Mike Benz

It wasn't until DHS's censorship operations became so sprawling and so massive and had so many touchpoints that they needed this dull, boring, bureaucratic management layer, the Disinformation Governance Board, to manage what DHS, CISA, and the intelligence wing of DHS, DHS-INA,

was doing.

And so it was only then that you had Chuck Grassley and Josh Hawley and all these different Republican members of Congress say, holy, wait a second, we've heard rumors about internet censorship being directed by the U.S.

government.

Maybe they're true because, look, they have this Disseparation Governance Board.

In that same month, Elon Musk announced his intended acquisition of X and that he was spending $44 billion to

to set the bird free, to get rid of the censorship policies that had existed essentially from 2016 until 2022.

In November of 2022, the Republicans took control over Congress.

In October of 2022, Elon Musk completed his acquisition.

And Republicans in Congress began to break much of this open, as did Elon Musk through the Twitter files.

And so there began to be all these public hearings on government pressure on Facebook, on Amazon, on YouTube, on Twitter.

Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Weaponization Subcommittee, got us the Facebook files, which showed that Facebook was only censoring COVID-19 because...

They felt beholden to the Biden administration and folded under that pressure in order to be receptive to their cause to censorship because they have bigger fish to fry on multiple policy fronts, meaning they needed the Biden State Department's help to defend their rights in Europe.

They needed the Biden administration's protection of their data rights and their advertising revenues.

When Elon kicked the door open with the Twitter files and there began to be congressional support in Congress, many of these federal agencies started to clam up and I won't say close down, but they had to reorganize in ways that added a lot of friction to what they did, and they became a lot less powerful.

Because now the public awareness had grown, and anytime they did something, they would be hit with subpoenas, people would be brought in for transcribed interviews, there'd be public hearings, there'd be lawsuits.

There have been many private sector lawsuits.

We've had this major Supreme Court case that just sort of, in my view, was wrongly decided, but it's still a preliminary decision, so that may still play out favorably in the future.

But

There's been legal pressure.