I am normally not keen about posting long-ish videos, and about having a mini-run of Tucker Carlson interviews, but one he had last week was very important yet it seems oddly not much noticed by the commentariat (or truth be told, the site writers) despite getting nearly 30 million views on Twitter. Readers Li and Chuck L alerted me to this oversight. So I am running this segment as an extra post rather than part of our regular roster.
Tucker spoke to former State Department officer Mike Benz,1 who is arguably the top US expert on the workings of the censorship state to go public about the scope and workings of the censorship regime. He also helpfully describes the trajectory that led the US blob to go from seeing the Internet as its friend, particularly for helping facilitate regime changes, to its enemy by allowing non-mainstream views like support of Brexit to drive events. He also describes some major initiatives, like trying to thwart criticism of mail-in ballots.
Benz’s overview very much dovetails with the work of Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. Shellenberger showed up very earlier in the Twitter thread on the interview to corroborate some details:
Outstanding overview of the Censorship Industrial Complex.
Here’s background on the US government-funded Aspen Institute’s role in spreading disinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop.
The FBI spread disinformation and interfered in the election:https://t.co/WiPcsxF9R5
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) February 17, 2024
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
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1 Formally Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information PolicyBureau of Economic and Business Affairs in the Trump Administration. He has also been the subject of a 2023 hit piece by NBC. Benz claimed that his covert seeming white-supremacist project was to fight anti-semitism by converting white supremacists.