--:-- [Sound of a podcast intro fading out]
--:-- Georgia Howe: I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Sunday, February 25th, and this is Morning Wire.
--:-- John Bickley: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency faces claims it censors the American public and interferes in elections. After the debunked Russian collusion narrative and the Twitter files, some lawmakers now want to see the agency completely dismantled.
--:-- Georgia Howe: In this episode, Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham talks to Mike Benz, former State Department official and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, about size up.
--:-- Megan Basham: The following is an interview between Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham and Mike Benz, former deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy.
--:-- Mike Benz: Thanks so much for joining us, Mike. You know, to start, can you just give us a brief overview of the formation and purpose of CISA, you know, when it was formed and the justification that was used for forming it?
--:-- Mike Benz: Yeah, so it was formed at the height of the hysteria of Russiagate in November 2018 as an act of Congress that was approved by President Trump under the justification that Russia may have just hacked the 2016 election.
--:-- Megan Basham: If you remember at the time, they were sort of transitioning from Russian bots and trolls interfering on social media to the idea that maybe the DNC servers had been physically hacked and maybe this Vermont energy grid had been physically hacked by Russians.
--:-- Mike Benz: Of course, none of that was ever substantiated. But nevertheless, it was in the heat of this that this cyber security agency within the Department of Homeland Security was created by Congress.
--:-- Megan Basham: And one thing that's important to keep in mind here is it was never supposed to target mis, dis, or malinformation, right? When it was created by Act of Congress, there was nothing about mis, dis, or malinformation. There was nothing about social media whatsoever in CISA's purview.
--:-- Mike Benz: So what they did was a very crooked mission creep, probably the greatest mission creep in American bureaucratic history, in order to make the argument that elections were critical infrastructure.
--:-- Megan Basham: Critical infrastructure was under attack by cyber threats and mis- and disinformation on the internet is a cyber threat.
--:-- Mike Benz: When that mis- and disinformation is about elections, it is therefore a cyber threat to U.S. critical infrastructure and needs to be responded to the way anything on a kill chain architecture in the cybersecurity landscape is responded to, i.e. you neutralize it i.e. you censor it.
--:-- Megan Basham: So this was the sort of mission creep of the century and the way it was pulled off was when Russiagate died in July 2019 when Muller choked on the stand they transitioned CISA's purpose from being stopping Russian disinformation so to speak or Russian bots and trolls or Russian hacking attempts to a simple democracy predicate domestically.
--:-- Mike Benz: And at CISA conferences in the run to the 2020 election, they would openly talk. And I have all these folks clipped and it's been played in the halls of Congress and entered into multiple lawsuits.
--:-- Megan Basham: They even said their own top VHS advisors were calling for a switch from 80 percent foreign, 20 percent domestic to 80 percent domestic. That is, they deliberately, explicitly plotted and carried out the largest domestic censorship events in American history.
--:-- Mike Benz: While actually the SISA unit carrying that out was formally still called the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force at DHS.
--:-- Megan Basham: But then a cute thing happened the first week that the Biden administration came into power in January 2021. They renamed it to the generic Office of Miss, Dis and Malinformation, explicitly giving themselves a charter for both domestic and foreign and papering over the fact that it was the foreign dirty trick squad there that was responsible for the domestic censorship all along.
--:-- Mike Benz: So let me ask a, you know, perhaps somewhat provocative question. Do you believe that this was a pivot or was it part of the intentionality of this department all along?
--:-- Mike Benz: It was the intentionality of the department all along. Now, whether it was going to be that Department or one of the other sister ones that they plotted, I think, was up in the air until Russiagate died.
--:-- Megan Basham: So this whole group around CISA runs through an organization called the Atlantic Council.
--:-- Mike Benz: The Atlantic Council builds itself as NATO's think tank, but it's not really a think tank. It's essentially a clandestine political operation coordinator.
--:-- Megan Basham: It's got seven CIA directors on its board. It gets annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy.
--:-- Mike Benz: The Atlantic Council was also handpicked by CISA to be the so-called domestic disinformation flagger of mail-in ballots for the 2020 election, and then again to censor COVID-19.
--:-- Megan Basham: But what would happen is, is after they got away with election censorship and there was no political pushback, CISA then expanded its mandate to basically start calling everything critical infrastructure.
--:-- Mike Benz: You know, they said public health is critical infrastructure, so if you do misinformation about COVID, now that's the Department of Homeland Security's censorship obligation.
--:-- Megan Basham: Our borders are critical infrastructure. So if there's misinformation about irregular migration, then that's under DHS purview.
--:-- Mike Benz: They wanted to apply this to everything. This all started with this, you know, essentially dirty diplomats roadshow in early 2017, where they blamed the loss of the 2016 election on a free and open internet.
--:-- Megan Basham: And this group that spindles out of this Atlantic Council network went about devising a plan to essentially have a government agency be able to quarterback what they call the whole of society counter mis and disinformation network.
--:-- Mike Benz: It not counter mis disinformation This was not about counter speech This is about censoring speech So colloquially you should just think of it as the whole society censorship network
--:-- Megan Basham: What that involved was four separate institutional categories, government, private sector, civil society, and news media and fact-checking, all synchronized in a single network so that each could apply their own proprietary resources and pull their own levers in order to effectuate censorship at scale.
--:-- Mike Benz: Because there's a lot of moving parts that are necessary to do all this.
--:-- Megan Basham: But, you know, they initially wanted to do what CISA was doing. I mean, there were Atlantic Council white papers about this from 2018 all the way through 2020.
--:-- Mike Benz: It was under something that they called the forward defense plan against disinformation. It's not offense, it's forward defense.
--:-- Megan Basham: And, you know, these papers, they would say, well, listen, we need the government to be able to herd the cats of this whole society network because we can't just have some, you know, pumped up nonprofit group tell Facebook what to do.
--:-- Mike Benz: We need a government agency to do it. Well, they initially wanted to park it at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which was the formal censorship arm of the State Department created in 2014 to take on ISIS.
--:-- Megan Basham: But they said, the problem is, is if we park it at the Global Engagement Center, the State Department can only do this with respect to foreign-facing operations, foreign speech, non-U.S. citizens, because the State Department's not allowed to operate domestically.
--:-- Mike Benz: They said, well, this is really kind of an intelligence capacity. And this is the sort thing that the CIA has a license to do abroad.
--:-- Megan Basham: The CIA can go to the Frankfurt Algemeiner in Germany and tell them not to print a story. They're technically not supposed to do that with the New York Times.
--:-- Mike Benz: So that's far-facing. The FBI would be able to do this because the FBI has a domestic jurisdiction.
--:-- Megan Basham: But the problem with the FBI is it's supposed to be, by law, the intelligence arm of the Justice Department.
--:-- Mike Benz: And what we're talking about are really just opinion tweets. There's no act of law breaking.
--:-- Megan Basham: So the only other option that leaves, because we have 15 foreign facing intelligence services, but we only have two domestically, that's the FBI and the DHS.
--:-- Mike Benz: And the magic of the DHS is it doesn't require law breaking for the agency to expend resources.
--:-- Megan Basham: So let me just be perfectly clear here to bring this home. What they plotted and what they did was they created an institution within the Department of Homeland Security that combined the foreign-facing Department of Dirty Tricks power of the CIA with the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI.
--:-- Mike Benz: So something you said in your interview with Tucker Carlson seems really crucial to how they're getting away with this censorship.
--:-- Megan Basham: And part of that was that they were redefining democracy not to mean government by the will of the people, but to protect democratic institutions.
--:-- Mike Benz: So protecting democracy meant we protect these institutions.
--:-- Megan Basham: Can you expand on that a little bit and why that was so significant to SZA?
--:-- Mike Benz: Yeah, so you may recall, if you're politically aware and paying attention to the news, a lot of strange headlines coming out of typically sort of white shoe, foreign policy oriented places like the Atlantic or op-eds in Newsweek or foreign affairs around how elites need to have more say in elections and how actually, you know, in a strange way, elections might actually undermine democracy.
--:-- Megan Basham: If you look for it, you will find this in places that you might not, you know, the same places calling for democracy will, you know, occasionally put out these headlines around how actually elections are a threat to democracy in a certain way.
--:-- Mike Benz: And that doesn't come out of nowhere. That comes out of this post-2016 consensus building architecture that essentially posited that our traditional understanding of democracy was not ready for social media.
--:-- Megan Basham: That there were always these kind of bumper cars on democracy.
--:-- Mike Benz: Now, they did this in a few ways, right? They said, well, the problem with democracy is it leads to demagogues.
--:-- Megan Basham: You know, they will say, you know, Hitler was democratically elected and many other dictators were.
--:-- Mike Benz: And the thing that kept democracy working was actually not total and unfettered freedom in observing just the votes of what people voted for.
--:-- Megan Basham: It was the democratic institutions, everything from oversight institutions within the U.S. government to civil society institutions, which is their sort of catch-all euphemistic phrasing for politically like-minded universities, NGOs, nonprofits, and media institutions.
--:-- Mike Benz: And those basically were able to box out the rise of domestic political forces that might lead to demagoguery or a strongman authoritarian proclivities and whatnot.
--:-- Megan Basham: And so they said, actually, democratic institutions are really more important than the voting process itself.
--:-- Mike Benz: When you use that democracy framing, that unleashes this power within our foreign-facing Department of Dirty Tricks agencies, the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the NGOs forum that's pumped up by funding from USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.
--:-- Megan Basham: And what happened here was they said, well, what is democracy? Democracy is democratic institutions.
--:-- Mike Benz: Well, what are democratic institutions? Places like the New York Times and the Washington Post and NBC and ABC and CBS.
--:-- Megan Basham: I mean, you can go to usaspending.gov right now and you can find over $60 million of funding from the National Science Foundation directly to a censorship mercenary army just within the universities alone for censorship grants paying thousands of people across 60 universities to censor U.S. citizen speech that, quote, undermines public faith and confidence in democratic institutions, including the media.
--:-- Mike Benz: So I'll give you a great example of this. There's one grant that we published about recently to a new project called Course Correct.
--:-- Megan Basham: That's $5.5 million going from the National Science Foundation to the University of Michigan, for the University of Michigan to work with a bunch of software engineers to create a dynamic disinformation dashboard about speech online that undermines public faith and confidence in the news media.
--:-- Mike Benz: Because the news media is a democratic institution, according to DHS, the National Science Foundation, you know, what I call the blob, this constellation of national security.
--:-- Megan Basham: I was going to ask you to define the blob, but yeah, go on.
--:-- Mike Benz: Yeah. So that's not my term. That the term that President Obama deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes described when in the second half of the Obama administration Obama started to have a bit of a fallout with this very powerful faction within Washington.
--:-- Megan Basham: And in feeling like they were losing some of those skirmishes, his deputy national security advisor sort of described what they were up against as the blob.
--:-- Mike Benz: And I think that that's a useful term. It doesn't require you to be a Democrat or a Republican or a conservative or liberals to understand this constellation of stakeholders and institutions within D.C. that are essentially the top power block.
--:-- Megan Basham: And what you see here is the same sort of dirty tricks that we were doing to run counterinsurgency operations against little insurgent groups that were trying to run for office in their own elections, that the CIA had a carte blanche to rig and that the State Department had carte blanche to fund the political opposition groups or to foreign countries we're talking about.
--:-- Mike Benz: Yeah, in other countries. Yeah. They brought that home, fully home.
--:-- Megan Basham: So when you say, you know, this became about protecting democratic institutions, they're not talking about the Supreme Court.
--:-- Mike Benz: They're talking about protecting some extra constitutional institutions that came, you know, long after, let's say FDR?
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, they will include the Supreme Court if the Supreme Court is on their side.
--:-- Mike Benz: For example, when I say they say that journalism is a democratic institution and that independent news media is a democratic institution, they don't really mean the news media.
--:-- Megan Basham: They mean their political like-mindedness there.
--:-- Mike Benz: They don't mean the New York Times, they don't mean Daily Wire.
--:-- Megan Basham: I mean, Rob Flaherty at the White House Digital Strategy Office literally wrote an email.
--:-- Mike Benz: This came out in the Jim Jordan Weaponization Subcommittee subpoenas, literally wrote an email to Facebook telling them to change their algorithm to prioritize the New York Times and to throttle the Daily Wire.
--:-- Megan Basham: We did hear about that.
--:-- Mike Benz: So Daily Wire just is not going to be treated as a democratic institution, but that's the fine print they'll leave out of that, right?
--:-- Megan Basham: In fact, It's actually under this rubric of protecting Democratic institutions such as independent media that they censor independent media because it's just a branding device in order to protect their own cartel.
--:-- Mike Benz: So, you know, a lot of people will look at this and I think we kind of slip into the very easy framing of Democrat versus Republican issues.
--:-- Megan Basham: But, you know, based on some of the other interviews I've seen you give, this is much bigger than right versus left or Democrat versus Republican.
--:-- Mike Benz: Completely. Yes. Yes.
--:-- Megan Basham: And this is and that's such an important point. This censorship industry would not change shape whatsoever under a Nikki Haley presidency.
--:-- Mike Benz: And I'm not trying to single out a particular politician in this case.
--:-- Megan Basham: But what they would say is, is listen, you know, we've had this understanding of democracy and it needs to change in light of the role of social media, because we have a very precarious thing managing the American empire.
--:-- Mike Benz: If there's some funny truck driver who's popular on social media, they could collapse the entire inheritance of two and a half centuries of statecraft.
--:-- Megan Basham: And we need bumper cars around that.
--:-- Mike Benz: We had that in the analog media era because all of the major media institutions of the 20th century came out of the Pentagon.
--:-- Megan Basham: They came out of the Office of War Information set up in 1942 to fold them into the warfighting apparatus.
--:-- Mike Benz: There was always a dialogue to be able to align that world that served in order to box out candidates who represented the kind of political threat, the populist threat, the caring about the homeland more than the empire threat that Donald Trump did.
--:-- Megan Basham: And by the way, they would have done the same thing to Bernie Sanders in 2016.
--:-- Mike Benz: You know, 2016, Bernie Sanders was calling for an end of U.S. militarism and a scale back of all of our interventions and USAID and all of that in order to pay for free health care and free college tuition.
--:-- Megan Basham: He was crushed by the gears of the machine of the Hillary Clinton machine and of the DNC side of the blob.
--:-- Mike Benz: So it's not a partisan thing. It's much bigger than that.
--:-- Megan Basham: It gets to really the soul of what turns the gears of power in this country.
--:-- Mike Benz: So, you know, I mean, and this may seem a fairly low level summary, but to summarize, it's fair to say then that both parties had an interest in seeing a censorship bureaucracy on the domestic front.
--:-- Megan Basham: That's exactly right.
--:-- Mike Benz: And that's why the head of CISA was a Republican. It was Chris Krensch.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, there was a very strange thing, which was that his top deputy at CISA was a Democrat, which the White House found quite curious.
--:-- Mike Benz: It was never Trump plus DNC apparatus there within CISA.
--:-- Megan Basham: And because of that, they were able to sort of create the patina of bipartisanship because nominally you had Republicans.
--:-- Mike Benz: In the same way that nominally Liz Cheney was basically the I know Benny Thompson was the chairman, but Liz Cheney was effectively the face of the January 6th committee.
--:-- Megan Basham: So, I mean, a lot of people are going to naturally have the question when they hear about this. Was the Trump administration not able to stop this? Did it not understand what it was? or was it sold as something different?
--:-- Mike Benz: They didn't understand it.
--:-- Megan Basham: And at the time, I mean, it's hard for many people to remember now what things were like five years ago, 2018, 2019, when all this stuff was happening and I was screaming bloody murder about it to every contact in my phone book.
--:-- Mike Benz: You almost got laughed out of the room if you said there was any censorship at all.
--:-- Megan Basham: If you remember, it wasn't really until kind of mid-2021 that it was conceded that censorship on the internet was a real thing.
--:-- Mike Benz: Frankly, it kind of took Trump himself.
--:-- Megan Basham: If you remember, even before he was kicked off Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MailChimp, you know, and Pinterest simultaneously, there was about a month and a half where a very strange thing would happen, which is one of the largest accounts on Twitter and the sitting president of the United States.
--:-- Mike Benz: You would go to his Twitter page and nine out of 10 posts would have some fact check affixed to it or would be you'd have to go through this friction laden interstitial click through to see the tweet.
--:-- Megan Basham: But the other part of it is people did not want to believe because there was a perception that if it was as bad as I was saying it would require the kind of struggle that was perhaps too resource intensive or too distracting from things that were happening or was too big to take on or it might require a totally different approach to coalition building or to other elements of public policy.
--:-- Mike Benz: And even then, we still might not win. And it was just, it was like staring at the sun. If it was true, I don't want to know.
--:-- Megan Basham: And it wasn't until it became sort of, the sunlight was so bright that it was melting people's skin that suddenly it was like, oh, wow, OK, all right. It's OK. It's real. We have to do something about this.
--:-- Mike Benz: But by that point, five years of censorship industry architecture had been laid down and consolidated.
--:-- Megan Basham: You know, the time to scrape it away easily was when the cement was wet.
--:-- Mike Benz: But five years and several billion dollars of capital pumped into it and multiple federal agencies entrenching their spindles, you know, 60 different universities, hundreds of different NGOs, dozens of different censorship mercenary firms, and an entire ground-up sort of fact-checking media network alliance rolled into this so-called whole society.
--:-- Megan Basham: By then, you know, the cancer had metastasized to the heart and the lungs.
--:-- Mike Benz: There was no Tylenol pill you could take. There was no Section 230, and there never was.
--:-- Megan Basham: That was, you know, it requires a degree of, I say this metaphorically, but it's trench warfare that's necessary to untangle the Gordian knot here.
--:-- Mike Benz: There's no one single slingshot pebble that you can even throw at this Goliath.
--:-- Megan Basham: It is too big for that.
--:-- Mike Benz: And maybe last question, I mean, what does that trench warfare look like? And is there the will legislatively to do it?
--:-- Megan Basham: It looks like the same thing on the side of freedom that was done on the side of censorship.
--:-- Mike Benz: You know, what I've said all along is that the only thing that can take on a whole society censorship network is a whole society freedom coalition that ties together freedom-oriented government folks, the folks in the legislature, for example, or in an executive branch of either, whether that would be a Trump-type figure or an RFK-type figure.
--:-- Megan Basham: In theory, this is a nonpartisan issue.
--:-- Mike Benz: But what I'll say is we should take some heart. 2023 was a year of major, major, major victories.
--:-- Megan Basham: It was the first year we ever won.
--:-- Mike Benz: That is, by the end of 2023, there was more freedom on the internet than there was at the beginning of 2023.
--:-- Megan Basham: That was not true for the entire six, seven years before that.
--:-- Mike Benz: And every year we would lose by more and more and more.
--:-- Megan Basham: In fact, I talk about this a lot, but in September 2022, the Harvard Misinformation Review, the proprietary censorship journal of Harvard University, published a piece calling disinformation studies, quote, too big to fail.
--:-- Mike Benz: And just one year later, to the date, in September 2023, they published a piece saying that it was now, quote, crumbling because of the combined effectiveness of legal, regulatory, and media pressure on these issues, which relies on the camouflage of darkness to have the political legitimacy for the funding and many other things.
--:-- Megan Basham: So the issue is, since we started winning, they have responded in the same way that the Justice Department responded when Trump rising in the polls, not dropping out.
--:-- Mike Benz: So what happens? They indict him four times, and now he's facing 700 years in prison.
--:-- Megan Basham: And they're bankrupting him with suit after suit of, frankly, BS charges, costing him $500 million.
--:-- Mike Benz: But these are things that have never been done for two and a half centuries to an American president.
--:-- Megan Basham: No American president ever been indicted, let alone hit with stacking charges equating to 700 years.
--:-- Mike Benz: No U.S. president ever been targeted with lawfare that way or sued by a state attorney general's office for an accounting detail where there were no actual damages because the loan was actually paid off.
--:-- Megan Basham: And so they breaking that social contract and then radically raising the stakes.
--:-- Mike Benz: That is what is currently happening with the censorship industry.
--:-- Megan Basham: Since we had all these major wins in 2023 with Elon acquiring Twitter, with the House turning over from Democrat to Republican in a cascade of subpoenas, hearings and transcribed interviews from eight different congressional committees in total, especially weaponization, oversight, House Homeland Security and others.
--:-- Mike Benz: And then you had the Twitter files and all the exposures and media cycles from that.
--:-- Megan Basham: You had the major victories at the trial and appellate court level in the Missouri v. Biden case, which if the Supreme Court makes a favorable ruling will literally forbid by law the ability for the government to do what's been doing for the past seven years.
--:-- Mike Benz: Then you've got the other cases, everything from the America First legal case to this new state attorney general backed case against the State Department for their role in the censorship industry with Ken Paxton there in Texas.
--:-- Megan Basham: But the response to that has been transatlantic flank attack 2.0.
--:-- Mike Benz: Transatlantic flank attack refers to this U.S. political stakeholder plan to get Europe to pass censorship laws and then force the tech companies into compliance with European norms and standards in order to censor U.S. speech.
--:-- Megan Basham: And I watched these people do this in 2017 when they got an SDG passed in Germany.
--:-- Mike Benz: This is part of this whole dirty diplomats roadshow I referred to earlier when the State Department exiles of the Hillary Clinton State Department, after 2016, after she lost, went across the ocean to NATO and convinced all these European countries to start passing censorship laws, saying that we have a First Amendment here in the U.S., but if Europe moves first, we will close the gap, and this will give us leverage to do so.
--:-- Megan Basham: They're doing the exact same thing right now with something called the EU Digital Services Act, which is basically the NATO censorship law, which bans disinformation on the internet.
--:-- Mike Benz: That gives them godlike power to say that basically anything political is disinformation and would force Elon Musk to censor it or else forfeit their position in the European market, which is 500 million people.
--:-- Megan Basham: It's a bigger market than the U.S. market.
--:-- Mike Benz: They can't do that.
--:-- Megan Basham: So they keep escalating the stakes and they're effectively in running the First Amendment itself.
--:-- Mike Benz: All right. Well, I mean, we'll probably leave it there, Mike, just because this is so much to digest.
--:-- Megan Basham: And you have such an awareness that, you know, today we've only taken off maybe a tiny chunk of it.
--:-- Mike Benz: But hopefully, you know, our contribution keeps the ball rolling.
--:-- Megan Basham: Great. Well, thank you. I appreciate your time and talk soon.
--:-- Mike Benz: Thanks so much, Mike.
--:-- Megan Basham: That was an interview between Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham and Mike Benz, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Policy.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
