Mike Benz: Bill Gates Opened a ‘Pandora’s Box’ of Censorship in Proxy War Against Elon Musk

Mike Benz, a former diplomat in Donald Trump’s State Department and the founder of the new anti-censorship organization the Foundation for Freedom Online, appeared on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with Alex Marlow this morning to discuss Breitbart’s report on Bill Gates’ network of NGOs, and their war against Elon Musk.

The Foundation for Freedom Online provided the research behind Breitbart News’ report, which traced the funding behind the 26 left-wing NGOs that signed a letter of intimidation to Twitter’s advertisers urging them to boycott the platform if free speech is restored under Musk.

The FFO’s research found that 11 of the 26 NGOs were backed by money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or its supported entities.

“Since the terms of engagement and the terms of online freedom changed after 2016, new predicates have constantly been created for censorship,” said Benz. “Because no one wants to come out and say they’re for censorship, they disguise their preferences for rigging the information ecosystem through redefining concepts like ‘democracy,’ through redefining concepts like free speech, and often through channeling their efforts through proxy groups such as NGOs, such as activist groups, such as national security affiliated think tanks. And now there’s really a veritable Pandora’s Box of proxies for pushing the issue of censorship, and this piece on Bill Gates and Elon Musk is really a great example of that.”

“Hate speech has been interpreted to mean a border wall policy, or disagreeing with critical race theory. This is a tactic for censorship I call inflation, conflation, elimination. You take a meme that has been inflated with a tremendous amount of universal hatred — and often justifiably so — say, racism, or Russian meddling. And then you pick a proxy for the thing you want to censor, not the thing itself. You don’t say you’re censoring conservatives, or you’re censoring Donald Trump. You then conflate the proxy for you’re trying to target with this inflated meme, and then you’ve got this elimination predicate, because you can say they’re one and the same,” explained Benz.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @LibertarianBlue.