The DHS’ “Critical Infrastructure” Hoax to Justify Censorship Permanently Altered the Course of American History

When Big Tech abruptly began demonetizing, censoring and de-platforming accounts in 2015-2016, escalating to the mass-de-platformings of millions of accounts in 2018-2021, the outrageous, un-American tyranny of this was shocking to the classical liberals, centrists and conservatives who were experiencing an internet that had suddenly been weaponized against them and that had algorithmically targeted their online businesses for destruction – only to have all the tech CEOs cheekily deny that any of this was happening, in countless hearings of the House Judiciary Committee, starting in 2018.

Meanwhile Leftists, lacking any dissidence from the Establishment and shielded from any other points of view were left to bathe in an ocean of confirmation bias, blissfully unaware that anybody’s First Amendment and Civil Rights were being violated.

Years on, the confirmation biases of Leftists, algorithmically fostered by government propaganda and censorship have calcified into a superiority complex, compounded by an entitlement to prejudicial intolerance towards different perspectives, to the point of deadly violence, as we have seen.

Many of those targeted by this aberrant censorship were led to believe that this was bonafide “culture war” and that Big Tech CEOs, like Mark Zuckerberg, Vijaya Gadde and Susan Wojcicki were the cause of this newfound Leftist tyranny – or that maybe their radicalized pink-haired Zizian employees were to blame for capriciously unleashing algorithms to cancel all accounts espousing views to the right of Pol Pot.

But in August of 2016, Mike Benz discovered some DARPA documents that revealed that this new censorship regime was actually coming from the Pentagon under the aegis of “National Security”, which may help explain the tech CEOs’ previous denial of this.

In 2023, a CTIL whistleblower came forward to Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag with documents describing the origin of modern digital censorship programs in military and intelligence agencies and their partnerships with NGOs and commercial media, including the use of sock puppet accounts and offensive bots.

The documents explained that overseas, Interactive Internet Activities (IIA) were typically done by “the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense”. However, censorship efforts against Americans had to be done using private contractors, to circumvent the Government’s lack of legal authority to violate their First Amendment rights.

As Michael Shellenberger reported:

The whistleblower alleges that a leader of CTI League, a “former” British intelligence analyst, was “in the room” at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a “repeat of 2016.”

Over the last year, Public, Racket, congressional investigators, and others have documented the rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex, a network of over 100 government agencies and nongovernmental organizations that work together to urge censorship by social media platforms and spread propaganda about disfavored individuals, topics, and whole narratives.

The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) has been the center of gravity for much of the censorship, with the National Science Foundation financing the development of censorship and disinformation tools and other federal government agencies playing a supportive role.

Emails from CISA’s NGO and social media partners show that CISA created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in 2020, which involved the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and other US government contractors. EIP and its successor, the Virality Project (VP), urged Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to censor social media posts by ordinary citizens and elected officials alike.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of government-sponsored censorship, it had yet to be determined where the idea for such mass censorship came from. In 2018, an SIO official and former CIA fellow, Renee DiResta, generated national headlines before and after testifying to the US Senate about Russian government interference in the 2016 election.

But what happened between 2018 and Spring 2020? The year 2019 has been a black hole in the research of the Censorship Industrial Complex to date. When one of us, Michael, testified to the U.S. House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex in March of this year, the entire year was missing from his timeline.

2019 was terrifying for me. My film was de-platformed by Amazon, my newsletter was de-platformed by two expensive mass email services – all with no warning, explanation or recourse. In hindsight, I realized that 2019 was the run-up to COVID.

In early 2023, when Elon Musk released the source code for Twitter’s recommendation algorithm, posting it on GitHub, web developer, Steven Tey soon found a mechanism that permitted the US Government to “intervene” with this code. He also found that Twitter Engineering had a class for it, called “Government Requested” and linked to those specific lines of code.

Another break just happened last Tuesday, with Alphabet/Google/YouTube’s admission that it wrongfully censored and de-platformed users:

DOCUMENT: Alphabet’s Sep 23, 2025 letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan

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One wonders what has caused Google to end their denial? Google is now blaming their censorship on the unprecedentedness of COVID and the newfound need to “balance freedom of expression with responsibility”.

Do they mean the responsibility to enforce tyranny and civilizational collapse?

Their admission to the House Judiciary Committee is being politically framed as duress under the Biden administration – and while it’s true that Google’s and others’ censorship reached uncharted levels during Biden’s COVID mandates in 2021, it had already been extremely aggressive during the previous five years and virtually unknown on the internet before then.

IMAGE: YouTube banned accounts

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Don’t get your hopes up too far. Previously-banned users trying to open new accounts this week have found themselves immediately re-banned, about which YouTube issued the statement: “We’ve seen some previously terminated creators try to start new channels. To clarify, our pilot program on terminations is not yet open. It’s still against our Community Guidelines for previously terminated users to use, possess or create other channels and we’ll terminate new channels from previously terminated users in accordance with these guidelines. We’ll have more to share on the limited pilot program soon.”

As Mike Benz explains in this walk-and-talk video he made last month, the real January 6th was in 2017, during the final weeks of the Obama administration when Hillary Clinton and John Brennan’s Russia Hoax plot was hatched. On that date, elections, which had been controlled at the state level since 1789 were now declared “Critical Infrastructure” and they were federalized under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

As Mike Benz explains:

“The linchpin of it all was a concept called ‘Critical Infrastructure’.

“Now, nobody in their right minds would think that Critical Infrastructure would be a term used as the legal predicate for a government role in internet censorship.Critical infrastructure. What does that mean to most people? They think it means like dams and satellites and subsea cables, you know, weird, important sh¡t to the country that you don’t come across day-to-day…

“When I broke the CISA scandal at DHS, which is what kicked off a lot of this and helped guide some aspects of the Twitter Files around interpreting them, the “critical infrastructure” concept was so important. And I understand that phrase just puts you to sleep when you hear it.

“But what it did was on January 6th, 2017, the outgoing DHS made elections ‘Critical Infrastructure’. And then they said, because elections – a metaphysical concept – is critical infrastructure, then anything that damages the integrity of that critical infrastructure, those elections, is now a DHS domain, legally.

“So tweets that undermine the integrity of the election, because they contain ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ or ‘malinformation’ could now be censored by the US Government, notwithstanding the existence of a First f@cking Amendment, all because of this trick, this word game, this completely deceitful concept that ‘Critical Infrastructure’, a term that puts 99.99% of people to sleep, gives you the legal predicate.”

What has been done to our society over the past decade, through censorship and propaganda is vile but a way to rise above it is to know who’s doing it, how they’re doing it and why.

When we fully comprehend that propaganda and censorship have been deployed against us as a matter of military doctrine and how 5th Generation Warfare has weaponized citizens against each other, we can know that it’s not ultimately our neighbors, friends and family doing this to us. We can understand that we’re all being manipulated and we can begin to make it stop.

Full transcript of video below.

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TRANSCRIPT

Mike Benz: I’m walking around Washington DC right now in a little bit of a state of shock. I have the past nine years of my life flashing before my eyes, reading the declassified Annex that just got declassified. I’m still only about five pages into it and it’s about 29 pages but I’m already so shocked by it.

I’m actually not, how do I describe it? I’m not surprised, at all – and yet I’m shocked. You know that feeling like you’re not surprised but you’re shocked?

Everyone always asks me like “How do you how do you get into this? How do you know so much about the censorship space?”

Like a lot of people studied the censorship space. What kind of made my position in it unique?

And the answer was because right at the time that these emails that we’re just seeing that were in this classified Annex from July 2016, that was the exact moment that I really started my journey in this, pursuing this exact beat.

Everyone, at the time in 2016 was focused on Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Susan Wojcicki and I came across some documents, military documents, DARPA, these were open source. They were just available online around censorship techniques and I got very interested in the military National Security dimension of censorship and it seemed to me that nobody at the time even entertained the possibility that that was what was driving censorship. Everyone thought it was a culture war thing. Everyone thought it was a SJW, a sort of pink haired, you know, radical Marxist type.

And I very early, right when these written emails were being written, latched onto the National Security aspect of it and became obsessed with it, completely, totally, hopelessly obsessed with it.

And…I began writing ‘Weapons of Mass Deletion’ in August 2016, which was the same month that Hillary Clinton did her first Russiagate speech.

It was the month that we know that John Brennan was doing the handwritten notes, saying that the CIA was aware of Hillary Clinton’s plan to hatch this. And I’ve often asked myself, like, “Why all this stuff was out there? Why, why didn’t anybody else pick it up?”

And, and I’ve tried to come up with so many different theories about that and I still don’t know the answer, but I have a weird feeling it’s because of how boring the language is that these operations were used to dress-up.

The linchpin of it all was a concept called “Critical Infrastructure”.

Now, nobody in their right minds would think that Critical Infrastructure would be a term used as the legal predicate for a government role in internet censorship.

Critical infrastructure. What does that mean to most people? They think it means like dams and satellites and subsea cables, you know, weird, important shit to the country that you don’t come across day-to-day.

And I don’t know, I don’t know what put me in that, in that weird position. Maybe it was the corporate law thing. In corporate law, you’re used to dealing with a bunch of bullshit terms.

When you’re drafting a purchase agreement, the whole game is one side’s lawyers try to create these sophisticated, esoteric, defined terms that mean nothing like what you think they mean and trying to kind of deceive the other attorney or the other, the other, you know, the counterpart’s lawyers about what the contract really means.

So I don’t know, maybe it was that. But I saw that critical infrastructure sh¡t right away, 2016, 2017, and I pursued it like a dog, like a dog.

When I broke the CISA scandal at DHS, which is what kicked off a lot of this and helped, you know, guide some aspects of the Twitter Files around interpreting them, the critical infrastructure concept was so important. And I understand that phrase just puts you to sleep when you hear it.

But what it did was on January 6th, 2017, the outgoing DHS made elections critical infrastructure.

And then they said, because elections – a metaphysical concept – is critical infrastructure, then anything that damages the integrity of that critical infrastructure, those elections, is now a DHS domain, legally.

So tweets that undermine the integrity of the election, because they contain misinformation or disinformation or malinformation could now be censored by the US Government, notwithstanding the existence of a First f@cking Amendment, all because of this trick, this word game, this completely deceitful concept that “critical infrastructure”, a term that puts 99.99% of people to sleep, gives you the legal predicate.

And so I pursued every aspect of the critical infrastructure network, the CIA side, the DOD side, the FBI side, the NGO side.

When DHS created their Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a name that we have “security” in our name twice, because we just care so much about security! No, it was because “infrastructure security”, they said, “OK, now we can control elections and cybersecurity.”

That “cyber” gave them the predicate to go after tweets and Facebook posts and YouTube videos and TikTok videos and Reddit posts. It gave them the legal predicate to completely burn the US Constitution. And now what do I see today? What do I see today? I see a classified annex that has been here the whole time. A late July email from the head of the Eurasia Center of the Open Society Institute, the Eurasia Center!

How many times have I told you it’s all about Eurasia? The whole Blob game, here is “Seize Eurasia!”

Eurasia, Eurasia. Everyone says, what does that matter? And Lo, and Behold, the very email that the CIA Director presented to the president and to James Comey to kick off the entire Russiagate hoax, citing Hillary Clinton’s plan to frame Trump in a false flag – gay op –that Russia was going to interfere in the election.

And they knew it was a lie. And they knew it, because of the Eurasia Center of the Open Society Institute, of George Soros’s Open Society Institute. And they sat on it and they classified it.

And what did that email from Leonard Bernardo, the head of the Seize Eurasia posse of George Soros, the biggest financier to the Democrat Party and also to the whole wing of the Blob Republicans, in Google image of George Soros and John McCain, they look like they’re making-out in half the pictures.

What does the email say? Now, obviously everyone focuses, I mean, the whole thing is a bombshell. CrowdStrike, which I’ve talked about so much, that was going to be used as a media vehicle.

That Hillary Clinton had hatched this plot that the FBI was going to pour oil on it for them. But what’s right in the middle of that paragraph? I think the quote is, the goal is to make the Russia play a US domestic issue. Say something like critical infrastructure is a threat to elections.

It was that casual, that flippant, that cavalier. Just like that. Say something like “Critical infrastructure is a threat to elections.”

Can you appreciate the seismic implications of such a throwaway sentence? Every university in this country was twisted by Russiagate. Harvard, tens of millions of dollars to study Russian interference. US Army War College, money to study military strategy in light of Russian interference.

Billions of dollars to NGOs to study and conduct counter-operations to Russian interference, when there was none. And they knew there was none, the whole time. What was the legal predicate? Because how do you get around the First Amendment? You say, “Well, there’s a government role in protecting critical infrastructure.”

And that supersedes, I guess, the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, if you don’t know what the f@ck they mean by critical infrastructure. And the fact that they said, “Yeah, we need a Get Out of Constitution Free Card, here. How do we gin this up? Yeah, let’s say something like “critical infrastructure”.

And just like that, all of these critical infrastructure NGOs bloom, civil society organization, critical infrastructure bloom, the DHS critical infrastructure, FBI critical infrastructure, CIA protecting critical infrastructure. The entire apparatus of the Blob now has a legal predicate, a Get Out of Jail Free Card to censor you, to take down videos, to go to launch counterintelligence operations against US citizens based on who they vote for.

You know, what’s amazing is there’s been about a dozen times where I’ve been like sitting on a toilet or in the shower, staring out the window of a train and I thought to tweet out randomly, “Hey, does anyone have a link to DC leaks?” DC leaks was the 2016, it was about August 2016, it was right in this time period.

And DC leaks were the hack documents of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, because this was one of the things that pushed me to begin writing the book, to leave my law career, was I saw what happened with DC Leaks. I didn’t download all of them at the time, and I’ve tried to go back and look for them. And it’s been very, very difficult, but they were incredible.

They were George Soros Open Society Foundation documents, and it had everything. It had all the play around Ukraine, post-Crimea. It had all of his operations with the IMF and the World Bank, all the crap around the secretary of state who happened to be Hillary Clinton, mind you.

And what does it turn out now that John Brennan’s handwritten notes from August 3rd, 2016 reference? The DC Leaks. That’s where they get the Leonard Bernardo email, the Open Society Institute, Eurasia. So no wonder they censored it.

That was such a crazy thing to me when I could no longer access documents that were publicly available one second, and then the national security state sweeps in. I was born in 1984, child of the internet. First wave to start using this while conscious.

And I’d never seen that before. Just publicly available documents just vanish, gone from the internet. That’s part of what drove me to go down this whole path.

And it turns out it was that exact moment that the CIA and John Brennan knew how sensitive those leaks were, that they were, they turn out to be the linchpin of the classified annex that we don’t learn until nine years later after all of this Russiagate bullshit. The national security state stepped in to censor it. They knew the whole thing was bullshit from top to bottom.

I can’t tell you how many times in the early days, early, early, early days, seven years ago, I was making trips to DC. I wasn’t even working for an admin. And I’m trying to explain this concept of critical infrastructure.

I have all these random people who I randomly network with, and they’re listening and I can tell they’re like, I wouldn’t be structured like that. That phrase can’t possibly mean that. It can’t be that devious.

You have to explain all the language, all the little language tricks, and they come up with it just like that. We’ll use some bullshit like critical infrastructure. And then they ran with it.

2018, they create CISA out of that very critical infrastructure. In January 6th, 2017, do you know that our election system is completely changed because of that? Our entire election system. When Jeh Johnson, the outgoing DHS secretary, on January 6th, 2017, the real January 6th, when the CIA made the bullshit assessment and simultaneously DHS simultaneously DHS declared elections, the metaphysical f@cking concept of elections to be critical infrastructure.

The same day, they federalized elections then. That was when DHS took control at a national level. Before that, since 1789, it was all state control over elections.

They used that bullshit predicate, which all 50 states opposed at that time, and then they opened up a fucking slush fund to bribe states to do it. There is so much second-order and third-order damage from this all. This was how we lost free speech before COVID.

The Russiagate censorship, the presence of the CIA and DOD and FBI and DHS and all their little hellspawn NGOs during Russiagate was what allowed them to be in position to censor COVID. And because the American population had been so used to the concept of, “Well, I guess we’re censoring things, now!” that’s what made the COVID censorship pill easier for people to swallow, that they’d already been doing it because of Russiagate. And they would have never been able to do that without this bullshit national security predicate established by the crime family of Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, James Comey, all the way up to Barack Obama.

There has got to be a face that people look back on and say, “I don’t want to be like that guy, because I might get indicted like him.” I made this point before, but we now have a signed, sealed confession from Leonard Bernardo about this. He can be deposed by the Justice Department.

He can have all of the other emails and text messages around that time subpoenaed. We have agreement and affirmative act in furtherance of the agreement. And the one thing you don’t have is a signed confession from John Brennan and Hillary Clinton that they knew Russia was not interfering.

Now, you know that the other CIA analysts and FBI folks knew that there wasn’t. They disagreed with the assessment. We now know that they were bribed, threatened that they wouldn’t get promoted unless they changed their assessment.

But you don’t need that confession to move forward with prosecution. They didn’t do that with Trump. With Trump, the whole thing turned on his state of mind.

They said Trump was guilty of a conspiracy, and his only defense is that he had an innocent state of mind. We don’t have any confession from Trump, so we’ll just present the evidence to the jury and the jury will decide. Well, that’s how rule of law works, right? We learned it from them.

If no one’s above the law, that’s how the law has got to be applied now.