The warning from a journalist and an online censorship analyst:
The foreign policy establishment that once thrived under the control of both political parties has used Big Tech and the Obama/Biden Regime to codify a “war on wrongthink” that stifles dissent from the elites’ narrative.
This from wnd.com.
Michael Benz, a former State Department official under President Donald Trump and founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said Tuesday at an Oversight Project event at The Heritage Foundation:
What we’re up against here are not pink-haired, ambi-gendered LGBT-BLM-maximizing identitarian politics when we’re talking about censorship on the internet.
Benz explained:
It’s not partisan politics [driving censorship, but] the foreign policy establishment.
Further:
[Conservatives and populists] don’t think about the American empire, they don’t think about the managers of the American empire, which is the foreign policy establishment, our State Department, our Pentagon, our intelligence services.
He argued:
When you go upstream on internet censorship and what’s driving it, you will find that foreign policy establishment.
Benjamin Weingarten, editor-at-large at RealClearInvestigations, also attributed:
[T]he leading edge of all the attacks on Donald Trump as an avatar for tens of millions of dissenting Americans [to the administrative state and the] deep state”[within it].
He explained:
The ‘deep state’ refers to bureaucrats who oppose the agenda of the duly-elected president. These entrenched bureaucrats ‘felt most threatened that [Trump] would upend the uniparty foreign policy blob.
Referring to both the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election victory, Weingarten said:
You also had the tech companies identify that what happened in 2016 could never happen again.
Americans who disagree with their agenda—to define a new enemy—he said:
They kind of used the pretext of Russian mis-, dis-, and mal-information, grafting a Cold War paradigm.
We are the enemy that’s engaging in wrongthink that threatens to undermine their power.
Further:
[After 2016] Big Tech platforms became perceived as—rather than vehicles for free and open discourse—now they needed to be weaponized as assets of this security state, essentially.
Weingarten claimed, referring to the Biden White House strategy released in June 2021:
These bureaucrats used the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, as a pretext to launch a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.
He warned that the strategy:
[C]odifies a war on wrongthink in this country, [based on the idea that] you can’t have an information environment that enables what we saw on Jan. 6.
He described as “terrifying” the idea that the federal government would take upon itself the task of “confronting the long-term contributors to domestic terror” in the context of the misinformation panics of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Benz, the former State Department official, highlighted what he called the “foreign-to-domestic switcheroo,” noting:
[F]ederal powers created to oppose terrorism in the
War on Terror became tools to silence dissent at home.
Further:
The narrative that President Trump represented
a threat to the U.S. from Russia enabled the
foreign policy establishment to target conservatives.
Yet special counsel Robert Mueller’s report found no smoking gun evidence of Trump as a Russian agent, so the establishment had to move on to something else.
Benz noted:
Instead of shutting down the censorship apparatus
when Russiagate died, they changed the predicate.
Suddenly, the foreign policy blob started warning about: “a threat to democracy.”
Benz continued:
‘Democracy’ is the watchword of the foreign
policy establishment to overthrow governments.
He noted that the National Science Foundation has given over $60 million in the past year to “specially-constructed censorship labs” to study “misinformation as a threat to democracy.”
He warned:
[This bolsters] the ability to overthrow a government that is not doing the bidding of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
Benz described a symposium with “some of the most important thought leaders in the industry” convened after Space X founder Elon Musk purchased Twitter.
Benz said:
[T]he censorship industrial complex suffered a serious setback when Musk purchased Twitter and with the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case revealing the extent to which the federal government pressured social media companies to censor dissent during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet he said:
[T]he censors still have two tricks up their sleeves.
He explained that the European Union Digital Services Act—which he dubbed “the NATO censorship law”—intends to “stop the rise of populist parties,” going beyond “the simple hate speech laws” in Europe to establish a new rule on disinformation.
Benz warned:
You cannot be a multinational tech platform without access to the EU market.
This disinformation rule will come from “the same people who constructed the election censorship apparatus in 2020,” which urged Big Tech to censor concerns about voting by mail, for example.
He also warned about state governments launching:
[S]tate-mandated programs on media literacy [in public schools, teaching students that] if you read the wrong media sources, you are illiterate.
Benz further warned:
The censorship industrial complex is becoming an industry employing millions of people.
Benz concluded:
Americans need to pressure Congress to cut
funding to the censorship industrial complex.
Weingarten, the RealClearInvestigations editor, agreed, having said:
[C]utting off the federal funding … is imperative.
Weingarten concluded:
I would advocate for criminal penalties [for those who use social media and misinformation programs to censor Americans].
There’s a censorship-to-criminalization pipeline and all we have is oversight? There needs to be something more than oversight.
