Censorship Industrial Complex Expert Mike Benz Explains Telegram CEO’s Arrest

Mike Benz, founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online is a former State Department official with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters. Benz has done a great service to this country and to the world in exposing the Censorship Industrial Complex.

He was on a Twitter Spaces on Saturday, with Kim Dotcom, Andrew Tate and others, discussing the arrest of Telegram Founder/CEO, Pavel Durov in France earlier in the day.

He says he was kicked off the Space before he got to say his piece, so he fired-up his cellphone, while at the airport in Austin, Texas to give his take on what is going on in the arrest of the Telegram CEO.

Telegram is a Russian platform and it has therefore not been subject to the relentless censorship that US Government agencies and those of other Western nations have recently turned into their top priorities – and growth industries.

This is not to say that the Russian government doesn’t censor their own people. It is claimed that Russians are among the most censored populace in the world – but I can’t say anything bad about them, because I might have to move there, if Kabala is installed as POTUS.

I’m not certain of the accuracy of this visualization, based on my own personal experience but that could because I am spoiled, having lived in America for most of my life during a relatively uncensored period.

Pavel Durov had recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to talk about how the FBI had tried to infiltrate Telegram in order to install backdoors, so that they could collect all of their data and spy on anti-Globalists dissidents and the like.

After the successive debacles of the 2024 Paris Olympics and the 2024 DNC Convention in Chicago, the Globalists can’t have people sharing clips and telling jokes about how sick and disgusting these people are.

Remember how the French government claimed copyright strikes against those sharing clips from the opening ceremonies of the Olympics? Aren’t the Olympics supposed to be a major publicity event, promoting the Host Country? Wasn’t everybody supposed to fall in love with France and share images of the events? Isn’t that what the Olympics are largely about? How insane and out-of-touch are these morons?

Anyway, the subverted/perverted French government arrested the Telegram CEO when Durov’s private plane landed in Paris on Saturday.

Ars Tecnica is reporting that his arrest due to “a near-total lack of moderation” on the platform, allowing crime to proliferate – crimes, of which the French Government is now planning to charge Durov as an accomplice.

It’s a little more complex than this, as Mike Benz explains, below. Mike Benz is my power animal. He is another great hero to emerge during the current information war.

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TRANSCRIPT

Mike Benz: Hey, I’m here, in the airport in Austin and I was just on this [Twitter/X] Space with Mario [Nawfal] and Andrew Tate and Kim Dotcom and a bunch of people, but I want to make a point – but I think they booted me, before I could say anything. So I’m just gonna make it here:

On the news of Pavel’s arrest, the founder of Telegram, this is something that I see going up the US State Department. Wow, surprise, surprise, that’s my take, but that’s what it is.

And one of the things they’re talking about in the Space, right now is, “What can be done?”

And the fact is, is the House Foreign Affairs Committee could subpoena or could demand, as part of its Oversight, all communications between the US Embassy in Paris – that is, the State Department’s branch in France – for their communications with prosecutors or government officials about Pavel’s arrest, prior to the arrest.

Because I believe the State Department is at the very least – if not outright pushing – participating in this political prosecution.

The State Department has been going after Telegram – now, they don’t want to shut Telegram down. Let me explain this:

Telegram is a double-edged sword for the State Department. Telegram played a major role in the State Department’s fomenting of the Color Revolution in Belarus in the summer of 2020. The National Endowment for Democracy, the US State Department, and USAID were all funding the major organizers of the street riots in Belarus and using Telegram as the main channel to organize those street riots, because Telegram has such ubiquitous use in Eastern Europe – also in Russia, also in Ukraine.

So, they loved Telegram, as a way to organize “rent-a-riots”, to destabilize Lukashenko’s government. And I bet that they would do the same – if they didn’t, I’m not aware of it, just because I haven’t looked into it – but I bet that when Alexei Navalny was deployed against Russia from his right-wing flank, in organizing “peaceful protests” in Russia, I bet Telegram was used by the State Department as the coordination then – because I know that it was in Belarus.

Now, on the other hand, the State Department pressured – actually, astroturfed, with tens of millions of dollars – the government of Brazil to bring Telegram to its knees. Brazil passed a ban – actually made it a crime – to access Telegram for several weeks in 2022, until Telegram agreed to the new “counter-misinformation” laws that were lobbied-for by the US State Department’s NGO, Soft Power Swarm.

So what they want to do is not kill Telegram, like they wanted to kill WikiLeaks. They want to control it. And the problem was, is they didn’t have the ability to put sufficient pressure on Pavel to break his will.

He’s living in Dubai. And now, they have leverage and I believe that’s the purpose of this prosecution: not to establish a legal precedent – that it is, that every encrypted account, every encrypted chat app, its founder is personally responsible for all illegal conversations or transactions on the platform – but rather, to force Telegram to become WhatsApp.

This is what they did to WhatsApp, by the way, through this regulatory pressure. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. They broke WhatsApp’s back.

And now – this is why I always say, “Don’t say anything on WhatsApp that you don’t want put on a Times Square jumbotron,” because the whole thing is Fed F@cking Central. They broke it – and I watched that happen, by the way.

You know, the Atlantic Council played a huge role in that, with seven CIA directors on its board and annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department and CIA cut-outs like the NED…

They didn’t want to shut down WhatsApp. WhatsApp is used by everybody in Latin America and South America and half in India. They want to control it, to be able to have their own personnel in place to install and oversee the policies in every country on Earth, in order to shape the political outcomes from the inside of every country on Earth, to determine their elections. This is what they did to WhatsApp and Telegram in Brazil.

And when I say “They”, I don’t mean the government of Brazil. I mean the US State Department, the US Embassy, the US-funded institutions, like the Atlantic Council, the Wilson Center, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the NED. Thousands of these – at least hundreds, that I’ve documented – were all capacity-built.

And then, I mean, there’s a whole government program, CEPS, which you’re going to be learning a lot more about, in the months ahead. The $150 [million] annual budget – and $40 million of it was in Brazil – to lobby for these censorship laws.

I believe that they thought that they needed leverage against Telegram to finally be able to bring it under their control.

And remember, this is very important, in the State Department and the Pentagon’s view for winning the war against Russia via Ukraine, because all the Russians use Telegram chats. The ability to have a backdoor, to access – (video cuts out).