Invisible Rulers

109 Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 15.

110 Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 234.

111 Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Benjamin Mueller, “Lab Leak or Not? How Politics Shaped the Battle over Covid’s Origin,” New York Times, March 19, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/us/politics/covid-origins-lab-leak-politics.html.

112 Neil Jay Sehgal et al., “The Association Between COVID-19 Mortality and the County-Level Partisan Divide in the United States,” HealthAffairs 41, no. 6 (June 2022), https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.00085; David Ovalle, “Vaccine Politics May Be to Blame for GOP Excess Deaths, Study Finds,” Washington Post, July 24, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/07/24/covid-vaccines-republicans-deaths.

113 Klein, Doppelganger,101.

114 Moises Velasquez-Manoff, “The Anti-vaccine Movement’s New Frontier,” New York Times, May 25, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/magazine/anti-vaccine-movement.html.

115 Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-pandemic World (London: Verso, 2021), 11.

CHAPTER 8: THE FANTASY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

1 Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber), “It’s true. When I ran cyber at State, we leaned heavily on SpaceX for all things satellite-related. Always had a seat at the table,” Twitter, July 29, 2023, 9:33 p.m., https://web.archive.org/web/20230907145812/https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1685403088075853824.

2 Benz describes himself in myriad ways depending on the interview. His official State Department employment page indicates a November 2020 appointment (see “Michael A. Benz,” US Department of State, November 24, 2020, https://2017-2021.state.gov/biographies/michael-a-benz), and his prior stint as a speechwriter for Secretary Carson is confirmed at “Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs (HUD) Employee Salaries 2019,” OpenPayrolls, accessed September 25, 2023, https://openpayrolls.com/federal/united-states-department-of-housing-and-urban-development/2019-assistant-secretary-for-public-affairs. In other biographies he has been identified as a diplomat (see “Mike Benz,” Townhall, n.d., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org /web/20220530091853/https://townhall.com/columnists/mikebenz). In one interview, he puts the dates of his employment as “Fall 2020 to January 2021” and alludes to speechwriting for President Trump as well (see Abhinandan Mishra, “Anti-India Cabal in US State Department Manipulated Online Discourse on PM Modi: Ex US Diplomat,” Sunday Guardian (India), updated February 5, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230206060214/https://sundayguardianlive.com/news/anti-india-cabal-us-state-department-manipulated-online-discourse-pm-modi). In another interview, he laid out his responsibilities for his few months at the State Department: “I was the deputy assistant secretary for International Communications and Information Technology, which is a long way of saying I ran the big tech portfolio for the State Department in the Economic Bureau. I had three divisions under me. One was on security defending IT as it relates to low earth satellites and SpaceX and subsea cables and fiber optics. Another was our U.S. tech policy vis-a-vis countries on a one-off basis. The third division was multilateral affairs, which is basically the private sector” (see “Unraveling the Web of Internet Freedom: A Candid Conversation with Mike Benz, Former Diplomat Turned Digital Freedom Advocate,” Federal Newswire, April 23, 2023, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230419170152/https://thefederalnewswire.com/stories/641707686-weekend-interview-mike-benz).

3 See Mike Benz, “Department of Homeland Censorship’: How DHS Seized Power over Online Speech,” August 27, 2022, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230517184202/https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/department-of-homeland-censorship-how-dhs-seized-power-over-online-speech; additionally articulated on Twitter in many threads, e.g., Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber), “Chris Krebs, the DHS director at CISA who deputized EIP and Atlantic Council to censor 22 million tweets during the 2020 election cycle, even gave the opening remarks at the Atlantic Council tell-all about how they colluded to silence conservatives,” Twitter, December 23, 2022, 5:35 p.m., Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20230906174807/https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1606342725975961600.

4 Center for an Informed Public, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graphika, and Stanford Internet Observatory, “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election,” Stanford Digital Repository: Election Integrity Partnership, March 3, 2021, https://purl.stanford.edu/tr171zs0069.

5 Mishra, “Anti-India Cabal in US State Department Manipulated Online Discourse.”