People always ask: What precisely can we do to stop the fall of civilization? It’s a big question. The only viable answer I can come up with is: get informed and change public opinion. It’s the only way we can stop it. A corrupt ruling class that loses public confidence entirely will fall. Not immediately but eventually. They can try to delay the day through censorship and demonizing dissent but if the persistence presses on, it will win.
For this reason, I cheer every narrative that breaks through to reach a large audience that blows up the prevailing orthodoxy that is wrecking the good life. It could be a small article or a large book, a movie or a song, a meme or cartoon, a press conference or a speech. It doesn’t matter. Any piece of content that exposes the truth behind what’s going on is a good one. That’s how we are going to win this.
In that context, I’m deeply grateful for the voice of Mike Benz in recent days. He is the director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. He possesses encyclopedic knowledge of the role of intelligence agencies operating today (and in the past) in a way that takes away your freedom, not only through internet censorship but also in manipulating election outcomes and skewing institutions toward ruling-class priorities and away from the just aspirations of regular people for freedom, rights, and normalcy.
He was interviewed already last year by Jan Jekielek in particular about the role of COVID lockdowns in consolidating corporativist control of societies around the world. That interview blasted open what many of us had studied and intuited but hadn’t entirely put together. It also got the attention of Tucker Carlson who also interviewed him.
As we know, Carlson has easily the most reach of any media platform in the English language today. This video has reached some 35 million views, which is gigantic by any standard. Actually, in passing, it is rather hilarious that National Review (yes, that old thing) has decided to cast Tucker Carlson out of the “conservative movement” like they used to do in the old days. The old days are gone and Carlson has about 1000x the reach of NRO. Some people just can’t deal with new realities of media decentralization.
In any case, the Carlson/Benz interview is fantastic. The content on the Epoch interview was better but the Carlson interview is what gained Benz mass attention, and then enabled him to make another series of walk-and-talk lectures on the role of the intelligence community in crafting and distorting our lives.
For millions of people, this is their introduction to this way of thinking. Most people, and I include my old self here, are woefully naive about just how involved the intelligence community is in U.S. foreign and domestic policy, media control, and corporate life especially as it affects digital communications. For decades, this kind of analysis was only available in small outposts of radical publications on the left and right, and was dismissed as “conspiracy theory” by all mainstream culture.
That’s a problem because it gave the plotters a free hand to go about their business without serious notice. The problem has been building for decades but Benz explains how the victory of Donald Trump in 2016 kicked the insider rackets into overdrive. The efforts to censor began immediately and so did the plots to accuse President Trump of having been elected by the Russians, a story that later proved ridiculous.
The main efforts of the establishment were directed against Mr. Trump but only as a symbol of a growing international populist movement that dates back in time to the end of the Cold War, when populism (for lack of a better term) began to gain ground. Brexit panicked the establishment in ways that I had not understood at the time, and the Trump victory made many architects of world order panic that all could be lost if they did not act.
Fast forwarding in time, it was in this context that the COVID lockdowns took place. Initially, the whole thing seemed like an incredibly foolish public health response. But the more we at Brownstone Institute looked at this, the more we kept bumping into pockets of information that were wrapped in classified secrecy. The mysteries still persist but we know more than ever that the whole COVID response was not actually a project of “public health” properly considered but rather a military/intelligence policy kicked into gear as an outgrowth of the biodefense industry that works tightly with pharmaceutical companies.
This is why, for example, the Food and Drug Administration did not really need to approve the mRNA potions pushed out by drug companies. They came pre-approved under emergency provisions passed on March 13, 2020. Yes, it took us three years to figure this out. But so too for many aspects of lockdowns. We didn’t know until intrepid researchers got involved just how pervasive the dark hand of the intelligence community really was in this entire disaster.
Mike Benz has followed all the twists and turns of this plot as much as anyone, and he is using his new-found attention in a kind of rapid-fire live seminar for the public, reaching as many people as possible with his highly credible accounts of what was going on behind the scenes. We don’t know how long he will be able to keep this up given the stakes but let us hope he goes and goes.
And let’s put in a word too for the remarkable coincidence of events that make all this possible. Tucker had to get fired by Fox and Elon Musk had to take over Twitter and several lawsuits had to be filed to get discovery plus there had to be a venue like Epoch that reaches millions. All of this had to come together to build this resistance force of public education to counter the overwhelming messaging of the establishment that had already captured most of corporate media, academia, and government.
None of this guarantees any kind of victory but it certainly does place some roadblocks in the way of a clear path for those who hate our liberties and the Constitution. An aware public is a non-compliant public. With knowledge comes consciousness of the depth of the terrible things that have happened to us and why. And with that comes the determination and moral courage to resist. Without that, we are truly toast.
Do you have the sense that we are living on the precipice of possible disaster? We are but it can be prevented. There is every reason to turn your despair to hope, thanks mainly to outspoken voices who defy the odds and reach multitudes. This is the right path forward. It accomplishes more than all the protests, elections, and events. Quiet and rational communication is the best tool we have. Many people are using that tool now in ways that should give us all hope.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
Jeffrey A.Tucker’s interview with David Leis on Leaders on the Frontier can be seen here.
