Mike Benz

We had this ability to do things to foreigners, to foreign countries, to foreign governments that the Constitution forbade from doing to U.S.

citizens because it was supposed to redound to our national interest, even if it's not a national security threat.

if it supports U.S.

national champions on the corporate side, or it allows Americans to have cheap gas so they can afford middle-class homes and middle-class lifestyle, it's possible that our whole 20th century magic of the American dream was only made possible because we have this capacity through our foreign policy establishment, the blob, to do these dirty tricks abroad.

The issue is, is with the advent of populism,

really starting in 2016 with the events of the Philippines election in 2016, the events of Brexit, and the events of Donald Trump's election, followed in short succession by Bolsonaro in Brazil, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Marine Le Pen's rise in France, the Vox Party's rise in Spain, AFD's rise in Germany.

You had these foreign policy establishment institutions who felt threatened that the entire rules-based international order would collapse because everyone's pursuing their own nationalism.

And so all of these international entanglements, these international financial relationships, this international influence over national events would all fall away, and it was only happening because of free speech on the internet.

So they brought to bear this very powerful censorship apparatus, really starting in 2014.

And it started with the military and the intelligence and the diplomatic corps.

These same blob institutions created this architecture, initially to stop Russian propaganda after Crimea in 2014.

NATO developed this doctrine called from tanks to tweets that NATO was no longer primarily about tank warfare.

It was about controlling tweets because tweets are how people get elected.

And at the time, NATO was saying that the biggest threat to NATO was that people would vote their way out of NATO or would vote to not give funds for foreign wars.

That was a bigger threat than Russian aggression.

So what they did is they said anyone who supports

Russia or is NATO critical or is against the foreign policy establishment at the domestic level is effectively operating, they're helping Russia.

And so even if they're not doing Russian disinformation, we can still use our national security powers, our national interest powers to get them censored because they are

helping an adversary state.

And once that apparatus was put in place, they began to apply it to everything, to COVID, to election disinformation, to climate disinformation.