Michael Benz Warns: The Regime and the "Foreign Policy Blob" Have Coordinated with Monster Tech to Wage War on "Wrongthink"

They are aggressively assaultive on the public.

The public must start fighting back.

The foreign policy establishment that once thrived under the control of both political parties has used Big Tech and the Biden administration to codify a "war on wrongthink" that stifles dissent from the elites' narrative, a journalist and an online censorship analyst warned.

"What we're up against here are not pink-haired, ambi-gendered LGBT-BLM-maximizing identitarian politics when we're talking about censorship on the internet," Michael Benz, a former State Department official under President Donald Trump and founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said Tuesday at an Oversight Project event at The Heritage Foundation.

It's not "partisan politics" driving censorship, said Benz, but "the foreign policy establishment." Conservatives and populists "don't think about the American empire, they don'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 upstream on internet censorship and what's driving it, you will find that foreign policy establishment," Benz argued.

I don't know if I'd say that foreign policy is driving tech censorship. Transgenderism is a stronger component than foreign policy.

But everytime you lift a censorship rock, you find the British intelligence services underneath it.

Benjamin Weingarten, editor-at-large at RealClearInvestigations, also attributed "the leading edge of all the attacks on Donald Trump as an avatar for tens of millions of dissenting Americans" to the administrative 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.

"You also had the tech companies identify that what happened in 2016 could never happen again," Weingarten said, referring to both the Brexit referendum and Trump's election victory.

"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 enemy that's engaging in wrongthink that threatens to undermine their power."

Lee Fang published a similary story in the Intercept: The US foreign policy/intelligence community is funding NGOs to smear critics of the war in Ukraine.

U.S. Funds Ukraine Groups Censoring Critics, Smearing Pro-Peace Voices American taxpayers are footing the bill for Ukrainian NGOs focused on smearing proponents of a diplomatic solution as "Russian disinformation" agents.

Ukraine's American-backed fight against Russia is taking place not only in the blood-soaked trenches of the Donbas region but also on what military planners call the cognitive battlefield -- to win hearts and minds.

A sprawling constellation of media outlets organized with substantial funding and direction from the U.S. government has not just sought to counter Russian propaganda but has supported strong censorship laws and shutdowns of dissident outlets, disseminated disinformation of its own, and sought to silence critics of the war, including many American citizens.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs, commentator Tucker Carlson, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer are among the critics on both the left and the right who have been cast as part of a "network of Russian propaganda."

...

There's no evidence of Kremlin influence over their viewpoints, but their comments alone are enough for a network of U.S.-backed Ukrainian media groups to tarnish these experts as Russian propagandists.

U.S. taxpayer dollars are flowing to outlets such as the New Voice of Ukraine, VoxUkraine, Detector Media, the Institute of Mass Information, the Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine and many others. Some of this money has come from the $44.1 billion in civilian-needs foreign aid committed to Ukraine. While the funding is officially billed as an ambitious program to develop high-quality independent news programs; counter malign Russian influence; and modernize Ukraine's archaic media laws, the new sites in many cases have promoted aggressive messages that stray from traditional journalistic practices to promote the Ukrainian government's official positions and delegitimize its critics.

VoxUkraine has released highly produced videos attacking the credibility of American opposition voices, including Sachs, Mearsheimer, and Greenwald. Detector Media, one of the most influential media watchdog groups, similarly produces a flow of social media and posts branding American critics of the war as part of a Russian disinformation operation. The outlets are also devoted to domestic disputes. Detector Media's broadcasts have lampooned critics of Ukrainian government moves to shut down opposition media outlets.

It's not only dissident voices targeted by the USAID-funded groups.

Detector Media went after the New York Times in February over a news report about hundreds of Ukrainians in the battle for Avdiivka who were captured or missing. The Ukrainian fact-check site offered little in terms of a rebuttal. Detector Media only cited a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Defense Forces disputing the Times' story, which it labeled "disinformation." The New Voice of Ukraine quoted a Ukrainian official describing the Times story as a "Russian Psyop," a term for psychological warfare.

Unlike similar media development programs that the International Agency for International Development (USAID) has led throughout the Middle East, Ukrainian outlets tend to produce a great deal of English content that trickles back into the domestic American audience and explicitly targets American foreign policy discourse.

The New Voice of Ukraine syndicates with Yahoo News. VoxUkraine is a fact-checking partner with Meta, which assists in removing content deemed "Russian disinformation" from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Detector Media has similarly led a consortium of nonprofit groups pressuring social media platforms to aggressively remove content critical of Ukraine.

More at the link.

The US used to have a law against the government running propaganda operations against its own populace.

Barack Hussein Obama repealed that law.

For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?

Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It's viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran, self-immolation in Tibet, human trafficking across Asia, and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq.

The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long-standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 1970s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they "should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics." Fulbright's amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who argued that such "propaganda" should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. "from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity."

Zorinsky and Fulbright sold their amendments on sensible rhetoric: American taxpayers shouldn't be funding propaganda for American audiences. So did Congress just tear down the American public's last defense against domestic propaganda?

BBG spokeswoman Lynne Weil insists BBG is not a propaganda outlet, and its flagship services such as VOA "present fair and accurate news."

The Deep Staters demanding that this be repealed claimed that VOA broadcast baseball games to Cuba. And you wouldn't want to ban VOA from sending those baseball game broadcasts to Florida, would you? It's baseball -- as American as apple pie.

Well, the US government is now paying foreign governments to defame and harass anyone critical of its policies.

We're a long way from "this isn't propaganda, it's just baseball!" now, aren't we?

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:50 PM

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