Years ago, controversial pundit Scott Adams said that if US intelligence agencies were any good, they’d end up taking over the country. Based on an interview with former State Department cyber official Mike Benz, that moment may be upon us. In a recent Tucker Carlson interview with over 32 million views, Benz argues that the US has become a de facto military security state, with censored media, corrupted institutions and a sham democracy.

He contends the intelligence agencies’ decades of experience destabilising and overthrowing foreign governments has now been turned inwards, against their own people – ‘domestic extremists’, Catholics, Trumpers, J6 protesters, ‘Christian Nationalists’ and more. Their next big push is restricting internet free speech.

By its nature, a shadowy, bureaucratic capture of Washington’s halls of power would not be announced in press releases and interviews; but as the old saw goes, if it looks, swims, quacks and behaves like a duck, it’s probably a duck. There are now enough patterns of government behaviour, controversies unmasked, guilty individuals exposed yet unpunished, and whistleblowers persecuted, that it is worth considering Benz’s thesis as an explanation of recent US events.

Benz runs a free speech watchdog, the Foundation for Freedom Online, and his persuasive interview is replete with checkable legal and operational references, dates and history. He argues a turning point occurred in 2014, when US elites finally lost faith in free speech on the internet. This followed Crimea voting in a referendum to rejoin the Russian Federation. Both Brexit and the 2016 Trump election would have sent the same message; that people were not to be trusted with making the right choices in the internet era.

Benz argues that skilled senior bureaucrats who had expected to be promoted into a new Clinton regime became a ready workforce to conduct various colour revolution-style operations, most obviously the now debunked Russia collusion hoax, and build a new domestic censorship structure. The 2020 US federal election and the Covid era were the two most heavily censored events in US history, he claims, with vote fraud claims (‘delegitimising elections’) and vaccine criticisms met with relentless repression. A censorship alliance comprising federal agencies and third parties is now strong, well-established and working hard to control speech. Meta’s global affairs president Nick Clegg recently boasted he had 40,000 employees censoring speech on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – nearly two-thirds of Meta’s workforce! EU bureaucrats have created new hate speech laws that may yet restrict Elon Musk’s attempts to make X a bulwark of free speech.

An aside on security state methods: it’s clear that those involved have worked out how to use the law, to break the law. US authorities frequently do this by using third-party groups to do what they legally can’t. For example, Musk’s takeover of Twitter allowed the exposure of go-between groups such as the Stanford Internet Observatory and others who worked secretly to censor and shadow ban the platform, at the behest of government agencies.

Then there are the word traps, beloved of officialdom. Former FBI boss James Comey laughingly rejected Trump’s assertion of spying on his campaign. When it emerged that surveillance had indeed been conducted at Trump Tower, Comey sidestepped, saying that spying was illegal surveillance, and the bureau had had legal authority so it wasn’t spying. Later we found out the FBI had lied to get that authority, but by then Comey was long gone.

Another option is just to ignore your own laws; if you control law enforcement and the judiciary, what can happen? The Supreme Court found last year that Biden’s student debt cancellation scheme was illegal; Biden recently boasted of ignoring the justices, and has gone on to forgive $138 billion worth of debt.

There has been little to no punishment for those responsible for such malfeasance, because the political will isn’t there. Hillary, who’d paid law firm Perkins Coie to trick up the fake Steele dossier, received a piddling $113,000 fine.

FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who doctored documents to deny that a Trump aide had worked for US intelligence, was charged but got off with probation. John Brennan, and another 50 intelligence officials, claimed falsely that Hunter’s laptop was likely Russian spycraft. No consequences.

Meanwhile, presidential frontrunner Trump is being dragged through a multitude of courts at unfathomable expense in often farcical cases, led by self-declared Trump hunters, and many of Trump’s coterie have faced lawfare: Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, while economist Peter Navarro is now fighting to stay out of jail. Veteran reporter Catherine Herridge has just had her computer and papers seized by her employer CBS, after they sacked her. She had been investigating the Hunter Biden laptop row. This used to be what happened to media in communist countries.

One wonders how US elites imagine this is going over in the rest of the world, which doesn’t have the benefit of a 24/7 lapdog domestic media warning of Trump’s unique awfulness. At a recent Cpac the El Salvador President warned of the ‘dark forces’ US conservatives must fight. Even the staunchly anti-Trump conservative media in Australia is starting to wilt at the obvious persecution.

Benz goes on to argue that ‘democracy’ is still talked about, largely in terms of Trump’s threat to the same, but that what the elites mean is institutional democracy, which former congressman Adam Kinzinger calls the ‘interagency consensus’. That’s what matters in Washington. Democracy is no longer for the deplorables, the smelly Walmart people, it’s for the democratic institutions, like, er, us. This is the America of the academies, the media, the judiciary, government and security agencies, big foundations, and big firms.

For those who cannot imagine that the home of the brave and land of the free could fall this far, a recent Rasmussen poll makes bracing reading. A one-per-cent radical elite fringe (high-earners, Ivy League and college graduates, big-city dwellers) had views wildly at variance from most Americans’. By big majorities they wanted to restrict and ration gas, meat and electricity, and thought Americans had too much freedom. Scarily, while only 7 per cent of all Americans said they would cheat to win an election, this rose to 69 per cent among the ‘politically obsessed’ subset of the one per cent.

To finish where I began, Scott Adams now refers to the American Republic in the past tense, 1776-2020.