Mike Benz (Part 2): How the ‘Department of Dirty Tricks’ Turned on Americans

<p>Previously, in part one of my interview with Mike Benz, he explained the existence of a “whole-of-society” censorship industry in the West. Benz has been tracking the rise of censorship for years as executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a former State Department diplomat.</p><p>Now in part two, Benz explains how tools originally developed to promote regime change were deployed against Americans.</p><p>“What you are doing in a regime-change operation is you are operationalizing huge masses of an indigenous or domestic population in order to create a ground-up overthrow of a sitting government. And in order to do that, you need to control the media infrastructure, you need to control the narratives that people believe. … What was new is that in 2016, this began coming home,” Benz says.</p><p>Changes in America also corresponded with changes in the broader Western world, Benz says. “There became a whole new military doctrine—it’s not a new concept, [but] I think it was given a new name—called hybrid warfare. NATO declared a new doctrine called ‘from tanks to tweets.’”</p><p>And a whole new lexicon emerged to describe the new censorship regime, Benz says, from “digital resilience” to “media literacy” to “moderation” and “intervention.”</p><p>“Whoever can control the Department of Dirty Tricks is able to use it to remove all opposition,” Benz says.</p>