Joe Rogan Experience #2237 - Mike Benz

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All right, we're up. Nice to meet you, Mike.

Nice to meet you, Joe.

Uh, I wish you didn't have to exist. (laughs)

(sighs) Me too. (laughs)

(laughs) You're one of those guys that when you talk, like, God, I wish what he's saying isn't true, but I know it is. Um, but I'm happy you do. Uh, I, I, I don't remember what I... where I first, uh, saw you speak, but, uh, I mean, right away, I was thinking, "Okay, this makes a lot of sense." When you were explaining, like, the Ministry of Truth or what- whatever it is. Is that what it's called, Ministry of Truth?

Well, yeah, that's the name it came from.

They tried, they tried to do that for a while. That was, uh... I think, th- so just as a background, please tell people what you do and what your... what positions you held.

I do all things internet censorship. That's really my mission in life, my North Star. Uh, I started off as a corporate lawyer and then worked for the Trump White House. I was a speech writer. I sort of advised on technology issues, and then I ran the S- the Cyber Division for the State Department, basically the big tech portfolio that interfaces between sort of big government, international diplomacy issues on technology, and in the sort of private sector, US national champions in the tech space like Google and Facebook. So, I was the guy that Google lobbyists would call when they wanted favors from big government. Um, but, you know, my, my life took a huge sort of U-turn, you might say, when I... the 2016 election came around, and I became obsessed with the early development of the censorship industry, you know, this, this giant behemoth of government, private sector, civil society organizations, and media all collabing to censor the internet. And it was kind of a weird, weird path from there.

When did it all start rolling- when did the government realize that they had to get actively involved in censorship, and what steps did they initially take to get involved in this?

It started in 2014 with the Ukraine fiasco.

The coup.

The coup and then the counter-coup. Uh, the coup was great for internet free speech. I mean, you really do need to start the story of internet censorship with the story of internet freedom, uh, because censorship is... promotion of censorship is sort of the flip side of promotion of free speech. And we've had this free speech government diplomatic role for 80 years now. When the- when World War II ended, we embarked the, you know, we had the international rules based order that was created in 1948. We had the UN. We had NATO. We had the IMF, the World Bank. We had this big global system now. There was a prohibition in 1948 under the UN Declaration of Human Rights that you can't acquire territory by military force anymore and have it be respected by international law, so everything had to move to soft power influence. And so the US government took a very active role beginning in 1948 to promote free speech around the world. And this was done through all these, you know, initially CIA proprietaries like Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty. And then, the whole Wisner's Wurlitzer State Department CIA apparatus, all the early partnerships with the media and the war s- the war machine around propaganda for World War II continued through the Cold War. And then that, that hit the gas with promotion of free speech on the internet when the internet was privatized. You know, it was initially a military project, so it was a government operation from, from Jump Street. And then in 1991, the World Wide Web came out, civilian use. And right away, the, the State Department, the military, our intelligence sphere was promoting free speech so that we could have a, uh, a basically government pressure on foreign countries to open up their internet to allow, uh, basically groups that the US government was supporting to be able to combat state control over media in those other countries. So, we already had this sort of deep interplay between government, tech companies, uh, universities, NGOs, that dates back 80 years if you look at the evolution of NGOs like Freedom House or the Atlantic Council or Wilson Center in promoting these, these free speech. I think so. But what happened was is in nine- in 2014, we had had about 25 years of successful free speech diplomacy, and then there was a... you know, we tried to overthrow the government of, of Ukraine. We successfully did. And I'm not even arguing whether that's a good or bad thing, but the fact is, is the US did effectively January 6th the Yanukovych government out of power in 2014. I mean, we literally had our Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, handing out cookies and water bottles to violent street protestors as they surrounded the Parliament building and ran the democratically elected government out of office. But then what happened is the eastern side of the state completely broke away, said, "We don't respect this new US installed government." Crimea voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation, and that kicked off... that, that sort of set in motion the events that would end the concept of free speech diplomacy as like a US government unfettered good. Because what they argued is we pumped $5 billion worth of US government money into media institutions in Ukraine. That's the figure that's cited by Victoria Nuland in December 2013 right before the coup. $5 billion setting up independent media companies, basically sponsoring Mockingbird style our media assets in the region. And they still didn't penetrate eastern Ukraine. The eastern Ukraine was primarily ethnic Russian, uh, didn't penetrate Crimea, so they said, "We need something to stop them from being able to combat our media influence." And they initially called this the Gerasimov Doctrine named after Valery Gerasimov, who was this Russian general.They took a quote from him saying, "The new nature of war is no longer about, uh, no longer about military-to-military conflict. All we need to do is take over the media in these NATO countries, w- and that's primarily social media, get one of our pawns elected as the president, and that president will control the military. So it's much cheaper and more efficient to win a military war by simply winning civilian elections." So that was called the Gerasimov Doctrine. That's what set up the early censorship infrastructure in 2014. Three years later, the, the guy who coined that, Mark Galeotti, would write a sort of mea culpa saying, "Oops, I'm sorry. G- Uh, Gerasimov was actually citing what the US does." But, by that point, they'd already renamed it hybrid warfare. NATO formally declared its Tanks to Tweets doctrine, saying that the new role of NATO is no longer just about tanks, it's about controlling tweets. And then Brexit happened in June 2016. In July 2016, the very next month, in Warsaw, NATO added hybrid warfare to its formal, uh, formal charter, uh, basically authorizing the military, the diplomatic sphere, and the intelligence world to, uh, take control over social media. And then five months later, Trump won the election being called the Russian asset. So all that infrastructure was redirected home to the US.