I don’t know who this is, but this gentleman exhibits incredible composure while being arrested:

The above tweet was posted by Mike Benz, who has become a hero to me based upon his encyclopedic coverage of the military-censorship-industrial complex.  Mike, a former State Department official, is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.  He is incredibly brave based on the monied and powerful people he is angering.  If you want to know how bad things are getting for those of use who still believe in the First Amendment, watch and learn:

Probably the best place to start is this one-hour synopsis by Mike Benz that is equally brilliant and horrifying:

Here’s an excerpt from the above one-hour interview (Tucker Carlson and Mike Benz):

Tucker Carlson: You’re not describing democracy. You’re describing a country in which democracy is impossible.

Mike Benz: What I’m essentially describing is military rule. I mean, what’s happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. You know, democracy sort of draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is ruled by consent of the people being ruled that is, it’s not really being ruled by an overlord, because the government is actually just our will expressed by our consent with who we vote for. The whole push after the 2016 election and after Brexit, and after a couple of other, you know, social media-run elections that went the wrong way from what the State Department wanted, like the 2016 Philippines Election, was to completely invert everything that we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said is, we need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions. And who are the the democratic institutions? Oh, it’s us. You know, it’s the military. It’s NATO. It’s the IMF and the World Bank. It’s the mainstream media. It is the NGOs and oh of course, these NGOs are largely state department funded, or IC funded. It’s essentially all of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. Because if you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially, democracy is just the consensus building architecture within the within the democratic institutions themselves.

And from their perspective, that takes a lot of work. I mean, the amount of work these people do, I mean, for example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is one of these big coordinating mechanisms for the oil and gas industry in a region, for the finance and the JP Morgan’s and the BlackRocks in a region, for the NGOs in a region, for the media in a region. All of these needs to reach a consensus and that process takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of work and a lot of negotiation. From their perspective, that’s democracy. Democracy is getting the NGOs to agree with BlackRock to agree with the Wall Street Journal, you know, to agree with, you know, the community and activist groups who are on-boarded with respect to a particular initiative. That is the difficult vote-building process from their perspective. At the end of the day, if a bunch of populace groups decide that they like a truck driver who’s popular on Tiktok more than the carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass, well, then from their perspective, you know that Is now an attack on democracy.

And this is what this whole branding effort was. And of course, democracy again has that magic regime-change predicate where democracy is our magic watchword to be able to overthrow governments from the ground up in a sort of color-revolution style, whole-of-society efforts to topple a democratically elected government from the inside. For example, as we did in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych was democratically elected by the Ukrainian people. Like him or hate him, I’m not even issuing an opinion there, but the fact is, is we color-revolution, the amount of office. We January sixthed him out of office, actually, to be frank, I mean. With respect to the state department-funded Right Sector thugs, and, you know, $5 billion worth of civil society money pumped into this to overthrow a democratically elected government in the name of democracy, And they took that special set of skills home, and now it’s here, perhaps, potentially, to stay. And this has fundamentally changed the the nature of American governance because of the threat of one small voice becoming popular on social media

Tucker Carlson May ask you a question. So into that group of institutions that you say now define democracy, the NGOs, foreign policies, etc, you included the mainstream media. Now, in 2021, the NSA broke into my private text apps and read them and then leaked them to the New York Times against me. That just happened again to me last week. And I’m wondering how common that is for the Intel agencies to work with so-called mainstream media, like the New York Times to hurt their opponents.

Mike Benz: Well that is the function of these interstitial government funded non government organizations and thinktanks. Like for example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is NATO’s think tank, but other groups like the Aspen Institute, which draws the lion’s share of its funding from the State Department and other government agencies. The Aspen Institute was busted doing the same thing with the Hunter Biden laptop censorship. You had this strange situation where the FBI had advanced knowledge of the pending publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story. And then magically, the Aspen Institute, which is run by essentially former CIA, former NSA, former FBI and then a bunch of sort of civil society organizations, all hold a mass stakeholder censorship simulation, a three-day conference. This came out, Yoel Roth was there, this is a big part of that Twitter file leaks. And it’s been mentioned in multiple Congressional investigations. But somehow the Aspen Institute, which is basically an addendum of the national security state, got the exact same information that the national security state spied on journalists and political figures to obtain and not only leaked it, but then basically did a joint coordinated censorship simulator in September, two months before the election, in order, just like with the censorship of mail-in ballots, to be in ready position to pre-censor anyone online amplifying the same story that had not even broken yet.

The above excerpt is merely a part of a much longer gripping discussion. I recommend watching every minute of it.

—

[Added March 15, 2024]

Orwellian headline. Voting is now a threat to democracy according to Bloomberg: