Mike Benz, founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, joined Steve Bannon on Friday following his report that Hunter Biden was involved with the CIA in Ukraine.
Benz is the former State Department official with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters.
During their discussion Benz described the foreign policy establishment and the likelihood that they could go full authoritarian. Benz argues that he believes they already have.
Mike Benz: Oftentimes, when rule of law is insufficient to contain that, we kick out our counterinsurgency doctrine, where there’s a lot of nasty things that we will do to the resident population in order to get their minds right to stop opposing the ruling regime. And the issue is, you need legitimacy in order to govern cheaply. That is, a people who have grievances in their heart, a people who feel that the government is illegitimate, are expensive to govern…
…In a counterinsurgency situation, you are starting off the chess game, essentially, with them already having those grievances, and you need to exert control over that population in order to force them to a state where they are compliant and then perceive legitimacy. And the issue is, is there’s a trade-off between legitimacy and control. The more control you exert, the more illegitimate people perceive things to be. So you create 10 more insurgents with every one insurgent that you persecute. In fact, we’re seeing this right now, I think, reflected in the polling numbers for Donald Trump in this election cycle, where the more they’re persecuting him, the more his numbers are going up, which was much to their surprise. Anyone who would read US military doctrine would on counterinsurgency would see that immediately. But the other way…
So there’s only so far they can go. And now they may go full authoritarian. You can argue they already have. I believe they already have with what they’ve done, breaking two and a half centuries of precedent with everything they’ve done with the Justice Department, the bankrupting folks, going after everyone around the populist universe, including yourself. But the other way is if a certain node within the blob itself can be convinced that it’s not worth going full control, that it would be too far in terms of creating international perceptions of illegitimacy if their crackdown is too hard. And there are certain concessions that Trump world makes to the blob.
So for example, I heard it floated that Marco Rubio, who knows who the vice President pick is going to be, right? It could be one of 10,000 people. That name was floated this week quite publicly. Senator Rubio is the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He’s a person who, a little bit like Ted Cruz, has tried to position himself as not a never-trumper, but very much like with the foreign policy side, but straddling those two worlds, but very definitively being pro-blob consensus. A figure like Marco Rubio, for example, might be able to convince a critical note within the blob that while we don’t like Trump, and We’re going to do a little bit of election rigging.
Via Karli Bonne.
