MUST WATCH: Tucker Carlson exposes national security state as 'main driver of censorship and election interference' in the US

In an interview posted on Friday, Tucker Carlson spoke with Mike Benz, executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, on how the national security state in the US acts as the "main driver of censorship and election interference" in the country.

Benz began by noting the "story of internet freedom" and how it switched from "internet freedom to internet censorship."

He noted that "free speech on the internet was an instrument of statecraft," and that free speech "was championed, more than anybody, by the Pentagon, the State Department, and our sort of CIA cut out NGO blob architecture as a way to support dissident groups around the world in order to help them overthrow authoritarian governments."

"Essentially, the internet free speech allowed kind of instant regime change operations."

Benz noted Google, which "began as a DARPA grant by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford PhDs," and quickly grew to using CIA satellite software for Google Maps and becoming a military contractor.

"All of the Internet free speech technology was initially created by our national security state. VPNs, virtual private networks to hide your IP address, Tor, the dark web to be able to buy and sell goods anonymously, end-to-end encrypted chats, all these things were created, initially as DARPA projects, or as joint CIA NSA projects to be able to help intelligence backed groups to overthrow governments that were causing a problem to the Clinton administration or the Bush administration, the Obama administration."

Noting conflicts and wars such as the Arab Spring and the 2014 conflict in Ukraine, Benz said, "it's infinitely cheaper than conducting a military war to simply conduct an organized political influence operation over social media."

The "crisis moment" occurred in 2016 with Britain’s Brexit movement, as well as other right-wing populist groups popping up around Europe and the world, with NATO declaring that "the biggest threat NATO faces is not actually a military invasion from Russia, it’s losing domestic elections across Europe to all these right-wing populist groups."

From the perspective of financial stakeholders in the IMF or World Bank, "if the military did not begin to censor the internet, all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after World War II would collapse."

"There began to be a more diplomatic debate" about the censorship industry after Brexit, Benz said, adding that "it became full throttle when Trump was elected."

"What little resistance there was, was washed over by the rise and saturation of Russia gate, which basically allowed them to not have to deal with the moral ambiguities, of censoring your own people. Because if Trump was a Russian asset, you no longer really had a traditional free speech issue. It was a national security issue."

"It was only after Russiagate died in July 2019, when Robert Mueller basically choked on the stand for three hours, and revealed he had absolutely nothing after two and a half years of investigation, that the foreign to domestic switcheroo took place where they took all of this censorship architecture spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DOD, the DOJ, and then the thousands of government-funded NGO and private sector mercenary firms were all basically transited from a foreign predicate, a Russian disinformation predicate, to a democracy predicate by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes from the Russians. It's actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself. And so by that they were able to launder the entire democracy promotion, regime change toolkit, just in time for the 2020 election."