Former State Department official, Mike Benz, the founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online joined Dave Brat Saturday on The War Room to discuss the government censorship complex. During their discussion Benz revealed that the US Defense Department is paying billions in taxpayer funds to major ad agencies who isolate, censor, smear, and ban ads to independent media outlets like The Gateway Pundit.
The Gateway Pundit continues to fight against the government censorship complex as a major plaintiff in the ongoing Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit that recently was kicked back to the appellate courts.
As many of our readers already know – The Gateway Pundit is one of the most censored, smeared and blacklisted websites in America today. Despite this our numbers continue to grow each year thanks to our amazing readers, brilliant staff, and undying devotion to the truth.
Mike Benz: After the 2016 election, the National Security State, our foreign policy establishment, basically the row of government gangsters, I guess as Cash Patel calls them, some people call it the Deep State, I refer to it as the blob, embarked on a quest to kill advertising revenue to alternative news sources. They blamed the loss of the 2016 election to Donald Trump and the events of the Brexit vote in UK on the rise of alternative media, basically outflanking traditional legacy CIA, Pentagon, State Department backchanneled media. These bumper cars on democracy that mainstream media had put on the boundaries of thought and on political movements had fallen away as alternative news sources like The War Room, like Real America’s Voice, like places like BBreitbart and OAN. Basically, organic grassroots citizen-run podcasts or journalism outlets were becoming more popular than the legacy outlets themselves. I mean, even Alex Jones at the time had more clicks on YouTube than all of CNN in 2018. And so what they decided to do, and by they, I mean these government forces, the US State Department, USAID, with help from the Pentagon, with help from the NGO complex, embarked on a quest to kill advertising revenue to alternative news sources.
They basically came up with a plan that it’s easier to shoot the messenger than it is to kill all of the messenger’s individual messages. So while they set up this censorship complex on the one hand to kill the distribution of news stories, their ultimate goal was to kill the actual existence of alternative news organizations. And so there are a couple of elements to that. One of them is this class of censorship mercenary firms like Newsguard, which folks may have heard of. Newsguard, Global Disinformation Index, Newzella.
There’s a pop-up industry of censorship mercenary firms who now assign rating labels to news online in order to treat them the way Moody’s or S&P does about debt instruments, whether or not this is a junk bond or AAA rated. They now do this with news organizations organizations in order to filter this to advertising companies, to kill advertising revenue to any website that’s deemed to be a misinformation spreader.
So for example, Newsguard created a blacklist of about 650 websites that had questioned COVID orthodoxy or talked about the manmade lab leak COVID origins thesis. And then using its relationships with the big four advertisers like Publicis, their four main advertising agencies, they then got to kill billions of dollars in revenue to alternative news sources by, again, exploiting that relationship between the censorship gargoyles who rate the news, and the advertising agencies who distribute corporate advertising funds to the websites and to places like Google Ads.
So there's one in particular known as GARM, which is this syndicate out of the World Economic Forum, which oversees about $2.6 billion every year in programmatic ad spend. And these rating agencies are all part of it.
Now, my foundation, Foundation for Freedom Online, just did a survey of all their federal contracts. Frankly, what we found is totally shocking. All four of the major ad agencies, again, including Publicis, and you'll see this on the FFO report on our website, but all four of them receive billions of dollars, billions, with a B, every year in federal government contracts. One of them gets $4 billion a year. Another one gets $1.8, $1.1. Now, a lot of this comes from the Pentagon, and this is basically the same strategy that they use to spread ESG. These are the agencies that are now killing the ability to operate an independent website by selectively discriminating against anyone who disagrees with the US State Department or who disagrees with the US War Machine, or who disagrees with big pharma. Now they can't operate a website effectively, while the entire playing field of media is rigged in favor of the government's preferred outlets.
And it's the taxpayers who are voting, who are basically having their money stolen to subsidize this. So I think that all these funds should be cut to these federal contracts, should be cut to these ad agencies the same way that's starting to be done with ESG, with places like Texas divesting from investments in Black Rock to the tune of $8 billion a few months ago until they get rid of their ESG activism. I think the same thing has to be done on the adversaries or boycott side.
Dave Brat: Yeah, well, and this all ties back into your original research on the censorship running through DHS, et cetera. Now, the private sector is one level, but when you show the government is complicit, that is illegal. Is that correct? If the government is funding political outcomes, that's illegal. Is that true?
Mike Benz: Well, it should be. We have a little bit of an uncertainty in the state of play here in the sense that there's this big Supreme Court case which was just punted on, effectively. There's the Murthy ruling... The Murthy v. Missouri case. Now, we had great rulings at the trial court and appellate court level, but again, it was on a preliminary injunction. The Supreme Court made a narrow, standing-based ruling, kicked it back down to the lower courts.
So we're in a gray zone right now as to whether or not this actually is legal. But I think for now, a lot of people don't actually even realize that this is happening, that you have the government subsidizing the ad agencies who in turn then discriminate against Conservatives, against independent outlets, even anti-war left-wing news outlets. It's basically comes down to, again, this blob. Do you agree with Hillary Clinton, if you will?
So some of these outlets who are even on the left, the old-school Bernie Sanders-aligned ones who may be NATO skeptical, even they get dinged by outlets like Newsguard, and therefore by the Big Four. But the government should not be picking winners and losers.
Here is the full video from The War Room.
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