The Connection Between the War in Ukraine and the U.S. Censorship industrial Complex

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?

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With the Democrat Party Fully Captured by the Foreign Policy “Blob,” Populist Republicans Lose a Key Battle on FISA

I have increasingly turned to Mike Benz to help make sense of America's obsessive and unnecessary warmongering. Joe Biden, his neocon cabinet and the DNC have already capitulated to the war state. Among the Democrats, there's no need any more to discuss whether a war is truly necessary. No need to weight the pro's and con's. No need to concern ourselves with the possibility of nuclear war. No need to ask whether the American treasury should be allocated to (massive) domestic needs. We always need more war. Full stop. But why? What is the end game? How does this pro-war ideology benefit ordinary Americans? It doesn't. As George Carlin stated so succinctly,

In this video, Mike Benz explains the big picture. I have created a transcript of Mike's comments at Real America's Voice. On a daily basis, I fear that his assessment is accurate.

Note 1:  When Mike is using the term "the Blob," (as set forth in the third paragraph) he is referring to the internationalist side of the U.S. government associated with big international businesses associated with the energy market associated with the military. .

Note 2: "The Atlantic Council has seven CIA directors on its board. A lot of people don't even know that seven CIA directors are still alive, let alone all concentrated on the board of a single organization. That's kind of the heavyweight in the censorship industry." - Mike Benz

Natalie Winters:

On this as of course, Mike Benz who I'm so honored that last minute he was able to come on, Mike, I honestly just want to toss it to you your kind of thoughts on this whole FISA debacle. If you want to start with the press conference that we just saw, or even just the forthcoming Monday vote, what you think's gonna happen?

Mike Benz:

I share an identical rage that I feel that emanating from you here for him to take to the press conference like that and and pivot to the border reciting all of the principles, "If we don't have a border, we don't have a country." Well, you know, what if we don't have a secret police in this country, a political police in this country, we don't have a country? You know, this idea that "Oh, don't worry about it. There's checks and balances on it now."

No, there's not. It's an empty check. It's a blank check for the FBI to do whatever it wants and it's bluster instead of balances. FISA is as a Senator Mike Lee said it best federal investigators stalking Americans, and there's something very sick and twisted about what's happening right now with the FISA fight. visa vie, the Republican Party. The Republican Party is in the middle of a civil war between the internationalist sect of the GOP, the Blob side of it, versus the nationalist wing of the GOP, the populist faction, and Pfizer will not be used on the blob side, the internationalist side of the GOP, that side of the GOP associated with big international businesses associated with the energy market associated with the military. In that empire managerial class of the GOP, FISA is not an issue to them. It won't be used on them, but it will be used on their opposition in the GOP Civil War. Every single right-wing populist nationalist Republican is a target of FISA. FISA is this idea that you can get around the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, and use the Department of dirty tricks powers that our foreign policy establishment has to spy on foreigners, to spy on Americans if you simply use the word counter intelligence instead of intelligence. "We're not doing intelligence spying on our own people. We're doing counter intelligence spying on our people, because they might be being spied on by Russia."

Continue ReadingWith the Democrat Party Fully Captured by the Foreign Policy “Blob,” Populist Republicans Lose a Key Battle on FISA

The Damage Done by Democrat Elites to Fly-Over States and Cities

Chris Hedges:

I rage against this demonization of the working class because it’s a very dangerous cop-out. The Democrats had this term to essentially enact the kind of New Deal reforms that might’ve been able to save what’s left of our very anemic democracy. And they didn’t. And why didn’t they? Because figures like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer would not have political power but for their corporate backers. I mean, nobody wants Biden. Nobody wanted Biden in the primaries. It took the Democratic establishment to force everyone else out. The guy’s not even sentient. But they don’t want to lose their positions of privilege and power, and they’re really willing to take the country down because if they pushed for these kinds of reforms, then Goldman Sachs and Raytheon - and let’s not forget the Israeli lobby - wouldn’t fund them. They are creatures of this system, so that’s the problem. They will blame people who don’t rush out and vote for them. The liberal East Coast establishment, the college educated, the quote-unquote “knowledge industry,” they have no contact with these people at all. And that isn’t to excuse some of their opinions. . .

Reagan started it, but Clinton was the Democratic impetus for this, where they talked in that “I feel your pain” language of liberalism but thrust a knife in the back of the working class. So are there irredeemable racists and bigots? Of course there are. But to write off the entire working class like that and essentially blame them for their own, I think, very legitimate rage has been a way for the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment to wash their hands of culpability.

. . . They packed the equipment up and shipped it to Monterey, Mexico. And the plants, they’re just empty lots now, but they’re massive and they’re surrounded by cyclone fencing, weed-choked lots, a kind of painful reminder of the jobs they used to have. What happens in Anderson? Well, it’s completely predictable: opioid crisis, diseases of despair, massive numbers of suicides, and so on.

You can find the full interview of Chris Hedge's (by Matt Taibbi) at Racket News.

Continue ReadingThe Damage Done by Democrat Elites to Fly-Over States and Cities

Democrats Have Lost their Advantage with Working People

Michael Shellenberger, writing at Public:

Democrats hoped that Biden’s everyman appeal might win back some white working-class voters back to the party. That hasn’t happened. In fact, now the Democrats are losing non-white working-class voters.

Every election cycle, Democrats lose more and more of this demographic. Despite his virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric, between 2016 and 2020 Trump gained support among Latino voters. Joe Biden did 16 points worse among Latinos than Hillary Clinton had four years earlier. The Democrats have an increasingly tenuous hold on the Asian vote and their support even from black non-college-educated voters has begun to slip. As of last summer, Biden fell short of earning the support of a majority of non-white voters without a college degree (a third of these voters preferred Trump).

Today, the Democrats and the Republicans are virtually tied in voters’ perception of which party is best for the middle class. Americans as a whole no longer take the Democrats for granted as the party that fights for ordinary people, and are just as likely to regard the Republicans as such. This is a historical sea change.

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Totalitarianism / Authoritarianism versus Democracy

Excellent list by Caitlin Johnstone. Here is an exceerpt:

In totalitarian regimes they have massacres and wars. In free democracies they have humanitarian interventions.

In totalitarian regimes they use torture. In free democracies they use enhanced interrogation techniques.

In totalitarian regimes they fund extremist groups to create instability. In free democracies they fund extremist groups to create stability.

In totalitarian regimes evil dictators bomb their own people. In free democracies we do it for them.

In totalitarian regimes a single party upholds and enforces the status quo. In free democracies, two parties uphold and enforce the status quo.

In totalitarian regimes the government controls the press and determines what information the public is allowed to have access to. In free democracies it is billionaires who do this.

In totalitarian regimes you know exactly who rules over you. In free democracies the true rulers hide behind fake puppet governments. . . .

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