A blogger and an online repression analyst warned that the foreign legislation creation that previously enjoyed dominance over both political parties has used Big Tech and the Biden administration to define a “war on wrongthink” that stifles opposition from the leaders ‘ tale.
At an Oversight Project event held on Tuesday at  , The Heritage Foundation, Michael Benz, a previous State Department national under President Donald Trump and chairman of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said,” What we’re up against here are not pink-haired, ambi-gendered LGBT- BLM- maximizing internationalist elections when we’re talking about repression on the internet.  ,
It’s no “partisan politics” driving repression, said Benz, but” the foreign legislation creation”. Conservatives and populists “do n’t think about the American empire, they do n’t think about the managers of the American empire, which is the foreign policy establishment, our State Department, our Pentagon, our intelligence services”.
” When you go downstream on digital censorship and what’s driving it, you will find that international policy establishment”, Benz argued.
Benjamin Weingarten, writer- at- massive at RealClearInvestigations, even attributed” the top edge of all the attacks on Donald Trump as an avatar for tens of millions of opposing Americans” to the operational state and the “deep state” within it. ( The “deep state” refers to bureaucrats who oppose the agenda of the duly- elected president. ) These entrenched bureaucrats “felt most threatened that]Trump ] would upend the uniparty foreign policy blob”, he said.
According to Weingarten,” You also had the tech companies identify that what happened in 2016 could never happen again,” referring to both Trump’s victory in the election and the Brexit referendum.
” They kind of used the pretext of Russian mis-, dis-, and malinformation, grafting a Cold War paradigm” to define a new enemy—Americans who disagree with their agenda, he said. We are the ones who are making false assumptions that threaten to undermine their authority.
After 2016,” Big Tech platforms became perceived as—rather than vehicles for free and open discourse—now they needed to be weaponized as assets of this security state, essentially”.
According to Weingarten, these bureaucrats used the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021 as a pretext to develop” a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” referring to the Biden White House strategy that was unveiled in June 2021.
He warned that the strategy” coordinates a war on wrongthink in this country,” citing the notion that “you ca n’t have an information environment that facilitates what we saw on January 6.” In light of the misinformation pandemons caused by the Trump-Russia collusion and the COVID-19 pandemic, he described the idea that the federal government would take on itself the task of” confronting the long-term contributors to domestic terror” as “terrifying.”
The former State Department official, Benz, cited the “foreign- to- domestic switcheroo,” noting that federal powers created in the War on Terror turned into tools to silence dissent at home.
According to him, the notion that Donald Trump was a threat to the United States from Russia made it possible for the establishment to target conservatives. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation revealed no smoking gun evidence that Trump was a Russian agent, so the establishment had to move on to something else.
” Instead of shutting down the censorship apparatus when Russiagate died, they changed the predicate”, Benz noted. Suddenly, the foreign policy blob started warning about” a threat to democracy”.
” Democracy is the watchword of the foreign policy establishment to overthrow governments”, Benz said.
He noted that the National Science Foundation has given over$ 60 million to” specially-constructed censorship labs” to study “misinformation as a threat to democracy” in the past year. This bolsters” the ability to overthrow a government that is not doing the bidding of the U. S. foreign policy establishment”, he warned.
After Space X founder Elon Musk purchased Twitter, known as X, Benz described a symposium with” some of the most important thought leaders in the industry” as being held after the symposium was convened.
The “censorship industrial complex” suffered a significant setback, according to Benz, with the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case demonstrating how much the federal government was compelled to censor dissent during the COVID- 19 pandemic. Musk purchased Twitter and with the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case exposing how far the federal government was at odds with social media companies. Yet he said the censors still have” two tricks” up their sleeves.
He explained that the European Union Digital Services Act, known as” the NATO censorship law,” seeks to” stop the rise of populist parties” by establishing a new disinformation law in Europe beyond” the simple hate speech laws.”
Without having access to the EU market, “you cannot be a multinational tech platform,” Benz warned. The same people who created the election censorship apparatus in 2020, who urged Big Tech to censor concerns about mail-based voting, for instance, will be responsible for this disinformation rule.
He also warned about state governments launching” state- mandated programs on media literacy” in public schools, teaching students that “if you read the wrong media sources, you are illiterate”.
The “censorship industrial complex” is becoming an industry employing millions of people,” Benz warned.
Americans must be pressured by Congress to end funding for the “censorship industrial complex,” according to Benz.
Weingarten, the RealClearInvestigations editor, agreed, saying that” cutting off the federal funding … is imperative.”
He continued,” I would advocate for criminal penalties for those who use misinformation and social media to censor Americans.” There’s a censorship- to- criminalization pipeline and all we have is oversight? There needs to be something more than oversight.”
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