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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The Truth Is Buried Under Sechelt’s Unproven Graves

Published on September 17, 2025

Todayville

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Marco Navarro-Genie

Millions spent, no exhumations. What are we actually mourning?

From Aug. 15 to 17, 2025, the Canadian flag flew at half-mast above the British Columbia legislature. The stated reason: to honour the shíshálh Nation and mourn the alleged discovery of 81 unmarked graves of Indigenous children near the former St. Augustine’s Residential School in Sechelt.

But unlike genuine mourning, this display of grief lacked a body, a name or a single verifiable piece of evidence. As MLA Tara Armstrong rightly observed in her open letter to the Speaker, this symbolic act was “shameful”—a gesture unmoored from fact, driven by rumour, emotion and political inertia.

The flag was lowered in response to claims from University of Saskatchewan archaeologist Dr. Terry Clark. According to announcements from both 2023 and 2025, Dr. Clark “discovered” 81 unmarked graves using ground-penetrating radar—a tool that detects changes in soil, not bones. Its signals require interpretation—and in this case, the necessary context never arrived.

Even more concerning, there has been no release of names or records. Chief Lenora Joe of the shíshálh Nation said the names of the children are “well known” to Elders. Yet none have been made public: not a single missing child reported, no date of disappearance, no death certificate, not even a family willing to speak openly.

Instead, we’re being asked to accept deeply held recollections as conclusive proof—without corroborating evidence.

The original 40 anomalies—first announced in April 2023—appear to be located beneath the paved parking lot of the band’s administrative and cultural hub, the House of Hewhiwus complex. This land has been excavated before. At no point were any human remains discovered. As former Chief Warren Paull confirmed, “remains were never found” and the stories circulating then “don’t include burial at all.” The pattern of red dots in the band’s video—a tidy grid beneath the asphalt—looked less like sacred ground and more like a plumbing schematic.

The grief narrative, meanwhile, was presented with great care. Professionally produced videos showed solemn Elders, blurred radar images and mournful speeches—all designed to evoke emotion while discouraging inquiry. In one video, Chief Joe warned that asking questions would “cause trauma.”

But reconciliation doesn’t mean blind acceptance. Silencing questions isn’t healing—it risks turning reconciliation into a one-way narrative.

In a 2025 follow-up, Dr. Clark reported another 41 anomalies—this time likely in the community’s own cemetery on Sinku Drive. Brief footage confirms that GPR was conducted among existing gravesites, where decayed wooden markers would naturally result in “unmarked” burials. As Tara Armstrong noted, finding undocumented graves in or near a cemetery is about as surprising as spotting seagulls at a landfill.

Even so, political leaders continued to validate the narrative.

The B.C. government endorsed the claims with another round of symbolic mourning. In doing so, it lent the power of the state to what increasingly resembles collective fiction. Since 2021, similar claims across Canada have triggered government apologies, funding announcements and media headlines—often without physical evidence.

Residential schools were bureaucratic institutions. They kept meticulous enrolment and death logs. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with eight years of access to these archives, conducted more than 6,500 interviews and reviewed thousands of documents. It found no cases of children who disappeared without a trace. Despite this, $2.6 million in federal funds was spent in 2025 alone on the Sechelt investigation.

This isn’t reconciliation: it’s mythmaking dressed up as healing. Worse still, it undermines real tragedies by replacing verifiable history with folklore dressed up in government robes.

Governments should not promote unverified stories with ceremonial gestures. Flags lowered at half-mast should honour actual deaths, not narrative convenience. Public policy, especially around historical reckoning, must be rooted in fact, not feelings.

If reconciliation is to mean anything, it must be anchored in shared truth. And the truth is, we cannot mourn 81 phantom children because they almost certainly never existed.

Canadians must start insisting on evidence. The standard of proof should be no different here than in any serious allegation. The principle that underpins our justice system—innocent until proven guilty—must also guide our view of history.

State-sponsored guilt rituals disconnected from verifiable fact are not justice.

They are theatre.

And not even good theatre.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023). With files from Nina Green.

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Ottawa’s so-called ‘Clean Fuel Standards’ cause more harm than good

Published on September 17, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

To state the obvious, poorly-devised government policies can not only fail to provide benefits but can actually do more harm than good.

For example, the federal government’s so-called “Clean Fuel Regulations” (or CFRs) meant to promote the use of low-carbon emitting “biofuels” produced in Canada. The CFRs, which were enacted by the Trudeau government, went into effect in July 2023. The result? Higher domestic biofuel prices and increased dependence on the importation of biofuels from the United States.

Here’s how it works. The CFRs stipulate that commercial fuel producers (gasoline, diesel fuel) must use a certain share of “biofuels”—that is, ethanol, bio-diesel or similar non-fossil-fuel derived energetic chemicals in their final fuel product. Unfortunately, Canada’s biofuel producers are having trouble meeting this demand. According to a recent report, “Canada’s low carbon fuel industry is struggling,” which has led to an “influx of low-cost imports” into Canada, undermining the viability of domestic biofuel producers. As a result, “many biofuels projects—mostly renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel—have been paused or cancelled.”

Adding insult to injury, the CFRs are also economically costly to consumers. According to a 2023 report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, “the cost to lower income households represents a larger share of their disposable income compared to higher income households. At the national level, in 2030, the cost of the Clean Fuel Regulations to households ranges from 0.62 per cent of disposable income (or $231) for lower income households to 0.35 per cent of disposable income (or $1,008) for higher income households.”

Moreover, “Relative to disposable income, the cost of the Clean Fuel Regulations to the average household in 2030 is the highest in Saskatchewan (0.87 per cent, or $1,117), Alberta (0.80 per cent, or $1,157) and Newfoundland and Labrador (0.80 per cent, or $850), reflecting the higher fossil fuel intensity of their economies. Meanwhile, relative to disposable income, the cost of the Clean Fuel Regulations to the average household in 2030 is the lowest in British Columbia (0.28 per cent, or $384).”

So, let’s review. A government mandate for the use of lower-carbon fuels has not only hurt fuel consumers, it has perversely driven sourcing of said lower-carbon fuels away from Canadian producers to lower-cost higher-volume U.S. producers. All this to the deficit of the Canadian economy, and the benefit of the American economy. That’s two perverse impacts in one piece of legislation.

Remember, the intended beneficiaries of most climate policies are usually portrayed as lower-income folks who will purportedly suffer the most from future climate change. The CFRs whack these people the hardest in their already-strained wallets. The CFRs were also—in theory—designed to stimulate Canada’s lower-carbon fuel industry to satisfy domestic demand by fuel producers. Instead, these producers are now looking to U.S. imports to comply with the CFRs, while Canadian lower-carbon fuel producers languish and fade away.

Poorly-devised government policies can do more harm than good. Clearly, Prime Minister Carney and his government should scrap these wrongheaded regulations and let gasoline and diesel producers produce fuel—responsibly, but as cheaply as possible—to meet market demand, for the benefit of Canadians and their families. A radical concept, I know.