Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s censorship complex aimed at censoring Americans and people across the globe would be able to be dismantled in a manner of “five minutes” if former President Donald Trump was elected in the November 5 general election.
Benz detailed that in 2016 following the election, there was the creation of a “worldwide censorship octopus” spearheaded by the U.S. State Department and other foreign entities to get countries around the world to pass domestic censorship laws in an effort to “stop social media speech that might support a populist candidate in the U.S. like Donald Trump.”
In addition, Benz noted that the creation of the censorship operation was also to combat the rise of independent, citizen journalists at the time, which was causing the success of “legacy media” to plummet.
“Basically, there was this worldwide problem which was that the popularity of populists, that is, people who are opposed to the institutional consensus, essentially a ground up people-powered movement were dominating on social media right as social media was becoming a more important determinant of election success than the legacy media. Even the legacy media had to compete online and the rise of citizen journalism, the rise of alternative news outlets, was supplanting mainstream news. Its revenues were tanking because it was losing market share to all of these new, civilian journalists and alternative news outlets,” Benz explained on Friday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“So an operation went underway starting immediately after the 2016 election to create a worldwide censorship octopus spearheaded by the U.S. State Department and the UK foreign office to get country after country around the world to pass domestic censorship laws to prohibit the ability of social media platforms to allow pro-populist speech in their region,” Benz added.
Stressing how the worldwide censorship operation coordinated by the State Department is the “main threat right now to free speech around the world,” Benz noted that the operation can be dismantled at the executive level, if executed correctly.
If Trump were to win the November 5 general election, Benz said the president would be able to put a stop to the State Department’s censorship operation by signing an executive order defunding all things censorship in each and every government agency.
“This is a State Department operation, it involves a whole web of U.S. government agencies in the executive branch,” Benz explained.
“A comprehensive list of every single censorship program, every single censorship grant, every single censorship contract, every single censorship task force, every single censorship initiative at the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, DHS, HHS, FDA, CDC, FEMA, CISA. You basically have a comprehensive executive order that bars all federal funding, all procurements, all grants, all contracts, and you basically kneecap the entire censorship industry through cutting the funding,” Benz explained.
“These people don’t work for free. This is a censorship war. It’s carried out by a censorship army. The censorship army is composed of censorship mercenaries, and those censorship mercenaries need government money to do their work,” Benz added.
In the case he was tapped by a potential Trump administration to lead efforts to put an end to the censorship complex, Benz said he would “serve any president who wants to take this on.”
“To me, this is not a partisan issue,” Benz said.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Mike Benz” by Mike Benz.
