“Deep State”

The failed assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, one of the worst security fiascoes in American history, reflects a core truth that fuels the MAGA movement and makes the case for reelecting its leader to the Oval Office: Our leading institutions are so corrupted and incompetent that the purported experts who run them cannot or will not execute their most basic functions.

When it comes to the Secret Service, its singular duty is to protect the life and limb of the subjects to whom it is detailed. On July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, it failed that mission in a spectacular fashion.

On Saturday, July 14, a 20-year-old local boy with virtually no online footprint or history of political radicalism brought a ladder and rifle to the Pennsylvania grounds where presidential candidate Donald Trump was about to speak to supporters. The would-be assassin stationed himself on a low, unsecured, slightly sloped rooftop with a direct line of sight to Trump, a mere 130 yards away, and got off a shot that came within a hair’s breadth of killing the likely next President. A Secret Service sniper then eliminated the threat (but only after he got off a total of eight shots, murdering one Trump supporter and critically wounding two others).

If Facebook, the company, had a personal Facebook profile, its “relationship status” with free speech would say, “It’s complicated.” The platform, however, has consistently courted election interference efforts.

MRC Free Speech America researchers compiled 39 times Facebook was caught interfering in U.S. elections since 2008. The platform’s record of election-interfering censorship began in 2012, reached a crescendo in 2020 and has begun fading somewhat in the early stages of the 2024 electoral cycle. All the while, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly made pro-free speech comments including during his famous 2019 speech at Georgetown University.

America First Legal (AFL), a public interest law firm, has obtained documents through a lawsuit which reveal a government agency’s recommendations for censorship.

The documents, created by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), encourage national governments and private entities to combat disinformation. Its recommendations are vaguely expressed — “regulate ad networks”, for example — but the report spells out various censorship methods in positive terms without explicitly endorsing them. These include disrupting the finances of disfavoured information sources by getting advertisers to pull funding, and shaping the way the public interprets the news through “media literacy” programmes in schools.

If you didn’t see Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Benz, you need to take an hour and watch the whole thing. In a mind-bending narrative about the emergence of what Benz calls “military rule” through an online censorship industry in the U.S., he lays out in startling detail just how corrupt and tyrannical the U.S. defense and foreign policy establishment has become.

Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. "What I’m describing is military rule," says Mike Benz. "It’s the inversion of democracy." pic.twitter.com/hDTEjAf89T

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 16, 2024