last week, Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg boasted on CNBC that he currently has some 40,000 employees, which is nearly 60 percent of Meta’s entire workforce, tasked with censoring speech on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Clegg also claimed Meta has spent about $20 billion, including $5 billion in the last year, on its censorship efforts — or what he euphemistically called “election integrity.”

What does that mean in practice? We don’t have to guess. Remember that Facebook infamously censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 at the behest of the FBI. With 40,000 employees now charged with censoring “hate speech” and ensuring “election integrity,” we can be fairly certain that if another Hunter Biden laptop story comes along this election cycle, it too will be quashed by the censors.

Why exactly is our government doing this? It’s not merely a partisan preference for ensuring Democrats stay in power, but something deeper and more insidious. To circle back to Carlson’s interview with Benz, it’s because the national security state has come to regard “democracy” not as the will of the people expressed through elections, but as the constellation of government agencies, government-backed institutions, corporations, media outlets, and nonprofit groups. Protecting democracy, in this view, means protecting these institutions from the people they were putatively meant to serve.

As Benz says at one point in the interview, “The relationship between the managers of the American empire and the citizens of the American homeland has broken down, and that has played itself out in the story of the censorship industry.”

All of this seems rather complex and dense, at least in the details of how it works. But at root it’s very simple: Those who have power don’t want to be held accountable by the unwashed masses, by “populism,” and certainly not by the results of free and fair elections. They will not tolerate anyone, not even a duly elected president, going against the “interagency consensus” — that famous phrase of Alexander Vindman’s from the first Trump impeachment. They don’t think the people have that right, and they intend to use every tool they have to protect their power and privilege.

The stark truth is that if we don’t defeat and dismantle this censorship-industrial complex, it means the end of our republic and the rise of tyrannical military rule in the United States.

If you think that’s an overstatement, go watch the entire Benz interview and consider it in the context of what we have all seen play out in America over the past half-decade or so. There is no language alarmist enough to convey the gravity of what’s happening here. This is a hybrid war being fought mostly online but with real-world consequences that are every day becoming more obvious. We have to win the war to save our country, but we can’t even fight if we don’t know what’s happening, or how, or why.

About 15 minutes into the interview, I was again reminded of something I once heard the late, great Angelo Codevilla say in a lecture. He said our response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it took a “law enforcement” approach to terrorism that required the creation of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus to detect and stop terrorist attacks. Once the terrorist threat subsided, Codevilla explained, this surveillance apparatus would be turned on the American people and destroy the republic it was supposedly designed to protect.

That lecture was in 2013. Codevilla was right. It’s all happened exactly as he said it would. What happens next is up to us.

https://thefederalist.com/2024...e-now-stealing-2024/