According to an online free speech expert, the U.S. military is directly working to censor “right-wing populist groups” on the internet.
“An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into an organized political warfare outlet,” Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week. “Essentially, infrastructure that was created [and] initially stationed in Germany and in central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones – basically 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.”
Ep. 75 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." pic.twitter.com/hDTEjAf89T
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 16, 2024
Benz is the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO).
“So, you had the systematic targeting by our State Department, by our [Inter-Services Intelligence], by the Pentagon of groups like Germany’s AfD, the Alternative for Deutschland there and for groups in Estonia, Latvia [and] Lithuania,” he said.
Benz added that when Brexit happened in 2016, it was a “crisis moment” for the military and defense sectors, who realized that the right-wing populist movement was moving westward, away from Eastern Europe and towards the United Kingdom and the United States.
“The very next month at the Warsaw Conference, NATO formally amended its charter to expressly commit to hybrid warfare as this new NATO capacity,” said Benz.
“Hybrid warfare” is a term that refers to militaries using traditional boots-on-the-ground warfare tactics, as well as cyber warfare tactics.
“So they went from 70 years of tanks to this explicit capacity building for censoring tweets if they were deemed to be ‘Russian proxies,'” Benz said. “And again, it’s not just Russian propaganda. These were Brexit groups or groups like Matteo Salvini in Italy, or in Greece or in Germany or in Spain with the Vox party. And 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 in Europe to all these right wing populist groups, who because they were working class movements, were campaigning on cheap Russian energy at a time when the U.S. was pressuring this energy diversification policy.”
Benz said that NATO decided after Brexit that the international community, mainly the European Union, would collapse unless the military took over the media.
“The EU would come apart, so NATO would be killed without a single bullet being fired,” he said. “And then not only that, now that NATO is gone, now there’s no enforcement arm for the International Monetary Fund, the IMF or the world bank. So, now the financial stakeholders who depend on the battering ram of the national security state would basically be helpless against governments around the world.”
“So from their perspective, if the military did not begin to censor the internet, all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after World War II would collapse,” Benz said.
Benz has warned about many tactics used by the federal government to circumvent free speech on the internet, including something called “middleware,” where left-wing companies like NewsGuard, funded by the federal government, are assigned to give trustworthiness ratings to every media outlet, which results in right-wing media outlets being deemed untrustworthy.
“The reason that they call it competitive middleware is because they’re trying to create a competitive industry around middleware compliance to avoid any antitrust situations that could arise,” Benz told The Tennessee Star in August.
“One of the things that I find most grotesque is that there is nothing natural about NewsGuard,” said Benz. “This is not a market that would exist without government pressure.”
“You pay off all these people who are affiliated with the state, and that’s what protects you from the state. The fact is, this is a hard-nosed national security state plan to eliminate opposition media. The taxpayer is being charged to subsidize their own silence,” the FFO founder added.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter/X.
