Mike Benz is a former official with the U.S. Department of State and current Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, is a free speech watchdog organization dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet. www.foundationforfreedomonline.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Nice to meet you, Mike. Nice to meet you, Joe. I wish you didn't have to exist. You're one of those guys that when you talk, like, God, I wish what he's saying isn't true, but I know it is. But I'm happy you do. I don't remember where I first saw you speak, but, I mean, right away I was thinking, okay, this makes a lot of sense when you're explaining, like, the ministry of truth or whatever it is.
Is that what it's called, the ministry of truth? Well, yeah. They tried to do that for a while. That was, I think— So just as a background, please tell people what you do and what positions you held.
I do all things internet censorship. That's really my mission in life, my North Star. I started off as a corporate lawyer and then worked for the Trump White House. I was a speechwriter. I sort of advised on technology issues. And then I ran the
So the cyber division for the State Department, basically the big tech portfolio that interfaces between sort of big government international diplomacy issues on technology and then the sort of private sector U.S. national champions in the tech space like Google and Facebook. So I was the guy that Google lobbyists would call when they wanted favors from big government.
But, you know, my life took a huge sort of U-turn, you might say, when the 2016 election came around and I became obsessed with the early development of the censorship industry, this giant behemoth of government, private sector, civil society organizations and media all collabing to censor the Internet. It was kind of a weird, weird path from there.
When did it all start rolling? When did the government realize that they had to get actively involved in censorship? And what steps did they initially take to get involved in this?
It started in 2014 with the Ukraine fiasco. The coup. The coup and then the counter coup. The coup was great for internet free speech. I mean, you really do need to start the story of internet censorship with the story of internet freedom because censorship is – promotion of censorship is sort of the flip side of promotion of free speech.
And we've had this free speech government diplomatic role for 80 years now. When World War II ended, we embarked. We had the international rules-based order that was created in 1948. We had the UN. We had NATO. We had the IMF, the World Bank. We had this big global system now. There was a prohibition in 1948 under the UN Declaration of Human Rights that allowed
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