You have a choice. One option is to follow the dictates of the U.S. warmongering uniparty, who tells you, “Putin is bad. So shut the fuck up and support our policy of endless treasury-draining war. Or you could listen to Mike Benz, Executive Director of Foundation for Freedom Online.

Mike discussed Ukraine and U.S. censorship recently on Twitter. I created a transcript of his conversation with Win Marshall:

Win Marshall
Do you not think America should have supported Ukraine in the war?

Mike Benz
It’s good question. It’s strange for– You know, if I’m hesitating, it’s because to answer that question, there are so many layers that come before it that I haven’t even really honestly had to think about where I actually fall on the underlying issue, because the process is so corrupted. And we lived through Russiagate, this thing where anybody who supported a detente with Russia was it was effectively deemed to be a Putin puppet, and then you could launch a federal investigation. You could bring in indictments and domestic spycraft on, you know, Trump’s whole campaign, because of his policy of neutrality, with with Russia effectively, or his NATO skepticism. They were able to argue, you know, that he was effectively a Russian puppet, and so they spied on his campaign.

Win Marshall
These things are happening today in Britain with Nigel Farage, and he’s been called a Putin apologist. I think it’s continuation

Mike Benz
It’s the same thing. And so I think the way I would answer the question is: if you took the gun off of my head, where the state, the regime, the NGOs, the cutouts, the media, the lawyers, the federal investigators, all said, “Hey, you know what? If you have your own opinion on the Ukraine war, I’ll put the gun down.” Then maybe I’d think about and say, Okay, well maybe we can now talk about whether or not it actually redounds to US interests to try to secure these $12.4 trillion in the natural resources, whether it redounds to our benefit to have this elaborate CIA State Department operation to kill Gazprom and pry all the profits off with this endogenous, you know, Ukraine Petro industry and lifeline by all these US oil and gas companies and British companies like Shell. Maybe. But the answer is a hard no while they still have a gun to my head, because you can’t, you can’t do that.

Win Marshall
Okay, so let’s say there’s no gun to a head.

Mike Benz
That feels like a hypothetical that is kind of irresponsible for me to indulge in because there is a gun to my head. The censorship industry grew out of Ukraine. That whole infrastructure of censorship that Americans live under and inherited during the 2016 presidential election cycle came from the 2014 US-UK overthrow of the Ukrainian-democratically elected government. When, when we orchestrated that coup, when the head of the US Embassy was personally handing out cookies and water bottles to the January 6 style protesters surrounding the parliament building, pumping them full of money, when our own senators like John McCain were there on the ground calling for a transition of the government, when we overthrew that government and then did not expect the blowback, did not expect the counter coup.

When the entire eastern side of Ukraine broke away and declared itself a breakaway state in 2014 and when Crimea voted in its referendum to formally join the Russian Federation, this set off a total crisis across NATO and called for a fundamental reimagining of how NATO understood warfare. This gave rise to something which I’ve talked a lot about. You know, first was called the Gerasimov doctrine. Then it was called hybrid warfare, and now it’s sort of called sharp power. But it was essentially this idea that NATO could no longer just be a military alliance. It had to expand its mandate, and this is a direct quote from Jen stellenberg, from tanks to tweets. The reason that we lost in Ukraine was because we lost the information war. We lost to Russian propaganda, infecting the mines of Ukrainians. And it was Russian propaganda who was infecting the mines of Germans, because at the time the German AFD party was on the rise. They were running on restoring gas relations with Russia, because they were mostly a sort of working class, sort of like Trump, Trumpism. They were running on, sort of because these sanctions that the US State Department and UK Foreign Office effectively imposed on all these different other European countries, after Crimea, to sanction Russian gas, which was the cheapest gas.

The alternative was LNG liquefied natural gas harvested in Houston, liquefy ship 5000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. You know, de-liquefied in ports in Portugal or in through the Baltic strait into Poland. You know, de-liquefied transported. That’s orders of magnitude more expensive than Russia, which means the industries suffer, which means the middle class suffers. The welfare safety net suffers. So AFD was running on restoring gas relations with Russia. Marine. Le Pen was was running on the same from from France. So is the Vox party in Spain.

And so NATO is saying, Oh, my God, these right wing populist parties are all running on this economic nationalist what’s best for us. Don’t care what the US or UK says about, you know, being a good Global Citizen and sanctioning Russia, we want to do what’s economically best for our own middle class citizens. And so our intelligence State, the trans military alliance of NATO, at that point in 2014 declared this hybrid warfare doctrine. Said war is actually not about tanks anymore. It’s about tweets. It’s about control over social media. Because we lost to Russia without Russia firing a bullet, Crimea voted itself to join the Russian Federation. It’s the same thing as if they had rolled into Crimea with tanks and submarines, they now control it because of the referendum of the people.

Well, where are they getting their information? They’re getting it through online news sites. They’re getting it through RT and Sputnik and through social media and through telegram. They were talking in 2017 in NATO periodicals that the age of conventional warfare was ended forever. Frankly, I think this move into control over information actually left them underprepared for what happened in 2022 because they were talking like war will never happen again, because at the time, NATO had never had to fire a defensive bullet ever, ever, since 1949. It had only been offense in 1995 with Yugoslavia, 1999 Libya, 2011-2013.

So from 2014-2016, because of what happened in Ukraine, NATO began to establish these censorship cells stretching all the way from Germany to Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, these. They call them Centers of Excellence for Strategic Communications. They had all these fancy names, but they were censorship coordinating centers where they worked with YouTube. They worked with Facebook, They worked with Twitter. They brought them all in. They filled these social media companies up to the brim with CIA intermediaries, with British intelligence intermediaries, and they developed this censorship technology, these, NLP, these AI censorship techniques to be able to scan the Internet at scale and look at what people were saying on the Internet, what are the trending narratives?

And it was then when Brexit happened in June 2016 and the Trump election happened in November 2016 that this censorship architecture coming out of their loss of Ukraine was grafted onto US citizens, and that history is unforgivable. I cannot entertain while the gun is still to my head and to all of my friends heads, and all my colleagues heads and half of Congress’s heads and you know, the current winning in the polls, presidential elections, head.

The cancer has spread in our body because they’ve held that gun to our heads for so long, they have effectively ended the First Amendment in my country using using this Ukraine excuse. Right now, the Biden administration is arguing to our Supreme Court that the First Amendment is effectively outdated. Needs to be wholesale reimagined, because, just as the Second Amendment did not envision assault rifles, democracy did not envision in our First Amendment, social media,, the power of everyone to be our own publisher undermines US national security. It prohibits a federal government coordination.

Win Marshall
Is this Murthy v Missouri,

Mike Benz
Yes, yes. They are making this argument that the crisis of democracy from Ukraine, into covid, into into presidential elections, now requires government control over the information ecosystem, or at least government influence on it, in order to quarterback what the independent media does. So it’s not independent anymore. To quarterback where the civil society institutions are doing. To quarterback what the technology companies are doing. Well, guess what you call that? Five years ago, we called that North Korea. That is government control of the information ecosystem.

This is the same thing our State Department passed sanctions on North Korea for doing in 2017. Passed sanctions on Iran for doing. We don’t recognize elections as being free and fair unless there is a free and open, independent media ecosystem. That is one of our seven measures for determining whether we formally acknowledge the results of an election.

Now, of course, this is all cynical, because that’s when a government does not allow our CIA or State Department or USAID or any de-backed (sp) groups to be able to spread their propaganda. And I don’t even mean that pejoratively. I mean that’s the utility of this thing is that we built free speech as an instrument of statecraft in order to bolster support for political movements.

But what I’m driving at here is I will not even entertain, because my answer is a hard no, I do not support the US agenda on Ukraine and infinite Monopoly money, you know, unaccountable or even with a fair amount on it, while our entire censorship industrial complex, while the entire finances of the censorship industry, is built on the back of it. You can ask me that question again, once that whole system is dismantled.