For what it’s worth, I’m with Jonathan on this.
From: Salon <salon-bounces@listserve.com> On Behalf Of
Warren Coats via Salon
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2024 3:27 PM
To: Chas Freeman <salon@listserve.com>; Chas Freeman <salon@committeefortherepublic.org>
Subject: [Salon] Fwd: Tucker Carlson on X: "Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. "What I’m describing is military rule," says Mike Benz. "It’s the inversion of democracy
More on Carlson Benz interview Jonathan Rauch offered the comments below.
Subject: RE: [Salon] Tucker Carlson on X: "Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. "What I’m describing is military
rule," says Mike Benz. "It’s the inversion of democracy
Date:
February 18, 2024 at 2:58:25 PM EST
Thanks. I probably won’t have time to play this through for a while, but from a skim of the transcript, I’d say it lacks credibility. There’s no government plot to censor the
internet, and the government couldn’t do that if it tried. Benz, Shellenberger, et al. have been dishonest in their attacks on Renee DiResta (e.g. that she’s connected to the CIA), the Stanford Internet Observatory (that it’s a cut-out for the USG), etc. The
New Yorker had an article a few months ago about this campaign to create a conspiracy narrative about internet censorship. Might be worth a look. Also, this.
Government communication with social media companies is legit but should be done in a transparent, procedurally regular way, instead of via jawboning. So that needs to be fixed.
Content moderation (“gatekeeping”) is unavoidable for media companies and unavoidably controversial, and that’s just a hard problem. But there’s no grand conspiracy.
From: Warren Coats <wcoats@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2024 10:30 AM
To: Jonathan Rauch <JRAUCH@brookings.edu>
Subject: Fwd: [Salon] Tucker Carlson on X: "Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. "What I’m describing is military rule," says Mike
Benz. "It’s the inversion of democracy
What do you think of this?
From: Chas
Freeman via Salon <salon@listserve.com>
Date: February 17, 2024 at 9:08:15 PM EST
To: graham <bozorgg@aol.com>
Cc: salon@listserve.com
Subject: Re: [Salon] Tucker Carlson on X: "Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. "What I’m describing is military rule," says
Mike Benz. "It’s the inversion of democracy
Reply-To: Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>
This is a major story and I think it will have large legs. It explains so much about what is now wrong with our democracy. I note that Carlson's interview with Putin appears
to have achieved 1 billion views. This interview will be of far greater interest to Americans than to foreign audiences, many of which now regard us as evil and will, if they bother to view this at all, see it as corroborating their worst evaluations of our
manipulation of both our own politics and the politics of other countries.
Hi Chas, don't know if you had a chance to listen to this whole thing, but I found it simply extraordinary. Dynamite. From things I know from here and there over the years both
in the agency and later in Washington it rings very true I found very little of the conspiracy mentality in the interviewee, it has huge explanatory power for some of my perplexity at the sweeping scope of US domination of the western narrative on Ukraine
and other issues.
Do you yourself take this guys story seriously? Will it have legs, or simply be stifled?
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