Former State Department official and free speech advocate Mike Benz exposed the nefarious agenda behind the legal assault that the Biden administration is waging against Elon Musk.
Benz talked about the censorship industry’s ongoing war with Elon Musk in a June 6 interview on TNT Radio. During the interview, Benz addressed the long train of legal suits that President Joe Biden’s administration has brought against Musk’s companies. He characterized the suits as retribution for Musk implementing free speech policies on X (formerly Twitter). Benz even went so far as to say that the suits were entirely motivated by politics and that they were of a similar nature to the charges brought against President Donald Trump.
“[T]he Biden administration is doing the same thing to Elon in a more diversified albeit smaller scale you could say,” said Benz, comparing Musk’s lawsuits to Trump’s.
Benz went on to list the various government entities coming after Musk.
“I think there’s something like seven different regulatory agencies, none of whom were troubling Musk before he acquired Twitter, that have all descended like a pack of vultures trying to feast on the Elon empire carcass, and in order, I think, to twist and capacity-cripple his operations in order to make him more pliable to negotiations around reinstalling censorship on the platform,” Benz said.
Benz explained that it was a common tactic of the censorship industry to use coercion in order to achieve its aims.
20 mins of rock ‘em sock ‘em fire on censorship industry origins & updates, media hit I did today👇 https://t.co/rRwzezCuk5
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) June 6, 2024
“I think they understand how leverage works. I know they do because they talk about this” Benz said. “ You have to raise the cost of saying ‘no’ in order to make people more agreeable.”
Benz also explained that Musk’s commitment to free speech was surprising to the government affiliated censors. He contrasted Musk’s behavior with other tech CEOs who were “running their mouth about how much they believe in free speech” while giving in to pressures to censor.
“But then as soon as the bayonets come for them, as soon as the advertiser boycotts show up, as soon as the government threats show up, as soon as the bottom line starts tanking, they become ‘reasonable’ to changing their terms of service,” said Benz.
Other critics have also taken aim at the Biden administration’s targeting of Musk. Brendan Carr, Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, penned a letter of dissent responding to his own agency’s decision to deny an $885 million award to Musk’s Starlink on December 9, 2023.
Carr’s letter noted that the FCC’s decision appeared to be part of a coordinated lawfare waged in tandem with other agencies to target Elon Musk as “Progressive Enemy No.1.” Carr also quoted Joe Biden to indicate that he was the architect of this legal harassment. During a November 9, 2022 press conference, Biden expressed that “there’s a lot of ways” for the government to look into Elon Musk.
“There certainly are,” wrote Carr. “The Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have all initiated investigations into Elon Musk or his businesses.”
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