How the Deep State is using the ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’ to crush free speech

The Censorship Industrial Complex, dominated by organizations often run by ex-CIA agents, is working around the First Amendment to suppress dissent and promote a one-world government

Author and reformed climate activist Michael Shellenberger has coined the term “Censorship Industrial Complex,” an apparent reference to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address in 1961, where the former Army General warned about the influence of the “military-industrial complex.”

In a recently published article, Dr. Joseph Mercola explored the Censorship Industrial Complex, how it works, and who some of the protagonists are. We will examine the following points regarding this nefarious network to understand how the censorship apparatus works:

A key figure: Renée DiResta
The Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project
The Council on Foreign Relations and the One World Government
NewsGuard and the “middleware” approach

A key figure: Renée DiResta

Renée DiResta is the research director of the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). Mercola fittingly described the organization’s purpose: “[Founded] in June 2019,” the SIO “promote[s] internet censorship policies and conduct[s] real-time social media narrative monitoring.”

DiResta quickly climbed the career ladder despite being involved in a major election manipulation scandal. She previously worked for the CIA and is a member of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

DiResta is a prominent example of the connections between the intelligence agency and the censorship industry, but she is certainly not the only one. The organizations that are deciding what is deemed “misinformation” or “hate speech” (i.e., the Censorship Industrial Complex) are often run by former CIA agents. According to Shellenberger’s research, seven former CIA executives serve on the board of the Atlantic Council, an organization partnered with the SIO through several projects.

“The Chief Strategy Officer and the Director of Federal Programs at Graphika, another DiResta partner organization, are former CIA officials,” Shellenberger writes.

In 2018, DiResta organized a false flag online operation that influenced an Alabama Senate race. Before she worked at the SIO, DiResta was the research director at a small political consultant firm, New Knowledge LLC, which received $100,000 from Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, to help the Democrat candidate win the U.S. Senate race in Alabama. New Knowledge used that money to subscribe thousands of fake Russian bot accounts to Republican candidate Roy Moore’s social media campaign. Mainstream media reports at the time claimed Moore was “backed by Russia,” even though his “Russian backers” were fake accounts created by New Knowledge. Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, went on to win the race by a slim margin.

After the election, an internal report from New Knowledge, which detailed the Russian bot operation, was obtained by The New York Times. The report admits that: “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”

This revelation gained national media attention and was so scandalous that even members of the Atlantic Council (an organization that now collaborates with DiResta) publicly criticized this egregious example of election interference by New Knowledge.

Shellenberger said the reason that DiResta was made “the leader of the Censorship Industrial Complex,” next to her intellect and articulateness, is that “[l]ike other American elites, DiResta believes that it is the role of people like her to control what information the public is allowed to consume, lest they elect a populist ogre like Donald Trump, decide not to get vaccinated, or don’t accept whatever happens to be mainstream liberal opinion on everything from climate change to transgenderism to the business dealings of the president[‘s] family.”

The Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project

The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) was founded only months before the 2020 U.S. presidential election “to defend our elections against those who seek to undermine them by exploiting weaknesses in the online information environment.”

Mike Benz, former State Department official in the Trump administration and executive director for the Foundation for Freedom Online, explained in a video that EIP was created as a “government cut-out,” a “private” organization that de facto acts as censorship arm for the things the government cannot censor because it lacks the legal authority to do so.

One of the “partners” of the EIP is DiResta’s SIO. Benz also notes that all of the EIP’s partners are at least partly funded by the government.

Elon this video goes over it in insta-PhD level detail. It shows exactly how DHS created the EIP censorship octopus. Condensed to 8 mins here: pic.twitter.com/l5EaxAIChD

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) November 7, 2023

In May 2020, a new organization with mostly the same “partners” as the EIP was created, the Virality Project (VP). The VP focused on censoring COVID-related content online, including factual information that “might promote vaccine hesitancy.”

READ: New ‘Twitter Files’ show gov’t-backed Stanford initiative told Big Tech to censor ‘true’ info about COVID jabs

A spokesperson from the SIO (one of the VP’s founding partners) claimed it “did not censor or ask social media platforms to remove any social media content regarding coronavirus vaccine side effects.” Perhaps the SIO did not censor content directly, but the VP that was founded by the SIO certainly did, as the Twitter Files released by Elon Musk have shown.

According to the Twitter Files published by journalist Matt Taibbi, the VP pressured social media platforms such as Twitter (now X) and TikTok to remove or flag online content. Posts flagged by VP included:

True information that could fuel “vaccine hesitancy”
Posts critical of vaccine passports
True testimonies of people experiencing blood clots after receiving COVID shots
People asking questions about possible adverse reactions from the jabs

The Council on Foreign Relations and the One World government

As mentioned above, DiResta, in addition to being a former CIA agent, is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a think tank specialized in U.S. foreign policy. The globalist CFR is partly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The CFR was founded in 1921 and has heavily influenced U.S. foreign policy ever since. Most CIA directors and U.S. secretaries of defense have been members of the Council. Mercola argues that the CFR’s ultimate goal “has been to bring about a totalitarian one world government, a New World Order (NWO) with global top-down rule.”

According to the Centre for Research on Globalization, James Warburg, the son of one of the CFR’s founders, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1950: “We shall have world government whether or not you like it – by conquest or consent.”

Moreover, CFR insider and former U.S. Navy Admiral Chester Ward stated the following in his 1975 book Kissinger on the Couch:

“[The CFR has as a goal] submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government … This lust to surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of its membership … In the entire CFR lexicon, there is no term of revulsion carrying a meaning so deep as ‘America First.’”

Mercola concludes that the Censorship Industrial Complex is part of the network that seeks to establish a one-world government.

“Those who oppose America First policies do so because they’re working on behalf of a network that seeks to eliminate nationalism in favor of a one-world government, and DiResta is part of that club,” he writes.

NewsGuard and the ‘middleware approach’

In another condensed video, Benz explains how the Censorship Industrial Complex is now using so-called “middleware” organizations like the news rating site NewsGuard to suppress dissent from the mainstream narratives.

The "Middleware" Plan To Restructure The Censorship Industry

1. Middleware = 'censorship as a service' orgs

2. Morphing from top-down to middle-out

3. Regs + middleware = disinfo compliance market pic.twitter.com/lDPqH72HrD

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) August 1, 2023

According to Benz, the Censorship Industrial Complex is anticipating a loss in the Missouri v. Biden Supreme Court case, which “threatens to ban all government coordination of domestic censorship with a few exceptions[.]”

To circumvent these possible legal restrictions, the government is propping up “intermediary censorship mercenary firms like NewsGuard.”

READ: Elon Musk slams leftist rating group NewsGuard as ‘scam’ that ‘should be disbanded immediately’

By funding these “private” organizations, the deep state government agencies can “effectively circumvent the First Amendment prohibitions on running a comparable thing out of the DHS [Department of Homeland Security].”

However, the idea that NewsGuard is somehow independent from the government is wholly divorced from reality. In 2021, the Department of Defense awarded NewsGuard $750,000 for its project “Misinformation Fingerprints,” which aims to combat what it calls “a catalogue of known hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives that are spreading online.”

Moreover, Benz notes that NewsGuard’s Advisory Board consists of “an all-star apex predator caste of the national security state,” including

retired Four-Star General Michael Hayden, who was formerly the head of the CIA and NSA,
Richard Stengel, former Undersecretary of State,
Tom Ridge, former head of the DHS,
and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former head of NATO.

By propping up “middleware” companies such as NewsGuard that are not technically part of the government, the Censorship Industrial Complex is able to work around possible First Amendment restrictions, as websites that receive a negative rating from NewsGuard will have reduced visibility on Big tech platforms and search engines. The negative rating by NewsGuard also provides a pretext for private Big Tech platforms to label outlets as spreaders of “misinformation” and censor them outright.

“There’s no clear solution to this threat, other than to continue pushing back against any and all efforts to legalize, standardize and normalize censorship,” Mercola writes in his conclusion. “To vocally object, to refuse using middleware like NewsGuard, and to boycott any company or organization that uses middleware or engages in censorship of any kind.”

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Dallas mayor invites NYers to first ‘sanctuary city from socialism’

Published on July 5, 2025

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From The Center Square

By Bethany Blankley

After the self-described socialist Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor in New York, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson invited New Yorkers and others to move to Dallas.

Mamdani has vowed to implement a wide range of tax increases on corporations and property and to “shift the tax burden” to “richer and whiter neighborhoods.”

New York businesses and individuals have already been relocating to states like Texas, which has no corporate or personal income taxes.

Johnson, a Black mayor and former Democrat, switched parties to become a Republican in 2023 after opposing a city council tax hike, The Center Square reported.

“Dear Concerned New York City Resident or Business Owner: Don’t panic,” Johnson said. “Just move to Dallas, where we strongly support our police, value our partners in the business community, embrace free markets, shun excessive regulation, and protect the American Dream!”

Fortune 500 companies and others in recent years continue to relocate their headquarters to Dallas; it’s also home to the new Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE). The TXSE will provide an alternative to the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq and there are already more finance professionals in Texas than in New York, TXSE Group Inc. founder and CEO James Lee argues.

From 2020-2023, the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington MSA reported the greatest percentage of growth in the country of 34%, The Center Square reported.

Johnson on Thursday continued his invitation to New Yorkers and others living in “socialist” sanctuary cities, saying on social media, “If your city is (or is about to be) a sanctuary for criminals, mayhem, job-killing regulations, and failed socialist experiments, I have a modest invitation for you: MOVE TO DALLAS. You can call us the nation’s first official ‘Sanctuary City from Socialism.’”

“We value free enterprise, law and order, and our first responders. Common sense and the American Dream still reside here. We have all your big-city comforts and conveniences without the suffocating vice grip of government bureaucrats.”

As many Democratic-led cities joined a movement to defund their police departments, Johnson prioritized police funding and supporting law and order.

“Back in the 1800s, people moving to Texas for greater opportunities would etch ‘GTT’ for ‘Gone to Texas’ on their doors moving to the Mexican colony of Tejas,” Johnson continued, referring to Americans who moved to the Mexican colony of Tejas to acquire land grants from the Mexican government.

“If you’re a New Yorker heading to Dallas, maybe try ‘GTD’ to let fellow lovers of law and order know where you’ve gone,” Johnson said.

Modern-day GTT movers, including a large number of New Yorkers, cite high personal income taxes, high property taxes, high costs of living, high crime, and other factors as their reasons for leaving their states and moving to Texas, according to multiple reports over the last few years.

In response to Johnson’s invitation, Gov. Greg Abbott said, “Dallas is the first self-declared “Sanctuary City from Socialism. The State of Texas will provide whatever support is needed to fulfill that mission.”

The governor has already been doing this by signing pro-business bills into law and awarding Texas Enterprise Grants to businesses that relocate or expand operations in Texas, many of which are doing so in the Dallas area.

“Texas truly is the Best State for Business and stands as a model for the nation,” Abbott said. “Freedom is a magnet, and Texas offers entrepreneurs and hardworking Texans the freedom to succeed. When choosing where to relocate or expand their businesses, more innovative industry leaders recognize the competitive advantages found only in Texas. The nation’s leading CEOs continually cite our pro-growth economic policies – with no corporate income tax and no personal income tax – along with our young, skilled, diverse, and growing workforce, easy access to global markets, robust infrastructure, and predictable business-friendly regulations.”

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National dental program likely more costly than advertised

Published on July 4, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

At the beginning of June, the Canadian Dental Care Plan expanded to include all eligible adults. To be eligible, you must: not have access to dental insurance, have filed your 2024 tax return in Canada, have an adjusted family net income under $90,000, and be a Canadian resident for tax purposes.

As a result, millions more Canadians will be able to access certain dental services at reduced—or no—out-of-pocket costs, as government shoves the costs onto the backs of taxpayers. The first half of the proposition, accessing services at reduced or no out-of-pocket costs, is always popular; the second half, paying higher taxes, is less so.

A Leger poll conducted in 2022 found 72 per cent of Canadians supported a national dental program for Canadians with family incomes up to $90,000—but when asked whether they would support the program if it’s paid for by an increase in the sales tax, support fell to 42 per cent. The taxpayer burden is considerable; when first announced two years ago, the estimated price tag was $13 billion over five years, and then $4.4 billion ongoing.

Already, there are signs the final cost to taxpayers will far exceed these estimates. Dr. Maneesh Jain, the immediate past-president of the Ontario Dental Association, has pointed out that according to Health Canada the average patient saved more than $850 in out-of-pocket costs in the program’s first year. However, the Trudeau government’s initial projections in the 2023 federal budget amounted to $280 per eligible Canadian per year.

Not all eligible Canadians will necessarily access dental services every year, but the massive gap between $850 and $280 suggests the initial price tag may well have understated taxpayer costs—a habit of the federal government, which over the past decade has routinely spent above its initial projections and consistently revises its spending estimates higher with each fiscal update.

To make matters worse there are also significant administrative costs. According to a story in Canadian Affairs, “Dental associations across Canada are flagging concerns with the plan’s structure and sustainability. They say the Canadian Dental Care Plan imposes significant administrative burdens on dentists, and that the majority of eligible patients are being denied care for complex dental treatments.”

Determining eligibility and coverage is a huge burden. Canadians must first apply through the government portal, then wait weeks for Sun Life (the insurer selected by the federal government) to confirm their eligibility and coverage. Unless dentists refuse to provide treatment until they have that confirmation, they or their staff must sometimes chase down patients after the fact for any co-pay or fees not covered.

Moreover, family income determines coverage eligibility, but even if patients are enrolled in the government program, dentists may not be able to access this information quickly. This leaves dentists in what Dr. Hans Herchen, president of the Alberta Dental Association, describes as the “very awkward spot” of having to verify their patients’ family income.

Dentists must also try to explain the program, which features high rejection rates, to patients. According to Dr. Anita Gartner, president of the British Columbia Dental Association, more than half of applications for complex treatment are rejected without explanation. This reduces trust in the government program.

Finally, the program creates “moral hazard” where people are encouraged to take riskier behaviour because they do not bear the full costs. For example, while we can significantly curtail tooth decay by diligent toothbrushing and flossing, people might be encouraged to neglect these activities if their dental services are paid by taxpayers instead of out-of-pocket. It’s a principle of basic economics that socializing costs will encourage people to incur higher costs than is really appropriate (see Canada’s health-care system).

At a projected ongoing cost of $4.4 billion to taxpayers, the newly expanded national dental program is already not cheap. Alas, not only may the true taxpayer cost be much higher than this initial projection, but like many other government initiatives, the dental program already seems to be more costly than initially advertised.